Theory and Concepts in Human Geography

Poststructuralism I:
Genealogies

Dr Noam Leshem
Learning Outcomes
At the end of the lecture, you should begin to
understand:

How poststructural theory emerged from

critical engagement with structuralist
theories

Some key themes in Michel Foucaults

contributions to poststructural theory.
The birth of the Post-

Colonialism

Post-
structuralism Modernism
 Poststructuralism
Definitions of poststructuralism highly
problematic.
Cannot be traced to a single thinker (e.g.
Marxism) or relatively cohesive political
movement (e.g. feminism).
Key initiators didnt call themselves the
poststructuralists, and some
poststructural theorists continue to resist
being labeled as such.
Poststructuralism: Where? When?
Where: largely French and predominantly Parisian movement of
thought, part of broader continental philosophy

When: deeply rooted in post-1945 development of French public

artistic and intellectual life, comes to a head in 1960s and 1970s.
Context of wider political ferment, questioning of French
Communist Party and certainties of Marxist class politics by those
artists, students and others of the left who were open to radical
philosophies of feminism and anarchism.
Cultural politics of May 68, and the struggle against Fouchets
reforms of the university. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUJZgkhSCq8
Poststructuralism: What? (1)
Philosophical response to the modernist structuralist theories
associated with Lvi-Strauss (anthropology), Althusser
(Marxism), Freud, Lacan (psychoanalysis), and de Saussure.
Structuralism reaction to phenomenology (study of conscious
lived experience and being), and esp. radical, existential form
(Sartre), where individual is more or less free agent
responsible for and able to making sense of experience.
scientific discovery of structural forces that lie beneath the
surface and are not simply apprehended in experience
Phenomenology/
Existentialism

critique
Structuralism

critique
Poststructuralism
 Poststructuralism: What? (2)
Opposition to structuralism in terms of both
epistemology and ontology:
Foundationalist .vs. anti-foundationalist
epistemology (i.e. how we know is not
separable from what we know, e.g.
gender; theory, practice and the objective
truth)
Essentialist .vs. anti-essentialist ontology
(i.e. search for universal meanings and
structural logics obscures dynamic and
diverse differences, e.g. capitalism)
Poststructuralism: What? (3)
Poststructuralism is a theoretical approach to knowledge and society that embraces
the ultimate undecidability of meaning, the constitutive power of discourse, and the
political effectivity of theory and research. While knowledge is understood in a
modernist frame as singular, cumulative, and neutral, from a poststructural
perspective knowledge is multiple, contradictory, and powerful. Although
knowledges cannot be differentiated according to their greater or lesser accuracy
(their success or failure in reflecting the world), they can be distinguished by their
effects the different subjects they empower, the institutions and practices they
enable, and for those they exclude or suppress (Gibson-Graham 2000)

Very useful summary, but important to recognize that the PS

response to structuralism was not homogeneous, singular or
unified, such that

Poststructuralism offers a number of strategies for calling into question

received ideas and dominant practices, making visible their power, and creating
openings for alternative forms of practice and power to emerge (Gibson-
Graham 2000)
Poststructuralism: Who?
Jacques Derrida deconstruction of assumptions written into classical
Western philosophical, especially hierarchical binary oppositions
between positives and their negative others (e.g. Platos mind/body;
reason/emotion; objectivity/subjectivity; market/state). Highlighting
undecidability of meanings

Jean-Franois Lyotard opposition to universalism and grand

narratives of progress and scientific understandings (e.g. difference,
diversity and multiple communities of meaning).

Judith Butler Feminist thinker who critiqued the strict binaries of

gender; understanding it as performance opens other categories

Not only is it the case that PS response to structuralism was not

homogeneous, but neither are subsequent moves to
digest/reject/assimilate poststructural theory and concepts.
Michel Foucault
Foucault perhaps more influential than other postsructural
theorists because his work challenged wide range of disciplines.

Professor of (History of) Systems of Thought

(cole Normale Suprieure, Collge de France)

Political Activist / Public Intellectual

 Foucaults Methods of Analysis

Foucault developed two methods of analysis to de-scientify scientific truths in

the social sciences

Archeology
He studies historical systems of knowledge to demonstrate the discontinuity
of conceptual formations and discursive formations.
The Archeology of Knowledge 1969, The Order of Things 1966.

Genealogy
How power uses conceptual formations to differentiate.
The aim is to distinguishes between the dominant discourse and the
discourse of resistance.
How does the discourse from below mobilizes power and changes the rules
that determine the legitimacy of power.

Demonstrated in Discipline and Punish 1975. the History of Sexulaity 1976.. Society Must Be
Defended". Lectures at The College de France,. 1975-76, Security Territory and Population
Lectures at the Collge de France 19771978
 Key Concepts
Discourse
Knowledge/Power
Discipline
Governmentality and Biopower
 epistemes/discursive
formations
In 1966s Les Mots et les choses (The Order of
Things), an early Structuralist text, Foucault
suggested that ways of constituting knowledge
can alter according to shifts in epistemes
(structures for organizing knowledge).
Transformations in knowledge occur according
to discontinuities and ruptures rather than any
linear progression.
 DISCOURS
E
After The Archaeology of Knowledge
(1969), Foucault shifts from the concept
of the episteme with the
poststructuralist notion of the discursive
formation to express his focus on the
way in which power produces domains of
knowledge. Discursive analysis would
define all of his later work
 Discourse
Foucault was interested in the phenomenon of discourse throughout his
career, primarily in how discourses define the reality of the social world and
the people, ideas, and things that inhabit it.

For Foucault, a discourse is an institutionalized way of speaking or writing

about reality that defines what can be intelligibly thought and said about the
world and what cannot.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that sex as pleasure was

transformed into a discourse abut "sexuality in the act of confession . This
discourse was then transformed into science in psychoanalysis which
changed the way we think about desire, and pleasure.

In Foucaults argument, discourses about sexuality did not discover some

pre-existing, truth about sexuality. It but rather reconstructed it through
particular practices of power and knowledge production.
Discourse, for Foucault, means ways of
constituting knowledge; coherent sets of
statements, rules and conventions that, in
tandem with social practices and power
relations, determine the regime of truth of
a particular period and culture.
Discursive formations do not refer to things, as we
might presume to be true of language. Rather,
discourse both constitutes its object and generates
knowledge about that object. For example, nineteenth
century psychopathology:
Constitutes (rather than discovers) mental illness as
its object of study, produces (rather than reveals)
scientific distinctions between the normal and the
pathological.
Defines and makes systemic the treatments of
abnormality.
Determines the arrangement of power roles
(professor/student; doctor/health administrator/patient)
within the institutions it generates (the sanitarium, the
clinic, the university department, the psychotherapists
office).

At every level of a given discursive

formation, what is known is the product
of relations of force and power.
Foucault and Genealogy
- Very broadly, Foucaults work united by concern with how
knowledges, discourses and meanings are accepted as truths
and inscribed on bodies/subjects in different socio-spatial
orders .
- Crucial here is his genealogical method taken from C19th
German philosopher Nietzche who was critical of power of
universal (religious) truths.
- Genealogical method = uncovering the historical relationships
between truth, knowledge and power, challenging apparent
rationality of history and history of ideas.
Foucault on Knowledge
Knowledge production and claims to the truth have
distinctive sociologies, geographies and politics.
Discourses organize knowledge: Produce the order of
things, permit what is sayable and thinkable;
Each episteme has distinctive archaeology of
organizing principles, or discursive formations, that
work to produce objects of knowledge and the truth
about them
E.g. liberal economics, the market, and the science of the
supply, demand, macroeconomic management etc.
Foucault on Power
Truth, knowledge and power are deeply implicated in each
other (i.e. power-knowledge).
Power is not a thing or centralized resource owned and
wielded by an agent as a constraining force.
Is a productive, intrinsic, contingent, hierarchical, circulatory
and ordering relation between people, things, institutions etc.
E.g. Contrary to Althusser, knowledge cannot simply be
ideology because it produces those who dominate at the
same time as it produces domination.
Foucault talks about government and decentred forms and
institutions of power - Noam Chomsky (Marxist) .vs. Michel
Foucault debates (1971)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kawGakdNoT0
Foucault on Subjectivity
Against long history of Western philosophy which views
identity as produced by the conscious self (C17th
Descartes; C18th Kant and the categorical imperative of
reason).
Subjectivity is made, produced and scripted in power-
knowledge relations (e.g. citizens, consumers, men,
women, British)
Foucaults later work (HoS, Lectures) as struggle to
analyze a liberal subject who is self-governing in the
name of their own freedom and welfare
Some Conclusions
Poststructural theory as notoriously difficult to define, but
a genealogical analysis traces it to a particular place,
time and group of authors.
As name suggests, is forged through critical engagement
with structuralism.
Michel Foucaults genealogical method, and the key
themes of knowledge, power and subjectivity which he
develops across a very broad and wide-reaching body of
work, mark him out as a key poststructural thinker for
human geographers.
 Michel Foucault. Panopticism. From
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195-
228

http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/courseblog/files/2011/03
/michel-foucault-panopticism.pdf