Martin Paul Eve, Foucauldian methodologies for considering emerging archives? 2015
Some notes and early (very abstract) draft thoughts on whether Foucauldian genealogies, as redefined by Colin Koopman, can help us to address the problems of the archive in contemporary fiction studies.
In Pynchon and Philosophy, I needed to give a succinct outline of the usual approach towards Foucault’s broad body of history/philosophy. In sketching the trajectory of Foucault’s career, I wrote:
Foucault’s works are most commonly split along a methodological axis that divides his early phase – designated ‘archaeology’ – and his later writings, which are termed, with deliberate Nietzschean overtones, ‘genealogies’. Archaeology consists of an excavation of the surrounding conditions that make an episteme possible; an analysis of the historical conditions that make viable a certain way of thinking that is no longer comprehensible within a contemporary context. Genealogy on the other hand takes Nietzsche’s anti-positivist ‘methodology’ – in so far that it can be thus termed – of removing the mask of universality from a specific truth at a localised level in order to show how these small fluctuations contribute to a shift in thinking. As Árpád Szakolczai puts it, genealogy centres on ‘the conditions of emergence’ while assuming ‘that reality is not a uniform surface but is built of interconnected layers’ and also ‘involves a special relation the investigator has to himself’. However, genealogy is not a retraction – it shares much in common with its preceding archaeology – it is rather one of the three ‘successive layers […] characterizing three necessarily simultaneous dimensions of the same analysis’, the others being archaeology and ‘strategy’; the overarching term that Foucault used for his methods (WC, 397). — Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy (Palgrave, 2004), pp. 77-78
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