[Felix Hoenikker]

Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy
1:2 | © 1997 C. Colwell

Although the term 'genealogy' is most closely associated with Nietzsche and Foucault it is Judith Butler who gives us the clearest, or at least most succinct, definition: "...genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin." Here Butler specifies the goal of tracing the lines of descent that run between identity categories, institutions, practices, discourses and multiple points of origin. Defining the practice of genealogy is another story. In an earlier time we might have searched for a method that specified how we applied the practice of genealogy to particular problems, how we applied the theory to a field of investigation. To a great extent, this is no longer possible in the wake of contemporary criticisms of the very notion of method. Indeed, one might well claim that anything that achieves the goal outlined above is genealogy, that genealogy is defined or identified by its effects instead of something intrinsic to the process itself.
Nonetheless, at the risk of being caught essentializing the inessential, I would like to try to think about what genealogy is apart from its goals. Specifically, I would like to bring to bear on the notion of genealogy a couple of concepts deployed by Gilles Deleuze, those of series and event. Briefly, my argument will be that genealogy functions by decomposing the particular series along which events have been organized in order to create a different series for those events. To put it another, no less idiomatic, way, genealogy counter-actualizes events, returns to the virtual structure of events, in order to re-actualize them in another manner. If history is the collective memory of a particular social group then genealogy is a counter-memory composed of the same elements repeated and arranged in a different manner.
Let me set the stage by briefly rehearsing parts of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and Foucault's Discipline and Punish. In each case what we find is an overturning of the accepted reading of a series of events, the overturning of a collective memory. In Essay I of the Genealogy Nietzsche attacks two key concepts of Western Christian thought, the primacy of good from which humanity turns in its fall into evil and the primacy of divine love as the ground of Christianity. With regard to the first, Nietzsche breaks the series of events that grounds both Judaism and Christianity by denying its origin, i.e., Nietzsche elides the central myth of the Garden as the 'good' beginning and the Fall as the origin of evil. In its place Nietzsche begins the series with the conquering of Judea by the Romans and the consequent constitution of evil as the (all too human) response on the part of the Jews. Following this, Nietzsche argues that the hatred directed at conquerors (Egyptian or Roman) that characterizes much of Jewish thought is repeated in the Christian era, for example in the concept of eternal damnation. Nietzsche replaces divine love with human hatred as the grounding structure of Christianity.
Foucault likewise overturns the accepted reading of the shift from torture to imprisonment. In the traditional interpretation (mythologized in the phrase 'cruel and unusual punishment') power structures become more humane in the wake of the Enlightenment. Likewise, the Enlightenment produces a diminishment in the power exercised over populaces. But, much as he did with regard to the mad (in Madness and Civilization) Foucault argues that there is less a decrease in the exercise of power than a shift of aims and strategies. Instead of simply attending to the series torture-reform-imprisonment Foucault correlates this series with others, most notably the multiple series of the development of disciplinary technologies in the military, the monastery, the school, the hospital and the factory. What is interesting here is that it is the relation between these series that enables the correlative re-cognition of each as modalities of increasingly coercive forms of power.
What I want to suggest is that it is the shift in the way events are serialized, the way that they are strung together in series and the correlative series that they are linked to, that generates the counter-memories that Nietzsche and Foucault's works produce. That is to say, that it is not that either author invents, discovers or emphasizes new or different events or that they re-interpret events discovering hidden or sedimented meanings in the archive of the West. More pointedly, it is not the case that genealogy simply provides a different perspective on its historical objects. In order to show this, I will sketch out Deleuze's use of the terms 'event,' series,' the virtual-actual distinction and his discussions of memory in Bergsonism and Difference and Repetition. I will conclude by elaborating the link between these notions and the 'definition' of genealogy as a conceptual strategy.
The notion of the event has multiple senses in Deleuze's work. I will focus on only a few of those here. The event is for Deleuze a sense-event that arises from a particular state of affairs in the world. This sense is not located in the things themselves (as a referent) or in the knowing being (as an interpretation). It is rather, much as Gottlob Frege described sense, located between subjects and objects, or as Deleuze says, on the surface between words and objects (LS 22). The attempt here is to define a realm of sense that escapes the domination of objects, subjects and the telos of either divinity or Being. Here, we may note similarities to Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge in which meaning is located in the practice of language, a practice which produces meaning-effects that always escape both the intentions of speakers and the synchronic order of signifiers-signifieds that describes a particular episteme. The event, and meaning, always escapes that which appears to fix it -- whether that be reference, structure or interpretation.
The event has a peculiar temporality that places it outside the progression of past-present-future. It exists, or rather subsists/insists, in a time which has always just past and is always about to come, i.e., it is never present. The event is always expressed in the infinitive, 'to die,' 'to be sick.' It neither arises out of a past which prepares it, nor is oriented toward a future in which it will be fully realized. It nonetheless can erupt into the present producing an upheaval in the order of things. Deleuze appears to be going after a notion of becoming here that is not the opposite pole of being, a becoming that is not simply a shifting Heraclitean flux that mutates over the course of time. The event is neither something that shifts, transforms, mutates over time nor a static structure that remains the same across time. It is that which repeats but repeats differentially. As we shall see, it is this differential repetition of events that makes genealogy possible.
Events are singularities (LS 53) that are arranged in series. The term singularity plays on mathematical concept of a point with neither width nor breadth (i.e., no extension or comprehension -- it does not function as a concept that is extended across predicates in order to produce comprehension). But there is never a single series at work; the serial 'form' is "essentially multi serial" (LS 37). The clearest example is that of the correlative series of signifiers and signifieds in which the terms of one series interact with the other series in the production of meaning (LS 37-8). Deleuze emphasizes here that there is no correspondence between series; each series slides across the other producing resonances in the interaction of terms. The Sign is the effect of that resonance. With regard to events however, the serial form engages at least three series, the series of events, the series of states of affairs (i.e., the arrangement of bodies or things at a particular point in time) and the words or propositions that express events.
The key to understanding how the event emerges in time lies in the notion of actualization. In a discussion of Henri Bergson's theory of evolution Deleuze opposes the virtual-actual distinction to the possible-real distinction in order to show that actualization is the "mechanism of creation" (B 98). Here, the distinction between the possible and the real is attributed to a 'theological model of creation' in which the real is simply one of the many possibles, all of which resemble the real, that has been brought into existence. This is, loosely, a Platonic or Christian model in which every possible existent, whether that be an event or a being, has some existence in either an ideal or divine realm. What is real, on this model, is a subset of the possible. But in fact, Deleuze argues, the supposed set of possibles is simply an extrapolation from the real which guarantees the representational relation between the possible and the real.
Actualization, on the other hand, is the process in which the virtual differentiates itself in the active creation of something new, an actual which does not resemble the virtual from which it arose (B 97). One example here is the relation between an organism and the genetic code of its DNA. It is through a process of actualization that the virtual structure of a strand of DNA generates an organism, the organism (phenotype) bearing no resemblance to its genotype. There is no relation of representation between the virtual and the actual as neither is a subset or an extrapolation of the other. Indeed, there cannot be such a relationship as the virtual can yield a practically unlimited diversity of actualizations.
The better example for my purposes here is memory. In memory the past exists virtually as a collection of past instants or percepts in a state of 'relaxation,' i.e., in a condition in which these percepts are not organized in any particular way with relation to each other. They exist as a dissociated set of singularities. That is, they are virtual. Furthermore, this past is not something apart from the present but something that is contained in the present. The entire past (as memory) is part of each present. Recollection is a process of actualizing this virtuality, of differentially repeating the percepts along a particular series, a series that arranges or organizes them in a particular manner, a way of bringing the past to bear on the present. Moreover, we should note that for Deleuze this actualization of recollection is not intentional; it arises at the intersection of the demands of the present situation and the virtual structure of the past. Even when we intentionally dredge up a memory we do not have control over the way in which the various elements are actualized.
To a great extent, the point of Deleuze's emphasis of the virtual-actual distinction is to dispense with representation as the image of thought. The possible-real distinction establishes a relation between the 'origin' (whether that origin be God, Being, original experience, human nature or an historical event [conceived of as an independent, static occurrence]) and the current order of things such that the present resembles or represents the origin. But for Deleuze, the actual, the present, is not a representation of the virtual. The actual is a differential repetition of the virtual. The actual is a transformation of the virtual, a mutation of a beginning.
Let me return at this point to genealogy. Our present is one in which the past is always co-present. The past is actualized, in one form or another, in the institutions, discursive practices, beliefs and relations of power that constitute daily life. Christian morality and juridical practices of punishment are events that produce meaning-effects in our lives. They are shaped in our histories and in turn shape our perceptions. They normally function in a transparent manner, i.e., they remain invisible in the way they form the various visible structures of life. What is doubly invisible is the history which produces them as they are.
These histories are series of events, series of meaning-events that produce effects by their juxtaposition with the current states of affairs and the way in which those events are expressed in language. These effects are what they are due to the way in which events have been actualized. The socio-political events that the ancient Middle East passed through remain current, differentially repeat themselves, in the valuations of good and evil that dominate perception and thought in the West. But this is only one way in which these events might be actualized. While they are present in a particular actualization they also remain present virtually, in a dissociated succession of elements.
The question then becomes how a particular actualization becomes sedimented; how, e.g., a particular evaluation such as good and evil becomes fixed over a period of time. The correlative question is, of course, how might such an actualization be undone, how is counter-actualization possible? As to the first both Foucault and Nietzsche argue that power, whether it be will to power, power/knowledge or discourse/practice, is what fixes the event in a particular actualization. That is, relations of power structure the serial form in which events are actualized such that a repetition of the Same occurs instead of a repetition of difference, a truly differential repetition.
We see this in both Nietzsche's and Foucault's writings. In Nietzsche, for example, the power of the Church, of Christianity, structures the repetition of the conflict between noble and slave morality, between Rome and Judea, in such a way as to repeat the victory of the slave evaluation of 'good and evil,' the triumph of ressentiment over bodily desires, of reactive over active forces. The power that Christianity exercises discursively, pastorally, institutionally and, on occasion, physically functions to repeat these specific valuations. Correlatively, it repeats a history that actualizes a particular event of valuation as a repetition of the tradition it seeks to continue and promulgate. We may note that the series of religious evaluations here generates, supports and receives support from legal, political and non-religious moral series of discourse/practices that in turn support the religious evaluations.
Similarly, Foucault argues that the intersection of medical, religious, moral and legal discourses, among others, and their associated institutional structures serve to repeat the categories that define criminality, sexuality and mental illness. One of the centerpieces of Foucault's arguments in each of these cases is that no single discourse, power or institution constructs and maintains the identity structures of delinquent, pervert, homosexual or madman or the correlative genealogies/histories that support these categories. What Foucault does is to show how various series of discourses and practices develop on their own, intersect, combine with, support and resonate with other series to generate meanings and identities that are then deployed against individuals.
To be sure, these histories do not entirely ossify the event. The Christian valuations of good/evil, the categories of delinquent or hetero- and homosexual shift across different epistemes. That is, these events are a differential repetition of sorts. Indeed, the major difference between Foucault and Nietzsche is, perhaps, that Foucault takes pains to document in some detail these shifts in recent history (while Nietzsche is more concerned with the broad shifts at the beginnings of these events). But both are concerned to show that this repetition occurs within relatively narrow constraints. Nietzsche's concern is that while the dividing line between the categories of good and evil may change, the categories themselves remain in place. As such, many aspects of life, many expressions of will to power are continually categorized as evil and become the target of ressentiment, of a will to nothingness that negates life itself. Foucault's concern is that while the parameters of the normal may shift many aspects of life continue to be categorized as abnormal and confront the same, or at least a similar, ressentiment.
And because these sense-events continue to be re-actualized and repeated within these narrow parameters they produce meaning-effects that are relatively fixed and sedimented in various ways. The valuations of good and evil become fixed insofar as they are given a transcendental meaning and ground in the development of Christianity which develops an elaborate theology in order to explain its various manifestations. The categories of normal and abnormal become fixed insofar as they are given an elaborate scientific meaning and ground in the development of psychiatry and criminology which develop complex rational justifications that replace the need for a transcendental foundation. But they also become fixed insofar as they are developed as multifaceted and specific answers that reduce the problematic situations from which they arise to problems, answers given categorical status and extended to encompass all future problems.
The question then, is to how actualize events in a different manner or, to be more precise, establish the conditions under which a different actualization might take place. This is what Deleuze calls 'counter-actualization' (LS 151 et passim). It is an attempt to return to the virtual structure of the event to pave the way for a new actualization. The problem is that, if I have Deleuze right, we cannot isolate and individuate the virtual components of events as discrete elements since to do so is to make them present, to make them actual. That is, identifying and isolating them is to serialize them and repeat them in such as to bring them to bear on the present. A project of this sort would be an actualization of the virtual which would defeat the purpose of returning to the virtual itself. Moreover, it would reduce genealogy to history by re-introducing representation at the heart of genealogy. Such a project would presuppose that the virtual could be represented, that there are discrete, fixed events in history that contain the truth of the matter.
Moreover, it seems to me that neither Nietzsche or Foucault function in this manner. Neither claims to identify the 'real' elements of our history that others have failed to perceive. Something else is at work here.
That something is what Deleuze refers to as the problematic and Foucault as problematization. Deleuze contrasts the problematic with the problem. The problem is a way of reducing the problematic character of things to something which has a solution. Problems, as such, always have specific and singular solutions. "A problem always gets the answer it deserves." Events, on the contrary, remain problematic; they do not have solutions or, more to the point, they do not have solutions except insofar as they are actualized. This is a function of their temporal nature as always subsisting in the infinitive form of verbs, always in a state of becoming. The problem is a reduction of this becoming to the present tense, an actualization of the virtual, infinitive structure of the event which allows for a singular solution that can be repeated without (much) difference.
Here we see what Nietzsche and Foucault criticized in their respective genealogies. For Nietzsche, Christianity reduces the problematic character of will to power by reducing it to the problem of good and evil (and its attendant notions of free will and the passions). For Foucault, crime, with all its political, social and economic aspects, is reduced to the problem of delinquency, of a criminal nature that lurks in the 'souls' of men. Each problem produces an answer, whether it be eternal damnation or the prison or the answer which is common to both -- the war against the 'instincts.'
What genealogy does then, the difference it makes, is that it returns to the virtual structure of the event by problematizing it, by re-actualizing it in such a way as to preclude a singular and specific solution. What marks genealogy, particularly the genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault, is its inability to provide solutions. Neither of the two had anything to say to their readers who asked when they finished their works -- "What then?" Foucault especially refused to provide programs for the reform or replacement of prisons, mental institutions or an ethics of sexuality. Each sought to problematize anew problems that had supposedly been solved, problems that were only presented as problems to students by teachers who already knew the answers, problems no longer conceived of as real problems.
To conclude: History, as opposed to genealogy, is the ordering of events in a single series that repeats those events within narrowly defined limits; it is for all intents and purposes the repetition of the Same. History is a narrative that reduces the problematic nature of the events it addresses to problems that have solutions; solutions that are also repetitions of the Same; solutions that re-impose or attempt to re-impose the values imbedded in a long history of errors. History is the reproduction of a social memory that reproduces the tradition and imbeds it in our psyches, our social relations and our institutions. History actualizes, materializes that tradition.
Genealogy is the attempt to re-serialize events. Again, genealogy does not invent, discover or emphasize new or different events nor does it re-interpret events in order to discover hidden or sedimented meanings that have been neglected by the tradition. It is the attempt to counter-actualize the event, to return, in one form or another, to the virtual structure of the event in order to re-problematize the event. The goal is not to find a new solution, to 'fix' history, to offer a better or truer history or account of the past. The goal is to make the problem problematic, to make it a real problem once again, a problem we no longer know the answer to but for which we are compelled to find solutions.
Genealogy generates a counter-memory, a memory made of the same components as the memory of history but one in which those components have been repeated and re-arranged in a different manner, re-actualized along different and multiple series. Counter-memory is a mutation of memory. Genealogy functions as a virus that mutates our collective memory to the point where we can no longer remember or recognize the tradition that is embodied in our psyches, our social relations and our institutions. As such, it forces us, or at least allows us the possibility of, re-membering and re-cognizing that tradition, of finding a way to create our own problems and our own local, specific and finite solutions.
If genealogy mutates the collective memory of our society it is with the goal of mutating the material structures of that memory -- our values, discourses, practices, institutions and our selves.


C. Colwell is Visiting Assistant Professor at Villanova University. He researches and publishes in contemporary French philosophy and philosophy of the bio-sciences with an emphasis on issues of identity formation.