A genealogical history begins with the identification of a power, in order to then see how it emerged—power produces knowledge and genealogy unmasks the relation

What is wrong with “a history of the past in terms of the present”? According to Foucault, this is the “presentist fallacy”; the historian takes “a model or a concept, an institution, a feeling, or a symbol from his present” and attempts to “find that it had a parallel meaning in the past”.41 Nor does a genealogical history attempt to discover the underlying laws of history, thereby falling in the trap of finalism. The latter holds that the present is the accomplishment of some latent goal in the past. Rather, a genealogical history begins with a diagnosis of the present. The genealogist-historian locates the manifestations of a given “meticulous ritual of power” to see where it arose and how it developed. Discipline and Punish examines the “Entstehung” of the human sciences (which Foucault calls “pseudo-sciences”) and their relation to the “Entstehung” of the prison. Foucault says: This book is intended as…a genealogy of the present scientific legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.” A genealogical enquiry shows that “…power produces knowledge…that power and knowledge directly imply one another”. What is the relationship between the prison and the human sciences? It seems that Foucault does not clearly differentiate between the two Entstehungsgeschichten, despite the fact that he did not wish to reduce the one to the other. Notice: I am not saying that the human sciences emerged from the prison. But, if they have been able to be formed and to produce so many profound changes in the episteme, it is because they have been conveyed by a specific and new modality of power: a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful. The connection that Foucault makes between “power” and “knowledge” is innovative. Foucault’s use of a hyphen between these two terms is meant to show the constitutive (or productive) aspect of knowledge.45 Power (relations) and knowledge (or truth) implicate each other,46 hence Foucault’s term “power-knowledge”47 («pouvoirsavoir»).48 The meaning of the composite term “pouvoir/savoir” is more complex than the English translation “power/knowledge” would at first sight suggest. In French there are different words for different forms of knowledge. In his archaeological works Foucault used the word “savoir” to refer to the “implicit knowledge” characteristic of an historical epoch, that is, to the “common sense” of a people at that time at a specific place; he was concerned with how the “savoir” shaped the “explicit knowledge” – what he called “connaissance” – “that is institutionalized in the disciplines that make up the human sciences”.49 Concerning “pouvoir”, although it is translated as “power”, one should not forget that in French it is also the infinitive form of the verb “to be able to”, i.e. “can”. Accordingly, as Ellen K. Feder says: In Foucault’s work, pouvoir must be understood in this dual sense, as both “power” as English speakers generally take it (which could also be rendered as puissance or force in French), but also as a kind of potentiality, capability or capacity. Power, Foucault tells us, must be understood to be more complex than a term like puissance conveys; it has multiple forms and can issue from “anywhere”.50 Additionally, it is difficult to translate the composite “power/knowledge”. Gayatri Spivak draws our attention to the “homely verbiness of savoir in savoirfaire [a ready and polished kind of ‘know-how’, in English], savoir-vivre [an understanding of social life and customs] into pouvoir”. So “pouvoir-savoir” could mean “being able to do something – only as you are able to make sense of it”.51 Foucault uses the composite term “power/knowledge” to refer to the relation between “power” and “knowledge” that genealogy unmasks. For example, a genealogical study shows that the explosion of discussion about sex in the Victorian age was due to a “type of power” that bourgeois society “brought to bear on the body and on sex”.52 It, thus, casts doubt on the “repressive hypothesis”.53 Genealogy demonstrates that “this power had neither the form of the law, nor the effects of the taboo”; rather, it operated by producing (different kinds of) sexuality and making it a defining characteristic of individuals. Consequently, there emerged four “figures” who were simultaneously “objects of knowledge”, namely, “the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult”.55 These were products of four strategies which “formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex”,56 to wit, the “hysterization of women’s bodies”, the “pedagogization of children’s sex”, the “socialization of procreative behavior” and the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure”, respectively.57 So, far from being an historical fact, sexuality is “a historical construct”58 («un dispositif historique»)59. Therefore, the real questions are whether prohibition and censorship are not forms of power rather than repression and whether all this discourse on sex is not itself part of the power it criticizes as “repression”.