Garland

So, despite their other differences, archaeology and genealogy share a certain critical intent with respect to the present, though each method pursues its historico-critical aims rather differently. Archaeology wants to show structural order, structural differences and the discontinuities that mark off the present from its past. Genealogy seeks instead to show ‘‘descent’’ and ‘‘emergence’’ and how the contingencies of these processes continue to shape the present.

David Garland

‘‘The body is the inscribed surface of events... Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history’’ (Foucault, 1991: 83). By reconnecting contemporary practices (or contemporary bodies) with the historical struggles and exercises of power that shaped their character, the genealogist prompts us to think more critically about the value and meaning of these phenomena. As Foucault put it in 1979: ‘‘experience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism’’ (Foucault, 1979 in Kritzman, 1988: 83). And again the same year, ‘‘[I]mportant and even invaluable political effects can be produced by historical analyses... The problem is to let knowledge of the past work on the experience of the present’’ (Foucault, 2008: 130).

David Garland

The meaning and importance Foucault imputes to his objects of study (in this case, the Panopticon, but his treatment of the technology of confession in his History of Sexuality, Volume 1 raises the same issues) are not those of the historical period in which these practices first emerged but emphatically those of the present. Such practices may have been marginal in the social and political life of the 17th and 18th centuries, but Foucault regards them as absolutely central to the genealogies and to the functioning of regimes of power–knowledge that operate in the present.20 For Foucault, the principles of observation and individuation, visibility and discipline, power and knowledge contained in Bentham’s design provide a grid of intelligibility for understanding how power operates in our own present-day society. The historian of the present does not commit the error of anachronism by reading the present onto the past. He or she is instead engaged in the historicocritical project of identifying traces of the past (historic power struggles, modes of control, alliances and associations) and their continuing operation today.21

David Garland