History and Theory 53 (October 2014), 419-427 Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10721

GENEALOGY, PROBLEMATIZATION,
AND NORMATIVITY IN MICHEL FOUCAULT

Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. By Colin

Koopman. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013. Pp.
xii, 348.

ABSTRACT

Colin Koopmans excellent Genealogy as Critique argues that Michel Foucaults gene-
alogiesand, in fact, his archaeologiesshould be read as historical accounts of the
emergence of particular problematizations. The idea of a problematization, which
Foucault introduces late in his career, has two sides. First, there is the idea that the situa-
tion whose emergence a genealogy traces is problematic in the sense of being fraught or
dangerous. Second, by tracing the genealogy, Foucault problematizes the situation itself,
showing how it calls for attention. Koopman argues that Foucaults genealogies are not
themselves normative, but they instead outline situations or practices in a way that allows
for normative investigation and political intervention. What is required, then, are norma-
tive approaches that complement Foucaults genealogies. Koopman argues that Foucaults
own late discussions of self-transformation are inadequate to fully accomplish the task;
they need to be complemented by recourse to Deweyan reconstruction or Habermasian
normative reflection. However, and in turn, such reflection cannot be had on an absolut-
ist ground but rather must be seen as historically contingent, universalizing rather than
universalist in Koopmans vocabulary. I argue that there are several reasons to think that
the strong separation between genealogy and normative posited by Koopman may be too
strict. Foucaults rhetoric, his choice of certain problematizations, and Koopmans own
commitments to problematizations as requiring attention all seem to point toward a more
intimate, although admittedly implicit, relation between genealogy and normative posi-
tions in Foucaults work.

Keywords: genealogy, critique, problematization, normativity, Immanuel Kant, Jrgen

Habermas

Genealogy as Critique is an excellent book. This might seem a strange way to

begin a book review, but it should be mentioned up front. After the academic
industry that Foucaults works have spawned, it is difficult to imagine yet another
treatment of them that could possibly offer new insight or open up a dimension
of his thought that hadnt already been noticed. However, Colin Koopmans book
does just that. In particular, it offers a new way to see Foucaults workand not
just his genealogiesthrough the lens of Foucaults term problematization that
Foucault himself invoked to describe his later studies. Koopman utilizes the idea
of problematization to show how Foucaults works were always problematizing,
and problematizing in ways that display the normative difficulties of our present
without themselves engaging in normative debate.
420 todd may

Koopman opens his book with a comparison between Foucault and Immanuel
Kant. For both, as the title of his book indicates, philosophy is largely a matter
of critique. That is, it is a matter of showing the character and limits of thought.
The key difference between Foucault and Kant is that for the latter, critique is
transcendental whereas for the former it is historical. Foucaults critique shows
us the character and limits of certain aspects of our thoughtand particularly our
thought about ourselvesin the present and as a result of a particular, contingent
past. The present that Foucault seeks to place before us, then, is not a present
without exit, but rather a present that could have been otherwise and could be
otherwise. As Koopman insists, however, Foucaults burden is not just to say that
the present is contingent, but instead to show how it came to be this particular
present as opposed to another one. That is the role of genealogy, which at its
best involves a practice of critique in the form of a historical problematization of
the present (2).
This historical problematization, Koopman argues (a point to which we shall
return), does not involve particular normative commitments on Foucaults part.
His genealogical task is not condemnation or denunciation, as with Nietzsche, or
vindication, as with Bernard Williams. Koopman contrasts Foucaults genealo-
gies with both of these thinkers in order to shed light upon what problematiza-
tion is. Rather than providing support for or resistance to a particular present,
problematization works in two keys: problematization was for Foucault both
an act of critical inquiry (expressed in the verb form as to problematize) and a
nominal object of inquiry (expressed in the noun form as a problematization)
(98). Let us linger over these two keys a moment, since they form the centerpiece
of Koopmans view.
Problematization as a nominal object of inquiry is a situation or group of
practices (or even a single practice) that is fraught or dangerous or unstable in
one way or another. For instance, as Koopman argues later in the book, Foucault
shows that our modern situation involves both an incitement to emancipation and
freedom as a personal ideal while at the same time engaging in forms of disciplin-
ary power that are inimical to the realization of such an ideal. This should be seen
not as a contradiction but as a tension (two reciprocal but incompatible aspects
[172]) within our current reality that emerges from a specific history of practices
that have made navigating that reality problematic.
In displaying the problematic character of reality, Foucault engages in prob-
lematizing in the verbal sense: rendering our situation problematic to us. By
showing the problematic character of our situation to us, what once may have
seemed, as Koopman puts it at the outset, problems whose itches feel impen-
etrable, whose remedies are ever beyond our grasp (1), becomes now something
we face at once in both its full force and contingency. Its full force comes from
the fact that the history that landed us on these particular shores is our history. It
is of us, and indeed it is us. We cannot simply choose to be otherwise and have it
automatically be so. However, and on the other hand, that history is contingent,
and because of this, with effort and commitment, it can be otherwise if we so
decide. In short, by problematizing our present, Foucault changes our relation
 GENEALOGY, PROBLEMATIZATION, AND NORMATIVITY IN FOUCAULT 421
to it: we need notand we cannotany longer take it for granted as something
natural or inevitable.
There are several elements to Koopmans construction of the character of prob-
lematization. One in particular stands out as a fascinating new angle on how to
frame Foucaults genealogical works. Koopman argues that Foucaults genealo-
gies (as well as his archaeologies) display the emergence of purifications rather
than exclusions. In reference to The History of Madness, for instance, Koopman
writes, Exclusion can be taken in the rather colloquial sense of banishment or
expulsion, such that the exclusion of reason amounts to the exile of madness
where rationality reigns. Purification can be taken as describing a process in
which two kinds of practices rigorously isolate themselves from one another,
such that the purification of madness and reason amounts to the simultaneous
production of both madness and reason in such a way that they cannot admit of
admixture with one another (157). This distinction seems to me to capture a
subtle but important point. If genealogies are histories of emergence, then what
emerges must be produced. We cannot, for instance, take rationality for granted
as ahistorical and then see whatever is not rational as subject to exclusion. By
focusing on purification rather than exclusion, Koopman allows us to recognize
madness, discipline, delinquency, medical health, sexuality, and so on as histori-
cally produced in relation to one another rather than as stabilities that change their
forms of relation over time.
Koopman is insistent that this form of problematization does not amount to a
denunciation of the present. We can show, he writes, that practices are prob-
lematic, dangerous, fraught, and in need of additional attention without making
any normative claims about these practices (92). He even goes so far as to claim,
contrary to what many Foucault scholars would want to argue, that the discipline
Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish is not an object of Foucaults con-
demnation, but instead constitutive of a problem or set of problems about which
we should ask ourselves but which we do not necessarily need to change.
In this way, Foucault skirts the problem of the genetic fallacy that Koopman
finds in Nietzsche and Williams. The genetic fallacy consists in coming to a
normative conclusion about a situation simply through tracing the history of its
emergence. It is not enough to show, for instance, that discipline arises through
a history of practices (monastic, hygienic, military, and so on) of monitoring and
manipulating the body that converge in the formation of the prison in order to
offer a normative criticism of those practices or of the discipline that arises from
their convergence. In addition, one must add a normative layer itself, which,
Koopman argues, Foucault assiduously avoids. Genealogy (as well as Foucaults
earlier archaeology) might well serve as tools for political change, but they do
not come normatively pre-labeled. Problematization, in short, although it may be
critique, is not criticism.
This leads one to the question whether Foucault offers anything in terms of an
alternative to the problematic situations whose genealogical history he traces. In
one sense, he neednt do so. He has offered us genealogies of our present that
articulate some of our current problematizations; it is not normatively incumbent
upon him to tell us how to address them. On the other hand, since the situations
422 todd may

he presents to us are problematic, there might be a motivation to think about

alternatives. Koopman reads Foucaults late workswhat are called his ethical
worksfrom the perspective of trying to develop responses to our current prob-
lematizations.
In doing so, he distinguishes between what he wants to call ethical orientations
and ethical commitments. The former are structural or formal whereas the latter
consist in particular ethical contents, theories, and so on. My view is that the real
value of philosophical work on ethics consists not in pronouncing verdicts (the
claim of commitment) but in clarifying and conceptualizing extant possibilities
for ethical living in the present (the work of orientation) (189). I would argue
that claiming the real value of philosophical work to lie solely in orientation is
a bit of a stretch. There has been much excellent recent work in practical ethics,
for example regarding the moral status of and obligations to nonhuman animals.
That quibble aside, however, Koopmans larger point is that Foucaults ethical
work, although not offering us specific ethical (or, even less, political) programs,
offers the possibility of approaching our current problematizations by means of
adopting a new ethical orientation. This ethical orientation is one that Koopman
calls self-transformation.
Self-transformation can be contrasted with liberation or emancipation. The lat-
ter is the ethical/political standard of modernity. As we have seen, it is coupled
in an incompatible way with discipline. Whereas liberation promises a self of full
autonomy, discipline engages in a fine-grained molding of people. Self-transfor-
mation is not liberation and does not promise full autonomy. Rather, it recognizes
that one is always within a given, and often problematic, situation. What it com-
mends instead is working on the ethical material presented within that situation
in order to make of oneself something other than what one is being produced to
be. Although Koopman doesnt treat the specific elements of self-transformation,
one can see this idea at work particularly in the second volume of Foucaults his-
tory of sexuality, where he isolates the four aspects of the formation of ethical
conduct: determining the ethical substance, the mode of subjection, the ethical
work, and the ethical telos.1
Of course, one might further ask, in the name of what should self-transforma-
tion occur? Here one is moving from ethical orientation to ethical commitment.
And, as Koopman notes, Foucault has little to say about this. Foucaults norma-
tive reticence does not allow him to extend his reflections into specific ethical
or political advice, and so if we are to go further down this path, we must depart
from his writings. For Koopman, this means turning to the work of the pragma-
tists and the critical theorists, and especially John Dewey and Jrgen Habermas.
Habermas in particular might seem to be a strange choice. After all, dont most
commenters on Foucault and Habermas see them as polar opposites, Foucault
occupying the contingent historical wing and Habermas the Kantian absolutist
wing? Koopman, however, offers an intriguing argument to bring them together.
Roughly, his strategy is to contrast an absolute universality with what he calls
universalization. Universalization is the historically contingent spreading of an
1. . Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, transl. Robert Hurley
(New York: Pantheon, 1985), 26-27.
 GENEALOGY, PROBLEMATIZATION, AND NORMATIVITY IN FOUCAULT 423
idea or a normative commitment across larger segments of a population or perhaps
many populations. He cites as an example Ian Hackings history of the universal-
ization of statistical reasoning. With the idea of universalization in hand, Koop-
man can see both the spread of discipline that Foucaults genealogy recounts and
the reconstructive work recommended by both Dewey and Habermas as instances
of universalization. The former would be a problematic universalization and the
latter, for instance Habermass defense of consensual deciding of norms, would
be reconstructive in the Deweyan sense. If Koopmans bid here is successful, then
Foucault and Habermas can find a point of convergence. To be sure, that point of
convergence is closer to Foucault than the Habermas of some interpreters. Univer-
salization is historically contingent. However, Koopman points out that Habermas
himself has, in recent work, backed off of some of the more absolutist pronounce-
ments of some of his work from the period of Theory of Communicative Action.
I hope this brief summary indicates some of the richness of Genealogy as Cri-
tique. Although I have studied and written on Foucault for over thirty years now,
I found much in the book that was fresh and interesting. Koopman has a masterful
knowledge of the surrounding literature, and is a generous interpreter of that lit-
erature. In addition, he is an admirably clear writer and thinker. Reading his book
was a pleasure. I would like, in the remainder of this review, to offer some com-
mentary on the vexed question of Foucaults relation to normativity. Koopman
faces it straightforwardly, which many of Foucaults interlocutors fail to do. And
he makes a sharp division between genealogical work and normative commit-
ment, while showing that genealogy can be friendly to a normatively committed
political program (and what political program is not normatively committed?).
I wonder, though, whether the distinction between Foucaults genealogies and
normativity can be drawn as straightforwardly as Koopman seeks. In particular,
there seem to be three reasons for doubt about this.
The first, and perhaps most vague, lies in Foucaults own rhetoric. In Disci-
pline and Punish, for instance, he refers to the carceral archipelago,2 discusses
the normalizing examination as a ceremony of power,3 makes claims like,
when one wishes to individualize the healthy, normal, and law-abiding adult, it
is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret mad-
ness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing.4
Moreover, near the end of the book, he describes in sympathetic terms the early
efforts of workers movements to resist normalization and discipline. The rhetori-
cal orientation of these and other passages, especially in Discipline and Punish
and the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where, in a passage as cryptic as
it is suggestive, he says that, The rallying point for the counterattack against the
deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures,5
seems to me to be unmistakable.

2. . Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. Alan Sheridan (New
York; Random House, 1977), 298.
3. . Ibid., 184.
4. . Ibid., 193.
5. . Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, transl. Robert Hurley (New
York: Random House, 1980), 157.
424 todd may

To be sure, there are at least two responses one might make, both of them with
some plausibility. The first is that these rhetorical flourishes are indeed vague,
too vague to make anything of them. In particular, since Foucault does not fol-
low them up with overt normative commitments, as Koopman notes, there is no
reason to take them as implying any such commitments. Second, in interviews
and other more informal interventions, Foucault is hesitant to offer any form of
political program, so why should we saddle him with normative commitments
where he does not explicitly posit any?
To the second response, there is a difference between refusing to commend a
political program and having general normative commitments. It is entirely pos-
sible, and in fact I think it is difficult to understand what Foucault is up to without
it, that Foucault believes that normalization, the epistemic sexualization of our
desires, the edifice of the prison, and so on are normatively unjustifiable without
committing oneself to a particular program to combat them. Although it may
well be that it is up to those who struggle to determine the shape of that struggle,
Foucault seems clearly to be focusing his genealogies on sites where struggle is
warranted. His rhetoric, moreover, is of a piece with that focus, which is why I
am unconvinced by the first line of response. My own view, and admittedly this is
a speculation on my part, is that Foucault was hesitant to engage in overt norma-
tive commitment, not because it was inappropriate to genealogical analysis, but
because he was unsure how far he could go in normative commitment before he
committed the sin, as Gilles Deleuze named it in a conversation with Foucault,
of the indignity of speaking for others.6
The second reason for thinking that Foucaults genealogies were more norma-
tively inflected than Koopman allows has to do with the choice of what is to be
the object of genealogical analysis. Why focus on discipline and normalization,
or the emergence of sexuality as a key to the ways in which we know ourselves,
if there is not something problematic about them? Here, of course, Koopman
would indeed reply that they are problematic. In fact, that is the point of his
book: to display genealogies as problematizations, in both senses of the term
discussed above. However, my point is that there is a third way in which the situ-
ations whose emergence Foucaults genealogies describe could be problematic.
This third, if related, way is not entirely divorced from Koopmans own view.
The idea here is that normalization and the like are problematic because, among
other reasons, there is something wrong with them. It is not simply that they are
worthy of our consideration. In all likelihood, there are many emergences that
genealogies could describe that are worthy of our consideration and reflection.
Why choose the particular ones Foucault chose? It would seem that somehow
these emergences more urgently require our attention than, say, the emergence
of other universalizing phenomena such as an increasing focus on personal
health. (Admittedly, it is possible that a genealogy of personal health might show
otherwisea possibility that could not be dismissed before the appearance of
such a genealogy. But that would only reinforce my point here.) My view is that
Foucault chose these particular genealogies rather than others precisely because
6. Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Intellectuals and Power, in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 209.
 GENEALOGY, PROBLEMATIZATION, AND NORMATIVITY IN FOUCAULT 425
there were reasons to resist the emergences those genealogies trace, or at least
some aspects of those emergences.
At this point one might reply that the evidence brought forward by these first
two reasons is indirect. Agreed. If Foucault had laid his normative cards on the
table either through endorsement or denial, there would be nothing to interpret
here. The issue between Koopmans view and mine arises precisely because
those cards were never laid out. My argument that Koopmans view too strictly
separates Foucaults genealogies from normative commitments does not rest
upon his making a mistake, but rather on signals that must be deciphered from an
uncertainand unfinishedlegacy.
The third reason for thinking that Foucaults genealogies have a more norma-
tively laden inflection than Koopman recognizes comes from Koopmans own
claims about them. He writes, as we have seen, We can show that practices are
problematic, dangerous, fraught, and in need of additional attention without mak-
ing any normative claims about those practices (92). This sentence seems to me
to seek to hold together two incompatible thoughts. The first is that there is some-
thing about these particular practicesor the situation they createthat requires
attention, and requires attention because theyor itis dangerous and fraught.
The second is that nothing normative is being claimed about the practices or the
situation. But isnt dangerousness or fraughtness a normative characteristic of a
situation? And isnt the obligation to attend to that dangerousness or fraughtness
a normative obligation? This, in fact, is the point I was emphasizing above in my
second reason for thinking that Foucaults genealogies have a normative edge.
If Koopman were to deny the tension in this sentence, and to support his dis-
tinction between genealogies and normativity, there are at least two paths open
to him here. The first would be to suggest that incorporating normativity into the
genealogical method would be to commit the genetic fallacy that he ascribes to
both Nietzsche and Williams. The second would be to deny that dangerousness
and fraughtness are actually normative characteristics. Let us consider each in
turn.
If Foucaults genealogies were to criticize, say, normalization on the basis of
its emergence, that would indeed be an example of the genetic fallacy. But I dont
take it that that is what he is doing. Rather, in tracing the emergence of normal-
ization, he also shows the roles it plays in contemporary life: its constraining
character, its barring us from thinking that there are other ways to live, its conver-
gence with deleterious capitalist practices, and so on. Although he does not offer
outright normative claims, Discipline and Punish does display normative prob-
lems associated with normalization. This is why he opens himself to the charge
of crypto-normativity leveled by Habermas and others, although I agree with
Koopman that that charged is misplaced. I would say that Foucaults genealogies
are implicitly normative rather than cryptically so, because they show normative
problems rather than explicitly discussing them. As Koopman notes, Foucaults
genealogies, although often taken to claim that our current practices and the situ-
ations they create are contingent and changeable, just as important show how we
arrived at this situation. In doing so, however, Foucault also shows not only the
contingency of the situation but also some of its normative shortcomings. It is
426 todd may

that, I believe, that lies behind his choice of certain genealogies as opposed to
others and explains the rhetoric found in his genealogical writings.
The second response Koopman might makethat dangerousness and fraught-
ness are not normativeis an interesting one. The distinction here might look
something like this. For a situation to be dangerous or fraught is not for it to be
bad. The requirement is instead that it could turn bad, although it is not bad in
itself. Such a response is certainly coherent. However, I am not sure it sits well
with Koopmans other claims about the genealogies. First, even if dangerousness
or fraughtness were not themselves normative categories, the claim that they need
attention is a normative one. It is a claim of obligation, or at least advisability.
However, I am not even sure that the problematic character of the situations
whose genealogy Foucault traces can be immunized from a more straightforward
normativity. For instance, in claiming that [m]odernity produces emancipatory
freedom and disciplinary power as two reciprocal but incompatible aspects of
our political existence (172), Koopman seems to be committed to saying not
only that we ought toor it is advisable toattend to this, but that something
ought to be done to address this. It is difficult to live an incompatibility. To be
sure, Koopman stops short of making such a claim, consistent with maintaining
a distinction between genealogy and normativity. However, it is not clear that
the commitments he explicitly undertakes do not entail other commitments that
would land one in a more straightforwardly normative space. This points, once
again, to Foucaults choice of tracing certain genealogies as opposed to others.
If Koopmans analysis of the dangerous and fraught character of the problem-
atic situations Foucaults genealogies describe both a) require attention and b)
do so because there are difficultiesincompatibilities, and so onthen it would
seem that Foucaults genealogies (although not necessarily any genealogy as a
matter of principle) would have to be read as normatively laden. This normativ-
ity, although often implicit, would structure genealogy itself inasmuch as a gene-
alogy were dedicated not only to show the contingency of the situation and how
it got to be the way it was but also the problems (in the more pedestrian sense of
that term) such a situation creates for living. In my view, that is the additional
task of Foucaults genealogies, and the task that makes them normatively laden
endeavors.
As I have mentioned before, this normativity is not treated as explicitly by Fou-
cault as it might have been. If it had been, Koopmans position would have been
impossible to take, and of course he would have recognized that. It is precisely
the elusiveness of the normativity in Foucaults work that allows us to have this
discussion and disagreement. My position is not that Koopman has blundered in
his reading of Foucault, but rather that the relation between genealogy and nor-
mativity is closeralthough often implicitly sothan Koopman allows. Since
the role of normativity in Foucault is an elusive one, it should not be surprising
to see disagreement precisely on this score.
During the bulk of this review, I have considered a particular divergence
although, as Koopman would undoubtedly be the first to acknowledge, an
important onebetween his reading of Foucaults genealogies and mine. In
closing, however, let me reiterate my opening thought. Genealogy as Critique is
 GENEALOGY, PROBLEMATIZATION, AND NORMATIVITY IN FOUCAULT 427
an excellent book. Well past the time in which it might be thought that second-
ary literature on Foucault was intellectually exhausted, Koopman has provided
an important and valuable guide to his work. He has engaged with some of the
thorniest issues in Foucaults corpus, and done so clearly, subtly, and often origi-
nally. This book should be on the shelf not only of those interested in learning
more about Foucault, but also of those who are tempted by the thought that there
is nothing left to say about him.
Todd May

Clemson University