Dear Glen,
I think the Annales School is the background of Foucault's notion of
eventalization. Good generic sources on the movement are François
Dosse’s New History in France. The Triumph of the Annales, Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994, Peter Burke’s The French
Historical Revolution: the Annales School. 1929-89, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1990, Stuart Clark ‘The Annales Historians’ in Q. Skinner The
Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge: CUP, 1985, p.
177-198
Here are my thoughts on this, another PhD blur:
Foucault recognised the importance of the Annales School and saw the
fertility of the encounter between structuralism and history as well as
the importance of not seeing them as mutually exclusive: the former for
its power of diagnosis and rigorous methodology in describing order and
regularities synchronically, the latter for its positing of the question
of periodization and time philosophically. In writing histories on the
basis of stretches of time and using no other criteria but a periodizing
one, Foucault praises the history of series, or eventalization as a
method, for being able to bring about the multifaceted character and
heterogeneity of elements at work in conjectural moments of emergence,
rather than looking into the events themselves in order to disclose,
from a hermeneutics of their internal principles, their causes and destiny.
'[Eventalization] means making visible a singularity at places where
there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate
anthropological trait or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on
all. To show that things weren’t ‘necessary as all that’; it wasn’t as a
matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it
wasn’t self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was
to lock them up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness were
to be sought through individual examination of bodies; and so on. A
breach of self-evidence, of those self-evidences on which our
knowledges, acquiescences and practices rest: this is the first
theoretico-political function of eventalization.' M. Foucault,
‘Impossible Prison’ [1980] in Foucault Live, 1996, p. 277
For taking up this method and applying it to the illusions of unities of
discourse Foucault has been amply criticised, but we believe his writing
of history was fundamentally linked to a concern for diagnosing the
present. The method of the Annales School and the study of events as
embedded as well as ramifying into the moment of their emergence is an
example of how a theoretical stance, when practiced and actualised in
research and writing, can itself become an event. The critique of
political, individual and chronological idols found in Foucault and the
historians of the Annales School addresses the problem of explanations
that rely on the categories of historical consciousness embedded in a
historical moment: the latter is not sufficient to reconstruct and
approximate to how it was nor can it be used to order the past in a line
of progressive continuity. This is the attack on the History of
Philosophy that had found its greatest expression in the guise of the
Idealism of Hegel and Croce. We have seen how the autonomy granted to
the category of discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge problematised
this in the framework of epistemology, and we shall later see how the
notion of self-déprise addresses it from a different angle. There is a
discrepancy between the thought and the thinkable that Foucault and the
Annales historians investigate and they do so in an interdisciplinary
way. Behind their insistence on framing and drawing grilles of
intelligibility for the past and the investigation into this discrepancy
lies the possibility of determining a difference in the present.
As Foucault asserts in the first of the lectures on ‘Il faut défendre la
societé’, against both scientism and empiricism, exercising critique
through the writing of histories entailed bringing together a certain
technical erudition of buried historical knowledge with the
‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ of a local character.
Arianna Bove
I think the Annales School is the background of Foucault's notion of
eventalization. Good generic sources on the movement are François
Dosse’s New History in France. The Triumph of the Annales, Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994, Peter Burke’s The French
Historical Revolution: the Annales School. 1929-89, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1990, Stuart Clark ‘The Annales Historians’ in Q. Skinner The
Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge: CUP, 1985, p.
177-198
Here are my thoughts on this, another PhD blur:
Foucault recognised the importance of the Annales School and saw the
fertility of the encounter between structuralism and history as well as
the importance of not seeing them as mutually exclusive: the former for
its power of diagnosis and rigorous methodology in describing order and
regularities synchronically, the latter for its positing of the question
of periodization and time philosophically. In writing histories on the
basis of stretches of time and using no other criteria but a periodizing
one, Foucault praises the history of series, or eventalization as a
method, for being able to bring about the multifaceted character and
heterogeneity of elements at work in conjectural moments of emergence,
rather than looking into the events themselves in order to disclose,
from a hermeneutics of their internal principles, their causes and destiny.
'[Eventalization] means making visible a singularity at places where
there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate
anthropological trait or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on
all. To show that things weren’t ‘necessary as all that’; it wasn’t as a
matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it
wasn’t self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was
to lock them up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness were
to be sought through individual examination of bodies; and so on. A
breach of self-evidence, of those self-evidences on which our
knowledges, acquiescences and practices rest: this is the first
theoretico-political function of eventalization.' M. Foucault,
‘Impossible Prison’ [1980] in Foucault Live, 1996, p. 277
For taking up this method and applying it to the illusions of unities of
discourse Foucault has been amply criticised, but we believe his writing
of history was fundamentally linked to a concern for diagnosing the
present. The method of the Annales School and the study of events as
embedded as well as ramifying into the moment of their emergence is an
example of how a theoretical stance, when practiced and actualised in
research and writing, can itself become an event. The critique of
political, individual and chronological idols found in Foucault and the
historians of the Annales School addresses the problem of explanations
that rely on the categories of historical consciousness embedded in a
historical moment: the latter is not sufficient to reconstruct and
approximate to how it was nor can it be used to order the past in a line
of progressive continuity. This is the attack on the History of
Philosophy that had found its greatest expression in the guise of the
Idealism of Hegel and Croce. We have seen how the autonomy granted to
the category of discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge problematised
this in the framework of epistemology, and we shall later see how the
notion of self-déprise addresses it from a different angle. There is a
discrepancy between the thought and the thinkable that Foucault and the
Annales historians investigate and they do so in an interdisciplinary
way. Behind their insistence on framing and drawing grilles of
intelligibility for the past and the investigation into this discrepancy
lies the possibility of determining a difference in the present.
As Foucault asserts in the first of the lectures on ‘Il faut défendre la
societé’, against both scientism and empiricism, exercising critique
through the writing of histories entailed bringing together a certain
technical erudition of buried historical knowledge with the
‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ of a local character.
Arianna Bove