Against the accusation of working on a plane in between
hyper and hypo rationalisms, Foucault replies that his historical method aims
at going against the de-eventalization that has occurred in historical
analysis, broadly speaking the ascribing of unitary character to the object analysed
(whether anthropologically, economically, or demographically). The work of
multiple causation and polyhedric intelligibility might be regarded as too much
or too little but it aims at being just that: a plethora of intelligibilities
and a deficit of necessities. ‘This is precisely the point at issue, both in
historical analysis and political critique. We aren’t nor do we have to put
ourselves under the sign of a unitary necessity.’
The following passages
are extracts of an interview published in The Foucault Effect. Studies in
governmentality. (G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller eds), Harvester
Wheatsheaf Press, 1991.
…The hypothesis being that these types
of practices possess up to a point their own specific regularities, logic,
strategy, self-evidence and reason. It is a question of analysing a ‘regime of
practices’.
Eventalization:
1) 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.
2) Uncovering the procedure of causal
multiplication: analysing an event according to the multiple processes that
constitute it. As a way of lightening the weight of causality, ‘eventalization’
thus works by constructing around the singular event analysed as process a
‘polygon’ or rather a ‘polyhedron’ of intelligibility, the number of whose
faces is not given in advance and can never properly be taken as finite. One
has to proceed by progressive, necessarily incomplete saturation.