(2003) Genealogy/Ethnography: Finding the Rhythm

CHAPTER NINE

Genealogy/Ethnography:

Finding the Rhythm

Maria Tamboukou

Last night I dreamt I was at Girton College. Virginia Woolf was with me. There was a cocoa party and the girls were having fun. I wanted to ask them, what it is like: being a woman student at a girls’ college in the heart of Cambridge, the fortress of male knowledge and power. (Tamboukou, 2000a, p.247)

I cannot remember what happened next in this ‘dream’. It was definitely not a ‘night dream’, but a day dream, floating in my mind while trying to wake up, and I do remember I had to wake up early, I had to go to school:

School again, but Monday is the good day. I only teach for four hours. However I had to apply for a day’s leave on Friday, the day of my college presentation and the headmaster was far from understanding. Since I had an hour off, I rushed to the supermarket and then to a stationer’s to buy some transparencies for my presentation. School again–the exhaustive use of time. Back home, I left my daughter with my brother’s girlfriend and rushed to the College. I had to collect an interlibrary loan. Back home I had to help my daughter with her maths. After she had gone to bed, I went on working for my presentation. My partner did not turn up or call, I think it is better if we have some time to ourselves. I went to bed rather early and read a little before I slept: ‘The Passion of Michel Foucault’. (Tamboukou, 2000b, p.471)

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I have referred to day-dreaming and real-life situations, my lived experiences as recorded in a diary-writing group activity in 1994, to which I will refer later on in this chapter. While indulging in the wonderful experience of day-dreaming, I have often fantasized myself being interviewed by an ethnographer in the future about how it felt to be a full-time primary teacher, single mother, part-time doctoral student, and partner of a full-time doctoral student in the crisis of submitting the thesis, at the turn of the millennium. I think that such an experience would be of interest to ethnographic research of the type Sue Middleton has already conducted, as demonstrated in her contribution in this collection. In therefore contemplating on ‘the actuality’ of my doctoral research experience, I could not have identified more with Foucault when he was recounting:

Each time I have attempted to do theoretical work it has been on the basis of elements from my experience—always in relation to processes that I saw taking place around me. It is in fact because I thought I recognized something cracked, dully jarring or disfunctioning in things I saw in the institutions in which I dealt in my relations with others, that I undertook a particular piece of work, several fragments of an autobiography. (Foucault quoted in Rajchman, 1985, p.36) In this chapter, I will revisit the writing of a genealogy (Tamboukou,

1999a) in an attempt to locate different planes where genealogical and ethnographic research lines have crossed each other. In attempting to map methodological paths from different research territories, I follow Foucault again in stating that:

I should not like the effort I have made in one direction to be taken as a rejection of any other possible approach. Discourse in general and scientific discourse in particular is so complex a reality that we not only can, but should, approach it at different levels and with different methods’. (Foucault, 1970, p.xiv) But let us start from the (a) beginning: being intrigued by Foucault’s

urgent suggestion to researchers to ‘stop spending energy talking about him and instead do what he was doing, namely write genealogies’ (Sawicki, 1991, p.15), I threw myself in the adventure of writing a genealogy of women teachers in the United Kingdom (Tamboukou, 1999a). In writing this genealogy, I wanted to sketch out a horizontal and microscopic cartography of the power relations and discursive forces that traverse the female self in education and unveil the conditions of her construction. In a Deleuzian sense, it was also a genealogy of what women teachers are but also of what ‘they gradually cease to be’ (Deleuze, 1992, p.164). Writing a genealogy was a difficult endeavour, full of risks and unexpected situations, simply

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because, while there is quite a significant amount of scholarly work about Foucault, there have actually been very few genealogies per se.1 The very term of genealogy is still not a familiar one in the social sciences, and I remember myself in seminars, groups, and/or conferences having to explain what genealogy is about, before I could actually say what I was doing. One of the questions that has kept coming again and again has been about why I have chosen to do a genealogy and what I think I have gained intellectually from my involvement with it. In therefore reflecting on my genealogical practice, I have identified a range of issues, which I believe came up as ‘research effects’ of the genealogical research strategies I followed.

Space was one of these issues that emerged under the genealogical influence; space has indeed been a relatively unexplored topic and has recently begun to be of interest in historical and sociological inquiries.2 Foucault’s genealogies are particularly attentive to the catalytic role of space in the ways human beings construct knowledge about themselves and the world around them. ‘The great obsession of the nineteenth century’, Foucault writes, ‘was history. [...] The present age may be the age of space instead’ (1998, p.175). In this analytical context, women teachers’ almost obsessive preoccupation with spatial arrangements of their lives formed a cluster of genealogical themes that traverse the multifarious ways they have worked upon themselves so as to become what they are. In recognizing the crucial importance of space in their self constitution as subjects, I have therefore identified a set of technologies of the self,3 which I have called technologies of space (Tamboukou, 1999c). What was particularly interesting in these technologies of space was tracing the ways women teachers rewrote the private/public distinction, moving beyond its ambivalent and often blurring boundaries. In Rajchman’s way of theorizing, I have seen women teachers moving to a ‘neutralization’ of the private/public binarism; this neutralization, I have argued, did not erase the private or the public, but instead moved beyond their dichotomy, creating ‘multiplicities’ and ‘new points of connection’, opening ‘the possibility of a disjunctive synthesis, where the disjuncts are disparate rather than “distinct” and the synthesis “inclusive” rather than “exclusive” (Rajchman, 2001, p.56). I have therefore demonstrated how by entering the first university-associated colleges these women lived within the limits of their society, but also beyond them, in yet unrecognized ‘different social spaces’, that Foucault (1998) has described as heterotopias. In Foucault’s analyses of space, heterotopias contest the real space in which we live, creating transitional spaces and sheltering subjects in crisis. Thus, the notion of heterotopia became instrumental in the analyses of the

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first women’s colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century (Tamboukou, 1999a, 2000a). In the genealogical analysis of women’s colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias,it was not so much the effects of power that were important, but the subjective capacities that were being developed in the attempt to resist the power that had made women what they were. It was through these technologies of resistance, as I have called them (Tamboukou, 1999a, 2000a) that women began to fashion new forms of subjectivity, always oscillating between the ‘unbearable lightness and heaviness of being’,4 by adopting unstable positions between them.

Beyond space, but related to it, the genealogical turn was most critical in my theorizing what I had thought was a matter of feminist politics: the importance of the body as a critical spatial site of interaction of material and symbolic forces, a battlefield of power relations and antagonistic discourses. As it has been argued, ‘[t]he whole of (social) space proceeds from the body’ (Lefevre, 1991, p.405). Following the line of the body’s absence from sociology, women’s bodies are usually absent from the classrooms as well as from their lives, ‘erased from the blackboard’ (Tamboukou, 1999a, 2002). The genealogical turn, however, focused on matters of sex in the constitution of the female self in education and unearthed marginalized experiences of passionate relationships, both real and fictional. These counter-memories of the body counterpoise the discourses of frigidity and passionlesness constructed by the sexologists in the context of medicalization of sexuality and the hysterization of the female body (Foucault, 1990). What the genealogical turn unearthed here, however, was not a reverse image of a sexually active woman as opposed to the passionless Victorian image, but a multiplicity of images and subject positions that sometimes co-existed not only among women teachers but also within each woman teacher herself. Therefore, instead of deconstructing identities, the genealogical approach has, in a Deleuzian mode, ‘put differences together in open or complex wholes’ (Rajchman, 2001, p.57). In this vein, although women teachers’ silence in bodily matters has been occasionally broken, silence itself has been of significant importance in the genealogical analysis, sometimes revealing more ‘truths’ than certain distorted voices. A system of silent moments thus made its own contribution to the writing of this genealogy.

Finally, in following genealogical lines, I think that I have become passionately interested in a wider shift in the European intellectual landscape: the return of ethics as a primary issue in the philosophical agenda, after so many years of the primacy of politics. I think that far from abandoning politics, this shift has been working towards redefining the


subject(s) of politics and the very notion of P/politics itself. It was therefore through my particular interest in ethics that I attempted to excavate the ways people and particularly women have acted upon themselves so as to create a stylistics of life, become ethical subjects, become what they are. It was in the genealogical framework that the focal question of my research was formulated: What is the present of women in education today? How have we become what we are and what are the possibilities of becoming ‘Other’?

Working Genealogically To address the above questions, I had to turn to the past so that I could trace hidden practices and unnoticed contours which have been interwoven in the formation of women teachers’ present. In the genealogical framework, this turn to the past is conceived as an analysis of descent and emergence (Foucault, 1986). Descent moves backwards revealing numberless beginnings and multiple changes, while emergence is about the entry point of the event on the historical stage. In what follows, I will further expand the deployment of these two notions in the writing of my genealogy.

In the genealogical analysis of descent the past can never be revived or reconstructed and there is not a final destination, a place where things originated in the first place. As Foucault explains in the search for descent, it turns out that ‘truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are’ (1986, p.81). The analysis of descent is about revealing the contingency of human reality, describing its complicated forms, and exploring its countless historical transformations. It was therefore in the search for descent that I looked at the formation of technologies of the female self in education. In focusing on the context of the fin-de-siècle, I attempted an analysis of the specification of the female subject in a nexus of signifying genealogical events which have constituted her public persona, but I also have dissolved the frontiers between the public/political and the private/personal. In this analytical context, what the genealogical analysis of descent revealed in the case of women teachers was that, instead of significant subjects, beginnings, and/or critical turning points what came up on the surface was a profound complexity of discourses and practices within which a web of subjectivities was intrinsically interwoven. I have therefore seen women teachers as nomadic subjects (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; Braidotti, 1994), moving around various and often contradictory subject positions rather than inhabiting them in a permanent way. These

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nomadic passages, I have suggested, have left open and unstriated spaces where the female self can endlessly reinvent herself and ‘become other’ of what she is every time she is arriving at any subject position of her nomadic itinerary.5 As Braidotti suggests, the female self has therefore been taken first as a theoretical or working hypothesis, a basis for analyzing the process of specification and problematisation of women in discourse; and second as a political hypothesis, a platform supporting women’s real and multiple struggles (1991, p.132).

As already mentioned, in using genealogy as a tool for exploring the female self in education, I located the beginnings of my inquiries in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the earliest part of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom. Being a period of crises and significant changes in the education of women not only in the United Kingdom, but also in Europe, America, and Australia, I thought that it perfectly constituted what Foucault has defined as emergence in the genealogical analysis. Emergence refers to a particular historical moment when things appeared as events on the stage of history. It is in the context of intense power relations at play that Foucault stabilizes this ‘moment of arising’ (Foucault, 1986, p.83). Emergence is not the effect of individual tactics, but an event, an episode in a non-linear historical process. The analysis of emergence is not about why, but about how things happened; it is about scrutinizing the complex and multifarious processes that surround the emergence of the event. The turn of the nineteenth century as the moment of women’s mass involvement in education has of course been the object of numerous and important historical studies6 that have often attempted to find a place for it in a supposedly linear historical development of women’s liberation. However, in the genealogical analysis, this linear development towards progress has been interrogated and problematized. In paying attention to the ‘minor’ pathways and processes surrounding the historical highway that has supposedly led women to the public sphere different storylines were able to emerge, while dissonances have often disrupted the melody of history. Taking up the genealogical analytical trails of descent and emergence, I chose to follow narratives of lives of the first women who attempted to navigate the difficult ways of forming a new self in the various new educational institutions, both as students and teachers. These women have often been represented in quite contradictory and often juxtaposing ways: either as lady heroes, the legendary pioneers of women’s education, or as agents of oppression, reproducing feminine ideals and middle-class ideologies in the newly opened sphere of women’s education.7 Instead of being confusing, these contradictions have indeed been highly relevant to


the genealogical project. As a genealogist I was particularly intrigued to look more carefully not only at the surrounding discourses but also at the discourses of women themselves, their personal narratives through which they made sense of their lives. In bracketing the gaze and discourses of the ‘Others’, I wanted to concentrate on their own processes of subjectification, using the genealogical device of the technologies of the self. Those women teachers who opened up new life-paths were faced with the urgent need to reinvent themselves. I have thus asked: ‘Who or, better, what were they? Having turned their backs on traditional sources of gendered identity such as wifehood and motherhood, how were they attempting to fashion a new self?’ They were the forerunners of women teachers of today, women whose lives have changed so much but, in many ways, paradoxically remain trapped between unresolved dilemmas, existential contradictions, and binary oppositions, as most forcefully illustrated in the following extract from Valerie Walkerdine’s ethnographic field notes written in a primary school staffroom during lunchtime in 1982:

The staffroom is full of women eating cottage cheese or grapefruit. Each of them knows about diet and eating and sexuality. They are willing and happy to talk about these, caught inside what they are: the unique combination of worker and woman, dependent and independent, free and trapped. (Walkerdine, 1990, p.28)

I referred to narratives of lives, but where have I looked for them? My

genealogical inquiries took me to the archives, the genealogical research field par excellence. It was in the archives and in libraries that I followed the evidence that some of these women left behind them in diaries, letters, autobiographies, and literary works. What has been particularly interesting with my work in the archives was the fact that some of the women whose grey documents of life I have been searching in the dusty shelves were very well known, as well as published, while living. I was therefore taken by surprise to find out that while their ‘public’ writings were published, and indeed, some of them are still being used in sociological and historical inquiries of women’s education (Kean, 1990; Delamont and Duffin, 1978; Copelman, 1996), their ‘personal’ writings still remain unpublished in the archives, for the odd feminist scholar to visit and work with them (Miller, 1990, 1996; Vicinus, 1985; Kean, 1990). As I have noted elsewhere (Tamboukou, 2003), these personal narratives irrevocably disrupt women teachers’ image either as lady heroes, bearers of middle-class ideology, victims, or agents of oppression. A genealogical approach to these narratives points to the fact that it is exactly when traditional history meets inconsistencies and disruptions that omissions and erasures are made for

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the historical linearity to be able to flow. Instead of subjects, these self-writings have therefore revealed subjectivities on which it is indeed difficult to apply any sort of authoritative definition or labelling, and it is upon the construction of these subjectivities that the genealogical approach has decidedly turned focus.

I have argued that the genealogical approach provides the lens for distortions to come into focus through the examination of personal narratives. It goes without saying, however, that genealogy has not come to operate on desert and unexplored territories. Various feminist theorists have long argued that recent theoretical debates concerning ‘the self’ and ‘the subject’ become particularly interesting when examined in relation to lived and/or written lives, and have stressed the importance of autobiographical writings in providing a deeper understanding of how the female self is constructed through and beyond writing (Smith and Watson, 1998). The genealogical approach to life-story writing meets here the ‘old’ feminist line of the interrelation of the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’. In such a context, ‘life-writing’ gives public and multiple meanings to that which is primarily held to be unique and private. In drawing upon feminist theorizations that have seen the female self as multiple, fragmented, and incomplete, I have thus used the genealogical approach as a means to frame women’s memoirs within a historical narrative, so as to render them temporally and culturally specific and avoid unwarranted generalizations and essentialist positions. Making connections between Foucault’s and Deleuze’s thought, I have seen the genealogical project promoting ‘a logic for thinking not in terms of generalities and particularities, but rather in terms of singular ideas, complications and complex themes’ (Rajchman, 2001, p.53). Working genealogically, I have focused on fragmented autobiographical pieces which mirror my interest in fractured and contradicted identities. Being particularly concerned with the notion of a nexus of subjectivities as opposed to the unified subject of the Enlightenment, I have explored the possibilities of replacing unitary notions of the female subject with plural and complexly constructed conceptions of the self. In this context, I have drawn on those feminist theorizations of the subject that have worked within the French postmodern critique of the subject, but I also have pinpointed some highly problematic issues that emerge from a wholesale adoption of the French critical school and especially of Foucault.8 What I want to suggest, though, is that the use of genealogy as a tool of analysis has shown me a path out of theoretical impasses that inevitably appear as a result of a wholesale adoption of general theories and/or critiques.


I have discussed how the genealogical turn to the past involves the notions of descent and emergence. However, Foucault has seen his genealogical project as‘ontology of the present’ (Dean, 1994, p.50), a history of the present. Calling into question self-evidences of the present by exposing the various ways they were constructed in the past, such histories shatter certain stabilities and help us detach ourselves from our ‘truths’ and seek alternative ways of existence. In my attempt to decipher the present of the genealogical project, I have therefore read fragments of contemporary autobiographical writings of women teachers. The task was a difficult one, since our present seems always to evade. To write ‘a history of the present’, as Foucault suggests, it is necessary to distance ourselves from this present of ours, objectify ourselves, and, in a Deleuzian line, pose practical questions about life. While being intensely immersed in feminist theoretical writings on the subject, it has often occurred to me to ask myself, ‘But now, does this make sense? Who or what are these selves I am reading about? Where do they live? Do they work? Do they have families around them? Can they love, or hate? Do they face dilemmas? Are they afraid of anything? Do they exist, are they real?’ Since there is no woman, but, women and, moreover, many ‘selves’ within each woman (and man), genealogy has shown me how to trace ‘real women’ and, therefore, how theoretical work on the female subject becomes relevant to the very process of analysis within a particular historical and cultural context. It is how I worked to illuminate ‘the present’ to which I will now turn.

The Genealogical Dispos i t i f in Focus: What is our Present Today?

Having sketched out the lines of the genealogical project, I now want to focus on questions of ‘how’. While immersing myself in the rich Foucauldian literature, I often remember feeling panic about ‘the pragmatic’ side of writing a genealogy. First in the list of my concerns was to identify a plane of departure. In the genealogical literature, the starting point of a genealogy is the construction of the dispositif: But what is a dispositif?

Foucault’s genealogical analyses start from a reflection upon our actuality, rethinking, as Elspeth Probyn has put it, ‘the necessity of an attitude’, that is, ‘a mode of relating to contemporary reality […] a way of thinking and feeling […] a way of acting and behaving that at the one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and marks itself as a task’ (Foucault, quoted in Probyn, 1993, p.109). Following the Kantian tradition

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of illuminating the present, Foucault moves on to work out its genealogy: ‘Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present’ (Foucault, 1988, p.262). As already indicated, in beginning his analysis from the present, Foucault reverses the focus of historical study: his analysis moves backwards rather than forwards in time, since genealogy is concerned with the descent rather than the evolution of historical events.9 As Thacker (1997, p.34) has commented, in tracing the forward evolution of the self, historians tend to produce images of progressive unity, while the backwards movement of genealogical analysis turns against the transcendental subject. Moreover, ‘the present’ Foucault is interested in is conceived as an effect of contingent occurrences and random beginnings, which genealogy, as effective history, attempts to trace.

Having been identified, the problem has to be cartographed in the nexus of practices, knowledges, power relations, and discourses it emerges from and mingles with; this is actually the process of the construction of dispositif,10 ‘isolating a cluster of power relations sustaining, and being sustained by certain types of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980, p.196). As Deleuze has noted, in each dispositif it is necessary to distinguish the historical part, what we are (what we are already no longer) and the current part, what we are in the process of becoming (1992, p.164). Deleuze has further described the dispositif as ‘a tangle, a multilinear ensemble’ (p.159), composed of lines and zones that are difficult to determine and localize. These lines are usually deployed in unforeseen directions, while it is amidst crises that new lines are created, and new directions open (p.160). As Deleuze sees it, in each dispositif, the genealogical analysis has ‘to untangle the lines of the recent past and those of the near future: that which belongs to the archive and that which belongs to the present’ (p.164). In the genealogical practice of untangling, there are lines of light, lines of force, and lines of subjectification emerging from each dispositif (p.160). According to the Deleuzian description, the lines of light form variable shapes inseparable from the dispositif itself, while each dispositif has its own system of managing light lines and producing light effects, ‘distributing the visible and the invisible, giving birth to objects which are dependent on it for their existence and causing them to disappear’ (p.162). As Deleuze notes, any dispositif ‘can be defined from the point of view of the visible and from the point of view of that which can be enunciated’ (p.162).

Following Deleuzian lines, education indeed can be cartographed as a crisis shaken area, par excellence, a ‘multilinear ensemble’ on the grounds of which ‘unknown landscapes’ emerge, while thinking evolves along moving lines. The dispositif of women’s involvement in education in particular has


indeed created regimes of exemplary visibility, as well as regimes of shadow and darkness. Take, for example, how the increasing visibility of women in the educational arena has been sustained by the carefully kept invisibility of their bodies and the unspoken of their sexuality, while it carries on to our own day through a cluster of discursive distortions revolving around what can be allowed to be seen.11 In this regime of light, I suggest, the dispositif functions as an impressionist painting, blurring lines, colours, and shadows. Moreover, the artist/designer of the dispositif runs the risk of being herself dispersed in the extravaganza of the light lines she will allow to emerge, or be hidden behind their shadows. To continue with untangling the ‘multilinear ensemble’, the lines of forces move across and between points and lines within the cartography of the dispositif and make connections between disparate zones and layers. Finally, the lines of subjectification derive from and are directed at the production of subjectivities. In the Deleuzian description, lines of subjectification are about escape: escaping lines and escaping the self (1992, p.161). The educational dispositif has very much been about escape. While, however, escaping [certain] lines has been relatively possible or at least in the possible, a heterotopic project as I have shown (Tamboukou, 2000a), escaping the self has rather moved towards a utopic rather than a heterotopic plane. As it has been pointed out, ‘the subject of the variations in the process of subjectification seems to be one of the fundamental tasks which Foucault left to those who would follow him’ (Deleuze, 1992, p.162), since as soon as the self breaks away from power/knowledge regimes of a certain dispositif, she is reinserted in another, in new and yet undefined ways. My genealogical analysis of women’s colleges indeed indicated how certain lines of escape from the dispositif of male educational institutions often led to the establishment of new types of restrictions, rules of inclusion and exclusion, and endless series of hierarchical relations (Tamboukou, 2000a). However, in the genealogical analysis of the female self, what was interesting was not so much the effects of power and its possibility of being reinserted elsewhere; the focus was not on ‘the cause’ or on ‘the result’, not the big questions—why—but the little questions—how—as Foucault has put it. As already indicated, the focus of genealogy has always been on the how of moving around positions within and/or between a multiplicity of dispositifs. This incessant movement of the self in the process of acting upon and reinventing herself has indeed been ‘the object of the genealogical desire’; as Deleuze has put it: ‘the new as the variable creativity which arises out of dispositifs’ (1992, p.164).

Being aware of the inherent risks of light and line games in the drawing of the genealogical dispositif of women teachers, I therefore had to construct

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the analytical grid that would frame my research question: What are we, women in education, today? What is this present of ours and what are we doing within this present? How can we become different from what we are already? These questions of the present, of the time of the actual, ‘our actuality’, involve, according to Rajchman, ‘the realism of showing the intolerable’ (2001, p.63). What we also have here, according to Spinoza and Deleuze as cited in Rajchman (2001, p.81), is the transformation of a logical problem (what is a dispositif) to a practical problem of life (how to make a dispositif) and therefore to a political problem.12 Moreover, what is crucial about this realism is not about our ability ‘to judge or decide’, but about our ability ‘to experiment and invent’ (Rajchman, 2001, p.63). Genealogy has therefore helped me formulate the question, ‘identify the problem of the present’, and has given me invaluable insights in tracing the genealogical descent. However, the present I had been trying to approach was evading me and genealogy could not provide me with the tools I needed to grasp it. It was therefore in the construction of the dispositif that I turned to ethnographic practices as one of the ways I followed to relate to contemporary reality. Ethnographic practices were used as a working material in the genealogical art of seeing, ‘where the link between what we can say and what we can see at a given time is fixed by discursive regularities rather than by a fixed schema (Rajchman, 2001, p.18). As above indicated, in following lines of descent, I mainly drew on an analysis of women teachers’ autobiographical writings, identifying them as ‘the grey documents genealogy is after’ (Foucault, 1986, p.76). Grey documents were, however, difficult to trace in the present. Contemporary collections of autobiographical writings, as, for example, in the Mass Observation Archive,13 are not yet accessible to the public. Few teachers, men or women, keep diaries or journals. As a characteristic of late modernity, it seems that there is little time for such reclusive activities. Although I had foreseen the difficulty of addressing the present, the actual experience of looking directly at ‘what is this present of ours’ was painful beyond expectation. Given the difficulties, how would it be possible to record everything and, moreover, proceed to isolate ‘the problem’ and give it a strategic position in the cartography of the genealogy? Drawing maps was a task I really hated ever since I was a schoolgirl. So, there I was, full of ideas about what is going on within the lives of women teachers and yet unable to ‘freeze’ any of the moments of their continuous movement so as to note down their passing points and study their interrelations. In grappling with these difficulties, I was aware of the fact that ‘a multiplicity is not what has many parts; it is what is complicated, or folded many times over and in


many ways, such that there is no completely unfolded state, but only further bifurcations […] as one unfolds or explicates an implication, one is led to another, which in turn helps rethink the first while pointing to others (Rajchman, 2001, p.61).

It was therefore at this very moment of harshness and problematisation in ‘shooting the present’ that ethnographic research almost ‘naturally’ unveiled itself as the most appropriate tool. I used both ethnographic practices in the form of participant observation and secondary analyses of existing ethnographic data. The diversity of the methodological tools, as well as the range of data I drew on, was within the very heart of the genealogical project. As I have written elsewhere, Foucault’s ‘documents’ were to be found in diverse areas: the asylums, the political demonstrations occurring outside prisons, the baths of San Francisco, theatrical plays and novels, works of art such as ‘Las Meninas’, or objects such as the famous pipe,14 noting that ‘this polymorphous and diverse map of documents and sources leaves future genealogists with an important legacy, that of continually inventing new sources and areas of research, not yet thought of by the so-called humanist sciences, which allow us to rethink and call into question the given truths of our world’ (Tamboukou, 1999b, p.208).

It is this diversity of methods, data, and strategies that has made ‘the use of Foucault’ in research such an adventurous endeavour, albeit a thrilling one. Doing genealogy has therefore been about following broken lines and often drawing new ones to keep going, searching, excavating, unearthing. This holding on to the genealogical project has been, I want to suggest, an almost aesthetically sustained exercise in Foucault’s ‘art of seeing’ (Deleuze, 1992, p.69), an attempt (as I have noted elsewhere) to find and keep the methodological rhythm that Foucault’s genealogies create (Tamboukou, 1999b, p.215). In therefore improvising in ‘the genealogical art of seeing’, I will now look more closely at, (1) the ethnographic practice of participant observation in ‘Holding On’ and (2) the secondary analysis of existing ethnographic data (Walkerdine, 1990; Steedman, 1992; Miller, 1996).

Ethnographic Practices in the Construction of the Genealogical Dispos i t i f

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‘Holding On’ was the name of a group of women teachers formed at the end of an M.A. in Urban Education. We came from different sectors of education, had different life patterns, different stories, and even different countries behind us. The group stayed together for almost two years, 1992 to 1994. During this period, we had meetings followed by social outings, discussed our readings of books and papers, wrote a paper in collaboration which we presented at St. Hilda’s conference (Cohen et al., 1993), and we kept a diary for the same day and then for the same week, to share our experiences, ‘all the horrors, joys and pains of working/living/just coping’ (Holding On, 1994). Some of the themes of our discussions, readings, and writings addressed the ways in which our autobiographies informed our theoretical concerns and our research projects, the experience of collective feminist writing, older women in education, friendships, and communities of choice. Through my participation in Holding On, ‘I did and was the research’. My experience in this group created a transitional space between the grey documents of nineteenth-century women teachers’ autobiographical writings and the real world around me, the reality of being a woman teacher one century later. It was a space that made it possible for me to take a quick and uncertain look at this present of ours that I was trying to problematize.

I have already referred to the difficulties of facing the present, to stabilize what is continually moving and changing and reflect upon it. Therefore, in further attempting to ‘document our present’, what I tried to do was to freeze some fragmented ‘moments of being’ and, in Virginia’s Woolf’s idea, build some narratives from fragments of meaning in order to understand other narrative fragments of meaning (Erben, 1993, p.18). In this, I have definitely made certain choices. I have listened to some voices, while being aware of the epistemological problems such a selection inevitably raises. As Morwenna Griffiths has clearly put it: ‘Which few others do I choose from the very large number I could listen to, since it is plainly impossible to undertake such a serious project with every human being. That is, who should I listen to?’ (1995, p.45). This is indeed a difficult question and, in attempting to answer it, I drew again on the Foucauldian framework of genealogy to make clear that the voices I had chosen to listen to were voices of dissonance, creating, however, a harmony ‘in terms of the possibility of a dissonance that brings together difference’ (Rajchman, 2001, p.74). These dissonant voices tell stories of women teachers who feel uncomfortable about their lives, who do not hesitate to confess their dilemmas and reveal the dark sides of their self. They are women who have interrogated their way of being in the world without having any alternative


life pattern to follow. Perhaps their insistence on change is the only line that keeps them within the cartography of female subjectivity that my genealogy has drawn. This is how I read their stories, adding secondary sources in the ethnographic data of my participation in ‘Holding On’.

In my reading, Carolyn Steedman (1992) came to loathe her life as a teacher. Schools and classrooms are depicted as ‘prison houses’ in her writings, where women have once more found themselves enclosed. Crossing the boundaries of domesticity, women have found themselves restricted again by the imperatives of their nature: mothering others’ children:

She moves from her desk to the window, looks down at the yard, the gates, the streets, the fields beyond; smoothes an eyebrow with a finger, corrects the setting of a belt. She thinks of: not being here, a love, a houseful of furniture, of marriage, the meeting of bodies, a new winter coat. The children’s murmur rises behind her; she turns to quiet them, and they bow their heads to their books in obedience. It is a crenellated Board School in Deptford in the 1890s, Glasgow in the 1930s, now, anywhere. In an Italian nursery school she is shown sitting at her desk thinking over her own affairs, smoothing her hair: real life, marriage, this time next year—as she gazes out over the heads of the children. At the window she stands looking out. She is a woman liberated, a woman who has escaped all our fate: she is a woman who is not a mother, a woman who does not care: a woman who has refused to mother. (Steedman, 1992, p.54, my emphasis) As I have noted elsewhere, Steedman’s stories ‘have broken the silence,

the taboo of speaking out women’s discontent of being with children, either as mother, or teacher or both’ (Tamboukou, 2000b, p.464). Using autobiographical approaches, amongst others, Valerie Walkerdine (1990) presents fictions of femininity as they are performed in real-life situations. In her stories, education is a place par excellence where various forms of subjectivities are acted and worked upon. By depicting forceful images of women teachers juggling with contradictions while inventing themselves, these stories most effectively illustrate the genealogical drive of making and experimenting with the self. Jane Miller (1996) tells different stories, coming from women who never stopped loving teaching, but who instead have strived to remap their position in the public spheres of life, education included. Her stories show that there exists a sort or a part of the female self in education that wants to defend the right and choice to be a teacher, but without being obliged either to mother, or to be distant, authoritative, and disciplinary. This ‘other’ female educator seeks to contest the hegemonic discourses of the educational institutions and attempts to be

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joyful and passionate, connecting teaching practices to the world of emotions and feelings.

In what I have presented so far, I have shown that, in the project of writing a genealogy as a history of the present, ethnographic strategies were used to enlighten ‘this present of ours’. The ethnographic approach made it possible for the genealogical dispositif to be constructed and for multiplicities to be more fully revealed. As already explained, freezing the present has not been an easy exercise. As Rajchman notes, ‘A multiplicity can’t be countered; its components can’t be picked out one by one, and they retain a certain vagueness. They are rather like stabilizations, systems that themselves change along with the definition of their individual components’ (2001, p.58). What I therefore attempted to do by using ethnographic practices was to trace the different heterogeneous elements, discourses, and practices that synthesize women’s position in education today. In ‘doing ethnography’, I thus managed not to drown in the depths of the grey sea of genealogical inquiries. What is more, I succeeded in materializing the ethical subjects of genealogy and make them look and sound ‘real’. As Rajchman comments, ‘Multiplicity is not simply a logical, but also a practical matter—something we must make or do and learn by doing’ (Rajchman, 2001, p.80).

Working in the Topos of Ethnography and Genealogy: In Search of the Rhythm

In this section, I want to move to a plane of thinking in which genealogy and ethnography can be brought to work (sound) together, as indeed different notes can be composed into a musical piece. I suggest that working with genealogy and ethnography should be seen in the context of music and the philosophical suggestion that ‘all method is rhythm’ (Novalis, quoted in Bowie, 1990, p.79), since rhythm can synthesize a potentially endless series of phenomena into a significant unity (Shelling, quoted in Bowie, 1990, p.173). As Bowie explains in the context of the early-nineteenth-century philosophical tradition, ‘Rhythm, like language, is a form of meaningful differentiality; a beat becomes itself by its relation to the other beats, in an analogous way to the way in which the I of reflection is dependent upon the not-I, the signifier on the other signifiers’ (p.79). In the same line of analogies, genealogical and ethnographic practices have, I suggest, the possibility of being used in the ‘form of meaningful differentiality’, in the sense that any single practice, be it genealogical or ethnographic, could be seen (heard) operating in relation to the other


practices within the same analytical (musical) context. As Bowie points out, rhythm in the philosophy of Novalis is ‘a form of reflection, the movement from one articulation to the next within a pattern’ (pp.79-80). Moreover, in Shelling’s thought, ‘rhythm is […] the transformation of a succession which is in itself meaningless into one which is meaningful’ and, in that sense ‘endless multiplicity becomes unified’ (quoted in Bowie, 1990, p.173). In delineating the ways in which ethnographic practices can be related to genealogical practices in the formation of the dispositif, it is the sound of their rhythmical movement ‘from one articulation to the next within a pattern’ that I have tried to listen to. What I think I have discerned in their sounding together is more like a musical piece of improvisation, notes/practices brought together only temporarily and provisionally as an effect of experimenting, inventing, inviting others to contribute, responding, or playing alone. As in music, the rhythm of genealogy and ethnography ‘is constituted temporally and is not semantically determinate’ (Bowie, 1990, p.80).

Thinking of and with music, what I have therefore suggested is the need to find a rhythm for a musical piece of genealogy and ethnography to be composed while performing together. Genealogy, I have suggested, turns the analyst’s attention to specific regimes of truth that may elude the knowledge terrain of the ethnographer, but yet they are part of the scientific discourses through which she recognizes the objects of her ethnographic inquiries and analyses their emergence, constitution, and function. However, to follow the genealogical imperative of leaving aside causality, to stop asking why and start asking how, the analyst needs descriptions both of the past and the present. While the grey documents can offer glimpses of the past, ethnographic approaches can effectively illuminate the present. While genealogy traces the black squares in the ‘order of things’ (Foucault, 1970), accommodates the invisible, creates uncertainty, and points to exclusions, ethnography scrutinizes the visible. The rhythm of their sounding together resonates with the contrast between visibility and invisibility, the sayable and the unsayable, pointing to what has been hidden or muted and what has been allowed to emerge or sound.

NOTES

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200026008_Aesthetics_and_Subjectivity_From_Kant_to_Nietzsche?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-a8878abf-fb63-4494-922e-d6f1e7aea681&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI3NDgzMjMxNjtBUzoyMTczNjI2MjEwNDY3ODVAMTQyODgzNDY5NTYxOA==

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1. Judith Butler has called her project ‘a critical genealogy of gender categories in very different discursive domains’ (1990, p.ix). See also, Jones (1990), Stoler (1995), Mirza (1997).

2. See, amongst others, Rose (1993); Massey (1994); Duncan (1996); McDowell (1999); Crang and Thrift (2000).

3. These technologies, as Foucault explains ‘permit individuals to effect, by their own means, or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies, and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being so as to transform themselves, in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality’ (1988, p.18).

4. As Simons (1995, p.3) notes, ‘Life is unbearably light when it has no purpose to it’, and he points out that the image of ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ originates with Nietzsche but has been formulated by Milan Kundera (1984).

5. For analyses of nomadism, see Deleuze and Guattari (1988); Braidotti (1994); Kaplan (1996); Tamboukou and Ball (2002).

6. See Delamont and Duffin (1978); Widdowson (1980); Dyhouse (1981); Kean (1990); Prentice and Theobald (1991); Purvis (1991); Copelman (1996); Miller (1996); Weiler and Middleton (1999).

7. For a discussion of the lady hero, see Pedersen (1991); Theobald (1999).

8. Braidotti (1991, 1994); De Lauretis (1987); Butler (1990); Probyn (1993).

9. As I have written elsewhere, ‘Descent records the true objective of genealogy and is opposed to a pretended unification of the self. Instead of implying a search for origins, the analysis of descent traces the numberless beginnings not easily captured by the historian’s eye. A genealogical analysis of descent does not attempt to reconstruct the past nor does it trace the effects of past events in the present. It disturbs previous immobile statements, fragments of unified truths and exposes the heterogeneity of previous consistencies. In the search for descent, it turns out that “truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are” (Foucault, 1986, p.81). This conception is important in establishing the role of genealogy as critique’ (Tamboukou, 1999b, p.209).

10. Dispositif has been translated in English as ‘apparatus’ but, according to Dreyfus and Rabinow, the term remains excessively vague. With some preoccupations, they instead suggest ‘grid of intelligibility’. See Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, p.120).


11. See Tamboukou (2002). 12. ‘For in Deleuze as with Spinoza a problem in logic (“what is a

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Documents

(2003) Genealogy/Ethnography: Finding the Rhythm