Daniel Perlman

ABSTRACT: This paper uses the methodological dispute between Karen Barad and Thomas Lemke over the concept of strategy and the dispositif to access a deeper methodological issue in genealogy pertaining to matter. Critics including Barad and Beatrice Han find a problematic ambiguity in Foucault’s writings around how to articulate the force of discursive practices. This ambiguity coalesces in the figure of the individual and the question of how genealogy handles the non-discursive in relation to the institution. To Han, it marks a failure of genealogy to overcome Kant’s transcendental theme. To Barad and Lemke, however, further developing certain concepts in genealogy’s analytic framework in a materialist direction can resolve these issues. Both Barad and Lemke aim to move genealogy towards a new engagement with the natural sciences, but they disagree over which concepts require revision. Lemke rejects Barad’s agential realist re-conception of the dispositif on the grounds that it neglects its strategic dimension; Lemke prefers to develop the concept of governmentality. I argue against Lemke that his focus on governmentality perpetuates the problematic ambiguity of discourse and matter by subsuming the non-discursive back into the institution, and that his demand for an intelligible account of how strategy stabilizes is misapplied to Barad’s work, which is not itself conducting a genealogy of the tactics that constitute strategies. To help make the case, I read their dispute back into Han’s critique, which though unconcerned with matter, demonstrates why the figure of the individual and the question of the non-discursive are substantial obstacles for genealogy.