Genealogy, production of subjectivity in contemporary society and internet: conversations with Nietzsche and Foucault

Abstract

The purpose of this article, written in the format of a theoretical essay, is to show how genealogy, as a set of methodological research operators in the human sciences, can be an effective way to analyze recent technological events, such as: the internet. The objective of this work is to problematize the practices that enhance a cultural, historical, political, economic and social analysis of the fabrication of subjectivity in relation to technology, especially the internet. Therefore, the text begins with the elucidation of genealogy in some conceptual definitions of the main tools that support it as a contemporary philosophical field and in the conversation of two thinkers who developed and used it: Nietzsche and Foucault. The German gave importance to the presence of the “Si” in genealogical studies, while the French insisted on using the method to approximate its effects to the historical and political analysis of truth. Both delimited that genealogy is not a search for essences, but the scrutiny of perspectives and values, in other words, the relationship between power, knowledge and subjectivity in history in favor of time and against time to denaturalize socio-technological devices.