Standpoint-Genealogy
I question everyone's angle — why never my own?
The question
Somewhere in the last few years I got a new reflex, and I didn't ask for it. Someone says a thing is just true, just obvious, just the way it is — and before they've finished, I'm already underneath it, asking who's served by it being obvious. A painting is "great." Whose great? A work ethic is "common sense." Common to whom, paid for by whom? It's automatic now. I do it to adverts, to my own government, to my mother at dinner. I'm proud of it. It's the closest thing I have to a defence against being a fool.
And then last week someone did it to me. Looked at something I was certain of — really certain, bone-certain — and asked, quietly, whose interest it served for me to be so sure. And my first move was to reach for the reflex, to get underneath them, to find whose standpoint the question was coming from. And I caught myself. Because if the reflex is good enough to use on everyone else's certainties, it's good enough to use on the reflex. And I have never, not once, turned it around. I don't know where I got it. I don't know whose it is. I don't know if it survives being pointed at itself — or whether the second I point it, it has to call itself a fool too.
The episodes
Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.
8 of 8 transcripts are readable now — audio is coming.
-
1
The move you didn't know you were making
The habit of asking, of anything obvious, whose interest its obviousness serves — a move most of us picked up without being taught it. This first episode names the move, and gives notice of the series' one task: to turn it, for the first time, on itself.
Read transcript → -
2
Suspicion that liberates
The move at its best — Michel Foucault on how the clinic, the prison and common sense carry the residue of power dressed as timeless reason, and why finding that a "fixed fact" has a beginning feels like freedom. The case for the method is made at full strength before it is made to pay.
Read transcript → -
3
Where the suspicion was born
The suspicion itself has a birth. This episode traces it to Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality — "good" traced back to resentment and a revaluation of values — and follows the lineage down to the present. Finding the origin, it is careful to say, settles nothing yet about trust.
Read transcript → -
4
Sometimes the genealogy builds
Not every genealogy debunks. Bernard Williams's Truth and Truthfulness and Edward Craig's state-of-nature account of knowledge trace truthfulness to a need no human group can live without — a tracing that builds rather than buries. The assumption that origins only ever bring things down is retired.
Read transcript → -
5
Turn the suspicion on itself
The method is turned on itself: where did you get the suspicion, whose was it first, what was it aimed at, and whose interest does it serve for you to believe it is simply clarity? The one standing exemption is revoked, and the episode ends deliberately without a verdict.
Read transcript → -
6
It eats itself — and so does saying so
The first exit — "it eats itself, so drop it" — is taken seriously and fails: the charge of self-refutation is one more use of the method, delivered from the placeless position the argument has just shown no one has. Neither trusting the method nor discarding it survives the hour.
Read transcript → -
7
The other exit is the God-trick
The second exit — that unmasking at least yields the truth power was hiding — fails too: there is no final layer, only the place one's inquiry happened to stop. Sandra Harding's reply, that owning your position makes inquiry more objective rather than less, is heard and left open.
Read transcript → -
8
Whose is the suspicion?
The final episode sets the five positions side by side and asks the question of the whole series: whose is the suspicion? Both exits stay closed, and no verdict is passed on whether the sharpest tool in modern thought is valid or bankrupt — only that it has an address, which cannot now be forgotten.
Read transcript →