Genealogy is gray, meticulous and patiently documentary.
This announces Foucault's treatment of history as text. Of course, genealogy is not simply a matter of writing new histories to reflect the historian's stake in political struggles. Realignment of cultural phenomena available publicly discloses the lines of force in a culture organized towards certain ends and proceeding through certain transformations. The attempt is not to find a unified story in history but a multiplicity of stories. Rather than seeing the present as the culmination of events that occurred in the past, Foucault sees the present as one of many events in a process that continues into the future.