Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy

3. A Genealogy of Modern Racism, Part 2: From Black Lepers to Idiot Children

three A Genealogy of Modern Racism, Part 2 From Black Lepers to Idiot Children In his experiment to determine whether or how far power might be thought on the model of warfare, Foucault puts forth some fragments of a genealogy of modern racism from about 1630 to the outbreak of World War II. In chapter 2 I elaborated on the first half of that genealogy with my examination of race from 1630 to the last years of the eighteenth century, by which time—at least in Kant’s Prussia and Jefferson’s United States—race was a morphological phenomenon , a matter of physical structure and appearance, not a matter of lineage as it had been in previous centuries. By that time race was a fact, first and foremost, about human bodies. But it was not, strictly speaking, a biological fact. Biological race—and biological racism— could not come into existence before the science of biology itself came into existence, bringing with it its concepts of function and development , and that did not occur until the turn of the nineteenth century. Race’s transformation and absorption into biological theory and its deployment in biopolitical regimes then occurred slowly over the next several decades. The word biology was coined in 1802 to name what contemporaries perceived as a genuinely new science.1 Unlike its predecessor , natural history, which focused on the visible structure of natural beings, biology (the science of life) focused on processes. Foucault indicates this distinction by pointing out that within the framework of biology a human being (like all other living things) is primarily “a being possessing functions—receiving stimuli . . . reacting to them, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America 98 adapting himself, evolving, submitting to the demands of an environment , coming to terms with the modifications it imposes, seeking to erase imbalances, acting in accordance with regularities, having, in short, conditions of existence and the possibility of finding average norms of adjustment which permit him to perform his functions” (Foucault 1970, 357). Biological science transformed human bodies, in effect: entities that were before conceived as structural assemblages, as extremely complex self-replicating machines, were reconceived as shifting manifestations of temporal processes, functional organisms. In the course of that transformation, race too underwent a fundamental change. In the late eighteenth century, race was a structural aspect of bodies: differently raced bodies had differently shaped and colored parts. In the nineteenth century, however, race came to be a matter of function, not structure per se: differently raced bodies behaved differently . Over the course of their lives, differently raced bodies could be expected to grow, learn, mature, and decline at different rates and thus to exhibit different material manifestations. Foucault contends that this shift toward conceiving of living bodies as inherently temporal entities begins in the early nineteenth century with Cuvier, a somewhat controversial claim among historians of science. It is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck after all, not Georges Cuvier, who is generally credited with the founding of biological science and the introduction of historicity into the natural world. It was Lamarck, not Cuvier, who insisted that species are mutable and that fossils are the remains of the ancestors of beings presently alive, a theory that came to be called the Development Hypothesis.2 To many historians, Lamarck’s work clearly prefigures the evolutionism of the second half of the nineteenth century, while Cuvier’s belongs among the relics of the era of static classification.3 However, what is crucially important for biological science, Foucault contends, is not the hypothesis of species mutability but the notion that life is essentially temporal. Cuvier insisted that organs can be understood only in relation to the work they do; their configuration is functional, not simply structurally elegant—and most certainly not the result of structural variation on a divine theme, as his archadversary Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire seemed to believe—and thus they can only be understood as they occur through time. To be sure, Cuvier did insist on the fixity of species over against Geoffroy’s willingness to consider the possibility that new species can emerge 99 A Genealogy of Modern Racism, Part 2 from alterations in those already in existence (Appel 1987, 131), and in that respect he seems further away than Geoffroy and Lamarck from the evolutionary theory that would arise in the last third of the century. But Cuvier’s conception of temporal functioning is a much more radical...