Section 1

Exposition of Foucault’s Texts¹

Genealogy and History

Foucault's method of genealogical analysis is different from traditional forms of historical analysis; its aim is to 'record the singularities of events outside of any monotonous finality.² In terms of the genealogical method there are no fixed essences, no metaphysical finalities and no underlying laws. Genealogy seeks out discontinuity where others find continuity. It finds rupture and recurrences where others find progress and growth. Genealogical avoids the search for depth, it seeks instead the surfaces of events, minor details and small shifts. InNietzsche, Freud, Marx, Foucault writes, 'whereas the interpreter is obliged to go to the depth of things, like an excavator, the moment of interpretation (genealogy) is like an overview, from higher and higher up, which allows the depth to be laid out in front of him in a more and more profound visibility; depth is resituated as an absolutely superficial secret'.³ Genealogy thus opposes depth and finality. Identities must be mistrusted in historical analysis since they camouflage appeals to unity. The genealogist has to reveal 'the secret that (things) have no essence, or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms'.⁴

Foucault argues that if

history is the violent and surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations.⁵

Genealogy attempts to record the history of these interpretations. Universals and fixed essences are revealed as the result of the arbitrary and contingent consequences of imposed interpretations. According to Foucault, traditional or 'total' history situates events into grand explanatory systems and linear processes, celebrating individuals and great movements, seeking to record a specific point of origin for a particular historical process, whereas genealogical analysis ('effective' or 'general' history) tries to establish and retain the singularity of events, avoiding the spectacular in favour of the neglected, the discredited, and that wide field of phenomena whose histories have been subjugated (such as reason, punishment, sexuality). Genealogy thus rejects the search for the origin, and looks instead for historical beginnings which are arbitrary, complex, lowly and contingent.⁶

In his discussion of genealogical analysis Foucault refers to two interrelated elements: first, genealogy as the examination of descent and, second, genealogy as the analysis of emergence. In the analysis of descent there is no uninterrupted development of continuity; instead it attempts to uncover the multiplicity of factors behind an event to preserve events in their appropriate dispersion and 'to identify the accidents, the minute deviations... the errors... that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us'.⁷ The rejection of uninterrupted continuity in history produces an awareness of the complexity, fragility and contingency of historical forms and events.

The emphasis in genealogical analysis falls upon the body or more specifically upon 'the articulation of the body and history'. Genealogy in this way establishes that nothing is stable; even man's physiology and nature do not escape the play of historical forces. Foucault writes:

The body is moulded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it conducts resistances.⁸

Another element in genealogical analysis is the examination of emergence, not as 'the final term of an historical development', but as a particular stage in the struggle or confrontation of forces. Historical developments are seen as transitory manifestations of relationships of domination and subordination, and as temporary embodiments of the underlying relationships of forces. The analysis of emergence with its forms of relations of domination enables genealogy to examine the confrontations and conflicts which produce historical events and developments. Historical developments, according to Foucault, are not to be seen as culminations of historical process, intentions or design, but as episodic manifestations of a series of subjugations or temporary manifestations of a stage in the play of dominations.

Genealogy conceptualizes the emergence of a particular event or development as the entry or eruption of forces for which no subject can be held responsible. Genealogy, conceptualized as the analysis of descent and of emergence, is therefore opposed to traditional history. Genealogy tries to reveal the historicity of properties and objects which have been considered a historical, such as feelings, ideals, morality and the physiology of the body. Genealogy also focuses on subjugated knowledges-the discredited, the lowly - and on periods which have been neglected: 'It shortens its vision to those things nearest it - the body, the nervous system... it unearths the periods of decadence',⁹ and it celebrates the perspectivity of knowledge.

Foucault argues that historians subordinate events to extra-historical mechanisms or structures. Genealogical analysis, in contrast, focuses upon events and upon singularities. By rediscovering the complex factors and processes which constitute an event, it seeks to disrupt the quality of self-evidence attributed to events by the use of historical constants and the application of anthropological traits. This requires it to be shown that 'things weren't as necessary as all that; it wasn't a matter of course that mad people came to he regarded as mentally ill; it wasn't self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was to lock him up; it wasn't self-evident that the causes of illness were to be sought through the individual examination of bodies'.¹⁰ In this way genealogical analysis gives expression to subjugated knowledges, to histories which have been neglected or 'lost within totalizing and globalizing systems. More importantly, genealogical, analysis is opposed to the scientific hierarchization of knowledges and their effects, its status being that of an anti-science. The methods, concepts and contents of science are not the object of Foucault's criticism, but rather the consequences and effects of 'centralising powers... linked to the institutions and functioning as an organised scientific discourse in our society.¹¹

InArchaeology of Knowledge, Foucault argues that the various distinctions between the dominant discourse such as science, literature, philosophy, religion, history or fiction, should not be accepted as distinct unities; instead judgement should be suspended and the self-evidence of these unities should be questioned. The task of analysis is the discovery of the conditions from which specific discourses emerge and this involves not only the discursive but also by necessity the articulation between discursive and non-discursive practices. This is of great potential importance to the study of racism since the forms of Foucault's analysis are net confined to the human sciences but encompass many forms of knowledges. As Foucault himself writes,

Archaeological, territories may extend to 'literary' or 'philosophical' texts, as well as scientific ones. Knowledge is to be found not only in demonstrations, it can also be found in fiction, reflexion; narrative accounts, institutional regulations and political decisions.¹²

A range of evidence is used to investigate the conditions out of which discourses have emerged. In Foucault's later works, however, there is a marked shift in emphasis; they show an increasing concern with relationships of power and knowledge, and the effects of powers that are linked to the scientific hierarchization of discourses. This shift, which owed much to his genealogical research, stresses the importance of 'the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish an historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today'.¹³ Thus genealogy gives expression to the discredited and resurrects subjugated knowledges rather than excluding or subordinating them.

Power /Knowledge¹⁴
In Foucault's booksDiscipline and Punish andThe History of Sexuality, the concepts of power and power-knowledge are of extreme significance. By identifying the exercise of power as the focus of genealogical analysis, Foucault isolates and conceptualizes the way in which the body has, in modern society, become a necessary component for the operation of power relations. From the outset he was interested in the body as investigated by scientists and in the power over bodies which institutions possess. He argues that the combination of knowledge and power, localised in the body, forms a general mechanism of power which is of great importance for Western society. Towards the end of the paperNietzsche, Genealogy, History Foucault raises the problem of knowledge. He argues that knowledge is enmeshed in the petty malice of the conflict of dominations. Knowledge did not

slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of reason... where religions once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge.¹⁵

Everything is potentially caught up in the networks of power, which are increasingly linked with the advance of knowledge. Thus, for Foucault, power and knowledge are not external to one another; they operate in history in a mutually generative way.¹⁶
Foucault's conceptualisation of power is not based on a juridical or economic conception of power. Instead his analysis of power can be interpreted as an attempt to invert the dominant modes of analysis of power. In these modes, power is construed in terms of the entire discourse of 'right' ever since the Middle Ages, or, in Marxist formulations, the economic functionality of power or, in Reich's hypothesis, as repression. In contrast, the focus of Foucault's work is upon the reality of domination. He tries to show not only how right is, in a general way, the instrument of domination... but also to

show the extent to which, and the forms in which, right (not simply the laws but the whole complex of apparatuses, institutions and regulations responsible for their application) transmits and puts in motion relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but of domination.¹⁷

This conception of power is not situated in terms of an individual or institution or even a class of people, but of the multiplicity of forms by which domination is exercised within a society.

If power is to be addressed in terms of domination and subjugation without being confined by legalistic conceptions of right, sovereignty and obedience, then, according to Foucault, specific methodological precautions are necessary. He outlines five, such precautions about the form, level, effect, direction and 'ideology' of power. The first methodological rule involves the examination of power at its extremities, particularly its local and regional forms, while 'bracketing' tile legitimate and centralized forms of power. The second rule suggests that the analysis of power be based not on the idea of conscious intention but on the point of application i.e. the point at which power itself is in direct relationship with its object. By observing this methodological rule, questions such as 'Who has power?' or 'What are the intentions of those who exercise power?' become less important than the examination of the processes by which subjects are constituted as effects of power. The third rule emphasizes that power ought not to be conceptualized as a property belonging to an individual or a class. Power is not 'appropriated' are a commodity or wealth; rather it has the character of a network which extends everywhere. Individuals do not possess power, they constitute its effects -'the elements of its articulation... its vehicle'.¹⁸ The fourth methodological rule proposes that the analysis of power should begin at a micro-level in order to reveal how mechanisms of power have been utilized by macro-forms of domination. In Foucault's terms the analysis of power should be ascending rather than descending. This involves examining how techniques of power operating at the level of routine and everyday life have been appropriated by 'more general powers' and by economic 'interests' rather than conceptualizing power as located at the top of the social order and descending through the entire social domain. The final methodological rule draws attention to the power-knowledge relation which connects the exercise of power, and the production of knowledge. For example, Foucault's analysis of the emergence of a discipline, a specific form of power, shows that the methods and mechanisms of power were formed and developed alongside the constitution of the terrain from which the science of man emerged.¹⁹

InDiscipline and Punish Foucault introduces a 'strategical' conception of power in order to facilitate an analysis of power relations invested in the body. Foucault explains that 'the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs'.²⁰ Power, for Foucault, is not an irresistible force; it may exert pressures, but these in turn may be resisted. This in turn leads Foucault to talk in terms of power and resistance.

In Foucault's analysis, power is seen as being exercised through "disposition, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings'. Power relations are not localised in confrontations between individuals and the state or social classes; instead they are considered as existing at the most elemental level of the social body and constituting it as well. Power relations are thus conceptualised in terms of innumerable points of confrontation, each of which entails an irreducible event. Such a 'micro-physics' of power might be considered to be equivalent with sociality itself.

Foucault describes power as a multiplicity of relations, as a process and a strategy which receives institutional embodiment in ‘the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies’.²¹ Power is described as the appropriate term for the unstable state which arises from the inequalities present in the highly mobile field of force relations. Power relations are not subordinated to economic, sexual and ideological relationships. Instead, power relations are conceived as both 'the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations] and as the internal conditions of these differentiations'.²² By rejecting the conceptions of power relations in terms of a global binary opposition between the ruling class and the subordinated classes, Foucault recommends instead a conception of major forms of domination as the 'hegemonic effects' which have emerged from the multiplicity of micro-powers.²³

Power Over Life²⁴
In developing an analysis of a more appropriate strategical conception of power, Foucault argues that the transformations in the nature of the exercise of power may be seen as a change in the conception of power not as a 'right to take life or let live', but as a force which fosters life. Foucault explains that the development of a power over life assumed two basic forms. First an anatomo-politics of the human body, and second a bio-politics of the population.

The notion of anatomo-politics of the body refers to the techniques of power which come to be exercised over bodily capabilities in order to maximise their economic utility and political docility. Bio-politics of the population involve the forms in which a power over life developed. In this case the population and the social order became the object of techniques of power, the focus of their aims being the social conditions affecting the biological processes of life, such as reproduction, mortality and health. The emergence of these techniques to subjugate bodies and regulate populations is considered by Foucault as marking the beginning of the era of bio-power, a power over life. Bio-power is constituted by a corpus of knowledges and techniques of power which have developed on the basis of the calculability and transformability of human life. And it is here that the logic of sexuality plays a significant role, since for Foucault it is through control over sexual relations that access may be gained to the 'individual' body and to the population at large, to the private and the public.

Anatomo-Politics of the Body²⁵
In explaining the political rationality of the present, Foucault distinguishes between two developments. First an increasing centralisation of political power in the form of the state, and secondly the emergence of technologies of power directed to individuals. He stresses the importance of the second development - the study of individualizing forms of power. It is at this point that he examines the body as the central target of control. Foucault analyses a 'political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations.'²⁶ These relations are complex and it is their mutual production, historical interconnections and their genealogy which Foucault describes inDiscipline and Punish. The position taken by Foucault is that

power isn't localised in the State apparatus that, nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level, are not also changed.²⁷

From this follows the significance of the notion of 'the social' in Foucault's work, the area in which positive, productive, local and individualizing forms of power have emerged and been exercised.

Foucault refers in particular to specific events and transformations that had occurred during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to a process of reversal of the 'axis of individualization' towards the collection of files, documents and information on individuals over whom power was to be exercised, thereby generating an individuality of the 'calculable man'. This mutation coincided with the emergence and expansion of new forms of the exercise of power. Thus, techniques for the formation and administration of individuals were adopted for the regulation of the social, which in turn were inextricably linked with the emergence of new 'rationalities', the human sciences, and with new forms of knowledge. Once the inter-dependence between relations of power and forms of knowledge was recognised, a conception of power-knowledge relations emerged. In his discussion of the change's that took place in the forms of punishment and the function of the prison, Foucault explains that the shift of focus from the body as the immediate target of the exercise of power (punishment) to the 'soul' or 'knowable man' construed in terms of psyche, subjectivity, consciousness and individuality, was the product of new forms of power and new forms of knowledge.

Foucault also makes the point that prisons and the ideal forms of punishment are the distinctly articulated expressions of more generalized practices of disciplining both individuals and populations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these tactics were extended with extreme rigour to other sectors of the population, places of reform, and administrations of control. The prison, the school or the hospitals are not really Foucault's targets; he is concerned above all with disciplinary procedures themselves.²⁸

According to Foucault, discipline is a technique and not an institution. It is appropriated by certain institutions 'such as schools, hospitals and the police, but it is not identifiable with any of these. Discipline, does not merely replace other forms of power which are already in existence in society, instead it 'invests' or colonizes them, connecting them together, extending their hold, making them more efficient and 'above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and 'distant elements'.²⁹

The process of diffusion of discipline throughout the social domain is described by Foucault as the formation of a disciplinary society. In a disciplinary society the body is taken as an object to be analysed and separated into its constituent parts. The aim of disciplinary technology is to construct a 'docile body', 'that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved'.³⁰ How does this work? Foucault explains firstly that the body is divided into units, for example, the legs and arms. These are taken separately and are made the objects of precise and calculated training. The goal here is control and efficiency of operation both for the part and the whole. The key to disciplinary power is the construction of a 'micro-power', beginning with the body as the object to be manipulated and controlled. In the second place, the army and the schools of the Classical Age gradually developed techniques and tactics to treat individuals as objects to be moulded, not subjects to be heard. Exercise of bodies became a central part of the workings of power, since it concentrated primarily on the internal coordination of the movement of the bodies of soldiers. The focus was on the formal organization and disciplined response of the constituent parts of the body. Thirdly, according to Foucault, micro-power is directed towards a different use of time. If disciplinary power is to be effective, it has constantly to strive to reduce bodies to docility. As the operation of discipline becomes standardised and efficient, it necessitates a constant and regular application. In this way the goal that is desired merges with the techniques designed to achieve it. To achieve this ideal of complete docility (and the correlated increase of power), space and time and motion must be codified and exercised continuously and intensively. For this reason, as Foucault shows, disciplinary techniques became more economic, technical, analytic, and utilitarian during the Classical Age.

The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the justification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely.... The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it.... Discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, docile bodies.³¹

Foucault explains that the control of space became an integral part of this technology, since discipline also develops by the organization of individuals in space and it consequently requires a specific enclosure of space, as in the case of the hospital and school which create a grid of order. Once this space is established resistance diminishes, since controlled space structures the distribution of the individuals to be disciplined and supervised.

Foucault describes the internal organization of space in disciplinary technology as depending on the idea of elementary partitioning into regular units. Organised space is based on the principle of presences and absence. When the grid is established, the principle reads: 'Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual'.³² Individuals are thus placed, transformed and observed in an efficient and economic way. In order to achieve an operation which is as efficient and productive as possible, it becomes necessary to find individuals who fit the definition proposed, to locate them in an ordered space and to achieve the distinction of functions in the structure of space in which they will operate. In addition, all the space, in the confined area has to be ordered and there should be no waste, no gaps, nothing should escape. Foucault explains 'In discipline, the elements are interchangeable, since each is defined by the space it occupies in a series, and by the gap that separates it from the others.'³³ Disciplinary space is achieved on the coding of this 'structural' organization.

Discipline, according to Foucault, operates differently and in a precise manner upon bodies. 'Discipline "makes" individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.'³⁴ It does this through procedures of training and distribution. It operates through hierarchical observation and normalizing judgement. According to Foucault they combine into a central technique of disciplinary power - namely the examination. Central to the notion of examination is the element of hierarchical observation. The aim here is to make surveillance the integral element of control and production.³⁵ The act of being looking over or watched is a significant means by which individuals are controlled in a disciplinary space. Foucault explains that the control of bodies depends on optics of power. One of the first models of this control 'via' surveillance, through the systematic gaze and through the ordered spatial structure, was the military camp. It was here that total organisation and observation were made possible. Foucault goes on to show how the achievements of this model were extended through the constructions of urban schemes, prisons, working class housing projects, schools and so on.

Increasing hierarchical observation and surveillance affected architectural design. An example cited by Foucault was the construction of an Ecole Militaire to 'Train vigorous bodies, the imperative of health... create obedient soldiers, the imperative of politics; prevent debauchery and homosexuality, the imperative of morality'.³⁶ The means for accomplishing these purposes were in part architectural. The building was constructed with long; halls of monastic cells, each set of ten cells had an officer, each individual was sealed off and separated from his neighbour but there were peepholes so that he could be observed. These and many others seemingly minor details were an essential part of the disciplinary technology. Individualization and observation were combined within this space.

These observational devices were extended into the productive apparatus. Surveillance took on a crucial economic function while simultaneously carrying out its disciplinary role. Through the development of surveillance in factories power became organized as 'multiple, automatic and anonymous'.³⁷ People carried it out, but it was the organization that made it successful. 'Supervisors, perpetually supervised'. According to Foucault, this meant that, in industrial society, power and efficiency were combined in a system and space and production were linked through optics of surveillance.

According to Foucault, not only has power generated individuality in the field of observation, but it fixes that objective individuality in the field of writing. A vast and meticulous documentary apparatus becomes a necessary component of the growth of power. The dossiers make it possible for the authorities to construct an objective codification of the population. More knowledge leads to more specification. The accumulation of individual documentation in a systematic order makes 'possible the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given "population"'.³⁸

This compilation of data, the emergence of dossiers, and the continuous opening up of new areas of research developed, according to Foucault, concurrently with the refinement of disciplinary techniques for observing and analysing, the body so as to make it more accessible to manipulation and control. The development and diffusion of methods for administering populations are linked to economic production and techniques for the -accumulation of capital. As Foucault has commented,

If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact the two processes - the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital - cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital.³⁹

For Foucault, the birth of the sciences of man 'is probably to be found in... "ignoble" archives, where the modern play of coercion over bodies, gestures and behaviour has its beginnings'.⁴⁰ The social sciences (psychology, demography, criminology, etc.) were first situated in particular institutions of power (hospitals, prisons, administrations) where their work became one of specialization. These discourses developed their own criteria and rules of evidence, their own ways of inclusion and exclusion, and their own disciplinary divisions within the larger context of disciplinary technologies. Foucault concludes that the disciplinary technology of power to produce docile and productive bodies

called for a technique of overlapping subjection and objectification .... The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation.⁴¹

Bio-Politics

Foucault explains that it was only in the seventeenth century that 'bio-power' emerged as a coherent political technology. Bio-power marks the period when the fostering of life and the growth and care of populations became the central concern of the state. This represented a new type of political rationality; according to Foucault, there now developed an entire corpus of knowledges, techniques of power, and associated effects based on a conception of the calculability and transformability of human life. It is here that Foucault discusses the topic of sexuality, since it is through sex that access may be gained to the 'individual' body and to the population.⁴²

Foucault explains that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sexuality became the object of scientific analysis, administrative control and social concern. To physicians and social scientists sexuality provided the answer to problems of individual health and of identity. The elaboration of a new symbolic of sexuality enabled the bourgeoisie to separate themselves from the working classes on the basis of their 'blood'. In Foucault's terms sexuality emerges as the central element in a strategy of power which brought not only the individual but the population as a whole under the net of bio-power. Foucault also explains that through the deployment of sexuality bio-power spread its hold over the minutest details of the body and the 'soul'. This was achieved by constructing a specific technology - namely the confession of the individual subject in speech and in self-reflection. Through the technology of confession several factors were brought together in Foucault's analysis of bio-power: the body, knowledge, discourse and power.

According to Foucault the historical development of sexuality as a distinctive discourse came to be linked with various discourses and practices of power at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He explains that a 'technical incitement to talk about sex' developed simultaneously with the administrative concern for the welfare of the population. Empirical studies, and the scientific classification of sexual activity took place in the context of a concern for life. At first they were very much under the influence of religious discourse, but gradually demography and police administration began at an empirical level to investigate issues such as prostitution, population statistics, and the spread of disease. Foucault writes

Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered. It was in the nature of a public potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytic discourses. In the eighteenth century, sex became a 'police' matter.⁴³

The increasing concern with statistical studies of the population illustrates this. Foucault explains how, during the eighteenth century, demography and its connected fields were gradually formed into disciplines. Administrations approached the population as something to be known, controlled, taken care of, made to flourish:

...it was necessary to analyse the birthrate, the age of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate births, the precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the ways of making them fertile or sterile, the effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptive practices...."⁴⁴

In order to control and regulate the population, administrations in the eighteenth century began instituting procedures of intervention in the sexual life of individuals. Developing from these political and economic concerns, sex became an issue involving the State and the individual.

In the nineteenth century, according to Foucault, a major shift occurred in the discourse on sexuality which now came to be discussed in medical terms. This transformation involved the separation of a medicine of sex from the medicine of the body. This separation was based on the isolation of 'a sexual "instinct" capable of presenting constitutive anomalies, acquired derivations, infirmities, or pathological processes.⁴⁵ Through these scientific interventions sexuality was connected to a form of knowledge and established a further connection between the individual, the group and control.⁴⁶

Foucault then distinguishes between sex and sexuality. Sex is construed as a family matter. 'It will be granted no doubt that relations of sex gave rise, -in every society, to adeployment of alliance’.⁴⁷ Until the end of the eighteenth century many of the Western codes of law were based on this 'deployment of alliance'. This meant that the discourse on sex was articulated through religious and legal obligations of marriage, codes for the transmission of property and the ties of kinship. These codes generated statuses, allowed and disallowed certain forms of actions, and constituted a social system. By means of marriage and procreation, alliance was linked to the exchange and transfer of wealth, property and power.

Foucault refers to sexuality as the historical form of discourse and practice which separates sex from alliance. Sexuality is an individual matter, it involves hidden private pleasures, fantasies and dangerous excesses of the body. Sexuality was seen as the very essence of the individual. It made possible the knowledge of the secrets of an individual's body and mind through the intervention of doctors, psychiatrists and others to whom the individual confessed his private thoughts and experiences. In Foucault's terms this constitutes the deployment of sexuality in which the personalization, medicalization and signification of sex occurred at a specific historical conjuncture.

Foucault distinguishes four great 'strategic unities' in which power and knowledge combined in particular mechanisms formulated around sexuality during the production and dispersion of discourses on sexuality. The first involves the hysterization of women's bodies which were analysed as being saturated with sexuality. Through the knowledge gained in medicine, the female body was isolated 'by reason of a pathology intrinsic to it; whereby, finally, it was placed in organic communication with the social body (whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure)...'.⁴⁸ According to Foucault, all the elements of the deployment of sexuality are present here; through medical discourses, the personal identity of the woman and the future health of the population are combined in a bond of knowledge, power and the materiality of the body.

The second strategic unity deals with the pedagogization of children's sex. This discourse was based on the idea that children are endowed with a sexuality that is both natural and dangerous. As a result, both the individual and the entire population were linked in their efforts to take charge of this ambiguous potential. Masturbation was treated as an epidemic; consequently, elaborate measures of surveillance, techniques of control, endless moralizing, incessant demands for vigilance, continual incitement- t-o guilt, architectural constructions, appeals to family honour and the lessons from advances in medicine, were all mobilized to eradicate masturbation. This assault, upon masturbation did not so much curb sexuality as increase the production of power. As Foucault explains, 'Always relying on this support, power advanced, multiplied its relays and its effects, while its target expanded, subdivided and branched out, penetrating further into reality at the same pace'.⁴⁹

The third strategy involved the socialization of procreative behaviour. Here the married couple were given medical and social responsibilities. In terms of the State the couple now had a duty towards society; they had to protect it from pathogenic influences that a careless sexuality might have upon the population. Thus careful attention was paid to the regulation of procreation. It was held that the failure to monitor and control an individual's sexuality could endanger the health of both the family and the social body. By the end of the nineteenth century "An entire social practice, which took the exasperated but coherent form of a state-directed racism, furnished the technology of sex with a formidable power and far-reaching consequences'.⁵⁰ It is under these conditions that the eugenics movements can be understood.

The fourth strategy was based on the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure. In terms of Foucault's analysis, sex was construed as an instinct. It was believed that this instinctual drive operated at both biological and the psychic level. Thus the nature of an individual was inextricably linked with the sexual instinct. Sexual science, in Foucault's terms, constructed a vast scheme of anomalies, of perversions, and of species of deformed sexualities. According to Foucault, the establishment of these species in scientific, terms facilitated the specification and monitoring of individuals. An entire domain arose for the detailed chronicling and "emulation of individual life. Here, just as in the other three strategies, the body, the new sexual science, and the demand for regulation and surveillance, were connected. Foucault argues that ever since the nineteenth century sex has been seen as the hidden causal principle, the secret meaning to be discovered everywhere.

It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.⁵¹

For Foucault, sex provides the connection between biology and the normative practices of bio-power. The categorization of sex as an essentially natural function led to the channelling and controlling of sexuality. Foucault explains that the cultural construction of sex as a biological instinct made it possible for it to be linked up with the micro-practices of bio-power.

...sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures.⁵²

Conclusion
The recurring theme of Foucault's texts is the examination of the concrete functioning of power in Western societies. In a self-characterisation of his work, he wrote, ‘My objective has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’.⁵³

His schema of the three modes of objectification of the subject provide a convenient way of summarising the main themes in his texts. The first mode of objectification of the subject is called 'dividing practices', in which the subject is objectified by a process of division either within himself or from others’,⁵⁴ for example, the criminal and the insane. These dividing practices form a substantial part ofMadness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic andDiscipline and Punish. The second mode of the objectification of individuals is connected to, but interdependent from, the first. It deals with

the modes of enquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject ingrammaire generale, philology, and linguistics... |or| the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labours, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or... the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology.⁵⁵

This 'scientific classification' of subjects is the subject-matter ofThe Order of Things andThe Archaeology of Knowledge. The third mode for turning individuals into objectified subjects can be called 'subjectification'. It concerns 'the way a human being turns him - or herself - into a subject'.⁵⁶Here Foucault examines the process of self-formation of the individual. For example, he shows that during the nineteenth century there existed a vast proliferation of scientific discourses about 'sex', and this was at least in part because sex was seen as the key to self-understanding, a trend in thinking which was to culminate in Freud. Here the health of the population and the controls over the individual are combined in a common set of concerns, and these processes of subjectification are examined inHistory of Sexuality andDiscipline and Punish.

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Section 2

The Methodological Implications of Foucault's Analysis

Individuality is neither the real atomistic basis of society nor an ideological illusion of liberal economics, but an effective artefact of a very long and complicated historical process. (Foucault)

There are two aspects to the implications of this statement to the problematic of racism:

a) the genealogy of the objectifying trends in western culture;
b) the subjectifying practices which have become increasingly important in recent years.

In this section, an attempt is made to construct a mode of analysis, derived from Foucault's texts, to identify those practices in western culture which have influenced the forming of the black both as object and subject.

Historical Analysis: Total History and Specific History
Foucault does not seek to provide a general reconstitution of the past; his analysis is concerned to investigate a specific problem by examining itsspecific history. 'Total' history is distinct from 'specific' history, particularly with regard to the question of evidence. 'Total' history seeks to reconstitute the past in terms of the exhaustiveness of evidence. Total history raises many questions: are there other sources of evidence that would change the narrative modify the generalizations or even undermine the conclusions? By contrast, in 'specific' history the question of evidence is treated in terms of its intelligibility, because evidence is itself related to the problem which is to be investigated. These two different approaches, those of exhaustiveness and intelligibility, introduce different criteria about the adequacy of evidence. In the case of a specific history of racism in South Africa, the aim is not to reduce evidence in the form which would satisfy historical methods of proof and demonstration in total or traditional history. This approach does not discredit the criterion of exhaustiveness, but operates within the limits of its own criterion, that of intelligibility. Neither will this approach adequately instantiate a general proposition, nor will it exhaustively reconstitute a segment of the past. An analysis of the specific history of racism seeks to make the problem of racism intelligible by reconstituting the conditions in which it operates. This does not exclude evidence; rather it entails a different treatment of evidence. If such an approach seems incomplete and always subject to modification, this is because the historical narrative itself is always incomplete and unfinished.

According to Foucault, traditional historical writing most often privileges a search for 'origins', since origin functions as a point of departure for causal analysis and elements of an historical field borrow their identity from their origins. This is particularly the case with histories of institutions. These histories are constructed in such a way that they are given an integrity far exceeding their forms of combination with other elements. Their identity is based on continuity, that is, in their development which is the difference between their present and their origin. But this is not the case with Foucault' s approach. His analysis is certainly concerned with the birth of clinical medicine, with the birth of psychiatry and with the birth of the prison. These births however are construed as beginnings and emergences; and they are preciselyconfigurations of elements. Even though mad men were interned before the eighteenth century, and medicine has long been concerned with madness, psychiatry has its beginnings at the point of a configuration of medicine and internment. In much the same way it is significant that racism in South Africa emerged at the point of a configuration of Christianity and civilization. This conception of a beginning of an emergence does not function as an origin.

Historical accounts of origins are based primarily on the organization of materials around the idea of progress. It is a history based on an ideological grid of the present, in which the present becomes the standard of reason. Foucault, however, rejects any conception of progress and his refusal to accept the category of progress serves an important theoretical end: it allows Foucault to underline important differences between things which are usually lumped together and subsumed under the category of progress.

Another aspect of Foucault's approach is that he mainly avoids traditional, historiographical periodization, and respects the common observation or assumption that contemporaneous phenomena are necessarily linked to each other. This assumption requires that any present moment constitutes an essential part of homogeneous time as is frequently justified in historical writing as the 'spirit of the age'. For Foucault there is no need for historical, writing to use calendrical time, as an organizing principle of analysis, since there is no requirement that temporality is undifferentiated. His analysis therefore tends to cut across the usual divisions of what is called 'Modern European History'. For example, inThe Order of Things he identifies two major mutations in intellectual history since the Renaissance: the first in the middle of the seventeenth century; and the second at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Foucault's historical research thus starts from identifying a specific discourse which his analysis aims to render intelligible. In such an analysis, detail has a different role. Traditionally detail is deemed to be important because of its evidential weight; however, in Foucault's analysis, detail is presented more as an analytic device; 'facts' are not so much a part of a permanent corpus of evidence against which a hypothesis might be tested but problems which analysis helps to make intelligible.

The notion of intelligibility, or the idea of making intelligible, places Foucault outside the usual tradition of historical explanation. Historical material in the social sciences is usually adapted to exceptionally strong explanatory schemes. Strong chains of causalities are invoked to demonstrate that events and institutions are the effects of the action of a structure. Significant patterns of events are explained in terms of underlying causes. In contrast, Foucault's analysis moves away from such theorizing. In his historical research he introduces instead the concept of 'eventalization'.

The Concept of Eventalization

Eventalization is a breach of self-evidence. This means making visible a singularity at places where an historical constant is evoked, or an obviousness which imposes uniformity. Eventalization tries to demonstrate that things in the past 'weren't as necessary as all that', for example when Foucault shows that it was not a matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill. Similarly it is not self-evident that black people came to be regarded as barbaric, uncivilized and genetically inferior. The first theoretical and political function of 'eventalization' is a breach of those self-evidences on which our knowledges, acquiescences and practices rest.

In the second place eventalization involves the rediscovery of the connections, the encounters, the supports, the blockages, the strategies, and the play of forces which, at a particular moment, establish what consequently come to be regarded as self-evident, necessary and universal. In a sense this analysis effects a multiplication or pluralisation of causes. Furthermore, causal multiplication requires the analysis of an event in terms of the multiple processes that constitute it. Thus to analyse racism as an 'event' and not as an ideological effect means to determine the recesses by which racism, as a form of domination by exclusion, discrimination and exploitation, becomes a central component of the South African political system; and the practice of racism itself needs to be further analysed in terms of a multiplicity of processes such as the formation of spatial differentiation (having separate residential areas for whites and blacks, and separate public amenities for the different racial groups) as well as the effects of those practices upon blacks at the everyday level.

'Eventalization' thus works by constructing around a singular event a multiplicity of processes of intelligibility; the number of these processes is not given in advance and never can be regarded as finite. In Foucault's words, 'one has to proceed by progressive, necessarily incomplete saturation'.⁵⁷ In other words the more one analyses the practice of racism in South Africa, down to its smallest details, the more one is led to study racism in relation to such practices as schooling, discipline, labour, sexuality, and so on. As the analysis progresses, this approach leads to an increasing polymorphism:

1.