FOREWORD ---the development of racism in South Africa---

Western culture was the first to critically reflect upon itself (beginning in the eighteenth century). But the effect of this crisis was that it reflected on itself also as a culture in the universal, and thus all other cultures were entered in its museum as vestiges of its own image. It 'estheticised' them, reinterpreted them on its own model, and thus precluded the radical interrogation of these 'different' cultures implied for it. The limits of this culture 'critique' are clear: its reflection on itself leads only to the universalization of its own principles.¹

As Baudrillard suggests, the assumed superiority of Western culture, both in discourse and practice, has imposed a Eurocentric model upon history. By collating an 'inventory of differences' between itself and the 'Other', Europe has set itself up as the paradigm. By capturing the high ground of universality, European ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and schools of thought, have judged non-Europeans and criticised their cultures. Nowhere has this asymmetrical relationship affected the black more deeply than in South Africa. Apartheid is the culmination an history of oppression, a 'monument' to the ultimate racism.² As Derrida points out, racism did not of course 'wait for the name apartheid'; but, as he succinctly puts it, racism is 'a Western thing'.³ As he explains,

The judicial simulacrum and the political theatre of this state racism have no meaning, and would have had no chance outside a European 'discourse' on the concept of race. That discourse belongs to a whole system of 'phantasms', to a certain representation of nature, life, history, religion, and law, to the very culture which succeeded in giving rise to this state takeover.⁴

This study of the deployment of racism in South Africa has been profoundly influenced by Foucault's methods. Among the reasons why Foucault's approach might help to throw new light on a question far removed from his own concerns is because he challenged the fundamental assumptions implicit in dominant Western discourse, a discourse which has subjugated other thinking on this subject. In The Order of Things, Foucault tells how he was struck 'in one great leap' by 'the thing that...is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that'. The wondrous 'taxonomy' which impelled Foucault to this conclusion was not, of course, the African's view of the world; it was rather the different way of classifying nature in 'a certain Chinese encyclopaedia'.⁵

This limitation led Foucault to stand outside the dominant forms of Western discourse, and to question Western norms such as rationality and order. By challenging the idea that reference to another 'modality of order' signified its 'aberrance', and proposing the heteronomy of different cultures Foucault challenged the absoluteness and certitude of Western rationality. Heteronomy is thus a wound in Western rationalism. It was precisely the apprehension of systems that are different from the system of the West that motivated Foucault to re-examine the traditional history of ideas and their forms. By questioning the historical a priori of Western discourse, by insisting on the vagueness of what 'his' West really is, Foucault has shaken the ground of Western certainty.

Foucault's analysis of epistemes, and the procedures and disciplines that they allow, account for historical practices in which knowledge functions essentially as a form of power. For example, in his treatment of the history of madness, reason is placed in question by its own history. Reason does not manifest itself in a unified progression; heterogeneity erodes the self-identity of reason. By undermining the claims of Western civilisation on the certitude of reason, Foucault suggests that 'other' forms of 'reason' may have suffered a long history of exclusion and rejection.

Foucault poses the fundamental question of the 'possibility of truth' by referring to four main principles. These are:

1. reversal - in order to 'recognize the negative activity of the cutting-out of discourse;
2. discontinuity - in order to apprehend discourse as a 'discontinuous activity';
3. specificity - in order 'to conceive of discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose on them';
4. and finally, exteriority - having to look out for 'the external conditions of existence' of the orders of discourse.⁶

These principles, together with the ideas that have flowed from them, have contributed to a radical re-examination of western thought and have led to a different understanding of Western experience. They may also hint at a new universe of thinking which, by recognising the process of 'cultural levelling', will enable men to transform their relationship not only to others but also to themselves.

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¹ J. Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, M. Poster (trans.) (St. Louis, 1975), pp. 88-9. <back>

² J. Derrida, 'Racism's Last Word', Critical Enquiry, 12, Kamuf(trans.) (Autumn 1985), p. 291. <back>

³ Ibid., p. 293. <back>

⁴ Ibid., p. 294. <back>

⁵ A reference by Borges to the heterogeneity of cultures and the irreducible differences in modes of thinking elicited this reaction by Foucault in his 'Introduction' to The Order of Things. The passage cited from the Chinese encyclopaedia stated that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (I) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera...'. It was 'by means of (this) table' that Foucault was reminded of the gulf between the system of though of the West and that of other parts of the world. See M. Foucault, The order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, A. Sheridan (trans.) (New York, 1973, p. xv. <back>

⁶ M. Foucault, 'Orders of Discourse'. Lecture delivered in French at the College de France on 2nd December, 1970. The English translation is by Rupert Swyer, in Soc. Sci. Inform. 10 (2), pp. 7-30. (The relevant principles have been extracted in summary). <back>

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