Configurations 7.

2 (1999) 175-190



Georges Cuvier: Founder of Modern Biology
(Foucault), or Scientific Racist (Cultural Studies)?
Ulrike Kistner

About Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)--comparative anatomist, paleontologist, biologist,
physiologist, geologist, educationist, and public administrator--two stories are being
told.
The Stories
Cuvier, Founder of Modern Biology (History of Science, Foucault)
The first story is found in books on the history of biology and in Michel Foucault's
Order of Things. Foucault celebrates Cuvier as the founder of modern biology. He
displays no small degree of admiration for Cuvier's intellectual muscle: "One day,
towards the end of the eighteenth century," he tells us, "Cuvier was to topple the glass
jars of the Museum, smash them open and dissect all the forms of animal visibility that
the classical age had preserved in them."
1
Cuvier's intellectual impatience pertains to
the tables of natural history of the seventeenth and the better part of the eighteenth
centuries, which do not yield any explanations, precisely because they cannot account
for elements that partake of the manifold movements of life.
2
The taxonomy of natural
history was patterned by four variables--forms, number, arrangement, and magnitude--
which could [End Page 175] be scanned, as it were, in one and the same movement,
by language and by the eye (p. 268). With Cuvier's intervention, characters--the
objects of classification--are being freed from their taxonomic function, and are being
introduced into the various organic structural plans of living beings (p. 263). Foucault
terms this system of thought an "untamed ontology": "transferring its most secret
essence from the vegetable to the animal kingdom, life has left the tabulated space of
order and become wild once more"(p. 278).
No longer content to transfer the methods of botany to zoology (in the manner in
which Linnaeus had done it), Cuvier points to the importance of anatomy (and a
general physiology) for zoology. Life, as the new object of inquiry, is no longer seen
to emerge from its visible surface, but from its hidden depth. Cuvier directed his
search to the internal organic structure of living beings through methods of
comparative anatomy. Everything that was hitherto rendered continuous and visible
through the static grids of natural history--genera, species, individuals, structures,
organs--attains a different status. Cuvier animates these categories by subjecting them
to the notion of the function of an organ (e.g., respiration, digestion, circulation,
locomotion). He thereby demonstrates the inadequacy of a mechanical explanation of
vital processes. According to Foucault, the further the organs are from the center of the
functionality of the system, the more flexible, variable, and rich they are in distinctive
characters: "Animal species differ at their peripheries, and resemble each other at their
centres; they are connected by the inaccessible, and separated by the apparent. Their
generality lies in that which is essential to their life; their singularity in that which is
most accessory to it" (p. 267).
This implies that the resemblances in function, which allow the biologist to draw links
between groups, are inaccessible to view. The distinctness and individuality of the
organism, in contrast, will be found at its visible surface: "Multiplicity is apparent and
unity is hidden"(pp. 267-268). Functional unity and the subordination of characters
were to become the most important principles in Cuvier's new classification. In a
memoir of 1812, he laid down his criterion for an optimal classification system: it had
to be one that could reduce the classification to its most general propositions.
3
This
criterion also pertains to Cuvier's notion of "species," whose individuals are highly
variable yet highly stable units. A similar principle is seen to govern the status of the
organs: those that are visible on the surface of the [End Page 176] body are designated
as secondary, while the primary organs are essential, central, hidden, and unreachable
except by dissection (p. 268). "Thus," says Cuvier, "we find more numerous varieties
in measure as we depart from the principal organs and as we approach those of less
importance; and when we arrive at the surface where the nature of things places the
least essential parts--whose lesion would be the least dangerous--the number of
varieties becomes so considerable that all the work of the naturalists has not yet been
able to form any one sound idea of it."
4

Cuvier's primary contribution, one that marked the emergence of modern biology, was
the discovery of hidden functions and their interrelations within the system of the
living organism. Access to the interior space was afforded to him by the techniques of
comparative anatomy, which uncover the otherwise invisible functional resemblances
that constitute the unity underlying the dispersion of visible differences (p. 269).
Through the divisions of anatomy, the families of living beings could be reconstituted
on a different basis than those established by natural history. Cuvier laid the theoretical
foundations for a new functional and comparative anatomy on the connection between
the conditions of existence, the functional unity, and the coordination of the body
structures of the animal organism. In tracing the various combinations and connections
of organ functioning, he revealed at the same time their physiological activity.
Secondly, through the law of the interdependence of the parts of an organism,
comparative anatomy illuminated the correlation between visible elements at the
surface, and those concealed in the depths of the body. These achievements facilitated
a third one--namely, the break-up of the continuity of time in physical history. For
Cuvier, fossils were not a prefiguration of forms of life existing in his day,
5
but an
indication of a different kind of continuity: a scale of decreasing complexity in the
great functions to be found in the majority of species (respiration, digestion,
circulation, reproduction, locomotion, etc.); or, an indication of continuity in the level
of complexity and perfection of the organ (p. 271). This continuity, however, is based
on a fundamental discontinuity that disrupts the idea of a Great Chain of Being, or of a
series: "not a continuous series of almost similar creatures, but rather an interrupted
sequence of dissimilar [End Page 177] forms."
6
The discontinuity that Cuvier
postulates for a physical history is defined by a succession of different organic types,
each unique and distinct:
It must not be imagined that because we place one genus or one family before another
we could consider them as more perfect, as superior to the others in the system of
nature. He alone has this pretension who pursues the chimerical project of placing the
organisms in a single line; we have long ago renounced this scheme. The more we
have progressed in the study of nature and the more we have become convinced that
this idea is one of the most untrue notions ever introduced into natural history, the
more we have recognized that it is necessary to consider each organism and each
group of organisms in itself and in the role that each plays by virtue of its properties
and its organization, and to make no abstraction of any of their relationships or any of
the links which attach them to the other organisms, from the closest to the most
remote.
7

Two different knowledges are being interarticulated here: comparative anatomy and
paleontology. This correlation involves yet another transformation effected by Cuvier's
systems--a transformation that was to become pivotal for the emergence of a theory of
evolution. It concerns the new type of classification, which had to define its criteria
anew. Scientific thought about life processes could no longer confine itself to
considerations of the species and the differences that separate each species from the
others--it could arise only through recognition of a break between species difference
and individual difference. It had to discover in the individual a link to the species,
through genus, order, and class as distinct and precise types of organization, in which
each of the interlocking categories has its own internal support: "to belong to a genus,
a class, or an order, to belong to all the categories which lie below that of the species,
means that each thing possesses, in itself, in its own anatomy, its own functioning, in
its physiology, its form of existence, a certain perfectly analysable structure, and one
which as a result of this has its own positivity."
8

The individual in its functioning carries within itself "the determinations, the orders,
regulations and correlations which can exist between the different levels"--all the
interlocking anatomo-physiological [End Page 178] structures that construct its class,
its order, and its genus.
9
As Foucault points out, in connecting the two genetic lines of
comparative anatomy and paleontology, Cuvier had to admit to some kind of
teleology. Class, order, genus, and species were to form the conditions for, if not to
predetermine, the existence of the individual, which is said to bear within itself all the
characteristics of the species. This teleology and circularity circumscribe Cuvier's
notion of the "unity of the type." Despite the fact that Cuvier seldom explicitly
employed the term "type," it provided him with a fundamental argument against the
idea of the Great Chain of Being.
10

Cuvier's understanding of the "type" was fundamentally called into question by
Darwin. Yet his notion of the discontinuity of living forms, establishing historicities
proper to each form of life, was more apt as a basis for evolutionary thought than was
the notion of the continuity of structures and characters. Cuvier's time did not as yet
know a history of living beings like that described by the theory of evolution.
Nevertheless, he provided some of the foundations for a theory of evolution by
thinking of living organisms in terms of the conditions that enable them to have a
history (p. 276).
Cuvier, Scientific Racist (Cultural Studies, Social and Cultural History)
The second story told about the role of Georges Cuvier comes from cultural studies
theorists, and social and cultural historians. Cuvier is singled out for particular
notoriety by South African cultural historians and anthropologists studying the history,
mode of subsistence, and extermination of the Khoisan peoples. He is being placed in
a long line of travelers, researchers, skull hunters, and settler colonials who are
considered to all have taken part, in different ways, in the genocidal campaign against
the aboriginals.
As Saul Dubow remarks, members of the hunter-gatherer-cum-pastoralist Khoisan
groupings acquired a novelty value for scientific speculation at the moment of their
extinction. The otherwise staunch monogenist Carl Linnaeus is quoted as stating that
"it would be difficult to persuade oneself that [Europeans and Hottentots] derived from
the same origin".
11
On the basis of the reputed testicular evulsions of Khoi males
documented in the Cape by European settlers since 1652, Linnaeus, in the first edition
of his Systemae naturae (1735), classified them as Homo monstrosis monorchidei and
[End Page 179] placed them on a side branch of human evolution.
12
Buffon, a
believer in the continuity or gradation of nature--a version of the Great Chain of
Being--compared the Khoisan to monkeys.
13

By 1800, the focus of attention had shifted to the anatomy of Khoi women. The
question of the function of the steatopygia observed in these women provoked
analogies to the tail of the fat-tailed sheep or the hump of the dromedary. With respect
to the elongated labia minora attributed to Khoi women--which Cuvier confirmed
through the findings of the postmortem dissection of Saartje Baartman--,the Khoi were
considered to be linked, by similarity, to apes and other simians.
14
From the end of the
seventeenth century onward, the Khoi were seen as the connecting link between
human and animal species.
Cuvier is said to fall in line with this tradition of exoticist interest in Khoi female
genitalia. Information about the latter was reportedly first obtained from dissection in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by physicians of the Dutch East India
Company, and by other physicians in the Cape. Cuvier, so the story goes, found out
about this anatomical curiosity through an expedition sent out by the French
government at the instigation of the Institut de France in 1800; en route back to
France, two of the zoologists (Peron and Lesueur) studied San anatomy, the findings
of which they presented to Cuvier (among others). Ten years later, Cuvier encountered
a San woman originally from the Eastern Cape near the Great Fish River, who had
moved to the vicinity of Cape Town by the time she was picked up by an English
ship's surgeon. She had been exhibited in England from 1810 to 1815, and in 1815 in
France under the title of "Hottentot Venus". Cuvier examined her and depicted her in a
lithograph in March 1815--nine months before her death from TB at the age of twenty-
six, on 29 December 1815. Her corpse was made available to Cuvier for more exact
study; he had it cast in wax, dissected, and the skeleton fully articulated.
15
(The
skeleton is housed in the ethnographic section in Muse de l'Homme in Paris, and is
accessible to researchers only by special permission.) In an autopsy report of 1817 he
described her anatomy, and he subsequently exhibited [End Page 180] the external
genital organs.
16
In his scientific paper published in 1824, he included the color
portrait painted in 1815 as an illustration of the type of "Femme de race Bochsmann."
17
On a page facing the one that depicts Saartje Baartman posing in the nude before an
array of spectators, Cuvier notes: "The most disgusting part of this woman was her
face, which displayed the characters of both the negro and of the Mongole
countenance in its different features."
18

In a monumental, four-volume publication of 1817 entitled Le rgne animal distribu
d'aprs son organisation pour servir de base l'histoire naturelle des animaux et
d'introduction l'anatomie compare (to which Cuvier contributed volumes 1, 2, and
4), the development of "civilization" is attributed to "the Caucasian race to which we
belong, a people distinguished by the beautiful oval shape of their heads." The "yellow
race" is said to have created great empires, but "its civilisation was always stationary".
About the "negro race" south of the Atlas, Cuvier had this to say: "Their colour is
black, their hair crimped, their heads squashed and their noses flat. Their protruding
mouths and thick lips are strikingly similar to those of the apes. The peoples which
compose this race have always been savages."
19
Cuvier's findings are said to have set
in motion a whole flurry of investigations into Khoisan women in the second half of
the nineteenth century.
20
De Blainville's 1815 and Cuvier's 1817 autopsy reports on
Saartje Baartman were followed by further descriptions and depictions of the Khoi
female genitals and buttocks (A. W. Otto, 1824; Johannes Mueller, 1834; William H.
Flower and James Murie, 1867; Herbert von Luschka, A. Koch, and E. Goertz, 1869).
21

Here we have two vastly different stories about one and the same figure who occupies
a prominent place in the annals of science. Moreover, these stories are being told by
researchers/historians who are not separated by such a great distance in the "family" of
humanities disciplines. If it is not possible to resolve these differences, it should be
possible at least to explain them, and the assumptions on [End Page 181] which they
are based. And if it is not possible to reconcile these vastly different stories in such a
way that each complements the omissions or blind spots of the other, it should be
possible at least to bring them face to face with each other, in order to see their
respective limitations. Finally--and this is where I shall allow Foucault to have the last
word--we should be able to develop a framework that can address, if not overcome,
these limitations.
The Assumptions behind the Stories
Cuvier's Comparative Anatomy in the Context of Enlightenment Philosophy
(Foucault)
Some social and cultural historians of scientific racism see an expression of racism in
the fact that natural historians and early modern biologists classified members of
particular groupings within "precapitalist" societies in proximity with apes and other
simians, in a grading reminiscent of the Great Chain of Being.
22
In assessing this
classification, it has to be borne in mind that in the nineteenth century, the animal
kingdom became the domain of the new breakthroughs in modern biology as the
science of life (as distinct from classical taxonomy, which privileged plants as objects
of investigation). In Cuvier's comparative anatomy, man does not occupy a privileged
place in the animate world and, zoologically speaking, does not provide a model for
the totality of other animals, or even for the vertebrates. Cuvier's comparative
anatomy, therefore, disrupts the notion of the Great Chain of Being through the spatial
organization of its classification.
Enlightenment philosophical anthropology located the newly arrived item in the order
of knowledge--man--within the life and the social sciences. While differentiating the
physiological knowledge of man (the investigation of "what Nature makes of man")
from the pragmatic ("what man as a free being makes of himself, what he can make of
himself, and what he ought to make of himself"), a philosophical anthropology
encompasses both aspects. Kant shows man as a world-citizen in the context of the
cosmos.
23

Philosophical anthropology straddles both disciplines, on the basis of Kant's
reformulation of the principle of mechanistic causality, in terms of a teleology of
nature that encompasses both the living organism in the life sciences, and the "social
organism" in a description [End Page 182] of the workings of society. Thus, it is not
surprising to find, as Saul Dubow observes (together with Michael Banton), that
typological theories of the nineteenth century correlate social categories with natural
ones.
24
It is only toward the latter part of the nineteenth century that we can observe a
division of labor being enacted within these disciplines, and anthropology branching
out into its various subdisciplines (physical, and later cultural and social,
anthropology). For historiography, this raises the danger of a "retrospective" or
"inductivist" history, which judges scientific revolutions by what is known to be
scientifically acceptable today, rather than evaluating them in the context of their own
intellectual milieu at its limits.
25

Cuvier's comparative anatomy, moreover, dislocates the temporal organization
presupposed in the continuist notion of the Great Chain of Being that had formed the
basis of the classifications of natural history. Against the views of some cultural
historians,
26
it has to be said that modern biology makes its entry precisely with the
demise of the possibility of a great natural order. This does not necessarily imply a
move from monogeneticist explanations (associated by Sander Gilman with a
nonracist notion of the "unity of mankind") to a polygeneticist argument (associated by
Gilman with a racist notion of the differential status of racial types) about the origin(s)
of man. Cuvier opposed the Great Chain of Being formulated by Linnaeus, and yet
held onto the notion of a fundamental (though hidden) functional unity of the
organism, and a unitary view of the human species. He postulated a functional
physiological unity across distinct species, genus, orders, and classes, each with their
own distinctive and precise type of organization.
This tenet of Cuvier's is embedded in the Enlightenment break-up of a notion of linear
history, and the charting of history along two axes--that of the individual, and that of
the species--which are distinct and separate, and are in many instances imaged as
vectors proceeding in opposite directions. With the intention of displacing the work of
"practicing empirical historians with the Idea of world history" based to some extent
on an a priori principle,
27
Kant outlines [End Page 183] the divergence between the
history of the individual and the history of the species: while each individual dies, the
species is immortal.
28
This philosophy of history is a precondition for nineteenth-
century theories of evolution (e.g., the charting of a differential history along the lines
of ontogeny and phylogeny, and the theory of genetic recapitulation as formulated by,
for example, August Weismann and Ernst Haeckel).
The duality registered in philosophies of history since the Enlightenment, I would
argue, is not coincidental but pivotal for the introduction of a historicity that sets the
items on the classificatory table in motion. The duality of history forms one of the
hallmarks of both the sciences of life in modernity, and critical philosophy. Foucault
recognized this clearly when, in the tradition of Nietzsche, he installed the procedures
of a genealogy at the heart of any critique, any counterhistory, and any history that is
marked by the conflict presented by the insurrection of subjugated knowledges. A
genealogy places origins and ends in a relation of radical disjunction, and these
disjunctions effectively forbid a direct correlation between the empirical object and the
object of knowledge. This is what a genealogical explanation and critique have in
common with genetic thought, more generally speaking: a dual armature of history
that separates the conditions of knowledge from the empirical existence of the object.
It is the sciences of life, labor, and language that, for Foucault, have the principles of
philosophical critique built into their own constitution. It is hence not surprising to see
that Foucault is not prepared to lay the charge of racism at the door of modern biology
in its founding moments.
Cuvier's Comparative Anatomy in the Context of a Continuous Tradition of
Racist Stereotyping (Cultural Studies, Social and Cultural History)
On the other end of the scale, it is not surprising that social historians (even those
calling themselves historians of ideas) can level their accusations against modern
biology, and against Cuvier in particular, only on the basis of the disavowal of the
epistemological rupture that inaugurated modern biology and critical philosophy alike.
Not taking account of the significance of the dual armature in a critical philosophy of
history that finds systematic application in the newly emergent sciences of life,
Michael Banton bemoans the supposed ambiguity in Cuvier's concept of the type. He
accuses Cuvier of a confusion between a historical view of connections over time, and
a classificatory approach starting from differences in the present.
29
[End Page 184]
Other social/cultural historians of biology move Cuvier's comparative anatomy back to
classical taxonomy and the Great Chain of Being (Gilman, Gordon, and implicitly also
Dubow, Baker, and Banton). They do not differentiate significantly between the
taxonomies of Linnaeus (1707-1778) and the race typologies of Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach (1752-1840), or the supposedly typological theory of race put forward by
Cuvier. The racial divisions charted by Enlightenment universalism are being
described as the twin effects of the advance of scientific forms of reasoning (inasmuch
as they involve observation, measurement, and classification), and the rationalization
of old prejudices (inasmuch as they produce racial prejudices and stereotypes).
30

The continuities that social historians of science and of scientific racism, and
historians of ideas, alike observe, can probably be explained by reference to the
supposed continuities of the objects of natural history and modern biology. In
discovering these continuities, they are largely guided by a tendency to regard
ethnocentric curiosity, lurid exoticist fantasies of sexual depravity, and skulduggery, of
any age at any time, with horror. This sentiment pervades the writings of social
historians, historians of ideas, and cultural studies theorists on the objects of
nineteenth-century biology, comparative anatomy, and physical anthropology.
Gilman, in his study on "Black Bodies, White Bodies," observes a continuity in the
image of the black as sexualized Other that finds an echo in the European prostitute.
He points to the analogy between the Hottentot and the prostitute, which "simply
articulates in images a view which had been present throughout the late nineteenth
century".
31
The synthesis of a wide variety of images, for Gilman, is provided by the
putative difference of the Other, made visible by anatomical peculiarities that at the
same time are designed to reveal the Other's pathology:
The "white man's burden" thus becomes his sexuality and its control, and it is this
which is transferred into the need to control the sexuality of the Other, the Other as
sexualized female. The colonial mentality which sees "natives" as needing control is
easily transferred to "woman"--but woman as exemplified by the case of the prostitute.
This need for control was a projection of inner fears; thus, its articulation in visual
images was in terms which described the polar opposite of the European male.
32
[End
Page 185]
The assumed continuities in the images of the Other find their most generalized
expression in the conclusion to Gilman's article: "The line from the secrets possessed
by the "Hottentot Venus" to twentieth-century psychoanalysis runs reasonably
straight."
33

Ironically, the continuities assumed in racist stereotyping in modern sciences of life
are reproduced in some of the writings of these cultural studies authors themselves.
They condemn the way in which Cuvier's anatomical description of a Khoisan woman
is illustrated with a juxtaposed drawing of her nude body, to represent the "type" of
"the Bochsmann race." At the same moment, however, they can reproduce the same
drawing for the edification of present-day viewers, who are thereby afforded the
luxury of having their exoticist fantasy and their moral outrage simultaneously
satisfied.
34
Among the ranks of cultural studies theorists, there is a battle of moral
one-upmanship. One of the contributors to the richly illustrated catalogue of the 1996
Cape Town exhibition entitled Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen
mentions the fascination that the elongated labia minora held for scientists, travellers,
and settlers at the Cape. She delves into this "curiosity," while at the same time
castigating a contemporary fellow-fascinee who made this one of the subjects of "a
chic volume on stereotypes of sexuality, race and madness".
35

Archaeology and Genealogy
It appears that cultural and social histories of scientific racism are intent on finding the
systematicity of racism in the systematicity of scientific knowledge. The assumed
isomorphism between these two systems can be shown to arise from an assumed
continuity in the order of knowledge. If one were to analyze the order of knowledge in
terms of discontinuities, displacements, ruptures, and transformations, (as Foucault
does), this isomorphism would fall apart. As it turns out, an archaeology of scientific
knowledge(s) has left the cultural and social-historical accounts behind, insofar as the
latter are confined to a precritical understanding of history, philosophy, and science.
Such cultural and social histories tend to remain external in relation to the internal
organization of the sciences whose development they purport to describe.
It would indeed be very tempting to explain the radically divergent assessments of the
role of Cuvier by reference to the internalism/externalism debate. At first sight, it
would seem that the role [End Page 186] that Foucault accords Cuvier in his
archaeological writings corresponds to an internal view of the history of science. This
view is seemingly authorized by Foucault himself, when (in The Order of Things) he
declares his concern to articulate the internal conditions of possibility of the history of
thought (p. 275). The counterpart would then be performed by cultural studies
theorists: the role that they accord Cuvier would correspond to an external view.
What would seem to confirm this explanation of the divergent assessments of the role
of Cuvier in terms of the internalism/externalism debate is the fact that, for Foucault,
the history of science comprises two heteromorphous systems. The first, which he
labels "archaeology," conforms to the criteria of an internalist account that
defines the conditions of the science as a science: it is relative to its domain of objects,
to the type of language it uses, to the concepts it has at its disposal or it is seeking to
establish; it defines the formal and semantic rules required for a statement to belong to
the science; it is instituted either by the science in question, insofar as it poses its own
norms for itself, or by another science, insofar it imposes itself on the former as a
model of formalization; at any rate, these conditions of scientificity are internal to
scientific discourse in general and cannot be defined other than through it.
36

The second system, though labeled "external" by Foucault, is in no way to be equated
with externalist (usually sociological-historical) accounts of science. It is external to
the archaeological system in the sense that it looks at the constitution and delimitation
of discursive sets against a domain of heterogeneous statements that have not as yet
attained a discursive regularity: "they have neither the same status, units, organization,
nor the same functioning as the sciences to which they give rise".
37
This system is
what Foucault terms "genealogical." It is opposed to the institutionalization and
functioning of an organized scientific discourse
38
--or, in Kuhn's terms, to the
operations of a "normal science." Due to its limit-status and nonimmanentist
explanation, it can make the history of subjugated and disqualified knowledges
reverberate through its system.
The noncoincidence of an externalist account with a genealogy demonstrates that the
internalism/externalism debate does not form [End Page 187] a framework for
Foucault's history of science. In fact, Foucault rejects both internalist and externalist
approaches to the history of systems of knowledge, and with them, the dichotomy that
separates them:
There is an illusion that consists of the supposition that science is grounded in the
plenitude of a concrete and lived experience; that geometry elaborates a perceived
space, that biology gives form to the intimate experience of life, or that political
economy translates the processes of industrialization at the level of theoretical
discourses; therefore, that the referent itself contains the law of the scientific object.
But it is equally illusory to imagine that science is established by an act of rupture and
decision, that it frees itself at one stroke from the qualitative field and from all the
murmurings of the imaginary by the violence (serene or polemical) of a reason that
founds itself by its own assertions--that is, that the scientific object brings itself into
existence of itself in its own identity.
39

How to Historicize Science--Beyond Internalism and Externalism
Foucault reinvents certain maxims of Enlightenment philosophies of history, which
allow him to transcend the dichotomy between internalism and externalism and to gain
new insights into the process by which scientific knowledge is shaped. This is what
connects his archaeology of knowledge to the philosophical and historical concerns
informing the work of Cuvier, among others. A route out of the internalism vs.
externalism dispute in the philosophical vs. social (or sociological) history of science
is charted within a universal history (of science) itself. For Cuvier and some of his
contemporaries in the philosophical history of science and medicine, the history of the
genesis of scientific thought becomes true natural history, replacing taxonomic natural
history.
40
Heeding Kant's warning that polyhistory is a cyclops of erudition with one
eye missing--that of philosophy--Cuvier's lectures on the history of the natural
sciences emphasize the vital role of a philosophical history of science for the
description of the functions of the forms of organic life.
Coming back to the question of scientific racism (and with it, to Foucault's assessment
of the role of Georges Cuvier at the threshold of modern biology), it becomes clear
why this is not an issue for Foucault's internalist archaeology of knowledge. This does
not mean, [End Page 188] though, that racism is not an issue for Foucault. It features
as an issue in a genealogical account of a biopolitics--the way in which, in modernity,
problems of governance are being rationalized by reference to "population": health,
hygiene, fertility, birth and death rates, longevity, morbidity and mortality. In other
words, biologically based racism comes to the fore at the moment at which the
biological is being drawn into the legitimation of the functioning of particular state
apparatuses.
41
The politicization of biology at the end of the eighteenth century did
not take place within the sphere of biology, but through its capture by political
economy: it became a biology not of the individual, but of the statistical person, of the
human species defined as population. The extension of biology over populations
became a matter of the calculation of productivity, length of the working day, decline
of productive energies, cost factors, the insurance mechanism, and milieus and
environments having effects on populations. In this context, the sciences of life are
instrumentalized for purposes of normalization.
This would explain why Cuvier's comparative anatomy of the human body does not
feature as scientific racism in Foucault's genealogical account of modern biopolitics.
To be sure, Cuvier's anatomical interest in a functional classification of species was to
some extent mediated by colonization. It represents a biological transformation of the
theory of the war of the races predominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
However, the biopolitics of the human species that we see at work in the better part of
the twentieth century is not reducible to the anatomy of the human body as outlined by
Cuvier, or even to an analogy with it. It is biopolitics and biopower that, according to
Foucault, have withdrawn racism from the antagonism of war and instituted racism
within the internal mechanisms of the state. Henceforth, dangers to the integrity of the
nation are being biologized.
This social racism, due to the immanence of its conditions and effects, and to the role
that it plays within civil society itself, does not feature in the analyses of cultural
studies theorists and social historians of science. They remain blind to the
transformations of the form of the state, of the forms of power and authority, of the
types of racism in relation to the state and civil society. On the basis of their
continuist-historical reconstruction of racist stereotyping across the ages, they are
inclined to launch retrospective readings that draw responses [End Page 189] of moral
outrage rather than critique. Their descriptions remain in undaunted complicity with
their respective objects.
Against this type of reading, Foucault upholds the possibility of mobilizing a notion of
race derived from the antagonism between the races in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, as a counterhistory to the biologized racism at the heart of modern state
apparatuses.
42
The open or disguised forms of this modern biologized racism,
mediated by processes of normalization, are thereby being opened to the cry of battle
that underlies them, genealogically speaking.
The new historicity of the living organism formulated by Cuvier breaks with the
continuist history of the ladder of the degrees of being; yet Cuvier's notion of
historicity places him within an Enlightenment philosophical anthropology that
attempts to think of what is human as a determination of being. Only once ontology
was separated from anthropology could the science of life become the site of a
biologized racism. On this account, seen from a present-day critical perspective,
Cuvier stands on this side of an epistemological rupture, but on the other side of a
modern biological racism.
University of the Witwatersrand
Ulrike Kistner is teaching in the School of Dramatic Art, and in the Graduate School
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, at the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, South Africa. Her interests lie in the fields of the history of science and
medicine, and of mutations of the social tie in the imagined communities of modernity.
She has published numerous articles in these fields.
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London: Tavistock, 1986), pp. 137-138 (parenthetical page numbers in the text will
refer to this work).
2. Georges Cuvier, Geschichte der Fortschritte in den Naturwissenschaften seit 1789
bis auf den heutigen Tag, trans. F. A. Wiese (Leipzig: Baumgrtner's Buchhandlung,
1928), p. 4.
3. See William Coleman, Georges Cuvier, Zoologist: A Study in the History of
Evolution Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 80.
4. Cuvier, quoted in Coleman, Georges Cuvier, p. 143.
5. See Georges Cuvier and C. Dumril, "Rapport sur un mmoire de M. Roulin, ayant
pour objet la dcouverte d'une nouvelle espce de tapir dans l'Amrique du sud, fait
l'Acadmie royale des sciences (13 April 1829)," Annales des sciences naturelles 17
(1829): 109-110.
6. Coleman, Georges Cuvier (above, n. 3), p. 150.
7. Georges Cuvier and A. Valenciennes, Histoire naturelle des poissons (Paris, 1828),
vol. 1, pp. 568-569; quoted in Coleman, Georges Cuvier, pp. 147-148.
8. Michel Foucault, Cuvier's Position in the History of Biology," Critique of
Anthropology 4:13/14 (1979): 128.
9. Ibid., p. 129.
10. Coleman, Georges Cuvier (above, n. 3), pp. 102, 106.
11. Saul Dubow, Scientific racism in modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), p. 22.
12. Carmel Schrire, "Native Views of Western Eyes," in Miscast: Negotiating the
Presence of the Bushmen, ed. Pippa Skotnes (Cape Town: University of Cape Town
Press, 1996), p. 350.
13. Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism, p. 22.
14. Robert Gordon, "The Venal Hottentot Venus and the great chain of Being."
African Studies 51(2) (1992): 191.
15. Alan Morris, "Trophy Skulls, Museums and the San," in Skotnes, Miscast (above,
n. 12), pp. 69-70.
16. John Baker, Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 316.
17. Morris, "Trophy Skulls," p. 70.
18. Schrire, "Native Views" (above, n. 12), p. 350.
19. Quoted in Lon Poliakov, The Arian Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist
Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (London: Sussex University
Press/Heinemann Educational Books, 1971), p. 220.
20. Baker, Race (above, n. 16), p. 316.
21. Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female
Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," Critical Inquiry
12 (1985): 216.
22. See Gordon, (above, n. 14).
23. See Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), trans.
Victor Lyle Dowdell, ed. Frederick P. Van De Pitte (Carbondale/Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
24. Dubow, Scientific Racism (above, n. 13), p. 27.
25. See Joseph Agassi; quoted in Michael Banton, Race Relations (London: Tavistock,
1967), p. 19.
26. E.g., Gordon, (above, n. 14).
27. Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of
View" (1784), On History, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-
Merril Co. Inc., 1963), p. 25.
28. Ibid., p. 14.
29. Michael Banton, Racial Consciousness (London: Longman, 1988), p. 18.
30. Dubow, Scientific Racism (above, n. 13), p. 26.
31. Gilman, "Black Bodies" (above, n. 21), p. 226; see also p. 228.
32. Ibid., p. 237.
33. Ibid., p. 238.
34. See Skotness, Miscast, n. 12, pp. 68-69.
35. Schrire, Native Views" (above, n. 12), p. 347.
36. Michel Foucault, "On the Archaeology of the Sciences. Response to the
Epistemology Circle," Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works of
Foucault 1954-1984, vol. II, ed. James D. Faubion, Trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New
York: The New Press, 1998), p. 326.
37. Ibid.
38. Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures (1976)," Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews
and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: The Harvester Press,
1980), p. 84.
39. Michel Foucault, "On the Archaeology of the Sciences," p. 331.
40. See, e.g., H.P.A. Damerow, Elemente der nchsten Zukunft der Medizin (1829).
See also Dietrich Georg Kieser, System der Medicin, zum Gebrauch bei akademischen
Vorlesungen und fr praktische rzte, 2 vols. (Halle: Hemmerde und Schwetschke,
1817-19); Karl Ernst von Baer, ber Entwicklungsgeschichte der Thiere:
Beobachtung und Reflexion (Knigsberg: Borntrager, 1828).
41. Michel Foucault, "Leben machen und sterben lassen. Die Geburt des Rassismus,"
in Bio-Macht, ed. Sebastian Reinfeldt and Richard Schwarz (Duisburg: Duisburger
Institut fr Sprach- und Sozialforschung, 1992), p. 27.
42. Michel Foucault, Vom Licht des Krieges zur Geburt der Geschichte (1976; Berlin:
Merve Verlag, 1986).