ABSTRACT
The history of racism is a narrative in which the congruency of micro- and macrocosm has been disrupted at the point of their analogical intersection. Raciology required that enlightenment and myth be intertwined. Indeed, ‘race’ and nationality supplied the logic and mechanism of their interconnections. The specious ontologies of ‘race’ are anything but spontaneous and natural. The modern idea of race operated within the strictest of perceptual limits. The shift from natural history to biology prompted changes in the modes and meanings of the visual and the visible. The idea of ‘race’ leaked out of the lofty confines where what Foucault calls the ‘chemical gaze’ was most fully developed. More than this, the idea of ‘race’ defined and consolidated typologies that could not be dissociated from their very specific representational technology and its perceptual and cognitive regimes. ‘Race’ became an important means to link metaphysics and technology; it made sense readily within the unprecedented historical conditions.
