ABSTRACT
We are making no progress and it’s all leading nowhere. It’s all repetitive, and it doesn’t add up. Basically, we keep saying the same thing, and there again, perhaps we’re not saying anything at all. (Foucault, 2003: 4)
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fi xed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (Darwin, 1985: 460)
I
I have been talking about race as a cultural production, about the rule and role of law in the creation and maintaining of racialized identities, the possible junctures at which law may pass into norm-or if there is not exactly a ‘passing into,’ the point when it is possible to refer to a norm where none appeared to exist previously. It may be, as Foucault complains in the fi rst of his Collège de France lectures, that we are telling the same story over and over again and getting nowhere: his own lines of research are closely interrelated, he admits, but they never added up to a coherent body of work, they have no continuity. But I have taken Foucault out of context-he is talking about his oeuvre, after all, not the narrative progression of ideas through time-and anyway, we know that a Foucauldian history would emphasize discontinuity, dispersion, difference (Foucault, 1972: 9, 12). Still, perhaps it is not altogether erroneous to seek out the ways in which the story of race has ‘advanced,’ changed and developed, or indeed whether it has, or whether we do indeed keep saying the same thing over and over again albeit in different form.
