Resistance and (Bio)Power

Abstract

‘Culture itself is, in the last analysis, an ideology’, writes Roland Barthes (1993, 81). South Africa’s Satanism scare had ideological effects as well as ideological causes, and these too influenced the lived experience of some conservative white South Africans in the early years of the 1990s. As I argue above, there was a provocative, if unconscious, element to the scare. The motivations of the media and community leaders who threw their full weight behind it were to some degree politicised or politically influenced, albeit unconsciously. According to Foucault,

Relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the State … the State, for all the omniscience of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the State can only operate on the basis of other, existing power relations. (1980, 122)

This chapter considers some of the ways in which relations of social power that developed around the fear of white Satanism worked to undermine the state and the NP as the end of apartheid loomed.