Jajuna

It has been a long time since I have posted. This is because I have been crazy-busy writing and delivering conference papers (three in the last two weeks) and trying as I can to organize and write my PhD exam and dissertation proposal (a terrifically masochistic endeavor indeed!). Below is something I came across in my files today as I was writing a section for my comps exam which critiques Foucault’s use of biopower, particularly its Eurocentric orientation. I wrote this awhile ago in response to Ann Stoler’s critique of Foucauldian biopower, which she expands to include the reciprocal relations between European identity and colonialism.

In Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995) Ann Stoler takes up Michel Foucault’s theoretical propositions in his A History of Sexuality Vol 1 and “refigures” them in a wider imperial field in order to link discourses of sexuality and the production of bourgeoisie subjectivity to race, and specifically to “racial thinking”. Thinking is a crucial word for it means that race must not only be confronted within an epistemological framework (how we know) but also within the ontological (what we know). Race is confounding in the sense that it blurs the material and symbolic lines of the visible and the invisible as well as the known and the unknown. I would like to briefly situate Stoler’s notion of “racial thinking” within this field of the thought and the un-thought and the visible and the invisible. By insisting that “racial thinking” was, and is, intrinsic to the production and circulation of discourses surrounding sexuality, Stoler is able to situate race as a fundamental category in the construction of not only what and how we know, but also who we are.

Stoler argues that the colonial “order of things” hinged upon the development of biopolitical technologies that enabled, albeit in an obvious asymmetry of violence, the efficient management of the colonizer and colonized alike, and bound them through mutually constitutive networks of material and affective relations. Intimately linked with the biopolitics of colonialism were discourses of sexuality which were interwoven with the subjectivization of colonial bodies: their study, classification, and manipulation in the interest of maximizing the rationality of the colonial endeavor. Discourses surrounding the racialized and sexualized bodies of the colonized were intrinsically tied to the production of bourgeoisie subjects. She claims that widely circulating notions of the racialized colonial “Other” served as “racially erotic counterpoints” which contrapuntally coded the terrain of European morality, health, and desire. Stoler argues that by failing to incorporate this expanded field of knowledge/power Foucault’s History of Sexuality misses a crucial axis in the production of European sexuality as well as the fundamental role of racial imaginaries in the historical modifications and developments of regulatory and normalizing techniques of rule. She asks, “was the obsessive search for “truth about sex” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries directly culled from earlier confessional models, as Foucault claims, or was this “truth about sex” recast around the invention of other truth claims, specifically those working through the language of race?”

According to Stoler, although Foucault understood that race underwrote the operation of power in the modern liberal (biopolitical) state, he failed to address how the material and symbolic exchange between metropole and colony produced mutually constitutive regimes of truth. Foucault restricted his analysis of race to a category of biopolitical regulation. In other words, he describes race as a “mechanism which allows biopower to work”, or, a category from which the vital capacity and health of bodies is regulated and managed in space and time. Stoler doesn’t feel like such a description goes nearly far enough in grappling with the way race is active within the constitution of modernity as it developed in out of the discourses and practices of imperialism. In this sense Stoler is making the claim that race is not only a “technique of power” but is a fundamental category underwriting the development the liberal state, its subjects, and the logics and rules governing and binding them together. By situating Foucault’s frame within this expanded field of power, Stoler argues that race functions as a grammar underlying the interstices of thought and experience within the construction of European and non European identities. This insistence deepens Foucault’s descriptions of biopower and complicates the field of thought and visibility. It claims that biopower is not only underwritten by the application of racial violence in the interest of maximizing the productive capacities of populations, but also predicated on racial thinking within the inter-subjective mediation of self and other. It involves the way ideas concerning difference are folded into thought and action as well as the processes of self governing and collective regulation. In this formulation, thinking is regulated by racial grammars which mediate the “relationship between visible characteristics and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence”…and the “untraceable identity markers” that negotiate what is possible to know and not to know, between what we see and do not see, and what we think and do not think.