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.

In the newest edition of Rethinking Schools Fred McKissack reminds us that while Obama’s election marks an historic moment for racial justice in America it far from signals the achievement of a post-racial society.

From his article:

Exactly how can we be in post-racial America when nearly 40 percent of black children under the age of 5 live at or below the poverty line? How are we in post-racial America when the level of school segregation for Latinos is the highest in 40 years and segregation of blacks is back to levels not seen since the late 1960s? How are we in post-racial America when the gaps in wealth, income, education, and health care have widened over the last eight years? In 2006, 20.3 percent of blacks were not covered by health insurance, compared to only 10.8 percent of whites. For Latinos, a whopping 34.1 percent were not covered. In 2007, the unemployment rate for blacks was twice as high as that for whites. We are all Americans, but the pain of poverty is disproportionately cracking the backs of minorities. There are those who insist that the gap in wealth, income, health care and education is due to an inherent culture of victimization. If people of color only worked harder, they’d be fine, we are told. But it’s a flawed premise. This economy has never provided enough jobs for everyone. The funding of education gives a leg up to those who grow up in wealthy districts. Lack of health insurance is a necessity for those without the means. And institutional racism persists. Now is not the time to avert our eyes from the prize. Indeed, the nation needs to refocus its attention on tearing down the walls that keep us from living in a truly post-racial America.

If we are to “tear down the walls that keep us from living in a truly post-racial America” then we will have to radically recommit to the ideals of public education in a democratic society. This is why Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan marks such a dangerous moment for the future of race, education, and democracy in America. Which path will the new ed secretary follow? The path of privatization, high-stakes tests, and zero-tolerance instituted in Chicago? Now is not the time for more market driven solutions to social problems. If we are to realize the promise of a more egalitarian multicultural society where all children are afforded the same life chances regardless of race, class, and gender then foremost on the politcal agenda must be to institute broad-based progressive reforms for public education. Its up to us to push Obama and Duncan down this path.