Continuing to haphazardly reread bits of Foucault in line with the last few posts. In the last section of Society Must Be Defended, Foucault talks about some preconditions for killing. He specifies that by killing he does “not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.” (256.) Foucault discusses racism as something which makes killing (more) acceptable. Put simply, it’s easier to kill someone (or make them risk death etc) or some population if they’re less like the killer(s). Dehumanization, so to speak, though Foucault might not like the term. That makes sense to me.
Despite his expansive definition of killing, what Foucault focuses on is killing by the state and more or less directly. There’s little to no attention to other forms of indirect killing that I associated with the economy here and here. Foucault mentions colonialism, mentions it as genocidal and I certainly would not want to minimize any of the bloodshed of colonialism, but in his discussion it sounds as if the _point_ of colonialism was killing, in the way that WWII German extermination programs were aimed at killing.
This last is the example Foucault really talks about and I find him convincing (I know nothing about that time and place so I’m easily convinced). I find his discussion of racial ideology interesting, he talks about a dynamic along the lines of “our race flourishes by purging those others” whether the others are considered a separate race entirely or a group somewhat inside the race (the former is race vs race the latter is race vs impurities of the race). As Foucault mentions, the same type of thing happens with regard to eliminating criminals and the mentally ill (258), though I think this stretches the term “racism” to near unrecognizability such that it would have been better for Foucault to use a different term (as it is, he creates the possibility for many a communicative misfire given the persistence of “ordinary racism” as he calls it on 258). See this, this, and this re: eugenics in the US, see this and this re: Indian removal (”nits make lice”).
The thing is, Foucault seems to me to take the German case as more paradigmatic than it is. Why is that the paradigm case? What about, say, slavery? Marcus Rediker estimates that about 5 million Africna people were killed as a result the transatlantic slave trade (the quote is in the page I just linked to). According to this, two people died for every five who survived shipping to the “new world, ” and that doesn’t say anything about life expectancy after arrival. Slavery was lethal, but it did not exist for the purpose of killing. One could argue about whether the killing was incidental or instrumental (exacting really horrible costs on rebellions may have helped make slaves more hesitant to rebel), but the point is that slavery existed to produce wealth, not death. This is not to say that the production of death is separable from slavery, far from it, but it seems to me there’s an important difference between killing in war and killing in order to take or keep slaves.
Plantation owners were not generals, slave traders and overseers were not soldiers. Those people operated according to economic logics as much or more than state logics. Those economic logics were (and are) certainly racist and I think Foucault can be usefully applied to that, but again there’s a difference between “this group is inferior so our killing of them is justified” and “this group is inferior and so our enslaving them is justified, therefore our killing in order to enslave them is also justified.” Put differently, perhaps the plantation owner and all that could be mapped onto Foucault’s claims - I can imagine claims like “our race benefits from this,” but the claim to benefit is not biological (eliminating impurities in what is taken to be one’s own race or eliminating another race which threatens one’s own) so much as economic (subjugating what is taken to be another race but keeping them alive so as to benefit from that subjugation).
I think parallel claims could be made with regard to waged labor. Workers were racialized, as were radicals. (See for instance, Zane Grey’s disgusting1919 novel The Desert of Wheat, which talks at length about German blood and the IWW as made up of foreigners who are either scheming or are too stupid to know they’re being had; the novel includes the following incident - committed by characters who are good guys in the novel - which is almost exactly what happened to Frank Little in reality:
“From the front cars rose shrill cries that alarmed the prisoners in the rear. The reason soon became manifest. Arms pointed and eyes stared at the figure of a man hanging from a rope fastened to the center of a high bridge span under which the engine was about to pass. The figure swayed in the wind. It turned half-way round, disclosing a ghastly, distorted face, and a huge printed placard on the breast, then it turned back again. Slowly the engine drew one car-load after another past the suspended body of the dead man. There were no more cries. All were silent in that slow-moving train. All faces were pale, all eyes transfixed. The placard on the hanged man’s breast bore in glaring red a strange message: Last warning. 3-7-77. The figures were the ones used in the frontier days by vigilantes.” [This is the end of chapter 21.]) This occurred in two ways, or rather, for two reasons - one, to put down their revolts. That is, to deliberately use violence on them or kill them, in order to send them back to work and end the threat they posed. The second was in order to justify their lives under the ordinary operations of capitalism. The first is completely in keeping with what Foucault talks about. The second is not, and the two are linked.
A final comment which is a complaint. The last 3 or 4 pages of the last lecture are ridiculous, irresponsible, and annoying. I understand that Foucault means “racism” as a technical term. I’ve already complained about that use and said that I think a different term encompassing “ordinary racism” would have been better. This is doubly so when he says that all socialists are racists. Nonsense, in the ordinary sense of the term. Foucault’s use of the term racism involves a metaphorical relationship to ordinary racism - to the ordinary uses of the word racism - and his discussion gains a certain rhetorical force by the metaphor. Along similar lines though even more expansive than Foucault, I might say that rape is a form of violent appropriation of women, then use some literary theory notions that all language is the violent appropriation of something coded feminine in order to say that all language use is rape. The metaphor might hold (provided the metaphors of ‘violence’ and ‘feminine’ in the account of language and all that hold, something I doubt) but even if it did so, such a use of terms would serve little positive purpose and I can think of some negative ones. In short, the rhetorical charge of the term strikes me as an argument for changing it. I suspect this is precisely Foucault’s reason for keeping it, and if I’m write it’s doubly irritating. Foucault’s point really amounts to “any consideration of armed struggle is racist” in the sense that it must consider the possibility of killing some people. Fine, but Foucault offers much more heat than light to that particular issue and his terminology here muddies rather than clarifies.
Foucault is far from the worst on this, but I’m more interested in him so it’s more annoying when he does it.
It’s like Humpty Dumpty as professor (or vice versa, I should write me a thing on that) —
“There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”” Alice said.Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t— till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!””
“But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
From chapter six of Through the Looking Glass, (note to self: a passage to to revisit sometime re: both university silliness and overinflated claims about language and labor, as when Dumpty talks about paying wages to his words).
Hi Nate,
I asked a similar question a few months back (the one about racism) but had very few responses. I too find it vaguely annoying, though more because it risks homogenising all difference to that of race which is baddybadbadbad, although there’s a reason for it that I think needs to be raised. Foucault is talking about the fragmentation of the population. This is what he wants to call ‘racism.’ I think that it was around the time he’s discussing the race was ‘invented,’ and it was invented as having to do with biology. In this respect, I think that part of the reason he uses the term is to draw attention to the way that science’s ‘description’ (putatively objectively, if you understand what I mean, thereby creating a ‘nature’ beyond question) biological reality had a lot to do with this kind of fragmentation. I’m not sure, then, that’s it’s quite that it’s a *metaphor*: it’s about a recognition of a structure that is larger than it first appears, one in which science cheerfully takes over from a racist politics, and justifies its fragmentation of the population and the permission to kill. Nonetheless, a different term, I agree, would be better. But race does bring with it that sense of a biological substratum that is being just to justify a construction of difference, and I’m not sure what else would give us a sense of that… but maybe this will be discussed in the new lectures?
Also, while I agree that Foucault is kinda crude towards the end of the lectures (and this is part of the reason I’m looking forward to the new release), I think that we need to take the diversity of terms he puts under ‘killing’ seriously, and if we do, I think it *does* tell us something about, say, slavery. This may just be my poststructuralism talking, but I think that what Foucault’s trying to demonstrate is that in and through the denial of (say) rights to particular groups of people - the subrace, the rights and privileges of those *thereby* deemed superracial are maintained. In this respect, the superracial are *dependent* upon the subracial for their self-definition, and for the privileges that are thereby accorded them. I’m too fuzzy-headed (I’m a bit sick) to be able to explain this properly in Foucault’s terms, or in relation to slavery, so we’ll go back to familiar territory for me: disability. In order to have a group of people who can be considered ‘able-bodied’ you need a group of people considered disabled. The privileges that accord to those who are able-bodied *require*, in this sense, the disadvantaging of those who are not: it requires a world built for the able-bodied in which the disabled struggle to access things (to take a really simplistic example). It requires the setting aside of able-bodied people from those with disabilities, the fragmentation of the population, in order to maintain the ‘life’ (understood as all positive attributes possible within a given social framework) of the privileged. This gets back to what we were gesturing towards over at mine: it is in and through the positioning of disability as a source of suffering (particularly in the loss of work) that able-bodied workers understand themselves as ‘not that badly off’ (potentially thereby tolerant to their own exploitation). And in this space, it is the ‘biological reality’ of the disabled body that justifies its preclusion from the workplace, and thus its ‘killing’ which may well, at some point, become real. In other words, making a particular group suffer does, actually, have ‘positive’ effects on the life of the privileged group. I think this is what Foucault’s trying to get at. But, you know, that could just be me
Comment by WildlyParenthetical — January 14, 2008 @ 9:34 pm
Also, bad form I know to post twice, but in relation to this and the previous post, I’m wondering what you’re making of Foucault’s argument that sovereignty is used to conceal the function of power, which is far more dispersed. And, relatedly, how you think the shift from the power ‘to let live and make die,’ to the power ‘to make live and let die,’ which seems to me at the heart of Foucault’s difference to these other folks. I’m not sure where I stand, but I suppose my point above is that the ‘letting die’ through the denial of rights functions as part of the ‘making live’ (worthwhile lives) of the… well, what I’ve been calling the superracial. I don’t think that Foucault is arguing that the violence isn’t there, but rather than the violence is *concealed*… you know, the old ‘violence of the timetable’ thing? In this respect I suppose it links back to what we wound up saying over at mine about how the violence remains there, not latent, but not visible, until the moment of maiming (in workplace accidents, for example). And this, I think, hooks nicely to Agamben’s thing about rights talk expanding power (which I think comes up in ‘States of Injury’ too). Anyway, just thoughts
Now I shall stop this productive procrastinating and thesis-ise.
Comment by WildlyParenthetical — January 15, 2008 @ 1:29 am
hi nate
…I don’t think Foucault is using racism as a metaphor; he’s saying that if the state “views” the population as a race, rather than as a citizenry of individuals in social contract mode, with different social status, this inspires certain policies.
A state is known to see its population as a race if the entire population as individuals are subjected or subordinated to the imagined good of a fictional entity which inhabits the population as a whole – the race. The proof of the ideology of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ is not that some people are stigmatised or victimised, but that a society’s ruling class males are also subjected to state power and norm policing.
Foucault judges a society by the quality of life and power it affords its ruling class men. Thus in history of sexuality, the horrible Victorians is the villain society, worst of the worst, in contrast to the near ideal, hero society which is ancient Greek slave society. What the “racism” in the former, absent in the latter, determines for him is that the ruling class males are “subjected sovereigns” - there is an impersonal web of institutions hampering their “liberties”, their exercise of power, their use of their own bodies and especially theire freedom to use the bodies of the lower classes and women. In the Athenian society, which Foucault characterises as one of “freedom”, the ruling class males are really sovereign, subjected to nothing but rivalry with one another, checked only by their own self control. They don’t have to negotiate with women for paternally identifiable children; they can simply force them to produce them because women are basically chattels, and to turn them over to adult males for whatever use they want to make of them. They can satisfy their “appetites” for people and stuff pretty much as “nature” – their will to power and spontaneous desire - demands. This “liberty” is what “humanism” – the subjected sovereignty of ruling class males - arising according to Foucault in the Roman republic, destroys, and what Foucault wishes to regain.
Are ruling class male’s personal will to power subordinated to norms which are designed ‘for the good of the whole/nationa/race’ or not? This is the distinction for Foucault between racism – the subjection of the free propertied male’s desire and power exercise to some abstract common good of the population conceived as a single organism of which they too are a part - and its absence. Thus the Athenian slave society can of course have hierarchies, stigmatised groups, everybody’s basically enslaved or subordinated to the propertied males, but this is not about “the race”. All these structures of oppression and exploitation are there to guarantee, provide and safeguard the “liberty” of the ruling male elite as true sovereigns, leading the sort of life worth living, worthy of them as Foucault sees it. The fulfilment of the desires of the properties males themselves are not restricted or subordinated to the “common good” or to any checks on their use of the bodies of the lower class majority. Thus despite all the stigmatising and people-marking etc, its not a “racist” social order, and its also an admirable arrangement, a dream of an ideal society, impossible to recapture of course but it’s the goalpost. The “liberty” and power of the ruling class males of ancient Athenian slave society is offered by Foucault as an ideal, set against the oppressed ruling class males of modern bourgeois society, who are subjected to all kinds of social norms and pressures, marriage, heterosexuality, business ethics, ways they are supposed to dress and behave, etc..
Race is at work in state policy whether the population in question fits any historic scheme as either homogenous or varied (the “ordinary” notion in ‘ordinary racism” of what races exist is not stable, and really it’s not ‘ordinary’ to define ‘racism’ as confined to individual’s conscious prejudice and violence against people they perceive as of a different race than themselves, indeed only when someone is defending someone or thing from a description as “racism’ is so narrow a definition ever even implied, and rarely actually laid out explicitly). That is you can have a concrete population which by one racial scheme – say British Imperial dominant idea of whiteness – is all one race, while the same population considered according to another racial scheme – nazi Aryanism – is made up of multiple races. A room of English and Irish de souche contains two races for the British in a certain period, and one race for American white ruling class in the same period. In the US, a classroom say full of people might be considered racially homogenous – all white – today, but in France that same group of individuals in that classroom would contain for some people more than one race if some of the people were français de souche and some were, for example, Poles, since the EU expansion has activated a racial otherness for the majority slavs of the new countries. The hierarchy and antagonism of multiple races is not the only feature of racism; there is “racism” in both classrooms if one conceives of the individuals as belonging to races, whether there is more than one or just one “in play” in the situation. There are plenty of situations in which “American” – USAian – is treated as a (single) race, even though by the most common racial scheme recognised in the US, the population of American-born or ethnic American people is also clearly understood to be “multiracial”.
So I don’t think he is revising the “ordinary use” of “racism” so much as highlighting the principle concept in it – the race and an individual’s relation to it, not the hierarchy of races - and finding it at work in places which don’t immediately show centre stage racial conflict or rivalry, that is, he is speaking about “race” and “racism” which is not limited to, but underlies and makes possible, “race war” or “race hatred” or “racial prejudice” or “racial discrimination”. Not every manifestation of the ideology of race directly involves war, hatred, prejudice or discrimination. In order for these latter to exist, that is for individuals to be socially marked by race-belonging and groups set against one another, the idea of race itself needs to be invented. It’s by no means obvious, but very counter-intuitive and bizarre. Similarly with “sexuality” as he argues at length elsewhere. You can’t be homophobic without having an idea of homosexuals – the ideas of sexuality and race are necessary to but not confined to the stigmatisation and harm of certain people. In order for someone to be “a white man” as someone can be today, there has to be an idea not simply of whiteness as a personal quality – like “blue eyed” or “Anglophone” – and not simply of difference to “a black man”, but the whiteness has to involve a special sort of attachment to a specific kind of whole or composite thing, “the white race”.
So Foucault expects his auditors for a moment to resist highlighting the element of “racism” that is the hierarchy or antagonism of multiple races, which is not the only feature or main feature of ‘racism’, the ideology of race.
I think you are looking at racism and identifying its prime or even sole characteristic as “hierarchy of types” and then in consequence looking for this form as the basis of analogy, another hierarchy of types, but it is not this feature of race ideology– hierarchy and antagonism – that Foucault is finding in the “biopolitical” policy he’s discussing, but another and in a sense “prior” feature of race ideology, which is this phantasy of “race” as a unit, an organism, a fictional whole that is more/different than the combination of its (individual human) parts. That is, I think you are looking for the “racism” to be in evidence (only and necessarily) on the receiving end of discrimination or aggression activated by identification of the object of this aggression as raced – that is, you are reading as if Foucault is suggesting criminals are understood to be “a race” the way Jews for some antisemites are “a race”, but that’s not the feature of racism he is “discovering” at work in criminalisation or norm policing in general. The people being ‘raced’ by criminalisation are everybody, not the criminals especially. Indeed in History of Sexuality it emerges that the people being meaningfully raced by criminalisation and norm policing are the ruling class males. It is their liberty, their once upon a time real sovereignty over themselves and the majority of workers and women, that is being assaulted (for Foucault) by the concept of “the race” - (and this is why Socialism is so good an example for Foucault. Because the ruling class males are going to be stripped of the final vestiges of the “freedom” they once enjoyed in ancient Athenian slave society. This is all heavily influenced by Nietzsche.)
So in this section Foucault is suggesting his readers/auditors consider for a moment in isolation the foundational premise of “race” itself (this idea in foucault strongly resembles nietzsche’s notion of christianity, slave morality) which is assumed in and undergirds any “more developed” fantasy of more than one race in conflict and hierarchised. The “ordinary racism” that is undertood to be aggression against people identified as personally possessing some or other race character is unintelligible in itself. You cannot actually identify people by race. At least not until you conceive of race as something both in people and to which people belong. This conception of a relation between individuals and a fictitious unit is “racism”, the ideology of race. The disdain or celebration of any particular unit is a consequence, for Foucault.
So all belief in or construction of “race” would be “racism” – that seems reasonable, like the belief in spirits is “spiritualism”, whether you are frightened of spirits or try to contact them at séances or are under the impression you are one yourself. (This would be stressing that race is phantastic.) Indeed only if you really believe in race, that humanity is really divided into races, could ‘racism’ reasonably be confined in sense to some kind of hostility to members of this or that (self evident) race. What would the word be for the belief that humanity is divided into races but each are equally worthy of affection and honour and respect? It’s still “racism” surely?
The object-people of “racist” state policies – policies designed purportedly to protect and govern the population as a “race” - don’t necessarily have to be designated racially other, indeed the object of the policies don’t have to be people, they can be rats or swamps or insalubrious urban housing. When the Fabians talked about “breeding an imperial race” out of the English working class, they implied the existence of inferior races in the colonies but the policies they advocated were directed at things like work safety and guaranteed employment and education, and ethnic minorities in the English working class – in the working population located in England – were not excluded from the race improvement plans. These policies are then “racist” as stemming from racial ideology, from the conception of the English working class as a race rather than as individuals.
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So fen drainage, urban development, or the health regulation of agricultural products are ‘racist’ state policy in this sense. It’s like a botanical metaphor. One weeds if one imagines a population to be a race. Race for Foucault is not principally about hierarchies of different races, but the notion of a race, of a group of people conceived as a race, itself. It’s in contrast to nietzschean aristo crypto individualism and also to social contract thinking – if you adhere to the social contract notion, clearly the state can’t weed the population. Each individual and his property deserves the protection of the state – has contracted for it. What he personally is like, his physical characteristics and biography, is in theory simply given – he has contracted with the state and it has obligations to him personally and individually. In Athenian slave society the state and the ruling class males are basically one – their personal power is state power, gratifying them and guaranteeing their “liberty” is the function of the political order which they themselves create and reproduce. They are not subordinated to the body politic, the population, the race. Other people are there as resources for their use personally and individually and as a group. But they are not in turn themselves resources for the use of any state hovering above them, any impersonal institutional guardian of some imaginary whole which includes their wives, children servants and slaves.
You can conceive of a population as a race in isolation. That is, it’s possible to think just one race at a time. It’s possible to conceive of racist state policies of a global state in which all of humanity is considered to be one race. In all racism there really is only one important race anyway – the dominant one, we. That those who are not we may be assigned their own races is not for Foucault very important, and their qualities constantly change to the needs of we. The racist state may attack people designated a stigmatised race, or it may attack sexual acts, or it may attack urban landscape, or it may attack the use of pesticides, all for the good of “the race” that is the population’s metaphysical wraith.
So, this is what he is advancing - considering the population not as a citizenry but as a race, the state weeds it, prunes it, nourishes it, breeds it, constructs its environment, cultivates its qualities, all in disregard of the welfare of the individuals as individuals affected, and – most meaningfully for Foucault – even in disregard of the will to power and desire of the elite males. Even they are subordinated to a phantasy of the collective organism’s good. (or so he argues). Thus Nazism is always the most glaring case, since it directly attacked a portion of the big bourgeoisie. And this is why of all the murderous policies of the Nazi state, the final solution to “the Jewish problem” is always presented as practically the only policy, or the only one making Nazism worth highlighting – Roma being for example ignored or just gestured to in passing – because this policy involved visible deliberate extermination of what is an unusual number of bourgeois property owners to be swept up in imperialist exterminations.
State policies can be racist- that is, based in the ideology of race – without stigmatising anyone in particular; the victims can be randomly chosen from the population that is the race itself. For example, in plenty of state policies where there is known there will be a certain death rate – on highways for example – whose victims are actually random. Not targeted by stigmatising ideologies, just random unlucky, but deliberately sacrificed all the same to the good of the race which requires whatever, a mode of transport, a forced vaccination programme, whatever state policies involve the taking of some percentage of the population’s life but not selected…some people will die from ingesting this product, but it is disseminated and even subsidised, for the benefit to the race. Some people will die in this war, but they are drafted anyhow, for the benefit of the race.
Comment by chabert — January 16, 2008 @ 12:50 pm