Nadine Ehlers is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University.

Racial Imperatives

Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles Against Subjection

By Nadine Ehlers

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2012 Nadine Ehlers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35656-7

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1 Racial Disciplinarity,
2 Racial Knowledges: Securing the Body in Law,
3 Passing through Racial Performatives,
4 Domesticating Liminality: Somatic Defiance in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander,
5 Passing Phantasms: Rhinelander and Ontological Insecurity,
6 Imagining Racial Agency,
7 Practicing Problematization: Resignifying Race,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Racial Disciplinarity

In the age of Reconstruction America, where slavery had been abolished and a new era of racial politics supposedly embarked upon, the presiding Judge in Scott v. Georgia (1869) emphatically declared that “the laws of civilization demand that the races be kept apart in this country.” He recited, here, the insistent historical desire within dominant American racial ideology to maintain unequivocal distinctions between disparate races. And he called upon the very ‘laws of civilization’ as the origin of and justification for these apparently immutable divisions drawn along the lines of race. Echoing this call, the opinion delivered in Kinney v. Commonwealth (Va. 1878) stated:

The purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our cherished southern civilization, under which two distinct races are to work out and accomplish the destiny to which the Almighty has assigned them on this continent—all require that they should be kept distinct and separate, and that connection and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.

Divisions deemed to be ordained by God were to be unhampered by human intervention, and the very well-being and future of the cultural dominion meant adhering to this supposed natural and omnipotent law. For, “[a] sound philanthropy, looking at the public peace and the happiness of both [the white and black] races would regard any effort to intermerge the individuality of the races as a calamity full of the saddest and gloomiest portent to the generations that are to come after us.” This individuality (marking that which is supposedly separate) speaks to the fundamental principle upon which the notion of race rests: more than simply describing physiological differences, race has been used to denote absolute distinctions between ‘types’ of humans who have been figured as intellectually, psychically, emotionally, and culturally incommensurate. Physiological markers were seen to be simply the external manifestation of these internal racial differences, differences that rendered racial groups as discreet in that they were seen to possess distinguishable and independent traits and characteristics. Though differences existed between racial types, individuals within these types were seen as generally homogenous in their shared attributes. It was these attributes that were used, retroactively, to continually reenforce racial lines, positioning race as that which signifies a resolute and unalterable boundary that cannot be traversed.

Despite producing powerful and distinct lived experiences, race is a social fiction. As Haney López (1996, 14) notes, race “can be understood as the historically contingent social systems of meaning that attach to elements of morphology and ancestry.” This historical contingency can be seen in the various and often contradictory distinctions that have been made between ‘types’ of humans in different temporal and spatial contexts. Between the earliest notions of modern racial ideology, where human types were hierarchically organized (between the Creator and all other living beings) within the ‘Great Chain of Being,’ to contemporary formulations of race, what constitutes different racial groups and what race means has undergone radical revision. Even though racial meaning has been disparate in content as well as context, the very force of race as a signifier has derived from this disparity, leading David Goldberg (1992, 558) to claim that the power of race “has consisted in its adaptive capacity to define population groups, and by extension social agents, as self and other at various historical moments.” The possession of certain traits or characteristics have, accordingly, been (temporarily) stabilized as denoting one’s belonging or non-belonging to a particular racial group. Yet “[t]o be capable of this, race itself must be almost but not quite empty in its own connotative capacity, able to signify not so much in itself as by adopting and giving naturalized form to prevailing conceptions of social group formation at different times” (Goldberg 1992, 558). While race classifies individuals in a system of inclusion and exclusion, it must be understood as more than simply categorization. Race is a practice: it is a system of meanings deployed in the racing of individuals and, as a concept, race must be maintained in order to survive. The categories accepted as natural and inevitable must be consistently reiterated in discourse in order for these categories to be sustained. They must constantly be called upon, called forth if you will, for without possessing ontological grounding, the ‘truths’ of racial categorization and demarcations exist only in their ‘retelling.’

It is through this retelling that race is understood and through which we come to see the demarcations of race as natural. And it is only through this reiterative practice that the “social systems of meaning,” to which Haney López (1996, 14) refers, can be connected to individuals based on physiology. It is these social systems of meaning that render race comprehensible. The question of what ‘marks’ or is the ’cause’ of racial difference (whether it be seen, for instance, as that which is imposed by biology or divine decree) has been the object of multiple and conflicting scientific, social, religious, and legal inquiries. Yet it is important to stress that all such efforts to understand race, or make racial distinctions, have been generated through sets of abstract injunctions that dictate (a) the way in which race has been (and can be) thought about and, in turn, (b) the manner(s) through which ‘difference’ is recognized. Individuals only connect themselves with those who supposedly share their racial identity and distinguish themselves from others who are supposedly distinct, based on these rules of racial recognition. For these injunctions structure how we see race: we can only see race through these injunctions. In being unable to even comprehend race outside of these injunctions, racial distinctions become figured as prior to culture, as residing in the domain and by the decree of nature.

It is discursive power that ‘makes’ race perceptible, because it teaches or instructs people to read by it. And the racial meanings that are generated within this form of power condition the organization of an individual’s relations, their world, their comprehension of others and of themselves. As Foucault has argued, this form of power works through hegemonic disciplinary mechanisms such that it “applies itself to immediate everyday life[,] categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth in him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects” (2000c, 331). In this chapter, I consider how the practice and notion of race can be figured as a type of discipline that functions to achieve the subjection of the individual—to make the individual a racial subject. The questions that interest me here include: what initiates and propels the marking of the individual; what attaches the individual to that which is apparently their ‘identity’; in what manner and through what means is a ‘law of truth’ forcefully bestowed on an individual so that they come to recognize themselves as raced, a recognition that parallels the way they are perceived by others; and how are the injunctions that structure racial meaning and identity generated?

To begin thinking through these questions, I look to Foucault and, more briefly, Butler because, while neither of these theorists has given extended attention to race, each provides accounts of subject constitution that are compelling when deployed in the service of such an inquiry. Butler has been principally concerned with interrogating how sex and gender function as normative ideals in the production of subjectivity. Taking her work as a point of departure, I enquire how race and the raced subject might be “marked and formed by discursive practices” in a manner similar to that of the ‘sexed’ subject (Butler 1993, 1). And Foucault only specifically considered race as a topic of sustained analysis in the lecture course published as Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (2003b), but focused on the regulatory functions of modern racism, a technology of power that, as Foucault explains, is employed by the state in order to ‘manage’ and ‘protect’ the population. Here, however, I look to his work in order to reflect on how the individual is inaugurated as a racial subject through the workings of discursive discipline. I argue that the specter of race is itself a disciplinary regime that discursively generates, forms, and constructs the racial subject.

THE COERCIVE DEMANDS OF RACE

In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Judith Butler begins her introduction with the following claim:

The category of “sex” is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a “regulatory ideal.” In this sense, then, “sex” not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce … the bodies it controls. Thus, “sex” is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. (1993, 1)

Butler’s claim is that the sexed categories of male and female, and the correlative gender assignments of masculinity and femininity, are normative and idealized discursive models that function to produce, or bring into being, the very sexed subjects that these categories supposedly only demarcate. Through regulating or disciplining the body, discursive power manifests sexed bodies. While Butler’s investigation specifically critiques the constitution of the subject in terms of sex and gender, I want to shift this analysis to consider how her ideas might be pertinent in mapping the formation of racial subjectivities. It is important to note at this point, however, that neither of these facets of subjecthood can stand alone or be considered in isolation.7 For the purposes of analysis, though, I want to consider race temporarily as if it can be divorced from other discursive categories of identity.

If Butler’s claim is refigured in terms of race, then it is possible to begin with the notion that race is normative. The racial categories of black and white can be seen, consequently, as normalizing regulatory ideals that generate and form thevery bodies that race governs. In such an understanding, race functions as a component in the broader workings of discipline as a practice that produces the very bodies and subjects that it controls. The notion of race (the demarcation along lines of ‘difference’) is disciplinary precisely due to the various methods of control that are exerted over the body; methods are instituted in the name of race that, in turn, racialize the body and condition racialized subjectivity. One of the primary and foundational regulatory devices in the disciplinary regime of race is, fundamentally, the process of classification or codification, that is, the division of different ‘types’ of racial bodies. Codifying, by way of division between ‘types,’ acts as a gate-keeping mechanism whereby bodies are separated—rendered as distinct in their difference.

Race, like sex, is regulated by “the discourses of truth that have taken charge of it” (Foucault 1998, 97)—discourses that work, moreover, to set the limits of how race is conceived. Racial discourse can be understood in Foucauldian terms as the group of statements that govern and condition racial ‘truths,’ practices, value systems, beliefs, and assumptions. These discourses mark the possible limits or enforce a conceptual grammar on what kinds of knowledge can be generated in terms of race and what can, in turn, be ‘known’ about race. In order to achieve this form of containment, these racial discourses must have “a repeatable materiality” (Foucault 2002, 122); they must retell, indeed reinscribe similar statements about race.

When it comes to thinking about racial discourse, though, it is important to remember Foucault’s “cautionary prescriptions” (1998, 98) or the rules that mark the production of any form of discourse, for these rules structure the matrices in which racial subjects emerge. When applied to notions of race, they can be thought about in the following ways. First, the power that governs the formation of racial subjects and the knowledge that is generated in relation to racial subjects cannot be extricated. Race only came to be considered as that which was worthy of interrogation (whereby various medical, legal, and social ‘truths’ have been formulated in order to ‘understand’ the racial subject) because relations of power had already marked it as a possible target or object. Yet relations of power were only able to mark race as a target because knowledge had been “capable of investing it” (Foucault 1998, 98). Knowledge and power, and the manner in which they regulate race, are indissoluble. Second, the distribution of power that governs racial subjects is always modified or shifting so that various forces control the racial subject; these forces are never fixed (Foucault 1998, 99). Third, when considering the production of discourse in relation to race, it is important to analyze how microscopic (or localized) power and macroscopic power, or what Foucault (1998, 99) refers to as “over-all strategy,” mutually condition each other in order to engender the regulatory formation of racial subjects. Foucault stresses here, though, that these two forms of power do not operate on different levels. Localized power, rather, acts as “the anchor point” (Foucault 1998, 99) for broader systems of power. Finally, discourse joins (multiple sites and forces of) power and (multiple and contesting forms of) knowledge; power and knowledge meet here. As a consequence, discourse must be understood as fractured, multiple, and contradictory. In Foucault’s (1998, 100) analysis, “discourse [is] … a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither stable or uniform.” Following from this, then, we cannot claim that there is an accepted discourse of race and, in opposition, unaccepted discourses. Instead, multiple discursive ‘truths’ exist in circulation and come into operation at different moments and in different sites. In order to claim, then, that the subject is formed in discourse is to acknowledge that this formation is marked by the inextricable workings of power and knowledge; that power, in this operation, is always mutating or shifting; that power works at both local and broader levels in a system of double conditioning; and that contradictory discourses exist simultaneously.

Yet certain discourses have maintained critical force within the Western racial economy and have generated the dominant conceptualizations of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ that are their legacy. This has been achieved because these ‘discursive truths’ have been grounded (or located) as material practices within specific institutional sites of power. And it is within these sites of power that racial discourse is rendered a “repeatable materiality.” Here, racial ‘knowledge,’ or what are considered to be racial ‘truths’ are inscribed over and over again; they are reproduced and maintained through repeated reference. It is these discourses that configure bodies and engender a racializing of the subject, a ‘reality’ fabricated in what Foucault (1991, 194) refers to as a “specific technology of power … called discipline.”

(Continues…)Excerpted from Racial Imperatives by Nadine Ehlers. Copyright © 2012 Nadine Ehlers. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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