Thursday, May 18, 2006
(12:05 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
State Racism, cont.
For some time now, I've been pointing toward a return to the topic of my post on state racism that generated a number of comments here and posts in response elsewhere by Jodi at I Cite, Angela at s0metim3s, and Craig at Theoria. Lots of promises then (and on my part since) to do the topic more justice when time permitted, with Craig invoking "Kotsko’s ‘law of bloggers’ — they don’t follow through on promises!". I finally got a chance to seriously read through all the posts and comments this morning. Many of the issues were addressed well internally in the conversation. For now, I am going to have to lean on Craig and Angela's responses to some of Jodi's queries. Jodi seemed, on one hand, to have more to say regarding certain points, but was bogged down in a conference. On the other hand, she seemed to find some of the arguments that the state is inherently racist quite convincing but nevertheless needing a 'but still,' an 'okay, but I can't fully agree' ... at least not yet. Perhaps at some point we might flesh out what is fundamentally at stake for some of us in our positions on this matter?
For my part, one outstanding question in the comments here was raised by Jodi, pressed further by Adam in a slightly different way (reformulated a few times), and finally affirmed as critical and needing still to be addressed by Amish. That question pertains to whether the differences between Europe and the U.S. matter. At one point Adam said
For my part, one outstanding question in the comments here was raised by Jodi, pressed further by Adam in a slightly different way (reformulated a few times), and finally affirmed as critical and needing still to be addressed by Amish. That question pertains to whether the differences between Europe and the U.S. matter. At one point Adam said
I don't remember Foucault ever mentioning the United States in Society Must Be Defended ... . He seems to be talking primarily about France, not surprisingly. Racism is obviously a big factor in the United States, but it does not seem to function in the same way -- for what seem to me to be obvious historical reasons, first of which would be the fact that in the region of the US and Canada, the conquerers were able to virtually annihilate the conquered race.
There is a whole lot a stake for me in such a challenge. As I see it, North America (and especially the U.S.) differ from Europe at most in terms of degree. It wouldn't be far fetched to suggest that the America has become the behemoth that she is because she discovered the biopolitical mechanisms analyzed by Foucault sooner and has wielded them more persistently and deftly than her imperial rivals. The story of 'religious liberty' (Roger Williams) and its subsumption into the broader narrative is quite important. It's something that I've worked on with J. recently. 'Society Must Be Defended' (SMBD) addresses the American situation, though not so fully as that of France, precisely insofar as Lectures Three through Five deal with the shift in historiography that forms the backdrop to seventeenth century revolutionary England. As I've suggested, figures like Sir Edward Coke and John Lilburne that appear in SMBD were vitally important in the development of American legal and political philosophy.
Last week I railed against covenantal rhetoric from the Christian left. One can see where a lot of these issues come together for me in the space of a single, extraordinary paragraph from SMBD. I'll quote most of it here
With this new discourse of race struggle, ... [w]e are closer to the Bible than to Livy, in a Hebraic-biblical form ... . [F]rom the second half of the Middle Ages onward, the Bible was the great form for the articulation of religious, moral, and political protests agaisnt the power of kings and the despotism of the church. Like the reference to biblical texts itself, this form functioned, in most cases, as a protest, a critique, and an oppositional discourse. In the Middle Ages, Jerusalem was always a protest against all the Bablylons that had come back to life ... . The Bible was the weapon of poverty and insurrection; it was the word that made men rise up against the law and against glory, against the unjust law of kings and the beautiful glory of
the Church. To that extent, it is not surprising that we see, at the end of the middle ages, in the sixteenth century, in the period of the Reformation, and at the time of the English Revolution, the appearance of a form of history that is a direct challenge to the history of sovereignty and kings ... and that we see a new history that is articulated around the great biblical forms of prophecy and promise (SMBD 71).
(One can see here a major source of the problem Adam continually points to where the Religious Right continues to whine about its persecuted status even as it controls much of national political Power.) For Foucault this Hebraic (essentially a covenantal understanding of politics and peoplehood) form of history first functioned as revolutionary, but eventually found its way into the very fibres of state sovereignty, a state that Foucault will insist throughout can only function by way of a continual focus on race as determinative of national identy. What Foucault's understandable focus on the French fails to spell out is the way that these ideas were able to work even, or should we say especially, in supposedly multicultural or pluralistic societies such as the U.S. and Canada (Amish's comments at the I Cite post are helpful here). This post could quickly turn into an article length piece if I tried to address every point raised earlier or hoped to anticipate further objections. I'll summarize, then, what I'm after and defintely be available quite a bit the next few days to respond to commenters.
The universe of nationalism in which people find a primary source of their identity within the boundaries of a particular narrative, a particular land, flies in the face of the entire Pauline project of universalization nicely summarized in "neither Jew nor Greek." The challenge, of course, is to found a form of universalism that allows differences to abide without allowing them to be determinative. Paul universalized the Jewish narrative without universalizing Jewish law. Protestantism's return to Paul reiterated that movement in a way that unfortunately applied the rhetoric of a chosen, covenant people to a whole host of nations who could then join that rhetoric to nationalized forms of law. It is of course true that historically things worked differently in China, Bolivia, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, or Canada. While I cannot take the time to point to the incredible similarities in the founding national stories of a half dozen or so otherwise diverse modern countries, I can say that in each of the histories that I am more or less familiar with, the drawing of precise border lines seems to go hand in hand with internal racial conflict and the need to acquire ever more sophisticated physical and rhetorical weaponry to defend society from enemies without. And as Angela pointed out in her post, as much as we talk about the transnational dimensions of capital, the flow of such capital actually has historically and still does very much require the continual creation and maintenence of racialized national boundaries.
