On Racism and Biopolitics17
In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault traces the genealogy of racism back to the 16th and early 17th century, when race struggle, a new form of discourse, appears as a counterhistory which is “the complete antithesis of the history of sovereignty” (69). With its emergence, the understanding of history as a unified experience is replaced by the notion of heterogeneity, pointing to the fact that history is always a multi-faceted construct contingent upon the speaker.
As Foucault writes, “one man’s victory is another man’s defeat” (69), this counterhistory not only disrupts the sovereign law but also poses a threat to the legitimacy of authority, revealing the effect of power as benefiting, or shedding light on, a portion of the social body, while the rest is left in the shadow. It is in darkness that this counterhistory speaks, for it is “the discourse of those who have no glory” (70), or the appeal of those who are in the dark, deprived of the right to speak. For example, during the Puritan Revolts in New England and the French
17 As my oral examiners have pointed out, race and ethnicity are two concepts guided by different logics. My understanding of the terms in this thesis follows Chow’s interpretation in her work, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For Chow, race and ethnicity are often conflated in their use because the terms are “mutually implicated” (23). She draws on Etienne Balibar’s essay “Is There a Neo-Racism?” and perceives “race” as a concept that had been associated with absolute biological characteristics in the 19th century, but is reformulated, after the Second World War, into one that hierarchizes cultural differences to justify racism (13). According to Balibar, “biological or genetic naturalism is not the only means of naturalizing human behaviour and social affinities. . . . [C]ulture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a
determination that is immutable and intangible in origin” (22; emphasis in original). In this sense, the biological underpinnings of race partly overlap with the “fictive” idea of ethnicity which, for Chow, is derived from the social imaginary constituted by culture and representation (24). Race and ethnicity, then, can be understood as concepts entwined within biopolitical discourses that hold biological referents accountable for sociocultural differences. For example, in his manuscript on the intersex condition of Calliope, Dr. Luce writes: “[T]he subject has been raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition. . . . [T]he parents seem assimilationist and very ‘all-American’ in their outlook, but the presence of this deeper ethnic identity should not be overlooked” (436). While Chow finds the term “race” deeply embedded in a “residual biologism” and therefore centers her discussion on the “ethnic” to enable a sociocultural analysis (24), it is due to this undeniable connection with the (although pseudo) biological and the physical that racism is implicated in the biopolitical management.
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Revolution against King Louis XIV in the 17th and 18th centuries, a political-military discourse was utilized to challenge the sovereign power.
Since the 17th century, war is no longer perceived as the “uninterrupted frame of history”; instead, the social body is structured around the war of two races. Foucault declares,
“The war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war” (SMBD 59-60). The word “race” here is by no means used in the general sense pertaining to biological traits, but can be understood as one of the two conflicting components divided from a single social entity. A form of racism in the late 18th century that Foucault describes serves as an example of the significance of the word. To maintain and expand its hegemony, the bourgeoisie aimed for an “indefinite extension of strength, vigor, health, and life” and “cultivated” its own body through attention
“on body hygiene, the art of longevity, ways of having healthy children and of keeping them alive as long as possible, and methods for improving the human lineage” (HS 125). Such form of “dynamic racism” or “racism of expansion” illustrates how the word “race” is loosened from its contemporary biological definition to incorporate class and social connotations (125).
This Foucauldian interpretation of “race” also suggests two transcriptions that occurred in the discourse of war in the early 19th century: the first transcription is a biological one, which borrows its discourse from materialist anatomo-physiology and philology, and is articulated with nationalism and colonialism; the second one is social war, which attempts to rework its traces of racial conflicts into class struggle (SMBD 60). By the end of this century, biologico-social racism, or modern racism, was born as the result of these two transformations. Regarding the formulation of this new type of racism, Lemke explains:
This “racism” . . . draws on elements of the biological version in order to formulate an answer to the social revolutionary challenge. In place of the
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historical-political thematic of war, with its slaughters, victories, and defeats, enters the evolutionary-biological model of the struggle for life. (41)
The exclusive biological concern of racism in the 19th century is how the word “race” has come to take on its contemporary meaning: which is the classification of humankind based on its shared physical traits or genetic markers. The society is still polarized and at war, yet it is a war not between two different races, but of a single race which has split into a superrace and a subrace that are constantly at odds. While the discourse of race struggle is essentially a tactic deployed by the subrace in decentered camps, still it can infiltrate the social system, subject to constant re-creation in and by the social fabric, and recenter itself so it becomes “the discourse of a centered, centralized, and centralizing power” that portrays itself as the “one true race”
(SMBD 61). The biological-racist discourse, in this way, functions as the creator and keeper of norms, and is entitled to punish those who deviate from or threaten the cohesion of society through practices of exclusion and segregation to attain normalizing effects. In a modern society characterized by racism, Foucault reminds us,
[The motto] is no longer: “We have to defend ourselves against society,” but
“We have to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the other race, the subrace, the counterrace that we are, despite ourselves, bringing into existence.” (61-62)
When sovereign power merges with biopower and political-military discourse infiltrated by a racist-biological one, race struggle becomes literally the struggle for life.
In the lecture following the introduction to the discourse of race war, Foucault further explains his conception. He notes that the discourse is not one that belongs solely to the oppressed; rather, it is “a mobile discourse, a polyvalent discourse” that can be shared by different enemies and always occupies the oppositional space (SMBD 77). In addition, Foucault makes clear his use of the word “race,” emphasizing that it does not entail a fixed
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biological category. Rather, it indicates a “historico-political divide” between two coexistent groups that cannot be mixed due to dissymmetries and hierarchies created by power relations, and only with acts of violence, such as wars, invasions, and occupations can they be unified into a single polity (77). As mentioned earlier, modern racism is born at the juncture of the rise of two transcriptions—or two counterhistories—in the first half of the 19th century. Whereas one transcription attempts to reformulate race struggle into class struggle, the other responds by recoding the idea of race (historico-political) into races (biologico-medical), and from it modern racism comes to take a clear form (80).
Characteristic of this new variety of racism is not so much war fought between two peoples in the historical sense, but the postevolutionist struggle for existence that produces a binary division of race as well as a “biologically monist” society (80). When confronted with external or internal threats that are heterogeneous and accidental, such as foreigners and anti-norm deviants, the society takes to racism to purge itself of uncontrollable elements.
Consequently, for Foucault, the role of the State that was “unjust” in the counterhistory of races was inverted:
the State is no longer an instrument that one race uses against another: the State is, and must be, the protector of the integrity, the superiority, and the purity of the race. The idea of racial purity, with all its monistic, Statist, and biological implications: that is what replaces the idea of race struggle. (81)
In other words, the modern, biological racism occurs right at the moment when the idea of racial purity emerges. What has been the counter-discourse of races that struggle against traditional sovereignty ends up being reclaimed by the State; as a result, “the proto-revolutionary discourse is converted into the anti-proto-revolutionary discourse of State racism”
(Prozorov 101; emphasis in original). Race comes to be defined by its singular form, being the one true race that protects and promotes the State through medico-normalizing techniques so
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as to negate any possibility of revolution. As such, Lemke aptly concludes, “a discourse against power is transformed into a discourse of power” (44; emphasis added). The biopolitical principle of the modern State deploying this discourse of power, therefore, is to defend the social body against biological dangers.
In light of a racial purity to be achieved via conformity to medical and hygienic norms, racism as exercised in the biopolitical present constitutes the fundamental structures of governmental power, to the extent that “the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism” (SMBD 254). What Foucault has in mind here concerns the two functions of racism. The first is “to fragment, to create caesuras” within a biological continuum; in other words, to create fissures in a single polity with a view to generating oppositions and hierarchies that will expose what must be homogenized or purified. The second function of racism is to establish a dynamic, “positive” relation: that is, being able to kill others in the name of improving life (255). Unlike the traditional dead-end relationship between self and enemy, racism allows for an advanced, war-like relationship which establishes a biological-type connection between my life and the deaths I caused. The self and other involved here are less related to the individual than they are to the species as a whole. In Foucault’s words,
The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. (255)
In a normalizing society, elimination of the other not only efficiently fulfills the demands for security and wellbeing but is in itself an act of life enhancement; in other words, killing has become a biopolitical necessity made acceptable by race or racism. Functioning as the precondition for the legitimate deprivation of life, liberty, as well as property, this new pro-life
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racism that emerged in the 19th century is modeled on a war waged with the aim of improving and regenerating one’s race.
In Middlesex, this “death-function in the economy of biopower” ensured by modern racism is most evidently manifested in the Turkish ethnic cleansing of Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians (SMBD 258). Before Cal’s grandparents Lefty and Desdemona immigrated to Detroit, they were brother and sister living on Mount Olympus in Asia Minor. Although their parents were killed in the recent Greco-Turkish War in 1922, they as well as other villagers of Bithynios felt assured under the aegis of the Megale Idea, the pan-Hellenic “Big Idea” that would make them “free Greeks […] in a free Greek city” liberated from the rule of the Turks (21).18 However, the Greek Army collapsed in the face of a Turkish counterattack, setting fire to everything as they retreated to the sea, and soon Lefty and Desdemona were forced to escape from the fires and smokes in Bithynios, unaware that their destination, Smyrna, was also about to be set ablaze. Citizens and refugees believed that in Smyrna they would be safe from the Turks, for at that time the city was protected by the Allied fleets that supported the Greek military expansion (which led to the Greco-Turkish War) on commercial, and perhaps religious grounds (a majority of Turkish people were Muslims). As the Armenian Dr. Philobosian tries to convince himself, “the European powers would never let the Turks enter the city” and that
“[e]ven during the massacres of 1915 the Armenians of Smyrna had been safe” (45). Yet again all hopes were doomed to disappointment as the Allied forces received orders to remain neutral, and even after the Turkish troops entered the city, massacred the population, and then set the land on fire, the European ships refused to take in any refugee. In stark contrast to the optimism before the Great Fire of Smyrna, a passage in Middlesex depicts the brutality committed by the Turkish troops through the eyes of Dr. Philobosian:
18 In Women and Nationalism in the Making of Modern Greece, Demetra Tzanaki defines the term “Megale Idea” as “the Great Idea, that is, the liberation and unification of the Hellenic genos—the orthodox community under the Ottoman Empire—and the establishment of a great Greek state in the lands that had once formed part of the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople as its capital” (3).
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It didn’t occur to Dr. Philobosian that the twisted body he stepped over in the street belonged to his younger son. He noticed only that his front door was open.
In the foyer, he stopped to listen. There was only silence. Slowly, still holding his doctor’s bag, he climbed the stairs. All the lamps were on now. The living room was bright. Toukhie was sitting on the sofa, waiting for him. Her head had fallen backward as though in hilarity, the angle opening the wound so that a section of windpipe gleamed. Stepan sat slumped at the dining table, his right hand, which held the letter of protection, nailed down with a steak knife. Dr.
Philobosian took a step and slipped, then noticed a trail of blood leading down the hallway. He followed the trail into the master bedroom, where he found his two daughters. They were both naked, lying on their backs. Three of their four breasts had been cut off. Rose’s hand reached out toward her sister as though to adjust the silver ribbon across her forehead. (60-61)
Here Cal’s narrative seems to be suspended in a moment of emotional void. Without his usual witty humor and poetic sentiment, Cal chooses to record the desolate reality in silence, forcing his readers to enter the vacuum of spatiality and temporality left behind by the mass murder, and to pose as a witness to the crime just as Dr. Philobosian witnessed the extinction of his family.
The atrocity of war is this: killings and deaths are never singular events that take place only within the Philobosian household or in the fictional dimension of the novel. Instead, from Foucault’s indictment of modern politics concerning the intrinsic racism in all normalizing biopolitical states (Stoler 88), forms of war, understood in the perspective of the discourse of race war, represent a schism at the root of a society. This schism is always in the process of
“an incomplete cleansing of the social body,” and whose maintenance depends upon the biopolitical idea that “structures social fields of action, guides political practices, and is
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realized through state apparatuses” (Lemke 43-44). The Turkish ethnic cleansing19 of Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians was articulated in the language of biopolitics as well. According to Taner Akçam in The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, the Ottoman Empire, although once multi-ethnic and religious-tolerant, resorted to xenophobic policies after it devolved into nation-states. With the rise of nationalist consciousness, the nation-states strove for independence, and the first step was to demarcate a clear social and geographical border. By
“purging” themselves from not only internal deviation but also any foreign population, they could in turn build an ethnically and religiously coherent polity. Yet the mass violence brought about by this fantasy of a “pure” nation-state in the 19th century escalated in the early decades of the 20th century, during which human destructiveness occurred on an unimaginable scale.
Efforts to define, reconstruct, and protect the Ottoman borders precipitated “wars and revolutions, brutally suppressed rebellions, forced population exchanges, deportations and ethnic cleansing, massacres and genocide” (x). The succession of atrocities carried on until the Ottoman government signed the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, an agreement that led to the establishment of the new Republic of Turkey. Back in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire began to saw a surge in its Muslim population, mostly migrants and expellees, and by the time of the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913, the number of migrants peaked. This presented a challenge to the Ottoman authorities, as they had been reactive in dealing with immigrant problems. In response to the sudden increase of population, they devised a plan targeted at the
“ethnoreligious homogenization” of Anatolia as a way to “free [themselves] of non-Turkish elements” in the Aegean region (29). This policy of “population and resettlement,” which reshaped the region’s demographics to cater to its Muslim Turkish population, was consisted
19 Gordon Severance and Diana Severance in Against the Gates of Hell compare Turkey’s ethnic genocide to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. They attribute the Turkish government’s persistent denial of, and later impunity from, the genocidal crimes committed during 1915-1922 as the direct cause that encouraged Nazi Germany to carry out its own ethnic cleansing against the Jews. They hold Turkey partly responsible for the Holocaust (as well as future genocides) by listing several similarities between the two (385-88).
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of two main purposes: first, the “cleansing” of non-Muslim populations (i.e., Christians) of Anatolia, who posed to the empire not only a “mortal threat” but a physical risk like “cancer”
in the body of the state; second, the assimilation, or “Turkification,” of Anatolia’s non-Turkish Muslim populations (29). Similar to what Foucault argues, the ethnic genocide in Turkey, articulated by modern racism, was not a temporary construct subject to certain ideologies found only in exceptional cases, nor an ad hoc response to sudden change. It was operated through state apparatuses in a biopolitical language, citing words such as “purge,” “pure,” and “cancer”
to rationalize the inhuman crimes conducted for the wellness of its own population and, above all, the military and economic strength of the nation.
The Turkish biopolitical ambition at purifying the Anatolia produced countless refugees along the way, displacing and dispossessing “harmful” racial and ethnic groups as Turkish troops marched toward a “healthy” nation. In Agamben’s formulations, these refugees—including the Greeks and Armenians in Middlesex—are the modern victims of a political paradigm that originated with the formation of the ancient Greek polis. Refugees are
The Turkish biopolitical ambition at purifying the Anatolia produced countless refugees along the way, displacing and dispossessing “harmful” racial and ethnic groups as Turkish troops marched toward a “healthy” nation. In Agamben’s formulations, these refugees—including the Greeks and Armenians in Middlesex—are the modern victims of a political paradigm that originated with the formation of the ancient Greek polis. Refugees are