Foucault and Ontopolitics: Another Framework to Think about Race, Law, and Power!

Falguni A. Sheth Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory Hampshire College Amherst, MA fsheth@hampshire.edu

Prepared for the University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop April 11, 2011

DRAFT. Please do not circulate or quote without authors permission. Thanks to Ellen Feder, Darrell Moore, and the participants of the 2007 Foucault Circle Meetings for their feedback on various versions of this paper. Special thanks to Mickaella Perina, Robert Prasch, and Sayres Rudy for their multiple patient and detailed interlocutions. All errors confusions, and disorganization remain mine.
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I.

In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault makes several unique claims: First, he states

that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States.1 For Foucault, racism is the tendency or the drive to fragment, divide, or create breaks in the biological continuum of the human race.2 The racism of the state lies in the ability to produce races of subjects by dividing that continuum, using any number and quality of characteristics, in order to create divisions between the living and the dying. Foucault frames this racism through the framework of biopolitics, which involves managing men-as-species through the control and regulation of the health and life of the population. Foucault makes another unique claim, intimately linked to the prior: in contemporary society, the exercise of power must be seen outside the exercise of sovereignty. As such, we should shift the focus of our analysis from juridical sovereignty to power in its regional forms and institutions, as it is exercised through networks, apparatuses, discourses, machineries, or in relations or operators of domination.3 He suggests that we understand both disciplinary poweras an explicitly non-sovereign powerand regulatory power as the modes by which race is inscribed in modern society. Finally, he argues that we should understand the central function of the state as maintaining a social order by managing and regulating its populations. His argument applies to modern societies, and he distinguishes this, the art of government, from the
1 2

Foucault, SMBD, 254. Ibid., 255. 3 Foucault, SMBD, 45.

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self-referring circularity of sovereignty, even as both governmentality and sovereignty have similar ends.4 The end of sovereignty is to preserve and protect itself by reasserting its authority over life and death; whereas the end of government is its populationbut not just to govern, but to improve [its] conditionits wealthitsand its health.5 In the 1975-6 (SMBD) and 1977-8 (STP) Lectures, he suggests that sovereignty has not disappeared, but insists that our task should be to displace its monarchical visage in order to illuminate the subtle yet forceful expressions of power that move through more complicated networks. Yet the relationship between sovereignty and power is ambiguous or seems to have changed across several of his writings.6 This ambiguity, along with what appears to be a strong presence (or resurgence) of sovereign authority in United States (especially post 9-11-01) and global politics in inscribing new forms of racial divisions, has lead to the question of how to situate Foucaults illuminating analysis of power and racism against that backdrop. As such, in the rest of this paper, I want to make the following related claims: First, Foucaults interest in displacing the emphasis we place upon sovereign authority in favor of analyzing the capillaries of powerespecially in relation to racial divisions and political management of subject-populationsunderestimates the important role that sovereignty plays in modern analyses of power. While central sovereign authority has

4 5

Foucault, STP, 98. Ibid., 105. 6 As appears when comparing the SMBD and STP lectures to the earlier 1973-4 (PP) Lectures. I will consider this shift in Section IV.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

been displaced by Foucaults analysis of power, disciplinary and regulatory power require being launched or instantiated by some sources of authority more than others. Second, biopolitics, while an urgent lens by which to assess the range of forms that racial divisions and political management take, eclipses how race works, especially in contemporary society. Biopolitics7 still needs to be complemented by other conceptual frameworks in order to address newer and ever-changing modes of racism that are not inscribable through the biological alone. Biopower is a mode that addresses the forms that racial divisions can take when the primary mode of racial division is biological, scientific, or health-related, as we see in his analyses of madness, incarceration, psychiatric power. However, when considering scenarios such as the war on terror, which has played out especially vividly against Muslims in the United States and elsewhere, we need to consider new inscriptions of racism that appear to emerge from sources other than biopower. As such, we should refocus and expand our analyses to include the role that (sovereign) power plays in collaboration with regulatory power, in producing ontological divides and resorting to a moral plane to legitimate those divides.8 This is another inscription of race and racism, which I will call, ontopower, and the framework in which it is locatedonto-politics. Onto-politics can consistently operate alongside biopolitics; however, its scope of (political) management refers to nonbiological, indeed moral, social, ontological categories that are recalled by Foucault in the

I use biopolitics and biopower interchangeably, as Foucault appears to do. Cf. What does this new technology of power, this biopolitics, this biopower that is beginning to establish itself, involve? Foucault, SMBD, 243. 8 Rather than to medicine/science/biologism.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

Abnormal, among other writings. Moreover, onto-poweras a mode of inscribing racism, parallels a Foucauldian dialectic between sovereignty, (disciplinary/regulatory) power, and population. The framework of ontopoliticslike biopolitics--requires a simultaneous

analysis of discourse, power, as well as juridical sovereignty (through the forms of criminal, migration, anti-terrorist laws, sequestering practices, detention centers, public safety hearings, anti-mosque/Islam movements, among other practices)in order to trace ontopolitical racism. One final note about this project: I am interested in utilizing Foucaults insights in order to understand a form of racism in the current moment that seems inadequately explained by his account of biopower, namely the current war on Muslims, which has been particularly explicit in the last decade. As such, my purpose is neither a history of philosophy nor a polemic. Rather, I want to augment his account with conceptual tools that may better help to analyze contemporary forms of racism within a juridico-political framework.

II.

Foucaults argument about centralized sovereignty is applicable to early modern

societiesnamely to those where sovereign right is understood as the authority of the king in relation to his subjects. In his February 1, 1978 lecture,9 he offers a distinction between the art of government and the reason of state, in order to illustrate an important transition between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. He suggests that the function of government is to manage things in order to preserve a certain order in society. The

Otherwise known as the Governmentality lecture.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

function of sovereignty, on the other hand, is itselfto maintain itself, to keep itself in power, and to ensure that the sovereign can keep its holdings and subjects.10 Because the notion of sovereigntyas the internal rationality of the stateremained the primary paradigm throughout the seventeenth century, it served as the primary obstacle to the development of the art of government.11 But as the framework of an economy became the central foundation for the science of government,12 the art of government as that of management replaced the juridical model of sovereignty beginning in the eighteenth century. This is not to say the force of sovereignty disappears, as Foucault points out, but rather it remains as acute as ever.13 Foucault locates sovereignty in a triadic form of modern society, in a relationship with discipline and government, all of which are concerned with the management of populations.14 The aim of sovereignty is refocused on the choices of government.15 This position appears to be consistent with Foucaults discussions of power in a number of other texts: In the SMBD Lectures, he suggests that the old sovereign right to take life or let live was complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it, namely the political right to make live and to

10

Foucault says of sovereign power, whereas the end of sovereignty is internal to itself and gets its instruments from itself in the form of law, the end of government is internal to the things it directs (diriger); it is to be sought in the perfection, maximization, or intensification of the processes it directs, and the instruments of government will becomes diverse tactics rather than laws. Consequently, law recedes; or rather, law is certainly not the major instrument in the perspective of what government should bethe ends of government cannot be effectively achieved by means of the law. Foucault, STP, 99. 11 Foucault, Governmentality, 213. Foucault, STP, 101. 12 Foucault, Governmentality, 215. Foucault, STP, 104. 13 Ibid., 107. 14 Ibid., 107-8. 15 Ibid., 108.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

let die.16 This right appears to have a certain sovereign force even if it is not manifested monarchically. The characteristic that changes between the old and the new right is the instantiation and vehicle of that authority.17 Foucault refers to this right as a new

technology of power,18 which is regulatory and applies to a multiplicity of mena global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness.19 It is a power that is massifying, namely biopower or biopolitics. Biopower is non-disciplinary, regulatory, and its domain pertains to processes pertaining to the securing and management of life: birth, death,the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population.20 It also pertains to hygiene, medical care, infirmities, geographical, climatic, or hydrographic environments, i.e. pertaining to epidemics that affect populations.21 Moreover, biopower is the ground of modern racism: It is indeed the emergence of this biopower that inscribes it in the mechanisms of the State.22 Biopower does so by transcribing the break between life and death through the field of the biological. And it does through the power of normalization, through regulation, and ultimately through a power of sovereignty.23 By contrast, disciplinary power is a non-sovereign power: it is

16 17

Foucault, SMBD, 241. Whereas in the Hobbesian model of the state, the Leviathan decided from whom it would take life and let die, the contemporary state uses a power of regularization or normalization to decide whom it will make live and let live. Ibid., 247. 18 Ibid., 242. 19 Ibid., 242-3. 20 Ibid., 243. 21 Ibid., 244-5. 22 Ibid., 254. 23 Ibid., 256.

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foreign to sovereignty, and it cannot be justified in terms of sovereignty.24 Still biopower (regulatory power) and disciplinary power work together, albeit at different levels.25 Now: whether we read biopower as a form of sovereignty and and disciplinary power as non-sovereign, or whether we read biopower as regulatory and disciplinary power as working upon the body, it difficult to articulate what the relation is between a) power and sovereignty or b) regulatory and disciplinary power or c) biopower and sovereignty (in its old form). Is power permeated with the force of sovereignty, albeit in a more diffuse form? Is power, as he discusses it generally in the beginning of SMBD, about the circulation of non-sovereign power? From where does power receive its force? Foucault views disciplinary power as non-sovereign,26 but a similar question arises: where does disciplinary power receive its force? These questions appear crucial to the scope of inscriptions of racism in the contemporary state. As such, I want to turn briefly to some of Foucaults earlier thoughts on sovereignty in order to understand the relation between sovereignty and power. In Foucaults PP Lectures, he refers to sovereignty in its centralized form., He makes an analogy between sovereign power and the complete subordination of the king, as told through the story of the treatment of the madness of King George III of England.27 The king is reduced to impotence, and is treated through the disciplinary power of his royal pages, who have been given the authority to

24 25

Ibid., 36. Ibid., 250. 26 Ibid., 36. 27 Foucault, PP. The story is found in Pinels Traite medico-philosophique of 1800.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth look after his needs and providing him with all the services his condition requires, but also with convincing him that he is entirely subordinate to them and must now obey them. They keep watch over him in calm silence, but take every opportunity to make him aware 28 of how much stronger than him they are.

Foucault draws heavily on this example in order to illustrate the mode by which psychiatric power resorts to regulatory and disciplinary dispositifs to treat insanity. However, it is not coincidental that Foucault engages extensively with the case of King Georges treatment. For Foucault, this example symbolizes the mode by which sovereignty is figuratively beheaded, only to be reborn as an
anonymous, nameless and faceless power that is distributed between different persons. Above all, it is a power that is expressed through an implacable regulation that is not even formulated, since, basically, nothing is said, and the text [by Pinel] actually says that all the agents of this power remain silent. The silence of regulation takes over, as it were, the empty place left by the kings dethronement.29

Ironically, Foucault analyzes this scene as the transformation of sovereignty into the regulation of the beheaded king through disciplinary power. One wonders whether sovereignty has been truly transformed or whether it has disappeared completely in the subtle emergence of regulation as well as disciplinary power. Foucault develops this analogy, focusing on the new power as a disciplinary power that is discreet, distributed, invisible except for those upon whom the power is imposed. In the analogy, he brings attention back to the doctors who organize the treatment, and the pages who are the conveyors of the treatment. As early as 1973, it is not clear that Foucault had sufficiently distinguished in his own thoughts the difference between disciplinary and regulatory power. However, it
28 29

Ibid., 21. Ibid.

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seems that the metaphor of the psychiatric beheading of King George III heralds the beginning of his belief that political power in the contemporary world has been transformed from a central sovereign authority to a diffuse30 power that is exercised through a range of institutions, forces, and individuals. He spends some time

circumscribing the initial parameters of sovereign power before moving on to characterize the nature of disciplinary power. His notion of sovereign power, as found in the PP Lectures, bears three distinct features: There is 1) a relation of levy or deduction on one side, and expenditure on the other; 2) a founding precedence, on the order of a divine right, or conquest, a victory, an act of submission, an oath of loyalty, etc.; and 3) the convoluted nature of sovereign relationships, which are not isotopic but intertwined and tangled up in such a way that we cannot establish a system of planned hierarchy between them.31 The first feature of sovereign powera system of levy and expenditureappears to evoke the notion that the mark of sovereign power is that it can demand, impose, or otherwise extract a certain obligation or price from the subject over whom it reigns. The second feature is fairly selfexplanatory: it suggests an act of power that must be recognized and continually observed by both the king and the subject. The third feature, perhaps the most enigmatic, appears to pave the way to discussing the transformation of a kind of central power to the diverse, diffuse nature of disciplinary power. Foucault says of this feature, [I]n a relationship of sovereignty, what I call the subject-function moves around and circulates above and

30 31

And discursive as well. See Foucault, Hist. of Sex., pt. 2, ch. 1 Incitement to Discourse. Foucault, PP, 43.

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below somatic singularities, and conversely bodies circulate, move around, rest on something here, and take flight. In these relationships there is therefore a never ending game of movements and disputes in whichindividuals are moved around in relation to each other.32 In so describing sovereign power in this way, he seems to point to the configuration of power such that power is exercised, reflected, deflected, refracted through the individual and his body. This is a hallmark of his notion of disciplinary power as it appears in Discipline and Punish, where he develops Jeremy Benthams notion of the Panopticon. Foucault augments his notion of disciplinary power several years later with the notion of regulatory power and bio-politics, found most famously in the SMBD lectures. Having argued against the relevance of sovereign power several years earlier and again in his Governmentality essay, in this set of lectures, Foucault summarily reviews the displacementindeed the complete disappearance of the great juridical edifice33 of centralized sovereign power through the expenditure of power in terms of goods and wealth.34 But the central crux of the marginalization of sovereign power in the SMBD lectures is its intricate link to the instantiation of racial divisions, and Foucaults genealogical tracing of racial divisions from the old, Hobbesian form of sovereign authority (to take life or let live) to the new, diffused biopolitical form of regulatory power (to make live and let die).35

32 33

Ibid., 44. of the theory of sovereignty. Foucault, SMBD, 36. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 241.

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III.

Biopolitics is utilized by the contemporary state in order to continue a centuries-old

race war that was conducted through sovereignty. Foucault traces this war to the seventeenth century, when it was manifested as a division between two races, one of which would dominate another.36 This war was, on the one hand, transcribed biologically; thus, these differences were read as ethnic, linguistic, physical, vigor, or barbarism, etc. On the other hand, differences were also transcribed through class, which conflicts with the biological transcription. His attempt to reconcile this conflicting reading leads him to suggest that the race struggle is not a clash but rather a hierarchical division between races (a superrace and subrace),37 as an expression of the discourse of centralized, and centralizing power.38 Foucault suggests that the race war has since shifted to one that is biologically monist, but which nevertheless is threatened byheterogeneous elements which are not essential, which do not divide the social bodyinto two parts, and which are in a sense accidental. Furthermore, the modern state no longer is an instrument used by one race to dominate another. Instead, the State 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.39

36 37 38 39

Ibid., 59-60. Ibid., 61.

Ibid.
Ibid., 81.

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However, his position in the later SMBD lectures suggests that there is still a binary divide in contemporary society, which is maintained through biopolitics.40 The racism of the modern state is inscribed through the agenda of distinguishing and compelling one population to live from another populations mandate to death.41 Biopolitics, that power to make decisions concerning life and death through certain biological priorities, is a technology of regulation. This technology is the unique and modern expression of the intrinsic racism that lies at the heart of contemporary society. It is implemented to

manage, control and regulate its population through these distinctions, and this function is normalized as an intrinsic practice of governmentalityif we take seriously Foucaults description of governmentality is the management of population in depth, in all its fine points and details.42 This articulation of governmentality leads Foucault to establish that sovereignty does not disappear, but rather co-exists alongside disciplinary power and governmental management. In establishing this triad, he appears to answer the question about the relationship between sovereignty and power, i.e. the force behind power and governmentality is still the leverage of life and death (but in an obverse relation to sovereignty).43 In other words, for Foucault, as it was for Hobbes, it is life that is held as

40

Since these are lectures being delivered over the course of the year, it would make sense that they are much more susceptible to inconsistencies than carefully edited monographs. 41 Foucault, SMBD, 254, 256. By death, Foucault includes "indirect murder" as well, including "political death, expulsion, rejection," etc. (p. 256). 42 Foucault, STP, 107. 43 Thus, in the old juridical model of sovereignty, the state has the power to take life and let live; in the new governmental model, the state has the power to make live and let die.Foucault, SMBD, 247.

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leverage against populations in order to secure the cohesion of a polity.44 Thus race wars still underlie the peace and order of a society, dividing a single population into two through the management of life.45

IV.

Foucaults discussion about sovereignty, race, and bio-politics are integral to our It is true, as

understanding of how the contemporary state manages its populations.

Foucault argues, that racial management has been decentralized and naturalized under the rubric of science and scientific understanding of race and biology. He opens up a new prism by which to analyze the micro-sites of power and the biological/scientific faade of modern race politics. And yet, his analysis is confusing on a number of counts. First, Foucaults notion of bio-politics, because it is decentralized and disseminated through various nodes in contemporary society, cannot account for two distinct relationships: One, between sovereignty and bipower, and two (maybe this is the same question), between those who are the personification of the state and those populations who are subject to its authority and caprices. Foucaults analysis suggests that the question of who has power over another is not the right question to ask, because the exercise of power operates beneath the level of sovereign power, and because disciplinary and regulatory power, as these operate via biopower, operate beyond sovereign right, that is to say, not at the juridical or constitutional-democratic level.
This excess of biopower appears when it becomes technologically and politically possible for man not only to manage life but make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the

44

To be more precise, for Hobbes Leviathan, it was the fear of death, which was used to keep men in check. 45 Foucault, SMBD, 49-50.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth monster, and ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive. This formidable extension of biopower, unlike what I was just saying about 46 atomic power, will put it beyond all human sovereignty.

14

As he warns at the beginning of Society Must Be Defended, he approaches power with several precautions: First, explore how power is embedded in local, regional, and material institutions. Second, consider power not at the level of intentions, but at the point where intentions meet live practices. Third, think of power as something that circulates, not hegemonizes or dominates.47 The upshot of these precautions is that he considers how power is exercised through bodies, individuals, masses, rather than how power is something one has over another at the level of practices, not at the level of intentions. Still, not all elements of the population are subject to power in the same way and not all subjects are equally vulnerable to the dictates of the state.48 Ultimately, someone (or some few) can still direct the trajectory of powerdisciplinary and regulatory. Foucaults discussion of disciplinary mechanisms and prisons, which insists on the reflexivity of power, does not attend to the decision to institute this form of surveillance as made by a prison warden or legislators or other representatives of State power.49 For example, in his November 28, 1973, Foucault discusses the Panopticon, and points to the immateriality of power, in which

46 47

Ibid., 254. Ibid., 28-30. There is also a fourth precaution: begin with the mechanisms of power and see how they are invested, colonized, used, inflected, transformed, displaced, extended 48 See Smith, The Sovereign State V. Foucault: Law and Disciplinary Power. Smith cites Morrison (1997), Davies (1996), and Mansell et al. on this dynamic in jurisprudence and law. 49 Foucault, D&P.Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth [power] has no need of all that symbolic and real armature of sovereign power; it does not need to hold the scepter in its hand or wield the sword to punish; it does not need to 50 intervene like a bolt of lightning in the manner of a sovereign

15

At the same time, it is interesting to note that in Discipline & Punish, the photographs of the medal commemorating Louis XVIs first revue in 1688, the lecture on the evils of alcoholism at Fresnes prison and of bedtime at the Mettray reformatory each show at least one individual whose subject position is distinct from the others in the room.
51

It is

unclear whether the isolated figure in Mettray is another pupil or a chief; however, in the description of Mettray, Foucault points out that
The chiefs and their deputies at Mettray had to be not exactly judges, or teachers, or foremen, or noncommissioned officers, or parents, but something of all these things in a quiet specific mode of intervention. They were in a sense technicians of behaviour: engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality. Their task was to produce bodies that were both docile and capable; they supervised the nine or ten working hours of every daythey directed the orderly movements of groups of inmates, physical exercises, military exercises, rising in the morning, going to bed at night, walks to the accompaniment of bugle and whistle.52

Foucault notes that Mettray cannon be identified absolutely with supervision or administration; however, he takes care to point out the heads, or deputy-heads who lived near the inmates, and that they practically never left their side, observing them day and night; they constituted among them a network of permanent observation.53 It may be objected that supervision is distinct from sovereign authority, namely the decision-maker; yet, it is unclear in the above examples, whether these are actually and always distinct.

50 51

Foucault, PP, 77. Foucault, D&P, 1. 52 Ibid., 294. 53 Ibid., 295.

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Elsewhere, Foucault seems to be distracted or oblivious to the question of who makes the decision that will be carried out. Using the passive tense, Foucault says, Even if a collective order is given through a megaphone, addressed to everyone at the same time and obeyed by everyone at the same time54 Yet, despite his acknowledgment of the necessity of supervision, he does not ask the question of who will direct individuals to carry out certain orders. Power is imposed upon, received, exercised by individuals, but it is often necessary for some authority to set it in motion, or to direct it. Only if the source of sovereign power is recognized (even if tacitly) does the rest of his construction of the beheading of sovereign power make sense, namely that
[the body of the king] must not die along with the kings somatic singularity. The monarchy must remain when the monarch no longer exists; the kings body, which holds together all these relationships of sovereignty, must not disappear with the death of this individual X or Y. [It]must have a kind of permanence; more than just his somatic singularity, it must be the solidity of his realm, of his crown.55

Sovereign power, then, must remain intact in some way, even if only in the form of symbolic recognition. But here I want to argue that the symbolic recognition of sovereign power is substantiated through its actual instantiation. For example, as we see, the

disparity between decision-makers and supervisors, and subjects, in any number of examplesprisons, schools, Guantanamo Bay and Immigration (ICE) detention facilities suggests that sovereign power does not disappear altogether in contemporary polities, even when engaging with the mechanisms and networks of regulatory and disciplinary

54 55

Foucault, PP, 75. Ibid., 45.

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power.56 Foucault momentarily acknowledges, then dismisses, this point: The director has no body[t]here is a de-individualization and disembodiment of power, which longer has a body or individuality, and which can be anyone whomsoever. Furthermore, one of the essential point of the Panopticon is that within the central tower, not only may anyone be theresurveillance may be exercised by the director, but also by his wife, his children, or his servants, etcetera57 Foucault is correct in the functioning of poweranyone can exercise surveillance, but again the question of the delegation of orders, of power arises: when do the directors children, or wife, or servants exercise power? One may object that the purpose of Foucaults analysis is to understand the exercise of power upon bodies, subjects, through networks and in relation to populations, and therefore the question of directing becomes moot. Yet, as we have seen throughout various historical narratives, most notably in the last decade, the creation of self-surveilling dispositifs such as Guantanamo Bay Prison Facility, Abu Ghraib, and other such structures, the issue of directing and of obedience is precisely not moot: There is a role that Presidents Bush and Obama, Attorney Generals John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez, and Eric Holder have played in influencing and pushing the trajectory of power.

56

In the literature, several others have noticed the same need for attention to sovereign authorit(ies). See Smith, The Sovereign State V. Foucault: Law and Disciplinary Power.; Genel, The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben.; Singer and Weir, Politics and Sovereign Power: Considerations on Foucault. Weir and Singer seem to argue for the retention of a symbolic sovereign authority as a way of giving form to collective representation (pp. 453-456). They appear to subscribe to the myth that in democratic society, there is no actual, empirical, sovereign authority except in times of revolutions or elections. (Ibid., 454). 57 Foucault, PP, 77.

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This is a point to which I will return in later, but here let me suggest that expressions of a more centralized sovereignty are crucial to Foucauldian analyses of power in modern politics. While it is certainly true that phenomena such as GTMO, Abu Ghraib Prison, etc. create a certain power-topographical58 map of the world through the exercise of disciplinary and regulatory power, it is clear that the repositioning of various racial groups, countries, and projects of colonialism must be spearheaded through direct exercises in political power, i.e. the direct sovereign authority that Foucault claims has been displacedbut not disappeared-- and therefore not addressed in his framework of power. Elite officials at the World Bank, the IMF, the European Union, the G-7, G-8, G20, the World Economic Forum, etc. are crucial in directing policies that are expressed through the famous regimes of regulatory and disciplinary power, from free-trade agreements, to energy, migration, nuclear policies, among others. Thus, when France voted to reject the Constitution for the European Union, threatening to slow down its ratification, Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of the EU and President of Luxembourg, insisted that the European Constitution would move forward, regardless of the wishes of the French. As The Economist Magazine described Junckers position, Are the wishes of the nine [countries that had already voted in favor of the EU constitution] to be ignored, simply because the French and Dutch have encountered difficulties?59 The comments of

58

I coined this word prior to reading Stephen Colliers article, Topologies of Power; however, he appears to have a similar meaning in mind. Collier, Topologies of Power: Foucaults Analysis of Government Beyond Governmentality. 59 The European Union constitution: Dead, but not yet buried.

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Javier Solana, Foreign Policy Representative of the European Union were as telling.60 Frances vote and the reactions of various EU leaders does not appear to reflect a diffuse or circulatory exercise of power, but rather signals the disparity between sovereigndirected power and a subject-population, as well as a serious clash between sovereign and subject. As importantly, then it suggests that we need to consider not only power in its aleatory forms--but in relation to the direct exercise of sovereignty. The expressions of sovereignty seen in the prior paragraphs are working contrary to the discourses emanating from other institutions (media, unions, activists, even the membership of various nations), and therefore appear to be especially vivid in their distinction to regulatory/normalizing power. In the case of the war on terror/Muslims certain normalizing discourses have been harnessed by various sovereign architects, such as President G.W. Bush, Attorney

60

As Solana said at the time: I firmly believe that after last year's enlargement, the European Union was ready for a deeper form of engagement which the Constitution would provide. With the "no"vote in France, we are definitely in a difficult situation. However, as the current President of the Council, Jean-Claude Juncker, has already said, we are going to continue our work and there are still other referenda to be held in the upcoming months and it is important that the ratification process continues. The decision taken by the French people is an important decision, taken by an important country of the EU. What is of crucial importance now is that we keep on working as we did before and that we do not get into a psychological paralysis. Let me assure you that this will undoubtedly not happen to me! The European Council in mid-June will give the leaders of Europe the opportunity to discuss the situation collectively and in further detail. The new situation will need to be analysed in a calm and lucid manner. There is no doubt that the European people as well as the European leaders wish the EU to become an increasingly important actor in the international arena. In the meantime, our work has to continue and we need to explain our partners around the world that the EU will remain an active global player. Our partners need a strong Europe that acts with determination on the international stage. Life continues and the course of the world will not stop. Solana, EU@UN - Summary of press remarks by EUHR Solana on results of French referendum.

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General Alberto Gonzaleze, U.S. Justice Department Legal Counsel John Yoo , in order to push a regulatory regime in which the slightest hint of Muslimism is sufficient to justify the exercises of disciplinary power (torture, detention, rendition, privation of civil procedures, etc.). But this does not appear, at least on the face, to be a biopolitical regime, but rather an ontological regime, in which terrorism is a presumptive moral category linked to religion and culture most predominantly among other non-biopolitical discourses. Foucaults linking of bio-politics and the inscription of racism is a crucial inroad to understanding politico-racial fragmentation in contemporary society. This view is pathbreaking, since it disarticulates the scientific objectivity of race in favor of a discursive production of race, namely where race is transcribed through the language of biology rather being grounded in biology. Foucaults concern, to be fair: is to illustrate one

modern mode of racism, namely either the domination of one population by another, or the elimination of heterogeneous elements from a monistic State racism (as in the case of 1930s Germany). Still, this analysis of biopower seems to pave the way for a reified biological transcription of raceone in which the race literature is dominated by medical/health/biological discussions of race. Moreover, there is a burgeoning literature today that reflects myriad applications of biopolitics to contemporary understandings of racism.61

61

Such as Lauren Berlant on obesity, differential medications for African Americans versus Whites, etc.

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Even in an epoch marked by bio-politics and still generally utilizing biopower, it seems important to acknowledge the limits of biopower in order to assess other forms that racial division takes. The new millennium has ushered in an enormous terror-management industry, which certainly includes among its weapons-disciplinary and regulatory power, e.g., torture, incarceration, rendition, and racial profiling. Many of the regulations governing these practices have successfully divided society along the lines of Muslims (Terrorists) v. Non-Muslims. While these practices certainly operate at the level of life, and it is possible to see how Muslims could eventually be construed as a threat to the general population at the level of biopolitics, I want to suggest that we can see racism directed at Muslims at another level as well. It is difficult to understand how the racial division between Muslims from the rest of society is initiated at the level of bio-power. What are the biopolitical criteria by which populations are divided? The expression of racismas manifested through bio-politics, still seems to require some prior element that drives any particular regulation of biological processes. Is it not possible that the

biologicalas this represents the domain of lifeis not the only mode of division? There is very little that distinguishes the category of Muslim men and women scientifically, although their visual differences have beenprematurelypointed to as the basis of statedirected persecution. Yet, if anything, Muslims and Arabs are viewed distinctly on grounds of religion, ideology, and culture. The perceived extreme terroristic behavior is ascribed to the extreme commitment to one of the aforementioned three or some derivative thereof.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

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V.

Consider the following example: in March 2005, when the FBI detained two female

Muslim teenagers from Queens, NY, on suspicion of being potential suicide bombers. Initially detained for different reasons, the girls encountered each other for the first time while separately being escorted to immigration facilities in Manhattan. FBI agents were alerted to Tashnuba Hayder five months earlier when her parents, Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, reported that she had run away. Fearing that Tashnuba would elope with a stranger in Michigan, her parents trusted the local police to find her. They canceled their request after she returned home voluntarily. Five months later, FBI agents searched Tashnubas room and computer.62 After an initial interrogation, and on the false pretext of an immigration violationher mothersthey detained her at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) offices in Manhattan. The FBI was

concerned by Tashnubas religious fervor, apparent in her propensity to listen to sermons by fundamentalist imams over the Internet, her chatroom comments about those sermons, class notes from a discussion on the religious ethics of suicide, and perhaps most symbolically, her decision to observe full purdah full Islamic veil. Their suspicions increased when Tashnuba and her government escorts encountered Adamah Bah in front of the BCIS building at 26 Federal Plaza. Adamah, who wears the hijab, was originally detained because she missed a USCIS appointment in order to go on a high school field trip to see Christos Gates exhibit in Central Park. During their encounter, Tashnuba Hayder and Adamah Bah reportedly acknowledged each other with an unspecified

62

For full details, see Bernstein, Questions, Bitterness and Exile For Queens Girl in Terror Case.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

23

traditional Muslim greeting, most likely salaam aleikum.63 That greeting, combined with their orthodox dress, were the basis of the FBIs concern that the teenagers might be collaborators as potential suicide bombers in a terrorist conspiracy.64 Both teens were sent to a detainment facility in Pennsylvania without access to lawyers or parents, where they were subjected to constant interrogation for seven weeks. Now, at the level of regulatory power, we can account for this event by turning to the USA PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, but also a spate of immigration and antiterrorism laws that were enacted well before September 2001, including the 1996 Welfare and Immigration Act, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a 1908 Conspiracy Law, a 1918 Sedition Law, and others long on the American law books. These laws enable federal agents to circumvent any norms against search and seizure, and privacy. They also single out certain kinds of individuals who are deemed to be more expendable than others. They criminalize

associations with certain organizations post-facto, i.e. they will name certain interactions that were legal one or even two decades before as now terroristic and therefore illegal. They name certain kinds of communications obscene, and illegal. In combination with a repeal of mandatory judicial review in the case of many immigration violations, it becomes evident how Muslims can be targets of persecution through regulatory and even disciplinary measures.

63

Bernstein, Girl Called Would-Be Bomber Was Drawn to Islam. It is difficult to discern the exact greeting, but it was most likely salaam aleikum. 64 Bernstein, Teachers and Classmates Express Outrage at Arrest of Girl, 16, as a Terrorist Threat.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

24

Western Europe has also long been interested in pushing a racial agenda that involves the regulation of Muslim women who wear the hijab and niqab65: this seems to be a departure from biopower and of a diffuse sovereign power. Rather, it seems to be directed by a much more central sovereign authority. It is clear that these laws are at best, tangentially connected to the politics of biopolitical racialization. But the racism in question, the kind that has long driven

domestic politics in the United States, is even more tangential to bio-politics. Indeed, this racism has much less to do with biology or lifeeven when it has claimed to, such as at the turn of the 20th centuryand much more to do with conceptions of domestic security, and national identity. Are bio-politics the relevant level by which to analyze this set of racialregulations? Moreover, at the level of disciplinary power, we can consider the neo-panoptical public gaze which intensifies the suspicion of racial others through the wearing of the hijab and full purdah. In conjunction with other gestures of Muslim devotion, the hijab or purdah are symbols that signify a threat to a larger regime. But who decides this threat? There are also other, more violent actshijackings, bombings, mass murder, insurgencieswhich, especially in a post 9-11 political discourse, have come to be understood as gestures of Islamic piety. The hijab was the source of disciplinary

regulation in several regions of Europe over a decade before 9-11.66 There are various

65

SeeSheth, TPPR, chap. 4. Also see the most recent struggle on this front which happened on April 11, 2011: Rustici, France Bans Face-Covering Islamic Veil. 66 For example, in 1994, the French government first leveled a prohibition against the wearing of the hijab in public schools. Considerable controversy ensued, and after a multi-year multi-

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

25

modes of discipline and regulation that are at work; but as we know, while all populations are implicated in disciplinary and regulatory regimes, they are not implicated in the same way, same degree, nor at the same time. And so the question arises: why the hijab? Why Muslim women? Why not Orthodox Jewish67 or Bahai or Nigerian women? Is this racial focus bio-political? Or is it engaged at some other level? And who has decided that Muslim women should be targeted as terrorists? Foucaults framework does not appear to account for other, fundamentally existential (or ontological), vehicles by which race is expressed.68 These vehicles may draw on bio-power,69 or they may not, but they can still account for divisions and breaks in the population. Nor can it account for how, why and which portions of a population become targeted for discipline and regulation. Moreover, by circumscribing the scope of his analysis through biopower, something insightful is gainednamely a keen understanding about the latent operation of power that underlies all social relations. But something important is lost as well: an understanding of who will and wont be subject to certain kinds of power, and why this is the case. We also lose the opportunity to ask who decides who will be placed on one side of a racial division and who will be placed on the other. And finally, it does not account for the empirical evidence that such racialization is

denominational investigation, issued a prohibition against all conspicuous religious symbols from being worn in public institutions in 2004. Germany has had similar prohibitions & Germany. 67 The New York Times, for example reported on the story of Tamar Epstein, an Orthodox Jewish woman who, though divorced through civil law, felt that she was still being held hostage, because her ex-spouse refused to give her a get, a religious decree that only husbands can grant to their wives, which would recognize her as no longer married under Judaism. Oppenheimer, Protesters Seek Womans Religious Divorce - NYTimes.com. 68 His framework does not necessarily need to account for all forms of racism; however, I want to urge that we need to augment his immensely important framework with another plane of analysis. 69 For example, through scientific links between blood and race, as already explained.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

26

produced through a centralized sovereign powera source that has not become obsolete since Hobbes, but rather persisted, albeit in a masquerade of liberal representation. These questions must be answered in order to fill out his account. If we accept that there are fundamental disparities in power between subjects and state administrators in contemporaryliberal democraticsocieties, then it seems reasonable to consider the missionthe purposeof the sovereign power as that of cohering its populace through the control and management of its populace. It is also one method of managementconquestto divide its populace through any number and combination of criteria. These criteria could include the physical or biological, or they could be expressed in the division in the biological continuum of human life, as Foucault argues, as manifested through health policies, pension plans, etc.70 Yet, it seems to be insufficient to point to the biological, to life, to man-as-species,71 as the ground of division, and thus as the essence of the new racism of modern sovereign power. Having raised some concerns about Foucaults account of sovereign power and racism, I want suggest some modifications to buttress and expand his account of the way race is transcribed through sovereign powerin ways that are not necessarily biopolitical. First, sovereign power is that form of authority that has, not only as its function, but as its end its own self-preservation. Second, the notion of a centralized state or sovereign authority is not obsolete; such an authority, as we have seen vividly not just over the last few years but for decades, can and does act in a direct fashion. This power can be

70 71

Foucault, SMBD, 251. Ibid., 242.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

27

expressed through a range of institutions, such as judiciaries, state legislatures, and various federal and state bureaucratic offices; moreover the power of the sovereign can be felt through informal or unofficial actions, such as mobs and political groups; its force/violence is directly felt. Finally, bio-politics and scientific management are two dimensions of how race operate in modern society, but they do not exhaust the modes by which sovereign power instantiates racial division. Sovereign institutions utilize numerous methods by which to instantiate and naturalize racial divisions. There are other modes of racializing that are not biopolitical, although they are consistent with his framework. These include certain juridical modes of instantiating race, such as fundamental divisions in different categories of membership in society (citizenship, residents, aliens), as well as the creation of exceptions to general membership and political rights.

VI.

In an effort to address some of my concerns about Foucaults account of biopower

and race, I would like to sketch out a framework of ontopower, and an attendant theory of ontopolitics. Ontopower and ontopolitics work in conjunctionorthogonallywith

Foucaults rich framework of bio-politics, governmentality, and his account of bio-power, as crucial elements of the race war that underlies contemporary society. But there are some distinctions between this framework and that of Foucault: First, I would suggest that we augment Foucaults arguments with an analysis of sovereign power. It is the attention to, and the analysis of, sovereign power that has become displaced over the last two centuries. This displacement corresponds to a preferred new model of political

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

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organizationliberal democracywhich has replaced monarchy as the prevailing model among many nation-states. As I have argued in previous sections of this paper, the model of (liberal) democracy has been a rhetorically popular model of power for the last two centuries, but it is not necessarily one that reflects a realistic framework of political power. Accordingly, the framework of onto-power is predicated on a marked disparity between subject and sovereign, although perhaps this disparity becomes less noticed as the rubric of liberalism has become more popular, i.e., that power is evenly distributed across and between subjects, that political power is held in proxy for political subjects through political representatives. Furthermore, onto-power depends also on the political disparities

between populations. And so, the first premise of onto-politics is that sovereign power exists as a direct force. Its function is to engineer political divisions as required to ensure its own preservation. As in Foucaults theory, onto-power takes as its operating premise that a race war underlies society. However, a race war need not be dependent upon biological fissures, but political fragmentations that can be exploited to divide populations. In this framework, I suggest that political fissures can be mapped along race-as-biological, or ethnic-, or class, or caste, or cultural, or sexual, or gendered divisions, or any combination of the above. However, rather than biological life, then, onto-politics works by exploiting the power of political division. Onto-power is predicated on the onto-moral continuum of political existence. Onto-politics works at the level of political, rather than biological, life. If we take seriously Aristotles point that human beings are political

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

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animals, then it makes sense to consider politics as prior to life. Sovereign power then has the capacity (and the interest) to decipher and manage threatsthreats not to life, first and foremost, but threats to its own existence, its own survival. On the level of onto-politics then, sovereign power must decide how to discipline and regulate those parts of the population whose existence or comportment threatens itself. In distinction to bio-politics, the categories utilized by sovereign authority are not medicalized or scientific, but rather politico-juridical. They indicate where a population stands in relation to other populations and in relation to the state. The function of these categories is to indicate the ontological, moral, and hence political status of a certain group whose behavior has come to the attention of the state. These categories are not developed ex nihilo; rather, they emerge from several sources: 1) from the states excavation of a prior discourse in which similar categories exist; 2) from the exploitation of a set of norms and fears that pertain to a dominant population, i.e., a population whose cultural standards prevail over those of other minority cultures; 3) from the existence of already existing protections/lack of protections that are manifested in a societys juridical foundations. In his 1974-5 lectures at the College de France, Foucault discusses the nature of the abnormal, which he maps along biological lines. However, in his January 29 lecture, Foucault mentions the moral monster, emerging at the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century. The moral monsters initial existence takes an abrupt departure from the biological map on which he grounds other pathological categories, that is, until he enters the juridico-medical of legal medicine in the late

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nineteenth century.72 Prior to that, the moral master emerges in an economy of power, whereby his existence is a challenge to the power of the sovereign. The breach of the moral monster is his criminality, and the criminal, says Foucault, is someone who breaks the pact to which he has subscribed and prefers his own interest to the laws governing the society to which he belongs.73 Moreover, the criminal and the sovereign resemble each otheras despotsgreet[ing] each other like two individuals who reject, disregard, or break the fundamental pact and make their interest the arbitrary law that they seek to impose on others.74 They are both outlawsthe sovereign above and law and the

criminal beneath itwhose status emerges in relationship to law, whether breaking overturning, suspending (for the criminal) or promoting, enforcing, applying, or suspending them (for the sovereign). Foucaults description of the moral monster at times resonates with Walter Benjamins description of the great criminal, whose existence is secretly admired by the masses in his challenge to the power of the state.75 However, for Foucault, the criminal as the moral monsternot only mirrors the sovereign in his relationship to law and power, but eventually is recognized as the sovereign:
The first juridical monster to emerge in the new regime of the economy of punitive power, the first monster to appear, to be identified and defined, is not the murderer, the transgressor, or the person who breaks the laws of nature, but the person who breaks the fundamental social pact. The first monster is the king.76

72 73

Foucault, Ab, 101. Ibid., 92. 74 Ibid., 93. 75 Benjamin, The Critique of Violence, 281. 76 Foucault, Ab, 94.

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For Foucault, the kingor queenenters the discourse of juridico-medical theme of criminal psychiatry because of the association between the figure of the sovereign to incest and cannibalism.77 However, the category of the moral monsterprior to its

affiliation with medicine (and hence, the transcription of the biological)is important and salient for contemporary discourses precisely because of its relation to law, sovereignty, and power. The moral monster is a criminalor its reversethe criminal is a moral monster because it skirts and flirts with the law out of its own particular interests. The dynamism of the interests of the criminal in relation to lawmirroring the sovereign at times, challenging the sovereign at other times, suggests a layer of power that does not need to be mapped on to bio-power, but rather presents the possibility of expansion on a different plane of power. The fluidity of the interests of the moral monster, suggests that the monstrosity of the criminal is that it dares to challenge the legitimacy of the sovereign, to resist and push against the righteousness of right. Then, if not mapped onto the biological, another way to consider the challenge to sovereignty is the ontologization of the sheer hubris of the criminal. Thus, for example, the category of undocumented workers or aliens or terrorists, which are among the most recent categories deployed by the (United States) in its decade-long wars (on terror, on illegal immigrants), indicate populations that are to be kept at arms length, or suspect, or confined in order to secure the politys safety. It is important to note that the juridico-objective nature of these categories can be institutionalized, and therefore entrenched, through the repeated instantiation of these

77

Ibid., 102.

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categories through different media: television news, various legislation, and various local political consultants, but they are dispersed through the various offices of sovereign power: the Attorney Generals office, the Congress, the Executive Branch, and they are confirmed, legitimated, through the judicial branch. The importance of the onto-political is that it does not require the taking of life, or the forcing to live of various populations, but rather it operates at the level of freedom, or the lack thereof, i.e. through the regime of carcerality. The theme of carcerality is intrinsic to Foucaults work; however, he locates it as a form of disciplinary management that emerges in intersection with regulatory mechanisms that help to circumscribe and ostracize a population on the level of living and dying. The framework that Im suggesting needs to be considered at the level of politics: carcerality as a response to the overthrow of a political regime.78 It might be argued by critics that the difference is subtleso subtle that it reinstantiates Foucaults own framework. It seems to me that both frameworks, the bio-political and the ontopolitical, can operate consistently and simultaneously with similar mechanisms. But the biopolitical works at the level of diffuse sovereign power, whereas the ontopolitical returns us

78

Carcerality can take several forms. The most well-known form, if not also the most common, is that of using prisons to contain criminals. Cf. Davis, Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition.; Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Some examples of these include the use of Immigration detention centers to contain illegal aliens, prisoner of war camps with uncertain sovereign jurisdictions, such as Guantanamo Bay, concentration camps, such as those which held Americans of Japanese descent and Japanese immigrants during the second World War on the grounds of containing potentially disloyal denizens. There are other forms of carcerality as well: There is what I will call geographic carcerality which restricts geographic movement for onto-criminals. Moral carcerality, which restricts and regulates ones social behavior according to distinctions between good subjects and bad traitorous citizens. Military Zones which restricted movement among Japanese Americans and immigrants.

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to the immediate and dynamic relationship between centralized sovereign authority and its subjects. Unlike the medico-juridicalization of the various categories of madness, monstrosity, and abnormality, the onto-political relationship is formed through the creation of categories that are intrinsic to the distinction between legal and potentially extra-legal subjects. From the very instantiation of a polity, escape avenues are built into the very legal fabric that links the sovereign and subject. The regime of carcerality is consistent with Foucaults understanding of disciplinary power, in that it operates on the malleability of bodies as well as the restriction of physical movement. However, I want to consider this regime as it operates on groups, rather than individuals. As Angela Davis argues with regard to prisons in the United States, they are designed to continue the mechanics of slavery and punishment at the politico-juridical level.79 The effectiveness of carcerality emerges from the widespread fear of possible incarceration. This fear is internalized at the collective or societal level when different groups understand that they are potential targets of the whim of sovereign power to criminalize them. There are two impulses, in turn, that are spurred: first, the rush to find oneself on the right or correct side of law.80 The second is any given groups rush (to collaborate/cooperate) to find another group to criminalize in its own stead.

79 80

Davis, Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition, 363. Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terrorism; Engle, Constructing Good Aliens and Good Citizens: Legitimizing the War on Terror(ism).

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Both of these impulses, as they emerge from the fear of carcerality, not only confirm the onto-political decisions of the sovereign as objective;81 they also shed the stigma and suspicion necessary to drive and reinforce its onto-juridical judgments. After all, if one has been placed in prison, then one must have done something wrong, unlike those of us who are free.82 And so in order to remain free, we must help find those who must be placed in prisonand legitimate their imprisonment by showing what they have done wrongshowing why it was right to criminalize them instead of us. Perhaps this point will shed some light on the name of this framework: Ontopolitics depends on the creation of categoriescategories that appear to have an objective foundationto create ontological divisions among populations, i.e. to distinguish different subsets of the population morally, politically, socially, and of course legally. These categories are ontological in that they denote some subjects as possessing some objective moral or political essencealways an essence that is in dialectical opposition to another, e.g., aliens v. citizens, terrorists v. law-abiding residents, insane v. rational, criminal v. innocent, undocumented immigrants v. legal residents, etc. These categories in turn warrant that they should be placed into a special political or legal category, and receive some particular special or exceptionalusually negativetreatment based on this status.

81

Davis, Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition.; Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime; Mendieta, The Prison Contract and Surplus Punishment: On Angela Y. Davis Abolitionism. 82 As Engle and Mamdani argue. Cf.Engle, Constructing Good Aliens and Good Citizens: Legitimizing the War on Terror(ism).; Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terrorism.

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35

These essences are ascribed based on the level of threat that some subjects/populations are perceived as posing to sovereign power. In this light, we could, as Carl Schmitt does in his incisive critique of the liberal state, understand the same mission to divide as the expression of the secularized divine omnipotence of the state. The juridic formulas of the omnipotence of the state are, in fact, only superficial secularizations of theological formulas of the omnipotence of God.83 In this secular role then, the state is driven to maintain its power and its coherence by making and shaping its men, i.e., its populace, by rendering itself forcefully political. In other words, the coherence and strength of the state requires a prior element, namely something that already renders it unified politically. For Schmitt, writing in the wake of the second World War, this mission was satisfied through the identification of an external enemy which would enable a people to understand itself as allied, coherent, and wholly united. This external enemy could not simply be identified as an economic competitor or private antagonist, but rather as one who was fundamentally opposed to the state in a concrete and existential sense.84 And so, how is an enemy identified? Schmitts response: the context of a concrete antagonism is still expressed in everyday language, even where the awareness of the extreme case has been entirely lost85 He explains that seemingly mundane terms can be polemicized only when they are articulated in close connection to a concrete situation and a specific conflict. Words such as state, republic, society, classare incomprehensible when one does not know exactly who is to be affected,

83 84

Schmitt, The concept of the political, 42. Ibid., 27-28. 85 Ibid., 30.

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36

combated, refuted, or negated by such a term.86 In other words, the polity must already know or have an idea of who the enemy is. In the framework of ontopolitics, various groups can be targeted for racialization/criminalization at various times. (Ontologically) racial categories are neither static nor exclusive, although again they must always have a dialectical counterpart. How, then are populations selected for racialization identified? They can be identified not only, as Schmitt says, in terms of a concrete situation, but in terms of their existence as a perceived threat. That threat is perceived even as it is something barely perceptible. Elsewhere, I identify the target of race, namely the taming of an unruly character. The unruly is the elementoften intangible, but possibly represented as physical or biologicalwhich constitutes a threat to the coherence of a polity, and needs to be domesticated or at least managed in order for the state to maintain control of its population. The unruly is picked up as the ground of classifying, distinguishing, separating, dividing. To return to Foucaults formulation of the state as fundamentally racist, where race is the bio-political expression of division, I would modify his understanding of race as follows: The state is fundamentally racist, where bio-power is one expression of that division; there can be other expressions of racial division. But in any case of racial division, bio-political or otherwise, there must be some element that drives the character and the criteria, and the lines by which the division is instantiated. As such, race, or racialization, is the transformation of a threat into a set of categories by which to divide populations against themselvesbio-politically, culturally,

86

Ibid., 30-31. My emphasis.

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socially, etc. It is one method by which sovereign power can fulfill its mandate to control and manage its populace, maintain its hold over them. Then, it would seem that the states mission to divide is not dictated by random biological or material characteristics, but rather by locating that which is potentially pernicious to sovereign power and managing it through the technology of race: the production of a classification (medical, political, legal, cultural, moralor some combination thereof) in which the unruly is embedded; its subsequent naturalization or reification as an objective category; and finally, its concealment as the expression of the relationship between sovereign power and its populace as one of potential violence.87 Any or all of these technological dimensions may be augmented or informed through bio-politics; however, there must be an unruly threat that drives the Foucauldian manifestation of race. We could understand the threat at level of onto-power. That is to say, the threat might manifest itself along the surface of ontological distinctions that are infused in the political and cultural discourse of enemies and friends. Onto-power would still target bodies, and utilize bio-politics to create decisions about who will be forced to live and who will be allowed to die, but it manifests itself alongside the biological, in seeking out the target of race through an ontological taxonomy that decides who fits into man-as-species, and who fits into a different, sub- species. In the case of Hayder and Bah, they joined thousands of Muslims in being the targets of suspicion, harassment, and persecution. These women, like their male Muslim counterparts, are met with hostility, suspicion, and extreme harassment because they

87

I will return to this dimension of technology in Part III.

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transgressed a prevailing cultural and political regime that might be best described as Western secular liberalism.88 But their crimes are not the ones for which they were detained or arrested, nor are they selected on biopolitical grounds (although they are certainly acted up through biopower). Rather, their common infraction is their

conspicuously heterogeneous comportmentopenly subscribing to a particular mode of being designated as Muslim or Islamic culture. Similarly, all adherents of Islam, violent or non-violent, secular or pious, are indiscriminately associated as threatening and dangerous. These conflations form the basis of their public representation as a threat or a potential insurgence to a dominant discourse or regime. In turn, this threat prompts a disciplinary framework that will manage, suppress, or force out the potential threat so that it does not upset or overturn the existing regime. Biopower is at work here, through disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms. But so are other important forces: sovereign authority is hardly obsolete. It is alive and well in the personas of presidents, legislators, and judges. And ontological regimes, cast in terms of procedural classifications, seem to work alongside biopower in the casting of certain groups in racial terms. The race war, too, is alive and well, and exercised in a myriad of ways that can no longer masquerade as biological, but rather on the level of the ontojuridical.

88

My use of the terms West or Western, indicates a geographical region, i.e. North American and (mostly Northern) Europe, as well as a cultural signifier of modernity and progress.

Ontopolitics F.A. Sheth

39 Abbreviations:

Ab BB PP

Abnormal (1974-5) Birth of Biopoltics (1978-9) Psychiatric Power (1973-4)

SMBD Society Must Be Defended (1975-6) STP DP Security, Territory, Population (1977-8) Discipline and Punish

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. The Critique of Violence. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Bernstein, Nina. Girl Called Would-Be Bomber Was Drawn to Islam. New York Times, 2005. . Questions, Bitterness and Exile For Queens Girl in Terror Case. The New York Times, 2005. . Teachers and Classmates Express Outrage at Arrest of Girl, 16, as a Terrorist Threat. New York Times, 2005. Collier, Stephen J. Topologies of Power: Foucaults Analysis of Government Beyond Governmentality. Theory Culture Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 78-108. Davis, Angela. Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition. In A Companion to AfricanAmerican Philosophy, edited by Tommy Lott and John P. Pittman, 360-368. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Engle, Karen. Constructing Good Aliens and Good Citizens: Legitimizing the War on Terror(ism). University of Colorado Law Review Winter (2004). Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador Press, 2003b. . Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. . Governmentality. In Power. New York: New Press, 1978. . History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vintage House. New York: Random House, 1978. . Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France 1973-1974. Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

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