Date: 	Wed, 26 Nov 1997 00:01:10 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-phoenix.princeton.edu (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-I: Identities, the State, Capitalism (was Reply to Doug Henwood...)



> She [Butler] says that it is the disciplinary apparatus of the
>state that produces the field of possible political subjects as well as
>totalizes individual identities. Instead, I say that what the state does is
>to codify, reformulate, and/or reproduce identities; I don't think that
>identities can be said to originate from the state. The state is a major
>player in the making, remaking, and unmaking of identities, but the state
>alone does not and cannot *produce* "women," "blacks," "sexual deviants,"
>etc. as we have come to know them. Butler needs to look at the interactions
>between the state and social relations (especially social relations that
>emerge from and reproduce the market) to properly analyze identities and
>politics based on them.

I will be getting to this problem eventually in my diss. Here is what I
think is really just a reformulation of the problem stated here by Yoshie:

In The Racialization of America, the strongest case yet made for the
abolition of  racial classifications, Yehudi Webster reduces race to an
official discourse and argues that social scientists should desist from the
use of racial classification as a means of analysis. While Navarro does not
discount the importance of the maintenance of health statistics by race,
Webster sees no ground for the specification of the distribution of social
pathologies or valued attributes across racial units.

Since the cessation of racial classification obviously would render it
impossible for social scientists to determine the effects of racial
practices which if existing independently of their representations would
only have the property of a natural kind, it becomes the linchpin of
Webster's argument that what Bourdieu refers to as folk notions do not
arise spontaneously at all, but are consolidated  through official
representations; official requests from the birth certificate to the census
to job applications to mortality records to confess to a racial and ethnic
identity; and official race-based remedies themselves.  What Webster argues
then is that the state and social science, in their official capacity and
due to their cognitive authority, establish conventions of how to see
things.   Webster thus implies that the state takes an active role in the
regulation of what Emile Durkheim referred to as collective
representations, which are both forms of description of social identities
and relations and in this sense constitute them, and also prescriptions of
the legitimate forms of existence possible.


Here is another paragraph or two, using  Foucault to think about the
formation of underclass identities:

In his analysis of the "culture of poverty" variant of these studies--in
partiuclar the attempt to construct African-Americans as an "ethnic
culture", the major characteristic of which is its "disorganization,
"breakdown" and unstable famiies--  Sanford Schram attempts to relate
knowledge and power in a Foucauldian manner and argues that the subnormal
behavior then become an object of regulation--for example, the restrictions
on AFDC so that it does not encourage the single motherhood which
statistical analysis correlates with underclass poverty.   At the same
time, there are few studies for example on whether AFDC may be necessary to
allow women to escape abusive relationships. Government intervention
instead takes on the positive and productive role of disciplining the body,
and  is aimed at changing the characteristics and behavior of underclass
men into worker-citizens; the proposals have ranged from conscription into
the US Army in order to instill discipline to worker training to orphanages
for the boys of welfare-dependent mothers.

Leading political scientist  James Q. Wilson. most recently the key advisor
the New York City police department, responded to the LA Riot in the pages
of  The Wall Street Journal  for example by calling for underclass men to
be entrusted to the military to be disciplined and punished as soldiers,
road workers and toxic dump site employees:

"It is imperative that our policies address both the material and the
cultural problems of our inner cities. For the policies to work, they must
meet three criteria: they must start early in life (when character and
expectations are formed), focus on young males (they are the source of
fear, the perpetrators of crime, the fathers of illegitimate children and
the members of gangs), and combine carrots and sticks (many lawful
opportunities will not be pursued if unlawful alternatives seem more
attractive). Many members of the underclass need to acquire not simply
technical skills but human skills...We now have military bases in search of
new tenants, a Defense Department in search of new tasks, an infrastructure
in need of repair, and an environment in need of care. Surely there is some
way to create a program out of these coincident opportunities, one that
draw on the military's skills at training men, building morale and
improving character."

   Having broken the biological continuum into a category of persons based
on putatively unique behavioral properties, "biopower" can now manage this
specific group, recomposed as docile bodies, to be "subjected, used,
transformed, and improved." (Foucault) Though the language is dramatic
indeed, Foucault actually emphasizes the normality which biopower can
achieve, even defining racism as "the condition that makes it acceptable to
put [certain people] to death in a society of normalization."
    As Ann Stoler has summarized Foucault's lectures on state racism,
racism "activates the discourse of biopower in a novel way" and gives
"credence to the claim that the more degenerates and abnormals are
eliminated, the lives of those who speak will be stronger, more vigorous
and improved."

(For a nice treatment of James Q Wilson, see Peter Rigby, African Images:
Racism and the End of Anthropology; for a more effective analysis of the
transformation of the social sciences from a positive eugenics to a
technology of death, I find Detlev Peukert's thinking much more profound
than Foucault's--see his essay in Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed. Thomas
Childers and Jane Caplan. Another important resource here is How
Classification Works: Nelson Goodman among the Social Sciences, ed. Mary
Douglas and David Hull, as well as Richard Jenkins Social Identity, the
latter the best intro to the problem I have come across, while Pierre
Bourdieu's "On the Family as A Realized Category" in Theory, Culture and
Society 13(3) is doubtless the most brilliant meditation on social identity
in modern society I have come across).





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