Empire (35 page)

in extent and in intensity. It appears to have declined only because

its form and strategies have changed. If we take Manichaean divisions

and rigid exclusionary practices (in South Africa, in the colonial city,

in the southeastern United States, or in Palestine) as the paradigm of

modern
racisms, we must now ask what is the
postmodern
form of racism and what are its strategies in today’s imperial society.

Many analysts describe this passage as a shift in the dominant

theoretical form of racism, from a racist theory based on biology

to one based on culture. The dominant modern racist theory and

the concomitant practices ofsegregation are centered on essential

biological differences among races. Blood and genes stand behind

the differences in skin color as the real substance of racial difference.

Subordinated peoples are thus conceived (at least implicitly) as other

than human, as a different order of being. These modern racist

theories grounded in biology imply or tend toward an ontological

difference—a necessary, eternal, and immutable rift in the order of

being. In response to this theoretical position, then, modern anti-

racism positions itselfagainst the notion ofbiological essentialism,

and insists that differences among the races are constituted instead

by social and cultural forces. These modern anti-racist theorists

operate on the belief that social constructivism will free us from

the straitjacket ofbiological determinism: ifour dif

f

erences are

socially and culturally determined, then all humans are in principle

equal, ofone ontological order, one nature.

With the passage to Empire, however, biological differences

have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers as the key

representation ofracial hatred and fear. In this way imperial racist

theory attacks modern anti-racism from the rear, and actually co-

opts and enlists its arguments. Imperial racist theory agrees that races

do not constitute isolable biological units and that nature cannot

be divided into different human races. It also agrees that the behavior

ofindividuals and their abilities or aptitudes are not the result of

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their blood or their genes, but are due to their belonging to different

historically determined cultures.14 Differences are thus not fixed and

immutable but contingent effects of social history. Imperial racist

theory and modern anti-racist theory are really saying very much

the same thing, and it is difficult in this regard to tell them apart.

In fact, it is precisely because this relativist and culturalist argument

is assumed to be necessarily anti-racist that the dominant ideology

ofour entire society can appear to be against racism, and that

imperial racist theory can appear not to be racist at all.

We should look more closely, however, at how imperial racist

theory operates. E

´ tienne Balibar calls the new racism a differentialist

racism, a racism without race, or more precisely a racism that

does not rest on a biological concept ofrace. Although biology is

abandoned as the foundation and support, he says, culture is made

to fill the role that biology had played.15 We are accustomed to

thinking that nature and biology are fixed and immutable but that

culture is plastic and fluid: cultures can change historically and mix

to form infinite hybrids. From the perspective of imperial racist

theory, however, there are rigid limits to the flexibility and compati-

bility of cultures. Differences between cultures and traditions are,

in the final analysis, insurmountable. It is futile and even dangerous,

according to imperial theory, to allow cultures to mix or insist that

they do so: Serbs and Croats, Hutus and Tutsis, African Americans

and Korean Americans must be kept separate.

As a theory of social difference, the cultural position is no less

‘‘essentialist’’ than the biological one, or at least it establishes an

equally strong theoretical ground for social separation and segrega-

tion. Nonetheless, it is a pluralist theoretical position: all cultural

identities are equal in principle. This pluralism accepts all the differ-

ences ofwho we are so long as we agree to act on the basis of

these differences of identity, so long as we act our race. Racial

differences are thus contingent in principle, but quite necessary in

practice as markers ofsocial separation. The theoretical substitution

of culture for race or biology is thus transformed paradoxically into

a theory ofthe preservation ofrace.16 This shift in racist theory

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

193

shows us how imperial theory can adopt what is traditionally thought

to be an anti-racist position and still maintain a strong principle of

social separation.

We should be careful to note at this point that imperial racist

theory in itselfis a theory ofsegregation, not a theory ofhierarchy.

Whereas modern racist theory poses a hierarchy among the races

as the fundamental condition that makes segregation necessary,

imperial theory has nothing to say about the superiority or inferiority

of different races or ethnic groups in principle. It regards that as

purely contingent, a practical matter. In other words, racial hierarchy

is viewed not as cause but as effect of social circumstances. For

example, African American students in a certain region register

consistently lower scores on aptitude tests than Asian American

students. Imperial theory understands this as attributable not to any

racial inferiority but rather to cultural differences: Asian American

culture places a higher importance on education, encourages stu-

dents to study in groups, and so forth. The hierarchy of the different

races is determined only a posteriori, as an effect of their cultures—

that is, on the basis oftheir performance. According to imperial

theory, then, racial supremacy and subordination are not a theoreti-

cal question, but arise through free competition, a kind of market

meritocracy ofculture.

Racist practice, ofcourse, does not necessarily correspond

to the self-understandings of racist theory, which is all we have

considered up to this point. It is clear from what we have seen,

however, that imperial racist practice has been deprived ofa central

support: it no longer has a theory ofracial superiority that was

seen as grounding the modern practices ofracial exclusion. Ac-

cording to Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari, though, ‘‘European

racism . . . has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation

ofsomeone as Other . . . Racism operates by the determination

ofdegrees ofdeviance in relation to the White-Man face, which

endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccen-

tric and backward waves . . . From the viewpoint ofracism, there

is no exterior, there are no people on the outside.’’17 Deleuze and

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Guattari challenge us to conceive racist practice not in terms of

binary divisions and exclusion but as a strategy of differential inclu-

sion. No identity is designated as Other, no one is excluded from

the domain, there is no outside. Just as imperial racist theory cannot

pose as a point of departure any essential differences among human

races, imperial racist practice cannot begin by an exclusion ofthe

racial Other. White supremacy functions rather through first engag-

ing alterity and then subordinating differences according to degrees

ofdeviance from whiteness. This has nothing to do with the hatred

and fear of the strange, unknown Other. It is a hatred born in

proximity and elaborated through the degrees of difference of the

neighbor.

This is not to say that our societies are devoid ofracial exclu-

sions; certainly they are crisscrossed with numerous lines ofracial

barriers, across each urban landscape and across the globe. The

point, rather, is that racial exclusion arises generally as a result of

differential inclusion. In other words, it would be a mistake today,

and perhaps it is also misleading when we consider the past, to pose

the apartheid or Jim Crow laws as the paradigm ofracial hierarchy.

Difference is not written in law, and the imposition of alterity

does not go to the extreme ofOtherness. Empire does not think

differences in absolute terms; it poses racial differences never as a

difference of nature but always as a difference of degree, never as

necessary but always as accidental. Subordination is enacted in re-

gimes ofeveryday practices that are more mobile and flexible but

that create racial hierarchies that are nonetheless stable and brutal.

The form and strategies of imperial racism help to highlight the

contrast between modern and imperial sovereignty more generally.

Colonial racism, the racism ofmodern sovereignty, first pushes

difference to the extreme and then recuperates the Other as negative

foundation of the Self (see Section 2.3). The modern construction

ofa people is intimately involved in this operation. A people is

defined not simply in terms ofa shared past and common desires

or potential, but primarily in dialectical relation to its Other, its

outside. A people (whether diasporic or not) is always defined in

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

195

terms ofa
place
(be it virtual or actual). Imperial order, in contrast, has nothing to do with this dialectic. Imperial racism, or differential

racism, integrates others with its order and then orchestrates those

differences in a system of control. Fixed and biological notions of

peoples thus tend to dissolve into a fluid and amorphous multitude,

which is ofcourse shot through with lines ofconflict and antago-

nism, but none that appear as fixed and eternal boundaries. The

surface of imperial society continuously shifts in such a way that it

destabilizes any notion ofplace. The central moment ofmodern

racism takes place on its boundary, in the global antithesis between

inside and outside. As Du Bois said nearly one hundred years ago,

the problem ofthe twentieth century is the problem ofthe color

line. Imperial racism, by contrast, looking forward perhaps to the

twenty-first century, rests on the play of differences and the manage-

ment ofmicro-conflictualities within its continually expanding

domain.

On the Generation and

Corruption of Subjectivity

The progressive lack ofdistinction between inside and outside has

important implications for the social production of subjectivity.

One ofthe central and most common theses ofthe institutional

analyses proposed by modern social theory is that subjectivity is

not pre-given and original but at least to some degree formed

in the field ofsocial forces. In this sense, modern social theory

progressively emptied out any notion ofa presocial subjectivity and

instead grounded the production ofsubjectivity in the functioning

of major social institutions, such as the prison, the family, the factory,

and the school.

Two aspects ofthis production process should be highlighted.

First, subjectivity is a constant social process ofgeneration. When

the boss hails you on the shop floor, or the high school principal

hails you in the school corridor, a subjectivity is formed. The

material practices set out for the subject in the context of the

institution (be they kneeling down to pray or changing hundreds

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ofdiapers) are the production processes ofsubjectivity. In a reflexive

way, then, through its own actions, the subject is acted on, gener-

ated. Second, the institutions provide above all a discrete
place

(the home, the chapel, the classroom, the shop floor) where the

production ofsubjectivity is enacted. The various institutions of

modern society should be viewed as an archipelago offactories of

subjectivity. In the course ofa life, an individual passes linearly into

and out ofthese various institutions (from the school to the barracks

to the factory) and is formed by them. The relation between inside

and outside is fundamental. Each institution has its own rules and

logics ofsubjectivation: ‘‘School tells us, ‘You’re not at home any-

more’; the army tells us, ‘You’re not in school anymore.’ ’ 18 Never-

theless, within the walls ofeach institution the individual is at least

partially shielded from the forces of the other institutions; in the

convent one is normally safe from the apparatus of the family, at

home one is normally out ofreach offactory discipline. This clearly

delimited
place
ofthe institutions is reflected in the regular and fixed
form
ofthe subjectivities produced.

In the passage to imperial society, the first aspect ofthe modern

condition is certainly still the case, that is, subjectivities are still

produced in the social factory. In fact, the social institutions produce