Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human Alexander G Weheliye
(Northwestern University, pub. book on politics of music)
Questions:
* Given whatever shortcomings/lacks we see in Foucault, what is our view of taking those up in our own work?
* Uber-philosophical mode tends to be adversarial
* What would it mean to productively engage Agamben
* Call at the end of the chapter would be to apply Agamben on the plantation —> this seems like the way to do this work, “without linking with the demon of comparison” to discuss other instances of these racializing assemblages
* What does the Agamben and Foucault criticism have to do with the discussion beginning on p.65 the “Born Free” music video?
- Why
- Why that example?
- Why one privileged example? rather than historical examples
* What is “ethnic racism” and biopolitical racism?
* What is the status of the critique of the Foucault?
* What is the explicit intervention (p. 56 and 57)
* What do we learn about biopolitics that we don’t already know after this critique?
* What is W’s own view of the relationship between ethnic and biopolitical racism?
It is fair to say that F should have looked, thought, etc. but at least a sense in which biopolitics emerge as a way of thinking about where the other sites of power that are not as visible because power makes them invisible.
Race comes in not as exactly the place where race is the only place that
how within a political space that is supposed to foster life, it can still justify death —> the whole point is not to highlight that function and to assume that what biopolitics is
the death function is a sort of challenge to what F wants to do (he introduces the genocide as a counter argument… then he needs an explanation. If the assumption is that the form of politics .. then genocide … then biopolitical racism
But if you replace “biopilitlcs” with genocide, you lose explanatory power
The subtle thing was to say why we don’t look at other sites where the question of normalization is much more subtle. (healthcare, sexuality)
Title: black feminism doesn’t seem to be anywhere in this?: pg 65 and MIA in lineage of “women of color”
- when you tell someone that you missed this amazing site where political power gets to be expressed.
- W even locates influence on F as Angela Davis, black panther movement (60, 62)
Denial of a certain presence (but it is known that F never quotes anything; how do you measure - esp. in the lectures - that he wasn’t giving proper credit)
- This was about “colonial expropriation” without mentioning the person and thus exploits that person without
- Similar things have been said about Derrida
—> What do we do with people we agree with?!?: is this a plausible mode of philosophical and theoretical precedents (F not quoting Marx or Nietszche to avoid being read solely for their quotes, mentions); is this different than when you are appropriating from the black panthers? is that different? why’?
- different because people are already familiar with Marx, etc. but when you appropriating from a less well known, or disavowed, it is a different; his audience can more easily detect the Marx, etc than the black panther party
Is this the way of saving Foucault: the lacunae (63) but here is a way that Foucault is connected with postcolonial thinking as well. The point isn’t to get rid of F, but to show F’s limits and the points in his thinking that have much more significant and radical ties.
Minolo as indicated for stealing from Peruvian thinkers; but this is a different critique because Minolo is already a decolonial thinker.
- Conflates the politics of scholarship with the potential politics of the influence of scholarship what should be two separate questions.
- He could be a good progressive about punishment and be on the wrong side with respect to who to cite and when.
- "I have this idea about political something” vs. if the idea should have political weight, doesn’t that depend on the purchase of that idea, the take up by others, the making it their own?
- The scholarship question: F got his ideas about discipline and punishment and state racism from the black panthers and the act of universalizing those ideas erased those bodies from the ideas.
- Is it the real thing that F ignores where he got the ideas, or
(F’s book was not initially about prisons in the 18th/19th century but would he not have written that book without people saying that prisons work in a certain way in the 1970s; even though he doesn’t quote them doesn’t mean that he doesn’t register that their thought is not thought)
( and more undergrads would know Davis than Foucault)
- So Foucault is missing ethnic racism (59): what is the “ontological differentiation” or a paradigmatic form that we get with biopower? Fouclat is making a historical point, not an ontological point about these two different forms of racism.
- what lis the order of operation with ethnic, biological, modern racism (most of modern forms of racism looks to the biological for epistemic authority). The ethnic and national are synonyms (ideology(. His claim is that F separates this from the biological and ∆ introduces the ontological and ∆ F leaves the door open for biological racism. W wants to
- Do you need that kind of order?
- F is more about how does biopolitical discourse get going —> it draws on race war discourse and biological/evolutionary
- But this was a guy who was TALKING here, giving a lecture, but then to make a big deal from a recording
- Then his claim that F elides ethnic racism as doesn’t attend that form of productive power (like nazism and the atomic bomb) but that argument only works if ethnic racism only works by way of oppression. But F tries to see oppressions as productive, yes-saying, that leads to it. (it is not English hatred of the Irish, but English love of self; and fear that the self that is so awesome is threatened // move about the Bourgie and sexuality) Fear in service of “let’s make them more like us” which F says this is NOT oppression but injustice of ego/normalization
- Is it problematic that the ways these things get classified as poor, indigent, etc. —> F reads a logic of the normal/pathological and certain logic underlies the ways that certain discriminations begin that will probably function in racism as well to a certain extent
(race is just a technology but W takes race to be the dominant term that produces the dichotomy, where for F race is a form by which differences are produced; “reason” and “unreason” is one dichotomy that produced the madman)
- MIA example: shows point of intersection between biopolitical and ethnic racism? the positive part of the chapter: exemplary of the assemblages (what F and A kept apart) - the ethnic and biopolitical racism.
- if you don’t decouple these different forms of racisms; where is the force of the theoretical points —> we can imagine racial orders differently
- the point is that biological is always articulated through the ethnic and warrants the treating the populations as such
- the gingers are exemplar of a "future ethnicity” that is performed in the video
Half of the sentence about scholarship on biopolitics, “taken together” ignores race, at least initially is true (though Stohler, McWhorter, Bernasconi, and Ellen Fetterer, Huggen)
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