Foucault\u27s Move beyond the Theoretical

Theory plays an important role in virtually every academic discipline currently vital. The specific functions of theory may differ from discipline to discipline, but it is difficult to think of any serious discipline that is able to dispense with it entirely; for theory, we usually assume, is quite simply the name of all instances of systematic speculation, all attempts at rational explication. Ordered mentation, most of us unwaveringly believe, is and must be theoretical. All that is not theoretical is either confused thinking – or, more positively, perhaps it is poetic – or it is not thinking at all, but rather a practice, object, or event. Thus the theoretical discloses itself to us as the essential nature of all our striving to make sense of ourselves and our world

Rites of Passing: Foucault, Power, and Same-Sex Commitment Ceremonies

According to Catherine Bell, The popular contention that ritual and religion decline in proportion to modernization has been something of a sociological truism since the mid-19th century . Conventional wisdom maintains that ritual practices just don\u27t hold central importance in the lives of those raised in the industrialized world as compared with the importance such things had for our distant ancestors or for our contemporaries in non-industrial societies. Some have contended that this is because ritual tends to be strongly correlated with pre-scientific cosmological beliefs that our society has for the most part outgrown. But for whatever reason, [c]omparatively speaking, writes Ronald Grimes, Western industrial societies spend less time and energy on rites than do people living in more traditional, small-scale societies and less than Asian, Middle Eastern, and African peoples

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Ladelle McWhorter

Shelley Tremain, of the blog Dialogues on Disability, interviews Ladelle McWhorter about her career, upbringing, and life experiences

Racism and Biopower

While ignorance, or at least a lack of clear and distinct experience, does not seem to have stopped our predecessors from philosophizing about all manner of things from matter to immortal souls, in the latter half of the twentieth century North American philosophers became increasingly timid about advancing propositions based primarily not on logic informed by material evidence but on intuition, creative imagination, and passionate desire. By the 1960s our generation\u27s teachers and mentors, perhaps battered by the McCarthy years or humbled by the dazzling successes of their colleagues in the hard sciences, had redrawn the disciplinary boundaries tightly enough to make almost any speculative work fall outside the realm of legitimate philosophy and into the realm ofliberal politics or sociology (read: soft-headed nonsense) or that of literature (read: girl stuff). In this way they sought to purify and legitimate the discipline. Even still, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, North American continentalists labor under and around these intellectual and institutional (and highly gender-coded) dividing practices and defensive barriers; much of our work is still considered by about 90 percent of our Anglo-American philosophical contemporaries to be irrational poeticizing or manipulative politicizing. And of course in most circles our masculinity is still in serious doubt

Where Do White People Come From? A Foucaultian Critique of Whiteness Studies

Over the past 15 years we have seen the rise of a field of inquiry known as Whiteness Studies. Two of its major tenets are (1) that white identity is socially constructed and functions as a racial norm and (2) that those who occupy the position of white subjectivity exercise ‘white privilege’, which is oppressive to non-whites. However, despite their ubiquitous use of the term ‘norm’, Whiteness Studies theorists rarely give any detailed account of how whiteness serves to normalize. A case is made here that we can only understand how whiteness normalizes if we place the development of white racial subject positions within the context of the development of normalizing biopower that Foucault describes in his work through the 1970s. Once that context is provided, it becomes clear that a larger problem exists in Whiteness Studies, one evident in the use of the concept of ‘white privilege’. Whiteness Studies theorists have not thoroughly critiqued the juridical conception of power that they have inherited from traditional political theory; as a result, they cannot get away from psychological accounts of the origins of racism, even though they usually state very clearly that they believe racism is an institutional phenomenon and racist subject positions are formed within networks of power. If Whiteness Studies is to accomplish both its analytical and its political goals, its theorists need to pay close attention to Foucault’s work on biopower

Racism, Eugenics, and Ernst Mayr’s Account of Species

At his death at age one hundred in 2005, Ernst Mayr was hailed as the greatest evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century. His definition of species, published in 1942 in Systematics and the Origin of Species and known as the “biological species concept,” is familiar to every tenth grader: “Species are groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups.” That definition, together with Mayr’s and Theodosius Dobzhansky’s theory of speciation, enabled the integration of modern genetics and Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this paper I will argue that it imported racism into the heart of modern genetics as well

Book Panel Response: Symposium on Ladelle McWhorter\u27s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy

Unfortunately I do not have space to address individually each issue these four papers raise. Instead, I will first situate my work in relation to identity politics and address fears that my approach is reductive. Then, building on comments from Professors Wilkerson and Al-Saji, I will offer some remarks about aims, methods, and shortcomings

Racism and Responsibility

Forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and fifty years after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, members of racial minority groups are still disproportionately disadvantaged in American society. Despite official civic integration, despite a massive shift in the terms of public discourse, despite a publicly avowed moral and cognitive reorientation on the part of a significant number of whites, neighborhoods and schools are more segregated than ever, whites still control an overwhelming percentage of this country\u27s wealth and hold a virtual monopoly on elite corporate and governmental positions, the distribution of income and health care is still dramatically unequal, and a disproportionate number of people of color live in poverty. Something is wrong. But what, exactly

Asceticism/Askēsis: Foucault\u27s Thinking Historical Subjectivity

In the Introduction to The Use of Pleasure Foucault calls his work an askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought. The living substance of philosophy, Foucault writes, is the essay, which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication. Foucault\u27s work, then, does not simply report to us his conclusions or theories. Foucault is not primarily interested in imparting information. What he offers instead is a kind of exercise book

Queer Economies

Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories. Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neoliberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible to governance through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in this analysis