Abstract
In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucault's work should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucault's archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical, and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and spatiality in terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces‐institutions‐geographies that consolidated the racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo‐history in terms of racializing spatialities.
Notes
Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the US,” New Left Review, 13 (Jan–Feb 2002): 41–60. See also “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society, 3, no. 1 (2001): 95–134.
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 301.
Two exceptions are Chris Pilo, “Foucault's Geography,” in Thinking Space, eds Mike Crang and Nigel Trift (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 205–38, and Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History (London and New York: Continuum, 2001). See also the use of Foucault by J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), especially chapter 2: “Maps, Knowledge, Power,” 51 ff. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real‐and‐Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996), chapter 5: “Heterotopologies: Foucault and the Geohistory of Otherness,” 145–63.
Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 307.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), ix.
Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Michel Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, Michel Foucault, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 226.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xvii–xviii.
Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in Michel Foucault Live, 346.
Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 224.
Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 92.
Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 82–83.
See Béatrice Han, Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), especially chapter 3: “The Reformulation of the Archaeological Problem and the Genealogical Turn,” 73–107.
Foucault, “Question on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge, 77.
Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Knowledge/Power, 83.
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 209.
Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 237.
Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 294.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 139.
Foucault, “Eye of Power,” 228.
Ronald R. Sundstrom, “Race and Place: social space in the production of human kinds,” Philosophy and Geography, 6, no. 1 (2003): 83–95, quote at 90.
The idea of racism as a technology of subjection and agency determination can be made more precise with reference to Foucault's clarification of the concept of “technology.” Foucault writes: “[T]here are four major types of these “technologies,” each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of another a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. These four types of technologies hardly ever function separately, although each one of them is associated with a certain type of domination.” Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18.
Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). The French version only appeared in 1997.
Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, 78–108.
Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, 102.
See Pasquale Pasquino, “Political Theory of war and peace: Foucault and the history of modern political theory,” Economy and Society, 22, no. 1 (Feb 1993): 77–88.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139.
See Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, “Situating the Lectures,” in Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 273–93. See also the special issue of Cités dedicated to these lectures. Cités: Philosophie, Politique, Historie, 2 (2000): Michel Foucault: de la guerre des races au biopouvoir (Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 2000).
Foucault devoted his 1979 lectures to “the birth of biopolitics.” See the resume of these lectures: “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Volume One, Michel Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1997), 73–80. See the following discussions: Thomas Lemke, “‘The birth of bio‐politics’: Michel Foucault's lectures on neo‐liberal governmentality,” Economy & Society, 30, no. 2 (May 2001): 190–207, and his book Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität (Berlin and Hamburg: Argument, 1997), especially part two, chapter 1. See also Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London and Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), chapter 5: “Bio‐Politics and Sovereignty.”
Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 245. Italics added.
Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 254.
Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 255.
Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 257.
See the suggestive if misguided reflection on Foucault's similarity to Carl Schmitt by Mika Ojakangas, “Sovereign and Plebs: Michel Foucault Meets Carl Schmitt,” Telos, 119 (Spring 2001): 32–40.
See David Theo Goldberg, “‘Polluting the Body Politic’: Racist Discourse and Urban Location,” in Racism, the City and the State, eds Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 45–60.
Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 41–42.
The distinction is discussed by Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African‐American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 9.
Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 54–60.
Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, 50.
See Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2000), 356–57.
Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993). Reprinted in Critical Race Theory: The key Writings, eds Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 276–91.
Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 7.
Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 46.
Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), viii–ix.
Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in two American Centuries (New York: Basic Civitas, 1998), 175–76.
Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 47.
See Loïc J. D. Wacquant, “The Ghetto, the State and the New Capitalist Economy,” in Metropolis: Center and Symbol of our Times, ed. Philip Kasinitz (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 418–49.
Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer, quoted in Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. The Suburbanization of the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 228.
Melvin L. Oliver and Tom Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth (New York: Routledge, 1995), 142. Quoted in George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 32. Lipsitz has one of the most perspicacious analyses of the ways in which “civil rights” have been used by Whites to further codify what Cheryl Harris called “Whiteness as Property.”
Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 7.
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 230.
Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 49.
Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 50.
Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 50.
See Bryonn Dain, “Three days in NYC jails: Black = Terrorist = Thug: The New Racial Profile?,” Village Voice, September 24–30, 2003, 30–31.
Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: The New Press, 1999), 1, 9, 19.
Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 19.
Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 23.
Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 119.
Marc Mauer, “Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Voters,” in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, eds Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney‐Lind (New York: The New Press, 2003), 51.
Young African‐American male means a male between the ages of eighteen and fifteen. Of these, one in three are under criminal justice supervision. See Loïc Wacquant, “Four Strategies to Curb Carceral Costs: On Managing Mass Imprisonment in the United States,” Studies in Political Economy, 69 (Autumn 2002): 19–30, quote at 19.
Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 186.
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982), 7–14.
Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 170.
Mauer, “Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Voters,” 51.
Jeremy Travis, “Invisible Punishment: An instrument of Social Exclusion,” in Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney‐Lind, eds., Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New York: The New Press, 2003), 22. See also Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 16–24.
Travis, “Invisible Punishment,” 24.
Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 58.
Wacquant, “Four Strategies to Curb Carceral Costs: On Managing Mass Imprisonment in the United States,” 20.
Parenti, Lockdown America, 213.
Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis,” 116.
NAACP <www.naacp.org/work/washington_bureau/DeathPenalty032803.shtml>. The 55 percent people of color statistic can be found in a report by the ACLU entitled “Race and the Death Penalty,” <www.aclu.org/DeathPenalty/DeathPenalty.cfm?ID = 9312&c = 62>.
John Bessler, Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 160.
Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Rep. Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Bruce Shapiro, Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 71.
Report entitled “Geography Determines Death Sentences,” <www.aclu.org/news>
Jackson, et al., Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future, 71.
Jackson, et al., Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future, 70.