The Remainders of Race - Ash Amin

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The Remainders of Race

Ash Amin Theory Culture Society 2010 27: 1 DOI: 10.1177/0263276409350361 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/27/1/1 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com

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The Remainders of Race Ash Amin

Abstract Prompted by the speed with which, in certain historical moments, the hardwon achievements of anti-racism can be comprehensively undone, this article reflects on the mechanisms that keep racial coding and judgement close to the surface, ready to spring into action. It reads the intensity of race in a given present in terms of the play between vernacular legacies of racecoded reception of visible difference and the conjunctural mobilizations of race by biopolitical regimes – state-regulated systems of governing populations – to maintain collective order. The article explains the contemporary trend in the West towards the ‘racialization of everything’ as the product of mutually reinforcing mischief between vernacular and biopolitical racism.

It closes with a discussion of the implications of such conjunctural tightness, one which questions the effectiveness of humanist arguments that have come to the fore in recent years focusing on practices of recognition and reconciliation.

Key words anti-racism

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biopolitics

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phenotype

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race

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racial legacies

The formula of revolutionary solidarity is not ‘let us tolerate our differences’, it is not a pact of civilisations, but a pact of struggles which cut across civilisations, a pact between what, in each civilisation, undermines its identity from within, fights against its oppressive kernel. What unites us is the same struggle. (Žižek, 2008: 133)

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HIS ARTICLE reflects on the historical phenomenology of race and racism, sparked by an extraordinary exhibition on apartheid in 2007 at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona. The exhibition spanned a 200-year history of racial violence perfected by the apartheid system in South Africa. Using a rich mixture of text, film, photography, installations, paintings and sculpture, the exhibition told three stories. The ■

Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 27(1): 1–23 DOI: 10.1177/0263276409350361

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first was that of classification: how racial differentiation and racist violence relied on an elaborate machinery of eugenic science, scripture, travel journals, museum displays, measuring instruments, photographs and laws.

The exhibition laid bare the architecture of racial formation and the heinous work done by it. Second, it told the story of opposition – the inventions of counter-classification, art, music, faith, organization and resistance that eventually dismantled apartheid. It showed that even a machinic architecture of race could eventually be shaken through steadfast subversion. Third, the exhibition told the story of persistence, of how the optimism and hope unleashed when the apartheid state collapsed have given way to new forms of racialized poverty and oppression linked to economic liberalism and racist legacy.

The exhibition forced me to think about why racism persists and quickly resurfaces even when thought to be thoroughly dismantled, about the play between endurance and change. It made me want to dig into the archaeology of a racial present, to know more about the historical dynamic of race in order to think anew the hopes and possibilities of anti-racist thought and practice.

For, while the exhibition acknowledged the possibility of change (radical and incremental), it also revealed the inflections of racist legacy, institutionalized and popular, acting like a call to order. It confirmed the all too familiar echo of persistence heard in historical novels on the experience of race in Africa, Europe, India and America, and which has troubled genealogists of race such Du Bois, Fanon, Said, Baldwin, Hall, Gilroy, Bernasconi, West, Pred and, most recently, Winant (2006: 987) when he states: the age of empire is over; apartheid and Jim Crow have been ended; and a significant consensus exists among scientists (natural and social), and humanists as well, that the concept of race lacks an objective basis. Yet the concept persists, as idea, as practice, as identity, and as social structure.

Racism perseveres in these same ways.1

Even the most discredited concepts of race seem to return, albeit in different guises. Biological racism is a case in point. Today, most justifications of race rely on cultural, not biological arguments, playing on the claim that the beliefs, values and practices of different ethnic communities are both distinctive and irreconcilable. The science of race read from pigment, cranial feature or hair quality, or culture read from biogeography or gene has been exposed as false, no longer able to justify violence against people demarcated as inferior or dangerous races. The discoveries of genetic science are widely disseminated in public culture, showing that some 98 percent of the human genetic pool is shared with chimpanzees and that variations in DNA sequence are greater within, than between, human groups, with the residual distributed in no consistent or meaningful way to justify racial classification.

Yet, the very science that questions the validity of race as a reliable marker of human difference is now being used in some quarters to look for Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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genetically validated differences between socially defined ethnic and racial groups, instead of questioning the given racial and ethnic categories in the first place.2 Though a new molecular biology might have arisen – one that is ‘probabilistic not deterministic, open not closed, not identifying an essential racial truth that determines individuals to different fates’ (Rose, 2007: 161) – it has not prevented some scientific, medical and insurance circles speculating on the socio-biological pathologies of taken-for-granted ethnic groups. This imprecision, inadvertently or otherwise, is supporting a new politics of race linking particular forms of ill-being and vulnerability to particular ethnic groups (e.g. obesity, social deviance and heart failure to African-Caribbeans or South Asians) (Carter, 2007; Duster, 2003; Fullwiley, 2007). The very rebuttal of race rooted in biology is returning as its justification, open to new forms of biological racism.

At one level, this particular example of return is relatively easy to explain, as a new classificatory (mal)practice that is naturalized through professional, institutional and discursive repetition. But the rapidity of return and its widespread diffusion – the open social receptivity to narrations of race – is perhaps less easy to explain, and certainly an underexplored topic in the literature on race and racism. Is there a temporal logic to race, an evolutionary dynamic that maintains racial legacies close enough to the surface to spring back with force? If so, what is its nature and how is it sustained? In turn, what regulates the intensity of harm caused by the perseverance or eruption of race in a specific present? Under what conditions do mixes of past and present racial practices become especially vengeful towards the racialized other?

These are the questions tackled in this article, prompted by a need to make sense of the current racial present in the West, a time of comprehensive suspicion and punitive orientation among states and majority publics towards Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11. The article seeks to understand why the steady achievements of multiculturalism and the politics of diversity in general in the last decades of the 20th century have melted away so fast, and to look for anti-racist possibilities cognizant of the burdens imposed by the past. These are large and difficult questions to which only partial and sometimes incomplete answers are provided, but in the spirit of soliciting a much-needed debate on the play between past and present in the regulation of race.

The article opens with a genealogical argument, claiming that in matters of race, where forces of duration are strongly etched into the social unconscious and institutional legacy, disruptions to settlements of race (e.g. multiculturalism, apartheid, assimilationism) are more open to the rush of past racial ‘debris’ than to new progressive developments. The second part of the article, however, also argues that the harms of what does get through of legacies of institutional and vernacular racism are regulated by the mobilizations of race by given biopolitical regimes – by the specifics of the systems of state governance of populations. The claim, therefore, is that it is the interplay between vernacular habits with long historical roots of Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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reading racial and social worth from surface bodily differences and racial biopolitics that makes the critical difference to the real experience of race, arbitrating the choice between accommodation and discipline of the racialized other. This is the proposition used to explain the intensely racial present in the West. The final part discusses the implications of this reading for antiracist practice. Given the obduracy of phenotypical legacies and the power of racial biopolitics, the discussion addresses the limitations of ‘humanist’ proposals that have come to the fore in recent years, recommending inter-ethnic/racial recognition and reconciliation.

Archaeology of the Present A valuable opening into the temporal logic of race is offered by Elizabeth Grosz in her book The Nick of Time (2004). Grosz turns to three important 19th- or early 20th-century thinkers on time to single out three evolutionary tendencies. The first is the tendency of unpredictable change, taken from Darwin’s insistence that the processes of natural and sexual selection yield more rather than less variety and categorical disturbance – including among humans – because past causal connections combine in novel ways. Accordingly, evolution – cultural and biological – must not be seen as the finalization of an inherently incomplete nature, but as a dynamic that yields variation for no reason: excess rather than fitness, continual change rather than fixity. The implication for racial evolution is that no logic of destiny, worth or self-preservation is at work or to be assumed as such.

Second, from Nietzsche, who criticized Darwin for reading too much novelty and variety into the free play of nature, Grosz recovers an ‘untimely’ force, a ‘will to power’ or active force of preservation and expansion built into all forms of life as part of an efficacy to conserve energy. While Nietzsche imagined this force to be as ‘natural’ as any other, he saw its continuity and release as dependent upon a conscious and supreme effort to commit the future to repetition. In the modern history of race, the consequences are well known of grossly distorted applications of Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘Overman’ – the force of eternal return, which Nietzsche saw as quite different from any will to preserve/expand nation or race.

Third, in the gap opened between Darwinian proliferation and Nietzschian eternal return, Grosz turns to Bergson’s idea of the past as immanence, conceived as a duration of the more than necessary into the present, a vital energy close to the surface of things, becoming manifest only when actualized. Bergson described this force as the élan vital, which he saw less as a generic life force than as an ‘initial impetus’, something of the past acting to delay, prolong, redirect the energies of the present – a spark for ‘novelty, invention into what is otherwise predictable’ (Grosz, 2004: 201). Thus, from a Bergsonian perspective, if race is duration, it is so as a latent force, bursting through ‘a nick in time’ – an opening in settled evolutionary trajectory – but with always emergent and unexpected outcomes.

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This reading of time as the play between newness, repetition and immanence suggests the possibility of three dynamics of race: first, a restless impulse of variety and novelty, always disrupting and challenging settled patterns of racial formation and behaviour; second, the potential to return sameness if the forces of repetition are strong, perhaps organized and channelled; and, third, the potentiality of accumulated racial debris, variegated and dormant from different eras, ready to be instantiated in unknown ways. It helps to explain both the surprises and constancies of race and also why newness comes temporally freighted. To be alerted to the remainders of race in this way is to be drawn to the possibility that a given race ‘event’ contains more than what is disclosed, poised between gathered momentum and disruption, between the singularity of the will to power and the pluralism of the élan vital, between immanence and actualization.

How, then, might the balance between racial duration and disruption be regulated? Could it be that when the forces of repetition are as strong and purposeful as they have been at least in the modern history of race within or led by the West – a history in which racial categorization and evaluation has been both pervasive and deeply etched into institutional and popular practice – the Bergsonian temporal logic of disruption/another latency and that of Darwinian proliferation are somehow stifled? Might such an account help to explain why every act of categorical subversion or anti-racist progress is so often folded back into stacked legacies of racism, if not in form then in intent, keeping more or less the same bodies in place?

Grosz in her book turns to Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson to outline a positive politics of race (and gender), one that is respectful of the past, recognizes latencies yet to be actualized, finds hope in the unpredictability of the evolutionary process. She looks for openings and lessons from the past to strengthen anti-racist thought and practice in the present. I share this historicity, which is all too readily forgotten in the heat of struggle in a given time and place, but remain wary of the possibility of Time’s arrow throwing up latent non-racialized or pre-racialized tendencies of human being, due to the sheer force of racist legacy in imperial and post-imperial Western history.3 I am suggesting that in such a temporal context, the relationship between the evolutionary tendencies identified by Grosz may be a hierarchical one, with entrenched accumulations and repetitions of race acting like a call to order with machinic force upon the surplus latencies and unforeseen novelties released through the nicks in time when settled patterns of race are disturbed. To propose this is not to read the future of race as more of the same or to throw a veil of doom around anti-racist politics; inaction in the face of new inventions to maintain and make mischief out of racial hierarchy (as described in the next section) is not an option. Instead, it is to recognize the weight of racial legacy, to ask why, in our times, progressive openings such as hope for a non-racial society in South Africa after apartheid remain so fragile and vulnerable, why the Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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steady steps towards a multicultural West prior to 9/11 have come to be so quickly swept aside by new racisms building on old exclusions.

If a historical momentum behind an event pushes for more rather than less race, how this works needs to be explained. There is a rich tradition of academic, documentary and fictional writing that speaks of racist continuity, if not in form then certainly in substance, but it tends to fall short of giving an adequate explanation of the sources of continuity. I do not pretend otherwise here, save to offer one possible explanation stressing the interplay between institutional legacies and human sorting instincts in the face of excess, variety and the unknown, to demarcate territory – an interplay that keeps similarity and difference, inside and outside, safe and threatening, as racially coded and, in turn, maintains racial hierarchy as the filter of social evaluation.

Codification and institutionalization are the staples of racial legacy, stretching their tentacles across time through visual and literary cultures, state practices of human categorization, pedagogical traditions, myths of nation, community and belonging (and their opposites), inscriptions in everyday technologies of social ordering (from measures of personhood and well-being to housing and social mobility calculations), and the long sedimentations of public culture – always putting a face and particular attributes to the racialized other at home or abroad, always concerned with the cartographic allocation of race. Continuity is secured through a machinery of human ordering in different domains of social life, maintained through state rules and regulations, social codes and conventions, myths of heritage and community, technologies of human governance (Rutherford, 2007). This machinery repeats the racial society by demarcating a weighted relationship between the racially defined body and the collective social body, between bodily form and personhood or citizenship.

Michel Foucault touched on the continuities, complicities and paradoxes of racial ordering in Society Must Be Defended (2003). He claimed that the rise of decentred and subjugated knowledges in Europe after the late Middle Ages as a reaction against the Roman idea of history as sovereign continuity yielded a discourse of history as a war between ‘races’, mobilized by both those seeking freedom from oppression and those looking to rule in new ways. This discourse gradually became taken for granted as the basis of human and social differentiation through diverse state and popular classificatory practices (see also Mendieta, forthcoming). Such an understanding explains not only the most visible and brutal continuities of racial biopower, as witnessed in South Africa, where the many material and symbolic practices of apartheid ensured the reproduction of white power, but also the continuities of racial inequality in liberal societies based on the colour-coding – in national myths, legal and constitutional interpretation, cultural and institutional legacies – of liberal understandings of personhood, citizenship and moral worth.

The historical repetition in this way of race as a mode of social categorization and evaluation is its naturalization. Race and its mobilizations Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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become a social given until unmasked and challenged (but even then, hard to shift, as suggested), steering everyday human practice by making available so many sorting filters that bodily and cultural differences are sensed as racial differences, in the flicker of an eyelid, the hint of a smell, the trace of an utterance. This is automaticity not only of coding bodies and cultures but also of affective and evaluative response (Ahmed, 2004). If there is anything like a sorting instinct among humans triggered by sensory data to distinguish foe from friend, threat from safety, the familiar from the strange, in order to help them make their way through the world without having to test the ground at every step, racial legacies, by encrypting such data as strongly meaningful, tap into this instinct, activating diverse affects of ‘territorial’ demarcation. Accordingly, racial practice becomes an everyday ‘doing’, well before thought, effortlessly weaving together historically honed folk summaries of others that people carry in their heads and a phenomenology of bodily response that also recurs with uncanny consistency (Brubaker et al., 2004).

Following Saldanha (2006), we might describe such everyday doings of race as ‘phenotypical’ racism, working with handed down folk summaries of ‘racial’ grouping based on essentialized biological and cultural markings (and therefore liberated from the ‘truths’ of genetic and biological science on race), and reliant on the sensory-affective sorting of surface phenomena through these summaries. Two examples of recent writing illustrate the workings of phenotypical racism. One comes from Arun Saldanha’s (2007) book Psychedelic Whiteness, which is about white superiority on the beaches of Goa asserted through the emanations of biography, skin tan, posture, dress code, bodily marking, accent, style, consumption habits and territorial occupancy of certain parts of the beach. Saldanha shows how particular bodily performances, signalling racial and affective location, tacitly sort out seasoned whites from Britain and Northern Europe and aspirants from Southern Europe, from Goans and other Asians who, despite every attempt to appear and act ‘cool’, always remain uneasy, second-best, beachcombers.

It is through these body rituals tapping into long histories of racial positioning – performative, discursive and symbolic – that the beach becomes a white space, displacing the settlements of postcolonial Goa, making the beach habits of natives and white pretenders seem out of place.

The second illustration is provided by ethnographies of embodied racism in the run-down mill towns of northern England, which witnessed intense rioting by young South Asian men in the summer of 2001 (Alexander, 2004; Swanton, 2007). For the briefest of moments during and after the unrest in places such as Burnley, Bradford and Oldham, when public and policy commentary was caught off-guard, unsure if these were civic, religious, youth or race riots, and anxious to understand motive, analysis focused on the role played by local histories of segregation, economic and social deprivation, cultural and religious isolation, racism and paternalist leadership. Along with an interest in the daily lives of whites and Asians, and especially contact between communities, there was a desire Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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to get behind the facts by understanding underlying causes, so that appropriate policy responses could be formulated to tackle disadvantage, disaffection, racism and cultural isolation. These concerns temporarily overshadowed the stereotypes of phenotypical racism based on bodily summations. Not for long, though. As time wore on, and as the scrutiny of Muslim bodies intensified after 9/11 and 7/7 in the so-called ‘War on Terror’, the ‘phenotypical’ evaluations – new upon old – returned to typecast the Asians in these towns, along with Muslims elsewhere in Britain, as cultural aliens and national threats. Pinning new aversions such as anxiety, suspicion, fear and hate to local Muslims has relied, as Alexander and Swanton show, on linking vicariously constructed phenotypes (including prayer caps, beards, baggy trousers, rucksacks, Yorkshire accents, loud music, shiny cars and shabby dwellings) to terrorism, radical Islam, sexual slavery, drug trafficking and cultural backwardness.

What is clear from these examples is that phenotypical racism relies on sensory – especially visual – signals which, when indexed as proxies of race, spark distinctive judgements of people whose differences are considered essential to their identity (Hacking, 2005: 111). The damning predictability here resides in the connection between a vernacular of human difference read as racial difference and particular instincts of aversion sparked as a result, between practised histories of racism and human compulsions to categorize. This I do not see as the predictability of an inborn racism, traceable to particular racial instincts or genetic forcings,4 since it is the repetition of a race-inflected sensory/affective culture – the relationship between physiology and histories of inter-human evaluation – that needs explaining, and not some logic of biological determinism.

The beginnings of an answer may be found in the power of bioscopic regimes, linking normality and abnormality, beauty and ugliness, civilization and barbarism, strength and weakness, health and disease, to particular bodies and bodily states. The details of colour, shape, smell, behaviour, disposition, intent, picked out by racial scopic regimes as tellers of human grouping and social standing – etched over a long historical period across a spectrum of communication media – come to frame the thoughts, actions and feelings of the condemning and the condemned, as Fanon (1967) so acutely observed, through their progressive naturalization and internalization. In weaving together phenomenological and affective states, the regimes simultaneously structure popular judgement and feeling, they assume ‘racial instincts’ to be inherent and ‘natural’, and such ‘instincts’ become the tools of everyday practice. Thinking along such lines invites consideration of the history of certain senses coming to the fore, in the way Cornel West (2003) has attempted by arguing that the rise of modernity privileged the eye, through its emphasis on epistemology and the knowing subject, which allowed Western racism to emerge once this ocular sensibility came to impose Hellenic standards of beauty and humanity. A visual scopic regime, once in place, could invent and sustain new racial hierarchies such as the association between blackness and servitude, which arises only after the Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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17th century but remains intact thereafter, as the indexing of human worth to visual traits becomes standard practice (Alcoff, 2006; Martinot, 2002) and open to new indices in the course of time.

Duration and Biopolitics The above two examples illustrate the power of phenotypical racism, working alongside biological and cultural scripts of race, and drawing on long-standing vernacular practices of bodily summation (naturalized by hegemonies such as bioscopic regimes). But they also reveal very different harms. The Goan example is grist to the Western mill of racial humiliation, balanced between tolerance and disapproval of the racialized stranger. The English example is freighted with menace. Its racial coding is intent on condemning, crushing the body that offends. It is anything but tacit, imprecise or tolerant. These differences are important, for they not only shape human experience in a given time and place, but they also hint at other forces mediating the intensity of race. The durations of race – however constant, as I have tried to argue above – are not uniform. The difference between phenotypical racism being a weapon of avoidance and one of condemnation needs to be explained.

I wish to suggest that the balance is regulated by biopolitics, regimes put in place by states to govern populations (Rai, 2004). Clearly, debris from the past, everyday negotiations, orders of discipline and strategies of resistance and opposition are all entangled together in the experience of race.

But the moderation of past ‘excess’ – latency becoming manifest, novelty bursting through, history repeating itself, race taking on new meanings and feelings – seems to be strongly conditioned by the weight placed on race by given regimes of human governance. Phenotypical racism became deadly when it was harnessed to state mobilizations of biological racism under apartheid, other ethno-nationalisms, and colonial rule. Similarly, cultural racism, involving states and societies declaring that ethnic differences are irreconcilable on grounds of cultural incompatibility, shifts vernacular racism decidedly towards feelings and tactics of avoidance, ejection, separation.

The tools of racist biopolitics, which include racial science, visual economy, standards of classification, habits of public commentary, regimes of discipline and laws on race and migration, define the norms of personhood, citizenship and integration, the demarcations of home, nation and the outside, the contours of who counts for what. My claim is that biopolitical regimes, with their explicit rules and practices of order based on bodily differentiation and discipline, regulate the state of alert towards the raced body. The balance in a nick in time between charged and watchful racist repetition, between tolerance and vilification of difference, is held in the intersection between biopolitics and practices of race shaped by a history of bodies encountering each other, materially and symbolically.

A perfect illustration of how biopolitics and racial legacies feed off each other is provided by the contemporary escalation of anxiety among Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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majorities in many Western and non-Western societies towards the stranger.

In the West, for example, asylum seekers, migrants, Muslims, militant youths, pan-handlers, carriers of transmissible diseases are daily being incorporated into old rituals of condemnation of non-whites, Jews and Gypsies; such groups are no longer seen by majorities as victims of hazard and risk, but as unwanted and threatening strangers, the new black (Hughes, 2007; Kundnani, 2007). This shift is closely linked to the sharp escalation of racial biopolitics after 9/11 as the staple of a politics of community and community security. Bodily traits and ‘ethnic’ cultures are becoming the basis upon which peoples are allocated rights, identities, a place in the world (Bayart, 2005; Mamdani, 2004), at the expense of other modes of marking community and negotiating difference (e.g. doctrinaire principles, ideas of good citizenship, moral and ethical values). Most emblematic of this development is the warning from intellectuals, publics and states of a calamitous war to come between the world of secular liberalism (conveniently traced to the skins and traditions of Europe/North America) and the world of religious society (conveniently traced to the skins and traditions of Islam and rarely those of Christian fundamentalism).

It takes such reasoning to explain how quickly, on the back of the terrorist campaigns of the few, the lives of so many Muslims in the West have come under scrutiny and ultimately been condemned, in the name of safeguarding a population and a ‘historic’ way of life. This reduction of the choice between the profane and the sacred, the safe and the hazardous, to the traits and practices of particular humans rendered strange is the work of a biopolitics fanning a vernacular racism digging deep into old white anxieties regarding the Orient, and Muslims in particular. Past and new portrayals of threat and contamination are being given bite by states hastily cobbling together emergency powers permitting intrusive surveillance, arrest without warrant, illegal detention, foreign rendition, supported by hysterical media commentary calling for vigilance regarding veils, rucksacks, Urdu, gatherings in mosques, Islamic organizations, the behaviour of Muslim-looking people in public and private.5 Through these shifts, a late 20th-century multicultural politics of recognition and co-habitation has been swept aside by a politics of assimilation, in which states and majorities feel morally unperturbed in demanding an end to veils, religious schools, linguistic and cultural isolation, and other traditional practices from Muslims. Linked to an alarmist discourse of collective preservation and national security, it is hardly surprising that the new disciplinary developments are accompanied by the kind of phenotypical racism emerging in places like Burnley, Oldham and Bradford.

Under such a biopolitics, the taming of the errant body – in this case the Muslim body – is urged as a necessity, a matter of everyday vigilance from the responsible citizen, wronged for thinking and doing otherwise. The biopolitics of multiculturalism did not justify such action. It may have essentialized the identities of ethnic minorities, displayed a certain smugness of tolerating or bestowing rights on the racialized other without questioning Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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‘home’ myths, and failed to encourage engagement with minorities and their material needs in the name of recognizing their cultural autonomy (Ahmed, 2007; Brown, 2006; Fortier, 2008; Hage, 1998), but it did not condone vigilantism leading to punishment.

The new biopolitics focusing on taming or punishing the body judged to be errant provides an opening for past ethnic and racial hierarchies to return, wherever a politics of the social/communal is redefined as a politics of disciplining minorities and strangers. Whether this is a general contemporary trend, and one linked to the end of universalist political projects that dealt with or ignored the problem of difference, is an important but unresolved question. For example, Arjun Appadurai (2006: 7) argues that the killings in Rwanda, Bosnia and Gujarat, along with the rage on all sides linked to the current ‘War on Terror’, are evidence of such a turn – a turn driven by a consuming ‘fear of small numbers’ among national majorities catalysed by the cultural mixing and spatial rupture brought about by globalization and resulting in an ‘anxiety of incompleteness’, a ‘narcissism of minor differences’. Minorities have become ‘metaphors and reminders of the betrayal of the classical national project’ (2006: 43), easily tracked through various modes of ‘counting, classifying, and surveying populations’ (2006: 47), so that when ‘specific situations become overcharged with anxiety . . . that body [can] be annihilated’ (2006: 47).

Slavoj Žižek (2008), in contrast, offers a different explanation for the return of racial biopolitics. He traces this to the supposed end of an ideology-based politics worldwide that focused on value-based disputations and aspirations. According to Žižek, a new politics of ‘efficient administration of life’ has emerged, thriving on threats of total collapse if particular modes of behaviour (from civic disloyalty to sexual freedom and deviancy) traced to particular bodies (from asylum seekers to immigrants and minorities) are not eliminated. Žižek explains: Today’s predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics – an awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: ‘post-political’ is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management and administration, while ‘bio-politics’ designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal. It is clear how these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains is only the efficient administration of life . . . almost only that. That is to say, with the depoliticised, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero level of politics, the only way to induce passion into this field, to actively mobilise people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. For this reason, bio-politics is ultimately a politics of fear, it focuses on defence from potential victimisation or harassment. (2008: 34, emphasis in original)

Such a politics of fear, according to Žižek (see also Bauman, 2007), must obsess about national identity, the duties of immigrants, declining moral Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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standards, criminals on the loose, abuse of welfare systems, national security, cherished freedoms and more. It must unambiguously name the threatening body and prepare for its elimination with the help of tighter border controls, sophisticated surveillance and strategies of encampment, or for its domestication through various state discourses of integration.

It might be added that the redefinition of politics as a politics of the deviant body, as suggested by Appadurai and Žižek, is being reinforced by another general political development in response to a world perceived as increasingly unstable and dangerous, one involving the displacement of a governmentality of insurance/assurance by one of planning against Armageddon. Governments, regulatory bodies, academic writing, the media now continually warn of the threat of total destruction – by mutant germs or genes, super-intelligent machines, climate change, global terrorism, speculative capitalism gone mad, masses on the move. A new language of mitigation has arisen, recommending constant alertness and preparedness in face of mounting hazard and risk, under the leadership of a ‘security state’, which accepts the inevitability of large-scale disaster but puts in place anticipatory actions to mitigate the worst of, and recover quickly from, emergency situations (Dillon, 2008; Lakoff, 2007). Increasingly, this is how costly efforts involving tidal barriers, military and civil catastrophe management exercises, forecasting scenarios, funds to bail out collapsing banks, technologies to track suspects, medical services to cope with large-scale casualties are being understood: as efforts that remain one step behind the threat, an anticipation in the dark, a reasonable guess.

There is little ambiguity, however, about the place of the errant body in the new politics of Armageddon. Being in a state of permanent alert – insist governments, opinion makers, the defence sectors, insurers and, increasingly, publics – demands naming, tracking and disarming the threatening body well before the act, even if this means suspending protocols of proof, legal conduct, civil liberties and human rights. The balance between the two historic forms of state response to disaster that Adie Ophir (2007) has identified – the ‘providential state’ striving for the welfare of all, including migrants and minorities, and the ‘catastrophic state’, ready to ‘wipe out, when it deems necessary, any particular individual, or a multitude of anonymous ones’ (2007: 21) – seems to have tilted decidedly towards the second form. ‘The administration of disaster’ as ‘a form of governance and a way of ruling’ involving the suspension of ‘citizenship, the system of law and the constitution itself’ (2007: 21) is becoming taken for granted as states of emergency cease to be seen as states of exception.

Whatever the causes of today’s highly punitive biopolitical circumstances (from anxiety linked to globalization to the rise of a politics of life or of catastrophe management), the new state practices of order being put into place – which both play on and manipulate popular sentiment towards people considered to be different or anomalous (Terranova, 2007) – are allowing all manner of vengeance to be thrown at the racialized stranger.

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dextrous, articulate, light footed, well connected – is largely left alone to contribute to the multicultural nation as doctor, nurse, engineer, teacher, waiter, cleaner, knowledge worker. He or she tends to be pursued only by the nationalist perennially worrying about the decline of the ethnic nation, or by the security state when suspected of seditious intent. Instead, it is the most visible, vulnerable, needy, ill-equipped stranger who is most at risk.

For this stranger – graded by colour and cultural affinity to the mythic community – the linkage between heightened public anxiety and intrusive state security can only mean endless surveillance, vilification, exclusion, pressure to conform: rule by state and popular vigilantism.

Negotiating Race Although this article has placed its emphasis on the historical continuity of race, it has also argued that a given biopolitical present strongly shapes the actual intensity and experience of race. The difference between feeling awkward on a beach for not appearing hip and being removed for it is significant, as is the difference between neighbours from different ethnic backgrounds gossiping about each other and attacking each other, or that between states demanding conformity from visible minorities and rounding them up. These are differences of life and death, possibility and impossibility, inclusion and ejection, and they have a direct bearing on the aims, ambitions and prospects of anti-racist struggle in a given time and place.

As already suggested, in recent Western history, the scope for progress within the multicultural polity, notwithstanding its racial hierarchies, has been far greater than within the emergency polity that is coming into being, terrified by the errant body. The ontological pessimism of this article located in the consistency of race as a mode of responding to difference and uncertainty, therefore, is not an argument against anti-racism. If anything, it forces us to think about the nature of possibility under conditions of racial persistence and changing biopolitics, which is what I attempt in this last section.

To begin, the potency of racial legacies ingrained as a kind of historical force poses a challenge to suggestions for a future liberated from race as a code of human categorization and evaluation (e.g. a ‘planetary humanism’ based on a consciousness of shared traits/values or non-racial differences, as proposed by Paul Gilroy, 2001). If race thinking and acting, depressingly, has become ingrained in vernacular and institutional practice due to the force of stacked legacies of reading human difference and worth in racial terms, the journey to a non-racial future may prove to be one of misplaced hope and disappointment, and certainly a very long and arduous one in having to build a humanist or other type of non-racial counter-legacy that starts to become second nature in institutional and vernacular practice.

To claim this is not to stop questioning the validity of racial thought and practice, exposing the harms and injustices – past and present – of racial legacies, learning from the legacies, looking into the past for conditions for an alternative temporality (as suggested by Grosz, 2004), building other modes of human engagement in order to contain racial coding.

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I see these efforts, however, as part of a politics of neutralizing, rather than transcending, race, without assuming the need for humanity to rise above itself in order to tackle racism. Such a politics is guided by a pragmatic interest in flattening and decentring racial hierarchy, possibly as an opening for non-racial modes of inter-human engagement. Two interventions, discussed in turn below, are suggested from the thinking developed in this article. The first is action to prevent phenotypical racism from becoming harmful (something also recognized by Gilroy, 2004), and the second is action to expose and disarm the machinery of racial biopolitics.

As far as the performances of phenotype go, although everyday mixity of itself provides no guarantee of channelling vernacular practices bent on harm into forms that are watchful or tolerant of racial difference (as the examples cited at the end of the first section show), the orchestration of collective or shared space as a commons in which majorities and minorities participate as equals can help to encourage a change in this direction.

Phenotypical racism is perpetuated by embedded assumptions that certain marked bodies are inferior, a threat, out of place, harbouring feelings of superiority and righteousness on one side of the divide and feelings of inferiority and supplication or resentment and anger on the other side.

Everyday mixity alone – in physical, virtual, cultural and symbolic space – does not necessarily alter these affects or dampen phenotypical coding for the reasons articulated in this article, unless attempts to arrange for and publicize hyperdiversity at all levels of the plural society become part and parcel of a constancy of equal subjectivity on the ground where all come together as equal claimants, despite their differences. This is one way of reconciling difference and mutuality, phenotypical categorization and recognition.

Organizing for equal subjectivity in the field of race is a matter of acting across a range of fairly familiar institutional, interpersonal and symbolic interventions. These include building popular consensus behind stringent anti-racist laws, progressive immigration and integration policies, and race-sensitive regulations in such fields as education, employment, welfare and public culture. They involve studied attempts on the ground to encourage recognition of the shared commons and equal rights of access, as well as meaningful interaction between people from different backgrounds.6 The inventory of contemporary tools – and accompanying literature – is large, and ranges from uses of public art to normalize difference and celebrations of multiculturalism, to targeted policies to build interaction and commonality in schools, public spaces, workplaces, leisure venues, neighbourhoods (Amin, 2002, 2008; Keith, 2005; Sandercock, 2003; Wood and Landry, 2007). They include developing a counter-culture that visualizes the racial past and present in novel ways, exposing the harms and injustices as clear outrages (e.g. by photography during the American Civil Rights and Black Power struggles), showing the absurdities of reducing the raced other to biology/culture/phenotype, tracing cross-racial connections, transgressions and commonalities (Berlant, 2008; Gandhi, 2006), and Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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working on public affects such as hope and compassion (Hariman, 2009), rather than envy or paranoia, as new ‘manners’ for negotiating difference (Wise, 2005).

The significance of these interventions is that they work tactfully with phenotypical racism, by restricting its harms, empowering the condemned, acknowledging the anxieties and fears that it feeds on, cultivating other modes of phenotypical judgement, building cultures of co-habitation, shared concern and joint practice, changing the register of public culture and public affect, channelling race in new directions or placing it among other modes of human evaluation. They can all be seen as acts in the present – fragile, temporary, constantly in need of renewal – closing down on, but never eliminating, the rushes of racial legacy.

In the current ‘emergency’ conditions maturing in the West, nothing is likely to be more effective in closing down on a politics of racial harm than a change in the biopolitics of defining and dealing with the so-called errant body. What this should involve is a much more difficult question, especially in light of the rise in recent years of a politics of progress projected from or around the human body – a politics aware of the social agency of the body, of the impact of genetic, neurological, psychological, physiological, sensory and emotional imprints on life chances, and aware of possibilities of human reconciliation through new empathies and ethical practices. The reply of such a politics to racial biopolitics is more biopolitics, but of an altogether different kind, based on human particularity, recognition and reconciliation. This seems to have been the direction of travel of anti-racist politics in recent years (though rarely understood as a counter-biopolitics), and, in closing this article, I ask if such anti-racism provides effective ballast against the violent incursions of the emergency state outlined in the preceding section.

Anti-racist politics – in Western Europe at least – has switched from a mid-20th-century stance that sought to address the structural, institutional and symbolic sources of racial discrimination and violence, to one increasingly concerned with cultural identities and practices. The former, typically, sought to strengthen anti-racist legislation, combat racial abuse and discrimination, ensure minority access to work, welfare and rights, and address the problems of race as part of a broader response to inequality and injustice. The latter, typically, focuses on minority identities and rights, combating majority or national cultural exclusions, proposing new principles of collective belonging. A struggle for sameness, pursued largely through the impersonal, has evolved into one attentive to difference and its reconciliation, with ideas in recent years increasingly focusing on the ethics of personhood and living together (Ahluwalia, 2007; Dalal, 2008; Naidoo, 2008).7 Bhikhu Parekh (2008), for example, has suggested that living in a differentiated and divided but also interdependent world requires active cultivation by states and societies of an ethos of common humanity, underpinned by appropriate practical and symbolic actions. This includes Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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sanctioning the pursuit of self-interest when it harms others (regardless of territorial and cultural location), acting ‘together in the spirit of human solidarity’ (2008: 226), accepting engagement as the ‘very condition of one’s growth’ (2008: 227). He echoes others who have turned to the basics of human being or community to derive central political principles of the open and plural society, for example, subjectivity as the condition of being with the other (Kristeva, 1993; Levinas, 1998; Nancy, 2000), demanding responsibility towards the stranger well before any form of social mediation (Amin, 2004), or new emblems of collective being such as sympathy, unconditional hospitality or fraternity in order to reposition the stranger (Derrida, 2002; Ricoeur, 1994; Rutherford, 2007; Smith, 1759). This new ‘ethical humanism’ does not take subjectivity, citizenship and community as preformed, tied to primacies of race, ethnicity, tradition or nation. It rejects ethno-nationalism, the racial state, the world imagined as a clash of civilizations, allocation tied to blood, soil or culture. Instead, it makes membership a condition of ethical practice towards the other and the collective, a right to be earned by all who find themselves together in a society, not just minorities and assumed outsiders.

In the current climate of unashamed vengefulness towards certain humans, it would be ill-judged and untimely to criticize a politics of belonging that emphasizes the rights of personhood, human fellowship, and an ethic of care.8 The crucial question, however, is whether ethical humanism can discursively and practically unsettle the elaborate machinery of fear, suspicion and discipline that is being put in place by the new biopolitics of emergency. The mischief of this machinery lies in the routinization of discipline through everyday watchfulness and typecasting, categorizing practices, software-based sorting, bureaucratic procedures, taken-forgranted defence, immigration and welfare measures, unchallenged corporate and business practices, public sentiments sustained by slogan cultures, and more (Graham, 2009). A politics of human fellowship can undoubtedly put a face to the malpractices of this machinery, question its hidden ethic of human treatment, and lay down the guidelines for an alternative system of human regulation, but it lacks the power and instruments to stop or subvert the disciplinary routines.

Importantly, the biopolitics of emergency also defends itself on moral grounds. It plays on the compulsion of ethical responsibility towards legacy, the community to be protected, the future to be defended. It too uses the language of human being and becoming in order to select between the good and the bad, building powerful moral and affective impetus behind the choice to discipline particular human subjects (Brown, 2006; Žižek, 2008).

It too justifies exclusion and violence in the name of defending the human commons, universal values, liberty, reason and enlightenment, law and order. This is exactly how the suspect ethics, doublespeak and drummed up sentiments of racialized biopower are repackaged and apprehended by majorities as an ethics of peace, survival and responsibility towards both ‘us’ and ‘them’. In these circumstances, wielding ethical humanism as a Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Witwatersrand on September 8, 2014

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weapon against the racism of emergency biopolitics can amount to tickling an adversary in armour-plate with a feather, placing hope in human fellowship in the way of an instituted violence justifying itself as an act of human fellowship.

Attempts to think beyond the ethical humanist turn in anti-racist politics are patchy and underdeveloped but are badly needed in order to confront the escalations of race by a biopolitics of emergency. A priority is to expose the architecture and methods of overt and covert injury, to build moral outrage and political momentum around the injury, to insist on subjecting state disciplinary practices to legal and democratic scrutiny, to impose a thousand checks on inflammatory labelling, systemic discrimination, excessive surveillance and draconian punishment, to outline a ‘providential’ model of security, well-being and social integration relevant to times of heightened risk, hazard and vulnerability. A new politics of ‘managing’ the diverse and mobile population in an age of uncertainty and risk needs to be developed, one that rejects crude racializations of threat, stops profiteering from the exaggeration of hazard, and dispenses with a model of security based on surveillance and rout.

Accordingly, at one end of a move to tackle racism by building momentum behind a new kind of ‘providential’, rather than ‘catastrophic’, model of governing populations (to borrow Ophir’s distinction), sustained political effort is required to expose the damage, dangers and absurdity of the extensive machinery in place (and increasingly drawing on hidden software-based systems) to track, code and discipline bodies by race and phenotype. The anti-racist struggle has to extend its remit, as well as see itself as part of a broader coalition opposed to other forms of discrimination and xenophobia, the erosion of civil and political liberties, and the incursions of the security state, in order to uncover the connections that link census practices, labelling conventions, the surveillance of people passing through borders, state welfare and public culture, and the uses of personal information by commercial and noncommercial agencies.

At the other end, anti-racist action has to flow out of a wider attempt to re-fashion the politics of unity and public security in the risk-facing plural and divided society. This is partly a matter of demonstrating that preparedness for unforeseen emergencies and heightened risk and uncertainty is possible without demonizing particular sections of the population or humanity elsewhere, or compromising commitment to the well-being of all in a plural society. Such preparedness would focus on issue-specific operations that can be scaled up or down, the forensic but non-clamorous isolation of those who really pose a threat, replacing a language of catastrophe with one of managing uncertainty through diverse knowledge, collective intelligence, and continual learning and adaptation, defusing disaffection, anxiety and envy through dialogue, understanding and inclusion, showing that the principles of universal welfare and state security are not in conflict.

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It is also partly a matter of building coalitions that cut across race (and other taken-for-granted human dividers), gathered around issues of common concern (Callon et al., 2009; Latour and Weibel, 2005) as well as desires and developments affecting everybody, so that a new politics of the commons can arise, offering breathing space beyond the injunctions of human proximity that have come to prevail. For Žižek (2008), this means making space for a politics of distance respectful of human difference, disagreement and dissent as the ground of peaceful coexistence. I am not convinced that a politics of distance is the antidote for a politics obsessed with the habits of the errant (or ‘normal’) body. Through any new opening allowing people to cultivate the many affects and relationships they are capable of (Lim, 2008) will also seep the sentiments and practices of aversion and harm sustained by racist legacy (legitimated as part of a politics of distance). This is why the conjugations of a politics of the commons – dealing with matters such as survival, settlement, mobility, security, provision, development, wellbeing, freedom, justice and ecological preservation, and releasing new affects, mobilizations and coalitions – remain crucial neutralizers of the politics of race.

These are only intimations of possible redress in the arena of biopolitics to temper the divisions and harms of racist legacy so saturated by an ‘Overman’ will to power, but what seems clear is the imperative to continuously attend to the architecture of race and to commonalities of concern. This is what the exhibition in Barcelona seemed to confirm about the long struggle against apartheid, showing that while no one knew when the monstrous regime would fall, its opponents gradually came to know its historical, systemic, visual, discursive and emotive structure, slowly piecing together a counter-machinery to wear it down through many inventions of boycott, subversion, protest, strike, reform, ridicule and defiance.

It also showed how, with equal steadfastness, the struggle looked beyond the divisions of race to find common cause and a passion for a new kind of society (e.g. yearning for common human rights, the non-racial state, freedom of movement, shared prosperity, the right to well-being, active democracy and so on). Here was a politics of anti-race combined with a politics of collective transformation, articulating shared problems, entangled futures, new principles and structures of feeling for a democratic society. It kept the politics of recognition close to the politics of structural transformation towards an equal and just society – a connection that seems to have been forgotten in the new South Africa and by anti-racist movements in the West.

Acknowledgements It has taken several iterations to get the argument of this article to this point on the difficult topic of racial legacy and biopolitics. A number of people have offered very helpful criticisms and comments. I am grateful to the editors and referees of Theory, Culture & Society, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jonathan Darling, Jonathan Rutherford and Pep Subirós, and five Fellows of the Durham Institute of Advanced Study during

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Amin – The Remainders of Race 19 its 2008–9 annual programme on ‘Being Human’ – Christa Acampora, Sonia Kruks, Eduardo Mendieta, Arun Saldanha and Maren Stange.

Notes 1. Winant’s argument is not that the forms of racism remain the same. Indeed, he is quick to acknowledge that new ideas and practices of race have arisen in the 21st century, including: a postcolonial consciousness tangled up with continued social differentiation on racial lines; the rise of a genomic science that questions racial identity but still becomes mobilized for racial profiling and discrimination; a multicultural ethos that is accompanied by backlashes of an ethno-national nature; and a new Western imperialism that espouses tolerance for the domesticated other and vengeance towards the unassimilated other. See also Bernasconi and Lott (2000) for a helpful synthesis of how thinking in the West has developed since Herder and Kant in the 18th century.

2. This is happening, for example, through genetic profiling of given racial and ethnic groups, to see if some of them are more open to heart disease, obesity, crime, educational under-achievement. Through such casual association between medical condition and race/ethnicity, the new science has become an unwitting ally in tracing maladies to the genetic core of ‘African-Caribbeans’, ‘Caucasians’ or ‘Asians’, a science called to action for race-inflected remedy – curative or punitive – and to comment on the strength and evolutionary prospect of different types of ‘racial’ stock.

3. My emphasis here on Western racism is not intended as a denial of social organization by race or ethnicity in non-Western societies, but is a function of the focus of the article on Europe. There are far too many examples of such organization in the course of African and Asian history to sustain a denial of this sort, although the extensive and deep ‘naturalization’ of white order through institutional and vernacular practices honed in long and far-reaching histories of Western cultural, political and economic imperialism is a distinction that lies at the heart of the historical pessimism of this article.

4. Contemporary developments in genomic science show clearly that it is possibilities and probabilities that are transmitted between generations, and always through inflections of culture and praxis, so even those traits with relatively firm genetic associations – and to list racial prejudice among these traits would require considerable proof – come with few guarantees of outcome (Rose, 2007).

5. The message to Muslims in the West is that they can stay ‘once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard as . . . essential to themselves’ (Asad, 2003: 168). This concession too, however, is qualified. ‘Bad Muslims’ can only become ‘good Muslims’ (Mamdani, 2004), and never fully of the West, as those doing the judging come to redefine the world – once again – as the battleground between a peaceful, progressive, rational and tolerant West and its opposite in the Islamic East (Gregory, 2004). Between the one and the other stereotype – both called on to justify disciplinary action – there is no possibility of Muslims being regarded as subjects with varying, complex and multiple identities, living in the West to integrate, improve their lot and claim the public turf like other citizens, and being allowed to belong to communities of their choice, mixing the reverent and secular, traditional and modern in a quest for a richer and fuller life (Modood, 2005; Nederveen Pieterse, 2007). That being Muslim in the West might amount to being quite ordinary, on the right side of civilization, has become a matter of proving it, and against the odds.

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20 Theory, Culture & Society 27(1) 6. This is not to deny the significance of other forces of human mediation in the everyday urban: the indifference, envy and aversion among strangers sparked by the bustle of urban life; the limits to direct engagement in the sprawling, segmented, depersonalized city; the mediation of human sentiments and attitudes in the city by the object-world, the built environment, the technological infrastructure, and more (Amin, 2008; Thrift, 2005). Their influence on human behaviour shows how thin is the line of separation between demotic and demonic cosmopolitanism.

7. One reason for a turn to a politics of ethics – the desire to link moral and political philosophy – is the belief that rationalism, utilitarianism, consumerism and individualism have diminished the role of ethics in social organization and human interaction, and that credos such as liberalism, socialism, religious society and nationalism have legitimated harm, including ethical harm, towards those believed to be on the outside (Appiah, 2006; Parekh, 2000).

8. The affective potential of such a politics should not be underestimated, especially when we consider how centrally biopolitics relies on the engineering of passions. Anne-Marie Fortier (2008) shows this in her account of how multicultural and assimilationist policies in Britain have tapped into a structure of national feelings of fear, anxiety, love and hope through which minorities and majorities sense each other and their place in the nation. The policies, in actively defining citizenship, community and national values, animate popular response to difference and divergence. A politics of personhood filtered through state management of feelings has anything but a background regulatory influence. It determines whether the stranger is felt as friend or foe, outsider or insider, anomalous or ordinary.

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Amin – The Remainders of Race 23

Ash Amin is Professor of Geography and Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. His work focuses on the intersections of society and space relating to urban and regional development, the geographies of situated practice, and the challenges of race, multiculture and politics in a post-territorial age. He is author, most recently, of Cities: Reimagining the Urban (with Nigel Thrift, Polity Press, 2002) and Architectures of Knowledge (with Patrick Cohendet, Oxford University Press, 2004), and editor of Community, Economic Creativity and Organisation (with Joanne Roberts, Oxford University Press, 2008), Thinking About Almost Everything (with Michael O’Neill, Profile Books, 2009), and The Social Economy: International Perspectives on Economic Solidarity (Zed Books, 2009). [email: ash.amin@durham.ac.uk]

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