Contextualizing Family Planning: Truth, Subject, and the Other in the U.S. Government

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Contextualizing Family Planning

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Contextualizing Family Planning Truth, Subject, and the Other in the U.S. Government

Mihnea Panu

CONTEXTUALIZING FAMILY PLANNING

Copyright © Mihnea Panu, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–60798–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Panu, Mihnea. Contextualizing family planning: truth, subject, and the other in the US government / by Mihnea Panu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–60798–5 1. Birth control—Political aspects—United States. 2. Human reproduction—Political aspects—United States. 3. Welfare recipients— United States. 4. Liberalism—United States. 5. United States— Politics and government. I. Title. HQ766.5.U5P36 2009 363.9'60973—dc22

2009013910

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CON T E N T S

Acknowledgments One

vii

Government, Truth, and Subjectivity in a “Post-substance” Reality

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Two

The Other in Liberal Governmentality

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Three

Governing the Nation’s Reproduction: Race as Pathology

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Governing the Nation’s Reproduction: Culture, Poverty, and Eugenics

87

Patriarchal Orders of Reality in the Apparatuses of Sexuality Regulation

121

Strategies of Truth and the Formation of Governmental Reality

151

Liberal Governing and the Contemporary Political Imagination

187

Four Five Six Seven

Appendix 1

List of U.S. Policy Documents Consulted

217

Appendix 2 Questions Used to Assess Pregnancy Intentions in Major U.S. Surveys

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Appendix 3 Measures That Predict Nonmarital First Pregnany and Abortion

223

Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

It is impossible to express in this space the extent to which this book represents a collective piece of work, so I shall not attempt it. Gurminder Bhambra and Robbie Shilliam both read great part of an early draft and provided extremely useful comments and critique. Thanks for being a permanent source of intellectual stimulus and for your long-enduring friendship. Raluca Parvu has generously offered her critical sharpness and theoretical imagination during the entire process of writing this manuscript. If there’s something interesting in the final product, it is in great part a result of this generosity. Thanks.


CH A P T E R

ON E

Government, Truth, and Subjectivity in a “Post-substance” Reality

In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the welfare reform law that fulfilled Bill Clinton’s electoral promise to change “welfare as we know it.” This law affirms that a broad spectrum of sociomedical pathology—welfare dependency, poverty and child poverty, crime, drug abuse, mental illness and more generally illness, child abuse and neglect, low cognitive attainment, low educational aspirations, or couple breakup—is produced by “illegitimacy” and by a particular subject that engages in such pathological reproductive practices: the poor, young, black, single mother on welfare. Roughly around the same time, but in a slightly different governmental sector, the national family-planning strategies elaborated by the Department of Health and Social Services (DHHS) for the decades 1990–2010 are blaming a similar spectrum of pathology— welfare dependency, child abuse and neglect, reduced maternal educational attainment and employment opportunity, and higher infant risk of low birth weight or of death during its first year—on “unplanned pregnancies” and a subject that fails to plan: interestingly, the same teenage, poor, black single mother on welfare. Both governmental initiatives continue to have serious consequences on the lives of the subjects the state holds responsible for engendering those “national crises” in the United States. The starting questions of this book, therefore, were: What is the nature of the relations between those two governmental framings of social reality? What accounts for the convergences (and differences) in the ways those two in theory distinct governmental sectors demarcate reality and subjects and act upon them? However, those realities and subjects showed themselves to be less straightforward

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than initially assumed, if by straightforward we mean that social policy results from a deliberate and coherent governmental plan. Even at the most obvious level, the similarities between the modalities of diagnosing and curing the social in the welfare and family-planning governmental fields could not be attributed to an impeccable central coordination of governmental rationalities and practices, simply because the policies investigated extended over three different administrations, two Republican and one Democrat. Could it be, then, that governmental statements in both apparatuses were based not only on one administration’s or department’s understanding of truth and the good, but also on wider logics that frame contemporary political reality in the United States and that are neither strictly restricted to the domain of the State nor belong to any one government or political organization? To answer this question, the analysis had to consider new questions: What are the onto-epistemological and moral conditions of possibility of governmental statements? More specifically, what are the practices of truth and power that make possible the construction of U.S. national welfare and family-planning strategies around the identity of an inadequate, “irresponsible” mother? And could we affirm, more generally, that those practices are structured by assumptions that are foundational for liberal thinking? Foundational enough to be assumed self-evident when liberal governing structures reality? This affirmation necessitated extending the problematique of the research to question the nature of liberal government: the relation between government, power, and subjectivity formation in liberalism and the nature of practices through which certain liberal identities are made true and universal, as well as the possibilities left for political resistance in the densely populated governmental field that, to a large extent, determines the shape of the political in liberal nation-states. Family Planning as Liberal Governmental Apparatus The central question of this book is, Why is unplanned pregnancy a dangerous event for liberal governing in the United States? If effecting divisions between the “true” and the “false” according to the dominant onto-epistemological rules of our time is to—unwittingly—invest our “will to truth” in apparatuses that work through powerful practices of exclusion and inclusion (see Foucault 1981, 54); then, I shall argue, it is exclusively within a liberal reality that defines Us by excluding an Other that “unplanned pregnancy” can be discovered as a pathological

Government, Truth, and Subjectivity

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behavior and constituted as a national crisis. These analytical concerns can once again be formulated as a series of overlapping questions: What techniques ensure that liberal governing preserves its legitimacy even while being hampered by the tension between its noninterventionist, libertarian ideology and its “will to govern”? What substantive practices construct governmental identities in forms that allow liberal governing to act upon them? How are governmental statements about the nation and reality made true? What foundational assumptions regulate the formation of governmental statements about the “truth” and “good” of social identities? More precisely, what are the forms given to identities such as race, gender, maternity, and poverty by the governmental discourses, and how are those constructions related to the general tactics of truth and power of liberalism? In answer to these questions the book argues, and supports through its analysis of social policy documents, that for contemporary U.S. liberalism to govern legitimately, the governmental discourses must (1) create certain identities as the Other that is the polar opposite of the good, normal citizen, (2) lock those identities as a-relational “substances” in the universal language of law and science, and (3) use those substances in games of inclusion/exclusion that simulate nonintervention while safeguarding the liberal “will to govern.” Centrally, this analysis argues that typical of contemporary liberal discourses is that the identities posited as Other are precisely the ones that the universalistic modes of those discourses posit as “particular”: the poor, the racialized, and the gendered. And that this positing of the equivalence between the liberal “particular” and Other is itself made possible by the characteristics of contemporary governing: the simultaneously particularizing and universalizing nature of governmental biopower and the positivist nature of governmental-scientific truths. Comparing the well-established identity of the risky welfare subject to that of the risky subject of the family-planning documents illustrates how the founding assumptions of U.S. liberalism regulate the translation of statements ordered in terms of deserving/undeserving or dependent/independent into statements ordered in terms of normal/ pathological. How elements like poverty, race, gender, family, reproduction, and motherhood are introduced into complex systems of relations with elements like freedom, morality, responsibility, efficiency, truth, biology, or biomedical pathology to define, identify, and rule the dangerous subjects. Family planning and welfarism are therefore understood as governmental apparatuses whose simultaneous analysis illuminates the relations between biomedical pathology and liberal social abnormality or, in other words, illuminates the relations between

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biomedicine and the model of “good liberal self hood” as expressed by the governing discourses, a model that throughout this analysis is called “bourgeois civility,” “bourgeois propriety,” or “bourgeois self hood.” To qualify as bourgeois, that is, as rational, good, and free, the contemporary self must make the appropriate choices that unequivocally express her strive, competitiveness, work ethic, prudentialism (saving, insuring, investing, and so on), individualism, desire for private possession, material prosperity, and consumption—and must perform properly the conducts of gender, heterosexism, familism, parenting, clean and healthy living, respect of the law, trust in the state, patriotism, and even beauty that in the “modern” liberal order denote autonomy. On one hand, welfare benefits apparatuses have defined for more than 100 years the terrain of political struggle and are crucial in shaping the bourgeois self hood in the United States, thus representing an interesting location to study the foundational assumptions of those struggles. If there is any constancy in the manner in which those assumptions shape liberal apparatuses, then we might expect to find similarities between welfarism and any other apparatus that regulates sexuality and reproduction. On the other hand, to paraphrase Foucault (1980, 125), family planning, and its articulations with race, sex, desire, gender, poverty, and pathology, represents one of the points where the segmentations through which various social disciplines operate on unruly bodies and selves intersect with those that operate on unruly populations. From the eighteenth century on, sexuality becomes a strategically essential element in the governing of the liberal state and thus the object of state apparatuses oriented along the three axes of medicine, demography, and pedagogy. Hence, an increasing governmental interest in elements such as illegitimate births, patterns of child illness, familial health behaviors, the effects of unmarried life, and so on. Moreover, the birth of the apparatuses of sexual security coincides with the historical moment when the “blood” of the aristocratic discourses of the self is supplanted by discourses that define the “bourgeois body” based on race, descent, genes, health, and hygiene—thus on distinction, restraint, morality— all of them defined more or less overtly in relation to sexuality: sexuality is central to the emerging bourgeois self (see Foucault 1990). Which is to say that in liberal biopower it is not possible to disentangle the regulation of sexuality from the regulation of the bourgeois self according to such notions as the nation, gender, race, and a colonial Other that are themselves shaped by the imperial “geographic distribution of unfreedoms” (Stoler 1995, 53). Those concerns survive and are probably amplified today in the liberal apparatuses that, in the process


5

of regulating sex and reproduction, produce new somatic, psychological, and cultural differences between groups, further segmenting the social into intelligible and manageable units (see Stoler 1995, 39). And indeed, as we shall see, at no point do the primary logics of the welfare apparatuses differ significantly from those of the family-planning apparatuses; both reiterate a eugenic, misogynist, patriarchal, heterosexist, pauperist,1 and racist order of reality. *

*

*

This book shows how the governmental apparatuses of welfare and family planning define social reality in terms of a “pathological mother” that is black, young, poor, and “out-of-wedlock” and that is made into the epitome of the failed U.S. liberal subject. She fails, first, as an individual, since she demonstrates an inability to behave autonomously and to exhibit self-control; second, as a woman/mother, since she neither reproduces properly nor cares adequately for her child, thus endangering its health and development; and third, as a citizen, since she puts at risk the future of the nation itself and hampers its efforts to achieve prosperity and health. She, therefore, is the polar opposite of the “proper,” white, and aff luent woman, mother, and citizen: a (m)Other. And, like all liberal Others, she is a scapegoat identity: constructed as a threat to the normal development of the liberal-pastoral system and as a burden on its pooled resources, she single-handedly engenders a full spectrum of social pathology. This scapegoat identity is shown to be a central necessity of the liberal governing in the United States, since it ensures the continuing legitimacy of liberal governing under circumstances of severe onto-epistemological and moral inconsistencies and disastrous socioeconomic results. Moreover, since family planning defines its task as being the prevention of “unplanned pregnancy,” a pathological behavior, and since it defines this behavior as being characteristic of (m)Others, family planning is a eugenic effort—that is, a governmental effort to prevent the reproduction of the Other. Finally, this book is also an analysis of the governmental politics of truth, since it argues that a great part of the effects of the U.S. governmentality results from the governmental adoption of a certain brand of positivism as its standard of evidence and truth. Those effects occur both because positivism has the authority of a “norm of truth” in contemporary social policy discourses and because of the way it posits objects: as having an immanent, natural essence. Thus, the liberal expert-governmental apparatuses of truth replace the questioning of

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their own assumptions with an unconditional and relentless drive for increased accuracy of measurement, with an uncritical reiteration of the orders of reality that generate the truths of those apparatuses to start with. By the standards of this analysis, then, the marriage of liberal individualism and “residual positivism” engenders increasingly problematic governmental objects and makes increasingly difficult the interrogation of the wider systems that form social identities. In other words, far from being a ref lexive and self-critical form of social inquiry, liberal governing is a profoundly conservative form of governing, since it actively works to depoliticize the social by bracketing the most relevant political question: How is liberal subjectivization taking place? The U.S. liberal apparatuses engage in endless cycles of regulated repetition of the same governmental truths and identities and make the systemic causes of inequality, exclusion, and domination more resistant to political contestation with each such repetition. The rest of this chapter aims to make explicit the theoretical premises of the analysis. And I shall start by pointing out what this analysis of social policy does not aim or is not able to be: first of all, this is not a scholastic exercise in metaphysics, but a study of the strategy and tactics of power and of knowledge from which result substantive realities, identities, and practices. However, if some of the chapters, and especially the remainder of this first one, contain sometimes dense theoretical discussions, it is because abstraction and the empirical do not represent different orders of reality, but contiguous, if heterogeneous, aspects of the processes of reality structuring from which our intelligible and tangible world results. This study is not primarily concerned with policy formation either, if such a concern means to look for the truth of governing processes in the strategic interplay of political actors behind each policy event, whether in terms of intentions or real effective forces. Rather, it understands these forces and intentions to be themselves effects of various discourses that allow subjects to think the world and their goals and strategies. Thus, instead of looking for the hidden story behind the enactment of a policy, this research is interested in policy as enunciated discourses and in the rules that condition this enunciation. There is no need to look for the “hidden truth” of discourse—its reality-building mechanics are always in full view. It is the “uttered” discourse that determines what a person “is” for the governmental gaze and what his or her place should be in the state apparatuses and that, therefore, determines the multiplicity of ways in which the processes of government affect people.


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And finally, this analysis does not take as its task to provide ultimate solutions, but to problematize in a certain manner fields of vision, identities, methodologies, or truths that are sedimented as self-evident in the contemporary governmental discourses and to propose ways of remaking political the foundational assumptions on which our practices of truth and power take place. Before I proceed, a last word of warning concerning form. It will become apparent that certain stylistic and analytical oscillations are present throughout the book: a particular reading is stubbornly applied to various events throughout the chapters; lines of analysis introduced in one context resurface at later moments in another context, and a certain overlap is always present when phenomena that otherwise seem discrete are analyzed. This nonlinear approach, while maybe having to renounce a certain level of stylistic f luidity, tries to learn from the “tactical polyvalence” and protean shape of the discourses analyzed, from their reality-shaping potential for fragmentation, mutation, reinvention, dispersion, or ceaseless repetition. The Orders of Reality and Subjectivity At the immediate level, this book remains an analysis of policy texts: of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act 1996 (PRWORA 1996), which reformed U.S. welfare provision, and of Healthy People 2000 (HP 1991) and Healthy People 2010 (HP 2000), which set the governmental health promotion and disease prevention national strategies in the United States, with a focus on their familyplanning objectives. Like any such practice, though, this analysis rests on a series of ontological presuppositions that structure what it can see and say. Of those presuppositions, foundational is the relational nature of reality, or that reality emerges from “putting in relation.” This means that knowledge about an object is never obtained by eliciting its nature through neutral cognitive processes (observation, perception), but by integrating the object in a relational system of meaning that includes inquiry itself. More explicitly, when observing an object, our perceptions and their transformation into knowledge are always already mediated by a system of intelligibility that places the object in a grid of relations with other objects, taxonomies, concepts, theories, investigative methods, trials, and experiments. These processes of tabulation structure what we observe and how we make sense of it—that is, what can be truthfully uttered about the object and what is

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the place of those truths in the wider hierarchies of truth. The “inner” nature of any object is formed within such systems of relations. Of course, this is also to state that “every statement presupposes others and is constricted by them” (Foucault 2002, 111–117), that neutral and independent statements about an object are logically impossible. For example, the identity of “teenage mother” is not one that exists naturally, outside the practices of knowledge formation of the expertgovernmental networks. On the contrary, it is an identity constructed actively within those networks of truth and exclusively by mobilizing an array of assumptions about the proper bourgeois family, the biological nature and social role of “woman,” good mothering and healthy child development, normal female reproductive function and the associated pathology, the nature of race, the causes and remedies of poverty, statistics and demography, the role and nature of government, the nature of society, and the nature of reality and truth and the possibility of knowing the truth of reality. Each of the terms in this enumeration is, in turn, made intelligible only within other “ordering tables”— that is, only by establishing relations between discourses and practices that are historically and geographically specific. It is those contingent and immaterial relations that construct governmental reality as both “solid” and possible to intervene upon by governmental agents, within and outside the state. And if we define discourse as “the systematic set of relations that allows the object to emerge” (Laclau and Mouffe 1990, 100), then discourse represents the point of entry for the investigation of this field where a plurality of objects is (de)formed and (dis)appears (Foucault 2002, 29). A discourse, then, is a “system of differences”; a modality of constructing, in linguistic form, a system of ordering objects as “same” or “different”; and therefore a system of ordering identities and ways of seeing, thinking, and doing for a precise domain of reality and of generating statements that present this system as natural. For example, the U.S. biomedical discourses on reproduction secure, in a language of universals, gender and race as natural, biological difference; fix as known and absolute the difference between normal and pathological motherhood; and create a system of distinguishing between normal and pathological that is related to gender and race. Therefore, those discourses structure a reality in which a natural difference seems to exist between “planned” and “unplanned” pregnancies, with the latter defined in racial and gendered terms. Moreover, the systems of relations that make reality intelligible must initially be understood as a dispersion, lacking an extra-discursive


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center that constrains the play of signification—be it nature, material reality, reason, the economy, and so on.2 Such a center would be, illogically, simultaneously “inside” and “outside” the system of relations it allegedly organizes—observable only as an effect of substantive social relations and systems of intelligibility, always particular, but theorized as determining this same social reality from outside, always universal (see Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 112). Also, affirming such a center that allegedly explains exhaustively each and every social event shields from critical investigation both the nature of the center (assumed as self-referential and immutable) and the relations and objects/subjects it supposedly engenders (since the center fully explains their nature). That is, by assuming a center, we place the social practices on which any such affirming of a center depends outside the scope of critical investigation, thus depoliticizing the social. How, for example, “reason” or the “human” became, at a very particular historical moment, the organizing center of Western history and reality is left uninvestigated by any theory that assumes rationality or humanity to be self-evident entities that found, rather than being the object of critical inquiry.3 Or, to give another example, consider the manner in which “nature” is posited by most contemporary expert knowledges as the center that, from outside the social, determines and explains each and every identity through, say, biology, genetics, or human nature. And yet, this center that supposedly precedes and transcends social relations is perceived exclusively within historically contingent social practices, from hunting, gathering, or agriculture to tourism or to discourses such as history, entomology, biology, biomedicine, literature, religion, anthropology, sociology, or psychology. The boundary between natural and social is itself always posited as natural and objective, since it is independent of any social act, while being discernable only through various grids of historical decipherment. However, as long as the location of this boundary is considered self-evident, it is impossible to understand and contest the shaping of identities and stabilizing of power relations exerted by the various discourses and practices that secure this boundary; by making nature natural, we fossilize the social. This book asserts that rather than relying on a hypothetical place outside discourse that defines order and sets the divisions between the “linguistic” and the “material,” we should analyze those places and divisions as internal to the discursive practice. In this context, any discourse of fixation becomes metaphorical: “center,” “power,” “subject,” and “autonomy” represent contingent social logics that acquire meaning in precise contexts and are limited by other logics.

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It follows that, while its immediate object are social policy documents, this book aims to be more than a specialized textual analysis, since it understands the text as an integral part of a wider set of realitydefining social practices. This does not mean that the text is a “surface” recording of “deeper” and more “real” processes. The text remains understood as an event that actively generates reality. This analysis can affirm a wider focus precisely because it doesn’t assume any ontological gap between the power/knowledge practices that structure a particular text and those that structure reality, whatever we take the latter to be: objects, perceptions, desires, experiences, social relations, institutions, behaviors, and so on. If we can affirm that text does not exhaust the world, it is not because there is a more authentic, material reality outside the text, but because reality emerges from always-already present systems of seeing and knowing, of which texts are only one part and expression. Much contemporary theorizing in the so-called social sciences continues to dread events that resist full systematization. Hence the prominence given to conceptualizations of the present as a threatening “loss of order,” as in diagnoses of the “disorganization,” “fragmentation,” or “crisis” of capitalism, the family, class, society, socialism or reality tout court; the nostalgia for an orderly, totalizable past; or the persisting spew of diatribes—apathy, hedonism, neoliberal individualism, anarchism, nihilism—directed against analyses that embrace decentering. Such theorizing posits “progressive” politics as exclusively depending on a social reality structured by unchanging centers: human nature, the economy, laws of nature and society, gender, sex, race, sexuality, and so on. Politics is usually defined as the revealing or awakening of (frequently hidden) true identities, correct/objective experiences, or transcendent meanings of history or society. Quite on the contrary, this analysis starts from the assumption that intelligible reality results from social practices that permanently set and dislocate boundaries between true and false, between good and bad, between Us and Them. Indeed, crucial for this analysis are the practices that shape specific orders of reality by setting and upsetting the boundary, or difference, between I and Other. The most significant political processes, then, consist in the regulated repetitions or in the interruptions of those practices (see Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 138). This means not only that there is no separate domain of the political, since any social practice including ontological inquiry itself is participating in practices of positing boundaries, but also that political analysis and critique must be extended from addressing only the most visible forms of domination to addressing the


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strategies of difference setting that make those dominations possible. This book aims to show that our most efficient political efforts should be premised on anti-essence onto-epistemological and moral positions and that the true depoliticization of the social is engendered by creating truth and identity as essences. *

*

*

The above-mentioned understandings of truth and reality make improbable any “metaphysics of the subject”: the “human” characteristics that certain forms of transcendent humanism presuppose as the ontological anchor of each and every subject—human nature, rationality, freedom, agency, language, and so on—are rethought as the result of historically contingent practices of power and knowledge, of which humanism itself is part. In this understanding, the subject as an autonomous ontological entity is replaced by an understanding of the identity, internal coherence, and self-identical status of the “I” as constituted by regulatory practices of power and knowledge and thus by the realization that there is no preformed “I” that encounters its environment in an oppositional epistemological frame, since the possibilities for any assertion of the “I” are created and regulated exclusively within the structure of signification (Butler 1990, 181–183). In other words, a liberal citizen’s “soul” (including agency and the possibility to think of oneself as autonomous) emerges where the practices allowing her to become the object of a knowledge, to be known by the “sciences of Man,” intersect with the practices allowing her to become a self-knowing subject—to self-understand (see Florence 1994). Rather than looking for atemporal characteristics of this soul, this analysis looks for the historically specific governmental practices that allow the liberal subject to think of herself in terms of an inner space (“I,” “self,” “soul”) and that rule her precisely by mobilizing this inner space. It tries to explicit how the liberal subject creates a representation of herself as an autonomous and unique individual, endowed with natural drives and desires like the urge to self-express and self-affirm, while all those understandings of the reality—autonomy, individual, natural, desire, self-expression, or self-affirmation—are historically contingent truths elaborated by the discourses of Cartesian humanism, positivist philosophy, biology and biomedicine, sociology, psychology, sexology, art, and so on and that are shaped, reiterated, and diffused in the social by a dispersion of experts, from parents to schoolteachers to geneticists and to

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counselors. The “soul” of the liberal citizen results from the internalization of those discourses and expert advices. Since successful social performance demands from the liberal subject self-expression in terms of a unique, stable, and immanent identity, while scientific knowledge defines identity in terms of natural laws of functioning, “normal” liberal identities manifest an anti-entropic tendency to exclude chance and contingency, to establish themselves around “natural” centers such as sex, gender, race, ethnicity, or culture, thus to close around a “substance.” It is no coincidence that “identity politics,” posited as they are on the existence of natural, unequivocal, and bounded identities, f lourish in the liberal political landscape since the late 1960s, when liberal governing intensifies to paroxysm its discourse of the autonomous individual. The governing process in the United States will be shown to actively make possible and reiterate those tendencies—chapter 2 details theoretically and the subsequent chapters substantiate how the ontological assumption of identity as arelational substance makes possible the governmental construction of certain identities as pathological Other. Analyzing race and gender is especially central to this attempt to understand liberal practices of subjectivization. And it is argued that, like all social identities, race and gender represent regulatory processes that attempt to postulate an immanent and natural center that identifies and defines each and every subject. This book attempts to demonstrate that U.S. liberalism’s systematic upholding of race and gender as natural and at the same time as particular identities, in opposition to the ref lexivity and universalism of the modern liberal individual, reinforces networks of power that make the ones defined by those identities at the same time prone to be harmed and to be (self-)posited as in need of state protection. *

*

*

To understand reality and identities in their “positivity,” as has been argued thus far, is to argue that there is no spirit or transcendent reason that supplants the regulation of people’s conducts through authoritative means. What we need to analyze are precisely the power mechanisms through which subjectivities are shaped (see Foucault 1981, 2002; also see Laclau and Mouffe 2001). I shall therefore use “transcendent” to designate entities that are considered beyond the social and outside social relations. In this context, and in Deleuzian terms, transcendence is what freezes living, coagulates its f low, captures difference, and submits it to the judgment of a single perspective; a “transcendent” perspective is one


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that pretends to be placed outside difference and to be able to gather it into manageable categories (May 2005, 27). Its synonyms are “worked from within” or “immanentism,” both terms borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy (1991) and meant to express the possibility to understand the formation of an identity or community in isolation from its environment. Here the antonym to “transcendent,” when applied to identity, is “relational.” Finally, the term “substance” is an adaptation of Gilles Deleuze’s critique of transcendental metaphysics, meant to oppose the metaphysical idea of the existence of different ontological “substances” from which identities emanate. The metaphysical presupposition is that since there are several substances ordered hierarchically—for example, sex, gender, race, culture, ethnicity, or civilization—the same hierarchy of ontological difference applies to identities (see May 2005). On the contrary, the assumption in the present analysis is that there is no natural hierarchy of substances that stands behind the attributes of objects that such hierarchies emerge within discourses, and, moreover, that assuming the existence of such a hierarchy engenders a racist, patriarchal, misogynistic, and eugenic order of reality. Thus, “difference as of substance,” “transcendent,” “worked from within,” or “immanentism” are used interchangeably to signify forms of humanism that posit that one’s identity emanates from a transcendent substance, be that a soul, genes, or personality type, as represented contemporarily by a plethora of discourses from philosophy and social science to biology, medicine, psychology, or psychoanalysis. Since it is undeniable that seeing, knowing, and negotiating reality involves a fixation of meaning and identities, once we discard the notion that those fixations are brought into being under the constraint of a reality that is ahistorical and independent of social practices, we have to understand how they result from the requirements of our systems of meaning making. The real problematique of “relationality” in a study of governing becomes that of understanding how effects of truth are created within discourses that in themselves are neither true nor false (Foucault 1980, 118) and then sedimented and taken for granted as the solid reality. Studying how governing generates reality means analyzing what makes possible the setting as natural of certain boundaries, for example, between words/things, social/natural, immanent/ transcendent, I or us/other, true/false or public/private; what effects are produced by those practices of boundary setting; and what technologies of power are policing the location of this boundary (see for example Foucault 1981, 52–56; Foucault 1982, 114). Here, the practices through which some definitions of the fundamental social concepts are

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selected and imposed is precisely what contributes to the formation of a social order: Those who are powerful are not those who “hold” power in principle, but those who practically define or redefine what “holds” everyone together. (Latour 1986, 273) The task therefore is not to discover what the “real” concepts that explain society are, but to understand how those debates on the nature of society are pursued and, always locally and temporarily, stabilized and how once a system of relations for the production of statements, identities, and truths is in place, it imposes limits on what, where, and by whom can be said. Governmental Rationality and the State This book is also conceived as a critical exploration of contemporary governmental practices in the United States and, more generally, the Western liberal nation-state. Following Foucault (1991, 102), we can think biopolitical government as a specific form of power4 whose periodicity coincides roughly with that of Enlightenment. It is no stretch, therefore, to use biopolitics synonymously with liberalism, since they share history, geography, and, importantly, problems, forms of knowledge, and governing techniques: the trials and tribulations of biopower are also those of liberalism. Biopower is usually thought of as a radical modification of how governing is thought of, from the focus on the sovereignty of authoritarian monarchy to the “conduct of conduct.” That is, biopower does not aim to preserve and extend the power of the prince or state but to modify the conduct of its objects, individual and population, by acting on their environment, circumstances, or will (Foucault 1991, 102), so that the end result is the well-being of both population and individual. However, this process is not to be done through direct intervention but through “acting at a distance”: not through coercing or dictating but through molding desires, thoughts, and behaviors from a distance large enough so that the presence of the state in the circuits of conduct shaping is almost invisible. Importantly, this attempt to shape conduct is always done according to specific ideas of “truth” and “good,” for example, ideas of the healthy, normal, virtuous, efficient, or profitable (see Rose and Miller 1992). Indeed, according to Foucault (1991) the essential concern of the


15

process of governing in the West is to govern in the name of the truth. Similarly, the object and content of governing being the living and the conduct of living, governing is always an endeavor done in the name of social “good” (Gordon 1991, 8). Wendy Brown (1995, 47) affirms the same when stating that much of Western political philosophy has derived (and legitimized) the good from the true. Government is therefore a normative activity that privileges a specific moral-cognitive reading of the present nature and future ideal state of society, makes this reading “true,” and installs this truth in a complex of laws, regulations, recommendations, stipulations, programs, and techniques that outline the norm against which it assesses what statements and what actions are possible. No wonder, then, that liberal governing is always realized by elaborating expert knowledges, diffusing them in the social through a plethora of networks, including but not exclusively restricted to governing apparatuses, and attempting to reshape the subjectivities of the citizens so that they behave according to those expert blueprints for lifestyle as a matter of their freedom. The term “grammars of living” (Rose and Miller 1992) very adequately captures this process: in liberalism, and more generally in “modern European civilization,” linguistic grammar is a formalized system of perceiving, thinking, speaking, and writing that is inculcated in each subject through disciplinarian power. At the same time, the extent to which the discipline of grammar is correctly assimilated by each and every subject is constantly scrutinized and policed by experts and nonexperts alike and becomes a metonym for the general worth of any subject, often expressed in terms of autonomy and/or creativity. “Being able to speak and write correctly makes one free.” And indeed it does, to the extent that liberalism is structured in such a manner that while the correct use of it cannot guarantee in and by itself any social success, the incorrect usage of grammar is a serious, often unsurpassable, handicap. The bilious invectives directed by knowledge experts of all types against Ebonics is but a symptom of the ferocious regulation of “proper” grammar as signifier of bourgeois worth and civility and of the punishment directed against those attempting to transcend or modify its formal rules. A similar treatment is reserved to those unable to correctly master grammar, those who are relegated to the category of deficient subjects. Thus, grammar is a laboriously learned and strictly regulated artifice used to (self-) police the bourgeois self hood and liberal social hierarchies, a disciplinary system that permeates in minute detail all social spaces and subjects, within and outside the expert-governmental networks. At the same time, grammar is a form of discipline that is not felt as an imposition by

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the subject: on one hand and as already mentioned, it is considered to stimulate freedom and creativity and to increase one’s social worth; on the other, it is constantly used by each and every subject, from the most mundane to the most formal situations, in an unconscious manner. Grammar therefore represents a great metaphor for liberal discipline, either internalized, used, and reproduced unconsciously as part of one’s most self-evident and intimate practices or, during the liberal subject’s most ref lexive moments, represented as a symbol of personal autonomy. It is precisely in this manner, through the regulated diffusion of grammars of living, that biopower operates to shape liberal subjectivities and realities, within and outside the expert-governmental apparatuses. Then, to understand how the “moral technologies” of biopolitics effect subjects and the social, we have to first understand how the true/ false and good/bad divisions that constitute the fundaments of those technologies are operated (Foucault 1991b, 74). Framed in those terms, the problem of government places the production of true and false, and especially of the truths of the subject, at the heart of historical analysis and political critique (Foucault 1991b, 79). The relevance of Foucaultian “governmentality” for the present analysis lies in its conceptualization of government as a codification of that form of power that categorizes the individual, marks him [sic] by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. (Foucault 1982, 212) *

*

*

“Apparatus” is a central analytical term of this book. But what is an apparatus? Late in his career, Foucault redefines the episteme as a “strategic apparatus” that permits to separate, from the field of possible statements, those that can be divided according to the true/false dichotomy—that is, that makes possible the separation of scientific from nonscientific statements (Foucault 1980, 197). What this means is that the strategic apparatus Foucault terms “episteme” imposes a principle of order on the production of knowledge—and implicitly on the production of power relations—by restricting scientific “reality status” to the statements that can be neatly classified as either “true” of “false.” This is a strategic apparatus for the erasure of ambivalence from scientific reality, and it is strategic precisely because it keeps what can be seen, thought, said, and done within the rules of our scientific truth. Gilles Deleuze (1992, 160–161) redefines apparatuses as “machines that


17

make one see and speak” and argues that they comprise several internal systems of order: first, forms of visibility, that is, forms of structuring light that form variable shapes and thus regulate what can be seen; second, affirmations that, themselves, depend on specific regimes of affirmations, for example, science; third, relations of power that represent the distribution of singular elements in a social field (163); finally, forms of subjectivization, that is, mechanisms of subjectivity production. An apparatus, then, is a machine that regulates what can be seen, thought, or spoken, what forms of being are available, and how the products of those forms of visibility, enunciation, and subjectivization are placed within various social spaces (162–163). Is it possible to apply this term, apparatus, to describe governing? Of course, Foucault (2007, 108) does so when he describes liberal governing to operate through “apparatuses of security” or “regulatory apparatuses.” For Foucault (1980, 194–196), establishing a governmental apparatus consists of forming heterogeneous systems of relations (“devices”) between a plethora of elements—institutions, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—so as to respond to a historical necessity. Each governing apparatus consists of “strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge” (194–196). A governing apparatus, then, is a system of relations between a conglomerate of elements that makes possible the strategic ordering and affecting of reality. And, since always confronted with “reality in all its inertia” (Procacci 1991), governing apparatuses survive only through permanent feedback readjustments of their system of relations;5 important in the apparatus therefore is the nature of the relations between elements that can strategically alter their function. The U.S. family-planning apparatus, for example, incorporates and puts in relation in strategic ways a plethora of dispersed elements, which include the assumptions about the nature of identities, reality, and social good of Enlightenment scientific discourses; statements produced using the specific discourses of medicine, economics, statistics, psychology, or bourgeois-Christian morality; artifacts that make those discourses operational, from the medical devices that permit the knowing, scrutinizing, and monitoring of pregnant women to institutions that regulate the administration of state aid to single mothers; various power relations that distribute those subjects in the liberal social spaces, from relations between single mothers and state or nonstate experts in charge of reforming them or of discovering their true nature to the relations between financial-technocratic institutions that monitor family planning in the United States, such as the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the scientists publishing in the journals funded by

18


the institute, and the experts in the Department of Health and Social Services who write the national family-planning strategies. The way the apparatus mobilizes and puts in relation those elements results in specific effects on the social and the subject or, we could say, in specific orders of governmental reality. Thus, the governing apparatus represents a system of relations that fulfills the strategic function of restricting what can be said, thought, seen, and done, thus of restricting reality to our present rules of governmental truth and good. It is also making this reality knowable and malleable, since it makes it possible to segment, measure, quantify, standardize, taxonomize, hierarchize, or compare the population in ways meaningful for the governmental aims. In Foucault’s (2007, 45 and 349) account, the liberal apparatuses of security expand centrifugally to incorporate ever new elements in their reality and, since they operate using the idea of natural, inevitable processes that need to be known and intervened upon (the market, the economy, the individual, civil society) so as to affect the population, shape the social according to their understanding of natural reality. To recapitulate, then, the U.S. family-planning apparatus is the regulated disposition of governing elements, from congressional laws to departments of health and social services to medical studies on the nature of low birth weight and to the regulation of prenatal care in a specific U.S. state, which defines what it means to properly “plan a family” in the United States. This apparatus draws on existing governmental modes of seeing and speaking in order to identify a governing necessity, in this case the need to regulate pregnancy in the United States according to expert-devised plans, and further reiterates those modalities of seeing and speaking when it deploys its elements to define and regulate the reality of family planning in the United States, since all the governable entities it operates with (unplanned pregnancy, low birth weight, illegitimacy, dependency, race, motherhood, family, and so on), as well as all the governmental technologies it devises to affect those entities, remain fully within the boundaries of the U.S. liberal order of reality. This analysis argues that the U.S. family-planning apparatus operates to further reinforce and police as natural the boundaries set and reset, with pernicious political effects, by liberal governing. *

*

*

Governmentality understands the state as an entity with f luid boundaries, whose nature is not immanent but dictated by changes in the


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practices of government (Gordon 1991, 4). This ontological nature results from the same logical impossibility of stabilizing a solitary center when analyzing social processes. The state cannot be understood as an independent and, indeed, an internally coherent entity that conditions the social from an external position of power since it cannot be described except within, and as a result of, relations that are always-already social and heterogeneous. The state becomes thought as an assemblage of apparatuses, a heterogeneous, f luid, and ultimately fragile system of relations, rather than as a set of immutable power and ideological and institutional structures ruling from a transcendent point above society (Foucault 1982, 213–214). Thus, arguing that the governing apparatuses construct and regulate the reiteration of a version of reality does not mean that reality is a blank slate that the state colonizes with meaning, knowledges, and technologies without constraint. Social processes always take place within constraints, since there are always-already power/ knowledge systems that anchor identities and realities. It seems that Foucault (1982, 224) was right when he suggested that contemporary hegemonic struggles are increasingly codified in the language of rights and freedom in manners that presuppose some form of state (non)intervention—that is, are becoming progressively “governmentalized”: “elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions.” However, this does not mean that governing is always a forceful imposition of will on the unsuspecting “civil society.” Rather, state power exists in permanent connection with, and as a new codification of, power relations originating in the social nexus6 (Foucault 1980, 122). In other words, the governmental power/knowledge systems do not necessarily originate with the state, but are transformations of discourses and power relations—from positivist science to patriarchy and to colonialism— that transcend any public/private governmental boundaries (and even any one nation-state) and that have been the historical environment in which liberal biopower has taken shape. In this case, any analysis of state institutions is also an analysis of the social “outside” the state. At the same time, the study of institutions can constitute a privileged point of observation for the understanding of social networks of power, since institutions represent a location where those power relations are diversified, concentrated, put in order, and carried through to their highest point of efficacity. It is here that, as a first approximation,

20


one might expect to see the appearance of the form and logic of their elementary mechanisms. (Foucault 1982, 222) Practices of subjectivization often taken for granted and therefore glossed over when operating in the daily social nexus—heterosexism, racism, patriarchy—can therefore become highly visible within the textual practices of the liberal institutions. In part, this is because such texts represent the governmental attempt to integrate those processes of subjectivization, otherwise dispersed in an entangled mass of mundane events, into a coherent and rational system of knowing and acting upon the social, and in part, because welfare and health technologies deal with subjects on which the mechanics of government operating in the “civil society” are ineffective, that is, on subjects considered incapable of self-governing. Moreover, the growing “governmentalization” of the liberal social spaces mentioned above is expressed in the increase of demands made on the state, as neutral arbiter, to sort social conf licts and to administer and protect identities7 (see Brown 1995, 14–18). Then, any pertinent analysis of the contemporary subjectivization must include a critical analysis of the state’s role in bringing into being and regulating what is possible for actors qua governmental subjects to think and do. Which is to say that the processes of liberal government and the processes of liberal subjectivization are coterminous and that we cannot properly understand the formation of contemporary subjectivities in opposition to governmental practices, but as taking place within the governing relation between the liberal individual and the state. The state and the subjects, even those subjects that contest liberal order and especially those that place demands on the liberal state, do not precede the state-subject relation, as already-formed identities that engage in a “dialogue,” but are actively constituted within this relation. Thus, to be able to analyze and contest the liberal practices of subjectivization, we cannot continue to posit the divide between public and private or state and civil society as a “real” boundary between discrete, autonomous objects that marks the limit of state regulatory processes, but must reassess it as a product of how of the governmental regulatory processes draw an arbitrary distinction that remains internal to the web of relations of the governmental apparatuses (Mitchell 1991, 90, 94–95). On the contrary, a dichotomous understanding of the liberal social as split into state and citizens acts to reposit the state as having a set boundary, identity, role, and even “self,” and agency as preceding the environment, as an ontological characteristic of the subject. It is therefore incapable of analyzing the mechanisms through which those boundaries


21

are brought into being, an analysis that is here considered as the pinnacle of contemporary politics. Unfortunately, upholding such reified understandings of social identities seems to characterize all thinking of politics in terms of “top-up” or “bottom-down.” *

*

*

As already amply suggested by the discussion above, an analysis focusing on the relationship between government and subjectivity cannot but engage with liberalism as a form of governing. This book’s focus on texts and state-related government is also part of wider efforts to denaturalize understandings of the liberal state as a source of statements that are authoritative because they are politically neutral and scientifically objective. To show that contemporary Western governance cannot coincide with the ideal-type image of itself as a noninterventionist and rational-scientific practice based on equality of opportunity, respect for autonomy, and democratic decision making; that the “small state” to which it aspires is based on an illusory separation between a private and a public sphere; and that the governmental postulation of the atomistic liberal individual and of freedom as synonymous with choice and as embodied in legal rights are tools that engender and legitimate an array of dominations and exclusions. To counteract those articulations, this analysis insists on how the imperative to rule in the name of “truth”8 and the “good” makes it necessary for contemporary liberal governmentality to set up far-reaching mechanisms that actively produce, implement, and regulate this “truth” and this “good.” Such a critical approach needs to eschew analyzing the practices of government in terms of sovereignty, autonomy, state/civil society, democracy, pluralism, and so on in favor of an analysis of the practices that allow those terms to define and to police the boundaries of governmental thinking. Persisting in using this language as the starting point of political analysis only reiterates the complacent (self-)understanding of liberal government as coinciding with its ideal-type and reinforces this type of government as the norm against which government processes are to be judged as successful or failed. Moreover, this book affirms the need to reconsider the understandings of liberal governmental practices in terms of a radical rupture with the governmental regimes defined as “pastoral” (a term that for contemporary neoliberalism comes to designate Western welfarism9) or “illiberal” (any type of governing that does not conform to the liberal politico-administrative ideal-type). It confirms that, since

22


liberal governing intervenes on its subjects in manners as direct as the “illiberal” forms of governing that contemporary liberalism defines itself against, persisting in thinking liberalism in terms of those classical dichotomies does not present any politico-theoretical interest, and argues that rather than postulating a clear liberalism/pastoralism dichotomy and historical succession, we should understand the contemporary techniques of power as always-already intertwined and, in fact, as deriving their force from this intertwining. Thus, the oppressive and exclusionary forms of liberal subjectivization this book focuses on are not, as traditionally thought, exceptional, atypical, and uncharacteristic, to be pushed at the periphery of analyses of liberalism, but are constitutive of what contemporary liberalism “is.” Nevertheless, this research does not critique neoliberalism to extol welfarism as the solution to all contemporary problems. The way certain analyses of contemporary political struggles posit the welfarism versus neoliberalism dispute as fully exhausting the political spectrum—or the theoretical field of state, governing, and even social analysis—is here perceived as a narrowing down of our political and analytical possibilities that can only lead to an impoverished political activity. This dispute, especially in the way it is ossified in the United States, is the sign of an irresolvable difference in which the pro-welfare camp’s major confrontation is with its own political-ontological limits. This pro-welfare camp is forced to uphold the state as the ultimate social good and arbiter of social conf lict while remaining fully within the confines of the liberal political language, and thus to forfeit any critical analysis of the participation of the state in the creation and perpetuation of social inequality and oppression.10 Again, this critique of welfarism does not try to posit neoliberalism/libertarianism as a superior solution to welfarism, but to acknowledge that a critical analysis of the state is a politico-theoretical necessity and that ignoring it represents a sign of the self-defeating timidity of contemporary leftist political analyses. This analysis did not start as a critique of statism as an a priori evil, since in this analysis the state is an effect of historically contingent governing forms; if it turned out as a critique of contemporary governing techniques and thus of the liberal state, it is because it found the practices of rule in the field of U.S. welfare and family planning to be central in the construction and perpetuation of inequality, stigma, exclusion, and domination. The ground is now prepared for presenting the premise of this study: that liberal apparatuses are characterized by a specific order that I shall call “othering.”


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The “Order of Liberalism” If reality is made intelligible by being ordered according to diverse regulatory systems, this analysis is mainly interested in the level of order that distinguishes between “same” and “different”—more precisely, that distinguishes between objects on the basis of how they share or not ontologically defining characteristics, and in the practices that allow the characteristics that define an object’s “being” to be selected and made to appear natural. While a system of order permits only certain understandings of reality, it does not do so by actively forbidding alternative readings but by deeply structuring our perception, truth, and conducts and thus by making whatever is not within those regulatory mechanisms invisible, unintelligible, or unthinkable. Foucault (1973, xv) opens the Order of Things with a famous quote from Borges in which “a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia” divides animals into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f ) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way look like f lies. The irrepressible laughter this list provokes is a laughter “that shatters all the familiar landmarks of our thought,” precisely because it shows the limitations of our system of order, “our stark impossibility of thinking that” (xv). So the question is, why can’t we think that? Why is it absurd and funny? In Foucault’s reading, what in this list “transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply the alphabetical series (a,b,c,d) which link each of those categories to all the others” (xvi). It is the very foundation of our logic (our “operating table”), the implicit set of rules we use to create meaning, knowledge, and truth that Borges’s list threatens. Our laughter is an expression of our panic at seeing the suspension of our principle of establishing order among things, more precisely of the principles, criteria, and operations according to which we divide things into “same” and “different.” I call “foundational assumptions”11 those rules that supply us with a “sense of order” and that we usually remain unaware of until we feel this order violated by “disorder.” Or, foundational assumptions are the principle according to which theoretical knowledge is given historically and geographically specific configuration and that regulates its access to scientific status (Machado 1992, 14). And I propose an

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“order of liberalism”: liberal governmental knowledges and realities are ordered by the principle of difference as Other, that is, of difference as immanent, as “worked entirely from within” or as natural. In this system of order, it is the genealogy of liberal governing that determines which differences among the potentially infinite differences possible to observe are considered to have ontological weight—that is, to express the true nature of the objects. Which means that liberalism applies this principle of order, othering, to knowledge, theories, technologies, identities, or power relations, in relation to a f luid and heterogeneous system of nodal points: race (ethnicity, culture), sex, sexuality, gender, biology, socioeconomic status, and so on. Let me detail those points further. To govern involves bringing into being a version of the reality of the governed objects—that is to say, of the population in its various guises from biomedical to sociological, consumerist, working, or electoral—that makes those objects amenable to specific intervention tactics and technologies (see Foucault 1991, Rose and Miller 1992, Rose 1999a). In the West, those realities remain structured by the Enlightenment idea of governing as an enterprise for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty (Foucault 1997, 312 and 1998, 378). It follows that, one, since liberal apparatuses rely on versions of truth and good that never set themselves free from the Enlightenment onto-epistemological and moral ideals, they re-codify in law and norm the brutality that founds Enlightenment universalism and difference: positivism, patriarchy, Eurocentrism, colonialism, racism, heterosexism, homophobia, eugenics, slavery, and genocide, to mention but a few. Which is simply to affirm that our grasp of reality is shaped by historically specific systems of difference that allow us to interpret only certain occurrences as significant (governmental) events and to respond to them in certain manners and never in others. To recall a well-known example, both liberal biopolitical apparatuses and liberal subjectivities are crucially concerned with sexuality and reproduction, nodal points whose systematically patriarchal, heterosexist, pauperisteugenic, and racialized nature has genealogies that go back to Empire and slavery. We can trace such genealogies of liberal brutality—both ontological and physical—in all liberal apparatuses that aim to constitute or preserve “bourgeois subjectivity” that is, in the governmental apparatuses regulating the family, child rearing, domesticity, ownership, self-restraint, work ethic, criminality, deviance, and so on. Thus, bourgeois identities and bourgeois order, as shaped by “modern” liberal discourses and apparatuses, were and remain founded on strategic


25

constructions of difference from a f luctuating set of Others (see Stoler 1995, 11). And two, the order of reality elaborated within liberal apparatuses depends on the positing of identity as substance and implicitly of difference as immanent. For example, structuring theoretical knowledge and empirical reality around gender and sex is based on the founding assumptions that identities are natural substances, that sex and gender express difference as entirely worked from within, that sex and gender define one’s natural self hood, and that there are specific and natural physical, psychological, and behavioral traits of a normal sexed and gendered subject. Or, if madness is used to make reality intelligible, it starts by assuming that there is a clear boundary between mutually exclusive poles of being: normality and pathology, irrationality and rationality, madness and sanity. Thus, all the scientific segmentations and taxonomies of the social on which the liberal governing of reality depends operate exclusively with objects whose natural, unambivalent, and true identities are revealed to the observer that uses the correct methodology. It is crucial to reiterate that insisting on a set of liberal foundational assumptions and grids of intelligibility means that there can never be a purely procedural liberalism, no set of abstract rules and mechanisms that we can term liberalism. Liberalism is always already historical and geographical, a set of substantive power relations and apparatuses of truth. However, that liberal perception is structured does not preclude a multiplicity of forms and rationalities to coexist within the various liberal apparatuses. For example, liberal apparatuses are always racialized in the United States, in that they understand the social in terms of hierarchical taxonomies of subjectivities based on skin color and culture, taxonomies considered to represent with fidelity natural ontological difference. However, how this taxonomy is structured, rationalized, and embodied into governing technologies is different in the case of U.S. apparatuses of health-governing, of electoral politics, or of foreign policy. Moreover, while stating a set of common founding assumptions, this analysis does not subsume governing to a coherent plan, technique, rationality, or determination. The “healthy eating” governmental programmes use different understandings of the social than the experts that produce the state policies of food labeling and of advertising. The “health inequalities” federal programs might use different understandings of poverty causation than a psychologist working as a social worker in the relation to his or her clients. And “race” might be understood differently by an expert working in a state-funded NGO

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providing services for immigrant women, by a state expert trying to monitor financially this NGO, and by the immigrant women “serviced.” However, all those subjects, to the extent that they are connected to the state apparatuses, will need to conceptualize identity through othering and the nodal points of governmental discourse it is invested in and to produce statements accordingly. If liberalism has a precise content, derived from its foundational logic of othering, then the orders of reality that liberalism brings into being are themselves a symptom of othering, and liberalism functions exclusively through the strictly regulated reiteration of those forms of othering. This goes directly against any analytical strands—including strands within grassroots theorizing, feminism, or Foucaultian governmentality studies—that hail the emancipating potential of liberalism, as if liberalism itself is not involved in bringing into being and reproducing the relations of power that those strands try to dislodge. Even more to the point, if it is true that liberal apparatuses are always constituted by and perpetuating othering, then we must renounce our compulsive desire for liberalism as the political tool that allows the dislocation of all power relations based on othering. We must probably start by renouncing our faith in the Enlightenment teleology that makes European liberalism into a “locomotive of history” inexorably pulling humanity toward progress, prosperity, democracy, and equality. Its historical sedimentation as truth through reiteration has ingrained this faith in and desire for liberalism deeply in the structures of our subjectivity, to the extent that we accept the historically contingent liberal political tools—legal codes, legal rights and human rights, parliamentary representative democracy and a political scene restricted to party politics and electoral games, the separation of the private and the public and the principle of separation of power, market behavior, or freedom of speech—to be the universal tools of freedom, the only tools we can imagine and mobilize when engaging politically. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that liberalism and the self-understanding to be free according to the liberal blueprint represent central nodal points of our subjectivity, alongside gender, sex, race, or sexuality. It is increasingly more difficult, then, to challenge this impoverished political imagination, but even more imperious to persist in our effort of challenging it, since any political project that tethers itself to liberalism is bound to reproduce liberal othering and the liberal order of reality. This analysis thus joins a long tradition of studies within the Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, or post-structuralist fields that contest the liberal-positivist teleology and suggests that we cannot put our political hopes in the


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liberal state for the simple reason that othering is deeply enmeshed in the fabric of the liberal circuits of power and knowledge. That othering, in other words, is neither a side effect of an otherwise strictly procedural form of governing nor an exceptional happening within the liberal order, but a structural component of liberalism and a crucial element in the ability of liberal apparatuses to make reality manageable through governing. And liberalism will not be able to expurgate othering from itself without changing fundamentally what it is, since, as far as we can see historically, any order of reality in liberalism is foundationally based on othering. To sum up, foundational assumptions are the principles of order according to which reality is formed within a variety of discourses and apparatuses. And this book will insist on one group of such foundational assumptions of liberalism—those creating a symbolic order of reality in which identities are substances and difference is immanent, always preceding social relations. The kaleidoscopic content of a reality so ordered precipitates around a plethora of nodal points that structure this immanentist difference in reality-organizing dichotomies—race, gender, sex, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, culture, financial status, class, cultural capital, habitus. Those nodal points distribute objects, subjects, and the relations between them according to the principle “same” or “different,” shaping orders of reality that are patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, familist, pauperist, eugenic, and racist. As long as those foundational assumptions are not seriously questioned and dislocated, U.S. liberalism will continue to reiterate, through each governmental practice—from military invasion to the mundane production of a study on the relation between race and high blood pressure—those orders. This book is concerned with illustrating those processes of structuring liberal reality within the U.S. welfarist and family-planning apparatuses.


CH A P T E R

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This chapter starts with an example of how conceptualizing government as a power relation can be used to articulate a poignant critique of liberalism, more explicitly of its central concept: freedom. It then proceeds to discuss why the dominant conceptualizations of liberalism as governmentality failed to achieve their theoretico-political potential as critiques of our governmental order. This analysis of governmentality studies also proposes a genealogical analysis of liberalism as event. The aim is to historicize the formation of liberal ideas about the good and the true in relation to the historically concomitant tactical shift in the discourses and power relations that define modernity in the West: science, colonialism, racism, eugenics, and so on. This discussion suggests that U.S. liberalism and, more generally, liberalism are not universal and procedural forms but always specific and substantive codifications of an order of reality structured by specifically modern foundational assumptions. The chapter then argues that the consequences of this structure of liberal governmentality are a series of unsurpassable inner tensions in the U.S. liberal project, tensions that express themselves in governing strategies such as othering. Liberal Freedom, Subjectivity, and Expertise Contemporary governmental practices are organized by the idea of freedom1 as definitive and sufficient for our self-understanding and thus consist of hegemonic boundary-(up)setting operations that create the liberal subject’s possibility to think herself as free or unfree. Freedom is therefore part of any contemporary hegemonic struggle over the governmental “truth” and “good.”

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The theorizing of governmentality that follows Foucault (1991a) portrays liberalism as a historical reaction to the totalizing tendencies intrinsic in the police state and its welfare state offspring. As a modality of thinking government as an open-ended system devised in response to the question “Who and how should govern?” that uses no governmental “grand plan,” political doctrine or raison d’état but operates incrementally: only in response to specific events (Gordon 1991, 18). Moreover, liberalism is supposed to profess skepticism and vigilance over the capacities of political authorities to know and to govern and, as opposed to the state paternalism of “illiberal” regimes, to encourage its citizens to take control of their own destinies (Rose and Miller 1992, 199), to become active citizens. Needless to say, liberal doctrine promotes a negative understanding of individual freedom as freedom from direct intervention and presents the market as a system where needs are provided for in an impartial, voluntary, personal choice-based manner, thus as the epitomal system of freedom (see Holmwood 2000, 25). The self-avowed aim of the liberal state, then, is to safeguard a space of social action circumscribed by legal rights and the public/private separation, in which the interactions of rational individuals pursuing personal (economic) goals can take place freely and harmoniously. Within this space, the liberal state supposedly surrenders its superior sapiental authority to the market forces that adjudicate between competing truth-claims using supposedly objective and universal techniques: the purchaser-provider split, the translation of problems in universal cash terms, budgetary discipline, risk management, or audit (see Rose 1996). This, then, is a very brief characterization of how liberal government self-defines; however, when looking at what the state actually does, this characterization shows its ontological presuppositions to be untenable. To start with, and like any form of governmentality, liberalism aims to intervene upon the social so that the overall result of the web of social processes coincides with the governmental aims.2 Thus, despite its critique of political government, liberalism retains a “programmatic a priori”—that is, it assumes that the real is thinkable and programmable by authorities in a way that allows its ills to be diagnosed and cured (Rose 1996, 53). For example, the neoliberal attempt to autonomize “society” from the state by imbibing it with the culture of economic enterprise, efficiency, autonomy, and competition (Burchell 1996) is nothing short of a concerted governmental plan. Then, similar ambiguities characterize the liberal problematique of freedom: the authenticity of liberal individual autonomy is predicated on the axiomatic


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positing of transcendent and inalienable boundaries between the private and the public, or between the natural autonomy of the subject and the state as a social institution, thus implicitly positing a fundamental difference between power as subjectivization (productive) and power as regulation (repressive). This dichotomous ontology furthers liberal contradictions, since the boundaries between the private and the public it posits as natural are brought into being and preserved partly through the systematic effort of liberal governing. The liberal “private”—as embodied in the bourgeois subjectivity and the in practices that reiterate and police it—does not represent an entity that preexists liberalism and that other forms of government forcefully colonize, but an effect of the reconfiguration of governmental spaces and identities that liberalism undertakes.3 Pretending otherwise is to engage in an anachronistic reading of history exclusively from the perspective of the present as “normal” and “truth,” as well as in a teleological reading of history as having the purpose of bringing about our present. Rather than respecting a transcendent, ahistorical freedom, liberalism continually redefines what is within the competence of the state and what is not, where the public ends and the private commences and thus effects both the classical liberal social spaces (state/civil society, private/public) and its organizing dichotomies (autonomy/dependency) (see Foucault 1988a). Indeed, liberalism is a game in which the state posits as intangible for itself a domain it actively creates and preserves through governmental practices, thus making the definition of liberal freedom in terms of state nonintervention tautological. The great governmental innovation of liberalism might be neither ref lexivity nor securing the freedom of its citizens, but fixing as true and natural a representation of reality in which the private and the public appear as distinct domains and in which freedom is predicated on this distinction. In other words, in positing as natural that the only conducts that qualify as “political” are those taking place in the public domain, while the private domain is fully apolitical (because natural). Through those maneuvers, liberalism erases from view its most important political strategies, tactics, and technologies: those shaping “private” identities and power relations. As long as the liberal individual persists in imagining her “private” life as apolitical or, at most, as defined exclusively by the politics of personal choice and desire, she will remain impervious to the power and knowledge relations through which liberalism molds reality and her self hood. This stubborn persistence in the certainty that freedom is brought about by engaging in the privatized practices of bourgeois self hood works to actively exclude transformative or, in the least,

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ref lexive political thought and action from the liberal social. In any case, only through an immense stretch of imagination could one affirm that liberal subjectivization is fundamentally ref lexive, since it is most often than not conservative. Once we analyze the liberal “private” spaces as the primary political spaces of liberalism, it becomes apparent that the freedom of the liberal individual is “real” exclusively within the liberal apparatuses; thus, that the habits of autonomy exhibited by the liberal individuals are forms of discipline—a highly regulated form of life produced and sustained by artifactual mechanisms (see Rose 1996, 1999). To be free in liberalism, and in any type of governing, means to be part of a polity that identifies certain conducts as normal, where experts—state bureaucrats, scientists, teachers, “psy” experts, economists, sociologists, doctors, priests, philosophers, personal trainers, and so on—set both the parameters of normality and the behaviors through which the good citizen can accomplish this normality, and where political authorities aim to program the wills of individuals, professionals, and enterprises to link their actions into political objectives (Rose 1999a, 56–57 and 76; Rose and Miller 1992, 197). The liberal citizen feels free only because she persists in understanding freedom as lack of direct coercion of one’s choices and therefore in believing that the liberal “private” domain is free of coercion and of power relations in general (and I shall argue in chapter 7 that the liberal subjectivity depends in investing into this belief ). Contemporary governmental apparatuses, since they act “at a distance” and through persuasion, education, or seduction, can therefore connect the self-governing capacities of the subjects to the objectives of the political authorities (Rose 1996, 50) while continuing to be perceived as simply protecting a social space of individual freedom. And the liberal subject continues to perpetuate the aims and power relations of the liberal apparatuses while engaging in her private practices of the self. Bourgeois subjectivity is shaped through the adoption of a dispersion of grammars of living that allow one to discipline one’s most minute and mundane practices, from eating to exercising and to dating, in accordance with expert knowledges. We live in a society based on the model of confession and guidance (see Foucault 1990), and indeed, every intervention on the contemporary bourgeois self proceeds through the voluntary seeking of expert guidance. Whatever aspect of our lives we are concerned with—eating, sleeping, shopping, sexuality, marital life; how to reproduce, childrear, and be a good parent; how to be pretty, how to be healthy, how to have fun, how to relax, what to desire, who we are, and so on—the


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answers will come from experts, after processes of confession, scrutinizing, surveillance, assessment, education, counselling, or training. As part of our practices of freedom, we voluntarily confess the most intimate aspects of our lives to a dispersion of such experts and follow their advice on how to correct and improve them. Thus, while it is true that the bourgeois subjectivity is constantly (self-)scrutinized and reshaped to fit to the liberal invectives of autonomy and self-affirmation, this is done exclusively through confession to the plethora of experts that help us discover our most inner truth and keep this truth—desires, drives, emotions, behaviors—in alignment with the imperatives of bourgeois propriety. And at the same time, the state will also deploy direct techniques for the reformation of the citizens perceived as failing their duty to self-govern. Consider a sector of the practices through which the subject liberalism defines as woman achieves her freedom and self-expression: maternity, as performed by the bourgeois, that is to say proper, individual. The expert-governmental apparatuses, in conjunction with the power relations that structure the liberal private spaces, including centrally the family, construct this “woman” subject to understand herself in terms of gender, itself understood in terms of reproduction. Motherhood, in the liberal apparatuses, remains the destiny of a woman, an axiom repeated ceaselessly in all social recesses, from biomedical establishments to education and to popular magazines, while the “childless woman” continues to be represented as a failed, abnormal, or morally corrupt subject. In those social spaces saturated with the discourse of gender qua motherhood, the adult liberal woman, when making the private choices that define her autonomy, will, with few exceptions, desire to become a mother within the nuclear bourgeois family. Choosing to become a mother is defined as an expression of freedom simply because it is not forcefully imposed on a subject; that motherhood is weaved into the fabric of her subjectivity does not count as a power relation. Once the liberal woman chooses her path to freedom, she will further her autonomy by, freely, seeking expert advice. Preconception advice and the biomedical investigation of both parents is undertaken to find out if their biology is deemed appropriate for reproduction. Psychologists might assess their minds’ and financial experts their socioeconomic status’s appropriateness for reproduction. Once the woman is pregnant, appropriate techniques for birth giving will be learned in special classes and doctors will periodically survey and investigate her body. Nutritionists will decide what the mother should eat and drink, and other pregnancy experts how she should sleep, exercise, or engage in

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sexual practices. In most cases, delivery will take place in a biomedical institution, under expert control. Subsequently, innumerable experts will teach the mother how to feed, wash, interact with, and educate the child. “Psy” experts in child development will both survey her parenting practices and teach her how to self-survey. Toy and clothes manufacturers will help her choose how her child will dress and play. In the end, the liberal woman will usually find utmost fulfillment, and therefore freedom, in her unconstrained choice to become a mother. The practices of motherhood will become the best thing she ever did, an unequivocal definition of autonomy in liberalism. Those few liberal women that decide not to become mothers will remain haunted by the desire for motherhood. And this entire string of practices will be represented both in the woman’s psyche and in the wider social spaces as “natural”—therefore, both an expression of personal freedom and of the good. At the same time, the liberal apparatuses that are involved in one way or another in all those practices, and whose historical aim is to regulate reproduction so that its result are healthy and proper bourgeois citizens, will see their aims perpetuated at each step of the process of mothering through the “free” conducts of the bourgeois woman. How is it possible that the desires and practices of this free liberal woman coincide to such an extent with what the liberal apparatuses that regulate reproduction would like this subject to do? According to the liberal ontology, simply because liberalism respects the citizen’s choices and nurtures the natural processes of the population. According to the ontology proposed here, simply because expert discourses and governmental apparatuses are at each step shaping that subject’s identity, thus her conducts. All the above refers to how the liberal subject should conduct herself to be deemed “good.” The following chapters will make explicit what happens when she does not perform properly and is, therefore, deemed a “bad” mother by the liberal taxonomies of subjectivity. Of course, to point out that liberalism cannot conform to its own precepts of negative freedom and nonintervention is simply to reiterate that freedom and agency do not preexist their context. This freedom is a practice that makes sense only within a substantive system of power/knowledge since it is defined by specific historical practices, institutions, and forms of power and in opposition to what is considered unfreedom within a discursive framework at a particular time and place (Brown 1995, 6) Indeed, that “freedom is everything except an ‘Idea’ ” ( Jean-Luc Nancy cited in Brown 1995, 6)—and, similarly, that there is no transcendent substance—the subject—on which government


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practices act, but that subjectivities are the historically contingent results of heterogeneous techniques of self-discipline and social discipline (see Rose 1999a, 40; Burchell 1995, 556). This stance exposes as dubious any traditional classification of governmental types into “free” (liberalcapitalist democracies) and “unfree” (any form of social organization that deviates from the ideal-type of this model). Thus, the liberal state’s significance in shaping the social is not a result of forceful imposition or of the hiding of its true intentions behind a veil of ideology; but of its connection with facts and factproduction techniques that have a high authority and social acceptance, namely those of science. The reverse is equally true: the constitution of any expert discursive core presupposes the simultaneous formation of a lay public that, while not able to claim expertise in that discursive field, shares the experts’ faith in the correctness and superiority of their practices of truth formation or, in Foucault’s terms, shares the expert knowledge’s framing of truth, transgression, and irrationality (Larson 1990, 36). It follows that the success of both governmental and expert strategies of truth involves the translation of reality into uniform traces—into uniform languages, logics, modes of perception, and, ultimately, subjectivities—so as to facilitate the dispersion of governmental rationalities and technologies in the social mass and the connection of liberal subjects to the governmental apparatuses (see Latour 1987; Rose and Miller 1992, 184; Dean 1996, 226). Liberalism as Genealogical Event The previous section illustrated how a “governmentality” approach can provide a critique of the element of liberal discourse usually posited as a self-explanatory starting point by contemporary political analysis: freedom in its relations to the state and the subject. Yet, I will argue in what follows that most studies self-described as “governmentality” fail to fulfill their critical potential, as a result of their refusal to conceptualize liberal apparatuses as genealogical events. Part of this failure results from some of the most representative authors in this current— that may draw too literally on Foucaultian analyses (1997, 73–81) that were meant as tentative and preliminary inquiries4 —understanding that what makes liberalism specific is an abstract principle: skepticism regarding the state’s possibility to know and thus of the necessity to govern in general. Hence the paradox that while those studies provide thick historical analyses of liberalism, they usually ignore the

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foundational position occupied by substantive and historically and geographically specific grids of intelligibility in shaping liberal perception, statements, and interventions: Liberalism can thus be accurately characterized in Kantian terms as a critique of state reason, a doctrine of limitation and wise restraint, designed to mature and educate state reason by displaying to it the intrinsic bounds of its power to know. Liberalism undertakes to determine how government is possible, what it can do, and what ambitions it must need renounce to be able to accomplish what lies within its power. (Gordon 1991, 15) Here, Colin Gordon makes liberalism into a quasi-metaphysical idea, embodied in haphazard apparatuses of security that respond to no other logic except that of the immediate moment, and thus decides to ignore that liberalism’s “will to govern” is performed within strictly delimited discursive frameworks that are anything but accidental. This form of querying liberalism is central to one of Nikolas Rose’s (1996) essays on contemporary government that attempts to summarize and conclude the seminal work on the topic both by Rose (the first edition of Governing the Soul [Rose 1999b] appeared in 1989) and by Rose and Peter Miller (1992). Here, Rose maintains the critique of the classical understandings of power, politics, state, and society that make his studies so poignant. He rejects the sociological and political philosophy analyses of governing in terms of a party, class, the immanentist nature or power of the state, or a political program; he also critiques the strict dichotomies—public/private, liberty/power, state/civil society, and so on—that found those analyses. He then proceeds to define the Western governing regimes that define themselves as liberal and democratic (Rose 1996, 37–38): nineteenth-century liberalism, welfarism, and finally neoliberalism. According to this history, welfare liberalism mobilizes social-scientific expertise to know and affect its objects; in contrast, neoliberalism reactivates the classical liberal injunction that restrains political governing by pointing at the governmental impossibility to exhaustively know and duty to respect the rights and interests of citizens. Thus, neoliberalism disperses professional authority centers, decouples governing decisions from the state and moves them in the market, and exerts a permanent vigilance over expertise using the tool of financial-economic “grey sciences” (Rose 1996, 40). Rose uses this summary history to characterize welfarism as a “substantive rationality of rule,” since it is based on “positive content,” the normalizing criteria


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of the human-social sciences; while neo-liberalism is characterized as a “formal rationality of rule,” based on “procedural content,” measurement, evaluation, and calculation as performed by the neoliberal financial-economic apparatuses of truth (54). Overall, Rose reiterates the characterization of liberalism as a self-referential critical appraisal of reality: The “ref lexivity” that imbues all attempts to exercise rule in our present . . . characterized liberal political rationalities from their inception . . . Liberalism inaugurates a continual dissatisfaction with government, a perpetual questioning of whether the desired effects are being produced, of the mistakes of thought and of policy that hamper the efficacy of government, a recurrent diagnosis of failure coupled with a recurrent demand to govern better. (Rose 1996, 47) Free of definite content, liberalism becomes characterized solely by its self-ref lexive spirit. It is not surprising, then, that Rose manifests an undeniable sympathy for the ontological assumptions of neoliberalism, whose techniques of reeducation focused on empowerment, self-control, and self-esteem result, in his opinion, in a form of subjectivization politically preferable to the paternalistic-prescriptive tendencies of welfarist reeducation. While Rose acknowledges in passing the misery and impoverishment that neoliberalism apparatuses engender or intensify, he considers the positive aspects of the neoliberal apparatuses’ reshaping of reality to result precisely from their “blaming the victim.” In Rose’s account, it is politically emancipating that those apparatuses portray the disadvantaged as active agents of their own faith, as opposed to passive victims of structural forces, and assist them through programs that aim to restore them in “their rightful place as self-actualizing and demanding subjects,” instead of relegating them to paternalist expert support and benefit checks (Rose 1996, 59–60). In conclusion, Rose (60) posits the ethical respecification of the subject as “an active citizen in an active society” as the most fundamental characteristic of the “advanced liberal” rationalities. What is immediately surprising in this analysis of neoliberal subjectivization is that Rose stops analyzing liberal freedom as a government artifact to be studied in its positivity and instead approaches it as a transcendent entity. An entity whose nature is truthfully represented by the liberal discourses themselves: liberal freedom is and does what liberal apparatuses tell us it is and does. Rose’s account, therefore, commits the

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classical fallacy of assuming that contemporary European sociopolitical arrangements are the pinnacle of social evolution—a fallacy that made possible an anachronistic reading of reality and history in the crystal globe of present discourses and that assumed this globe to be objective and universal. The very same fallacy genealogy tries to get rid of. By placing the dependent/independent citizen dichotomy at the core of his political analysis, Rose unwittingly adopts the liberal model of active freedom, namely “independence as market choice,” as ontologically and politically superior to any alternative. But if freedom and the citizen are historically contingent effects of power relations, then on what do we base our conviction that neoliberal freedom is preferable to other forms of freedom? On the one hand, in most cases neoliberal reeducation achieves not self-esteem but mortification of the self. Since liberal reeducation starts from the assumption that the poor are incompetent subjects, it cannot be but paternalistic in its techniques of subjectivity remodeling and cannot attract those subjects but through the lure of financial reward. To give but an example, Vivyan Adair (2001) provides a different insight into the techniques of reeducating the poor into active, empowered liberal citizens. These techniques include those of mortification: poor mothers and their children in the United States, for example, are compelled to sell their blood for survival, beg officials for food and medicine, eat expired food from the food banks, and undergo compulsory blood tests, interrogations and home visits, and threats and public display. The neoliberal techniques that Rose considers able to restore the destitute’s dignity and active social position are not much more reassuring: a contractor for the Oregon welfare agency advises hungry recipients to check the dump and residential and business dumpsters for food. New York City’s welfare commissioner asserts that workplace safety and the Fair Labour Standard Acts should not apply to welfare recipients (Adair 2001, 461). Wisconsin “Bridefare” programs promise added benefits to single mothers marrying a man and displaying their story in the local newspapers. “Tidyfare” programs financially sanction poor women whose houses are deemed untidy after inspection by state officials (465), while the New York state dresses welfare recipients cleaning the streets in orange prison uniforms as part of the workfare program (see Albelda and Withorn 2002, Mink 1999). Rather than creating self-actualizing and demanding active citizens, these practices seem to encourage those subjects to self-understand as unworthy, shameful, and isolated individuals (Adair 2001, 467–468). And this is even before starting to mention the effects of neoliberal policies on those citizens living outside the opulent Western core; the


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most cursory glance at the effects of neoliberal policies on the “third world” is enough to show even the most devoted admirer of liberalism that dignity, assertiveness, and self-affirmation are hardly the best ways to describe the shape assumed by non-Western selves living under the sway of neoliberal apparatuses. On the other hand, shouldn’t we be most suspicious of liberal apparatuses precisely when they are successful in their creation of active, demanding, and self-affirming citizens? What subjectivities are they shaping when successful, and with what effects? It is sufficient to read Nikolas Rose’s (1989, 1998, 1999) own analyses of contemporary governing to understand that neoliberal apparatuses aim to shape citizens whose liberty is expressed exclusively through their individualized choice of commodities, be those jobs, body image, or psy techniques of self-improvement, and whose practices of the self are founded on immanentism and othering. As already suggested, the bourgeois selfhood and practices of freedom, far from being a permanent critical and ref lexive ontology of the self as Rose implies, are a tool of depoliticizing identity and the social using the trope of the “worked entirely from within” self and conducts. The successful, or good, liberal self is one whose practices of self-inquiry repeat compulsively the conducts that liberal apparatuses inculcate in this subject as her most intimate resorts of identity; who accepts as superior to any other social arrangement a liberal reality based on domination, exclusion, and immiseration both within and outside the overdeveloped core; and who endlessly reiterates her extraordinary ability not to see any of this. By fixating the ref lexivity of the liberal subject on performing those practices of the self correctly—rather than on questioning their conditions of possibility, mechanisms, and sociopolitical effects—the expert-governmental conduct of conduct is a conservative effort. In a nutshell, successful liberal subjectivization is nothing to be desired politically, but a system of practices that blocks political ref lection as “starting anew” (see Bell 1996). One would also think that in the contemporary analytical landscape a theorist would have a harder time ignoring that liberalism and the ideal-type liberal subjectivity emerge in a violently colonial environment and that not a single moment in the history of liberalism is void of those power relations, or that the grids of intelligibility of Enlightenment science, liberalism, and bourgeois subjectivity are saturated with racist understandings of humanity, with patriarchal and misogynistic understandings of gender, sexuality, and with social arrangements, and eugenic understandings of pauperism. Then through

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what metaphysical artifice can one hope to analytically push aside those discourses and those power relations as mere leftovers that are irrelevant to what liberalism really is today? And with what effects? Rose’s analysis raises more question marks that center on the possibility to distinguish with clarity, within any given governmental apparatus, between form and content or between procedural and substantive knowledge. Is any one “procedural” knowledge—say economic, statistical, or financial theories—free of a formative relation with discursive genealogies and substantive power relations, which also establish what the ones who incorporate those knowledges into governing procedures can say, think, see, and do? To sustain this arbitrary dichotomy, Rose (47) distinguishes between the governing problematiques of a “real” history of liberalism and what he offers us—an “ideal history of liberalism”?—without engaging with the level of analysis that unravels this “real” history or explaining why it is worthwhile for a theorist of governmentality to theorize liberalism as an ideal-type, idea, or abstraction. Since Rose’s analysis refuses to critique liberalism’s formal intentions, it cannot but be timid in its appraisal of who we are now and ends up reiterating liberalism as a selfsame, transhistorical center (or, rather, idea); as well as repeating the humanist teleological tendencies that it initially rejects and that analyze a governing apparatus in terms of intention, moral-philosophical justification, or metaphysics of freedom. Theorists of governmentality should maybe take more seriously Foucault’s (2003, 313) hypothesis that we must analyze ourselves as beings that are determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment—an analysis whose real challenge does not consist in weighting dialectically what is good and what is bad in Enlightenment, but in attempting to trace a critical genealogy of who we are now. Isn’t it, then, that while Rose’s positing of liberalism as “the best option currently available”—while aiming to be a philosopher’s attempt to abandon the “exceeding” of the limits to knowledge by the philosopher—results in a failure to engage with the practical critique that envisages political theorizing as a possible crossing-over ( franchissement) (Foucault 1984, 315)? By trying to explore ways to move beyond this analytical sterility, this book affirms that, when the history of liberalism is concerned, there are important discursive regularities in the way liberal ref lexivity is structured. *

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I have suggested that approaching liberalism as a strictly “procedural” form of governing, as an idea(l), can preclude a critical analysis of


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the systems of differences that structure what a governmentality selfdefined as liberal can see, think, and do. In what follows I shall argue for reintroducing a dimension that I find missing in such analyses and that could be termed genealogical. The hope is that such a perspective might help frame liberalism as a set of historical events, instead of approaching it as either a universal structure, that is, a set of universal principles and institutional arrangements necessary and sufficient to guarantee prosperity, freedom, and democracy, or as an abstract form of governmental inquiry structured exclusively in response to the question How should one govern? The role of genealogy is to diagnose contemporary power relations and states of subjectivity by dissolving the temporal constancy of identity in terms of which we like to understand ourselves. It aims to deprive us of our continuities (Foucault in Deleuze 1992, 165). Analytically, that means replacing the hope to capture reality in some abstract formula with the assumption of a polymorphism of the object or event analyzed that increases as one progresses to break down its elements and to follow their external and internal relations of intelligibility (Foucault in Deleuze 1992, 77). The genealogical analysis of reality, then, is not a tool for exhausting its essence but one for multiplying its facets, undoing its self-evident fixed points, and reopening its truth to political contestation. At the same time, such an analysis looks for systems of relations that delimit, always incompletely, an event; that is, it tries to account for the processes that make possible a certain structuring of reality and the persistence in time and space of this system of order. In the case of liberalism, such a genealogical approach looks to reconstruct the various systems of subjection and play of dominations (Foucault 1998, 376) that allow contemporary liberalism’s apparatuses to assume their shape, as well as to analyze critically what makes those apparatuses understood by their subjects as tools for freedom, equality, and emancipation. Thus, when Foucault asserts that “humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (Foucault 1998, 378), I take it to imply that the task of genealogy is to bring to light the conf licts that survive within the rules we consider universal and emancipating at any given particular moment and to expose the dominations no more perceived as such since given, within liberal apparatuses, the form of natural, universal, and impartial principles of reality. This analysis tries to suggest the presence of a “block of historical knowledge” (Foucault 2003, 7) that founds liberalism and whose centrality might have been masked by governmentality analyses of liberalism. It tries to suggest that liberalism is insufficiently analyzed

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if it is imagined as a fully unstructured response to an event without elucidating what allows a particular occurrence to become significant governmentally and what shapes the governmental response. When analyzing liberalism as a form of questioning reality that results in a dispersion of governmental rationalities and practices, governmentality studies attempt to remain faithful to a definition of genealogy as a form of critical inquiry that opposes local, discontinuous, and often disqualified knowledges to a unitary theoretical instance that aims to organize them into a coherent overall body of knowledge (Foucault 2003, 8–9). This is an ethos that needs to be preserved by any serious critical effort. But it should not preclude a use of genealogy as an “insurrection of knowledge” against the “centralizing power- effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and working of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours” (Foucault 2003, 9). In this form, genealogy resists any discourse regarded as scientific no matter its embodiment, be it in the pedagogical apparatus, a theoretical-commercial apparatus like the “psy” sciences, or a political apparatus like liberalism (Foucault 2003, 9). Then, the “order of life” that the liberal state constructs is both an effect and a permanent recodification of systems of differences that are historically coterminous with the emergence of biopolitics. That is, the order of reality of each governmental regime self-defined as liberal is informed by a set of foundational assumptions that ref lect the specific genealogy of liberal biopower. Those “foundational assumptions” are a set of presuppositions that shape, insidiously, the discourses of truth of liberalism, its perception and actions. We can say that foundational assumptions are the principle of order of liberalism, its primary or organizing logic, and thus belong to an ontoepistemic stratum underneath the theoretical constructions of the programmatic governing discourses. Then, this discussion proposes the following theme: historically, liberal governing emerges within a formative relation with heterogeneous discourses about the good and the truth that can, very tentatively, be lumped under the term Enlightenment or modernity. And, to risk an anthropomorphizing metaphor, liberalism incorporates in its deep psyche the “modern” principles of distinguishing between sameness and difference and, ordered by those principles, the nodal concepts of race, gender and sexuality, civilization, progress, modernity, rights, equality, universalism, and so on. Crucial for this analysis is one such principle, which I call “othering.”


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Difference and Othering in Liberalism The discussion in the first half of this chapter suggested that liberal governing never limits itself at framing abstract spaces of law and rights and leaving the subjects to freely choose within those spaces, while restricting the role of the state to a politically neutral concern with their freedom. On the contrary, it actively infuses the social spaces with expert-governmental apparatuses that shape the desires, thoughts, or emotions of the bourgeois subjectivity, while affirming that those interventions encourage individual freedom. Implicit in this account is that whenever persuasion through “translation”5 is not deemed sufficient, liberalism intervenes directly on the conduct of the subjects considered unable to self-govern. Those failing to adopt the conducts liberalism establishes as normal are no longer autonomous, self-governing individuals but risky objects of government. Hence, liberalism is permanently confronted with the question, How to legitimize the tension between the respect of individual autonomy and the permanent interventions on the social required by the normative rationality of liberalism? The remainder of this chapter will bring together the issues discussed so far to suggest that this function is performed in U.S. liberalism by a governmental mechanism I called othering. More precisely, that foundational in solving the autonomy/intervention liberal antinomy in the United States is the governmental framing of the difference between I and Other. *

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At the most basic level, stabilizing an identity involves defining an “inside” in relation to an “outside” and a same (“I”) in relation to a different (“non-I” or “Other”). Identity making, in other words, is a regulated practice of setting (and upsetting) boundaries between self and Other that allow one to gain the sense of a coherent and self-same self. It is a regulated practice because it does not represent a matter of intention or individual agency but of internalizing, during ritualized disciplinarian practices that start at birth, of certain schemes of representation and intelligibility to the extent that they become the most intimate resorts of who we are. Race, sex, sexuality, and gender are, of course, such schemes that are placed as obligatory passage point of any “proper” subjectivity, in the sense that one cannot form a “normal” sense of self without relying on those nodal points of identity. That is, the feeling of a coherent (and immanentist) self required to negotiate

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appropriately the liberal-capitalism realities cannot be constructed but by acquiring an intimate sense of a nonambivalent sex, gender, race, and sexuality and by systematically and permanently reiterating this identity in performances that attempt to solidify our identities as certain and the nodal points selected by our order of reality as natural structures. The few subjects that fall outside this imperative of nonambivalence are placed in categories of otherness situated at the margins of humanness (see Butler 1990, 1993). To those classical tropes of subjectivity (gender, sex, and so on) can be added the nodal points that structure bourgeois subjectivity, from the need for individual self-affirmation to the desires for a prestigious job, commodities, ownership of a house, security, and stability. Those liberal nodal points have themselves been sedimented historically as natural to the extent that very few subjectivites can avoid engaging with them. Since all those nodal points of self hood are constructed according to the I/Other system of organizing binaries, arranging Others in ontological schemes, that is, the internalization as the core of our self hood of regulated gradations of otherness, is imperious for acquiring a sense of self. Thus, the kaleidoscopic ontological scheme of one’s subjectivity is shaped by a plethora of power relations in the family, educational system, work environment, couple, peer group, nation, and state institutions and by a plethora of discourses that create truth, race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, patriotism, nationalism, civilization or bourgeois civility. Those systems of power and knowledge distribute within our social and symbolic spaces the above-mentioned obligatory points of passage of personhood. More precisely, they select and fix as natural the differences relevant for perceiving and understanding otherness—phenotypical elements, cosmologies, place of birth, sexuality—and arrange them in moral-epistemic- ontological configurations that allow one to perceive objects or subjects as same or different and to assess how similar or different they are from oneself. The “ordering tables” of identity operate in terms of difference from the Other. And identities orbit around a handful of “fictitious unities”—race, ethnicity, culture, religion, nationality, profession, sex, sexuality, gender, and so on—that organize self hood and difference. This is not to deny the permanently ref lexive nature of identity-making processes, since a sense of “I” or “Us” is permanently reformed and reasserted in relation to both a genealogical narrative of one’s identity and to present power relations that shape and confine this identity. Building an identity is a process of continuous ref lection upon the I and the Other, of relocating or


45

consolidating the boundaries between the two, and it is on those processes that transformative political activity must intervene. Of course, this scheme of identity formation posits the impossibility to assert an “I” but by asserting a corresponding “non-I”: I know who I am (a white, heterosexual, Christian, or man) only insofar as I know who I am not (a nonwhite, homosexual, Muslim, or woman). Identity, then, results from the formative relationship with its Other and continuously depends on this Other for its constant reiteration, that is, for perceiving oneself as a presence that is stable in time and space. Which is only to say that, since every time I reiterate who I am (“I am a Christian! I am American! I am a woman!”) I also reiterate the Other the intelligibility of my identity depends on, then the possibility of any identity is predicated on the ontological incorporation of its Other.6 How, then, is it possible that we understand identity as self-referential, full, or “entirely worked from within”? If identities tend to assert themselves as uncontroversial, pure, and natural, then this assertion can take place exclusively through the exclusion or erasure of an otherness and ambivalence that is constitutive of any self. And the more I need to posit my identity as pure to make sense of my conducts, the more radical the erasure of the Other must be, since engaging in any conduct associated with the Other becomes a major threat to the self. The most evident examples here are related to sex and gender, where ambivalence of conduct is fatal to the coherence of self-identity. This erasure of the Other from identity posits the I and the Other as always already there, as identities whose fullness precedes historically and ontologically their relation. Because of those exclusions and erasures, the self and the Other appear as antagonistic poles.7 *

*

*

I argue that liberal-governmental practices, and especially liberal subjectivization, operate through othering, understood as the ontological fixation of difference as a difference of substance or difference of ontological nature. Liberal othering implicitly postulates that it is possible to “be” an identity; that it is possible to exhaustively know what this identity is and, more poignantly, what it is not; and that to perceive and know true, ontological difference, the single, spontaneous moment of confrontation with difference is sufficient. In other words, within an order of reality shaped by liberal apparatuses, I can perceive the different substance of the Other, her full presence or absolute absence, because who I am is fully “worked from within” and nonambivalent,

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because my perception reveals the truth of objects to my consciousness in an unmediated and undistorted manner, and because identities, especially the “I,” can be known in a complete and final manner. This is, of course, an understanding of the moment, of the self and of difference as full presences (see May 1998, 77-129), that makes knowledge and identity totally independent of language, discourse, or relations—in a word, independent of the social and thus apolitical—and assimilates them with a transcendent moment of recognition. Against it, this book argues that difference is salient to identity only to the extent that any self-conceptualization (“white”) requires the conceptualization of the Other (“black”), a conceptualization that is simultaneous with selfformation and not subsequent to it, as a theory of “worked entirely from within” identity suggests. That absence, or Other, does not appear outside of presence, but is internal to it (Derrida cited in May 2005, 11). And is only to the extent that the Other is part of the I that I can recognize the Other, since the other is recognized as being what the “I” excludes. I will insist that this discussion is not presented for the sake of scholastic gymnastics but because of its important political implications: by affirming that difference is natural and immediately translated into both consciousness and truth, othering makes difference fully external to the “I” and fully independent of the I/Other relation. It thus dissociates difference from the strategies of truth and power that construct intelligible reality precisely by structuring the world into systems of differences. By placing difference outside the reach of our critical analyses of reality in this manner, othering works to maintain in place the binary laws of truth that structure reality into mutually exclusive groups (see Butler 1990, 184). It operates as a discursive maneuver to fix certain identities as naturally inferior and stunts the possibility of reconfiguring the social within the liberal apparatuses. We therefore need to be equally cautious when positing the experience of any Other as irreducible to “my own,” since more often than not such positing isolates the Other on one side of an Us/Others dichotomy that makes truth and the good into the defining traits of Us. The peril in a move that equates ethics with our acceptance of the Other’s irreducible difference is to end up constructing the political around a moment of solipsism that can be used to erase both the political significance of responsibility for the Other and the constant presence of the Other in the self. Or, if you prefer, the perils of positing the Other as incomprehensible are to erase the politically crucial fact that both the I and the Other exist as meaningful identities exclusively within the relation


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between them. The political subject risks being defined as the monad who cannot know anything except oneself and who, therefore, is bound to remain a passive object of the power/knowledge relations that form both I and non-I and that transcend any one identity, location, or social group. Thus, the fear of “totalitarian” ontological moves that erase or subsume the Other and the obsessive attempts to preserve the otherness of the Other—those are usually theories coming from a Europe bruised by the Holocaust, while inexplicably remaining impervious to over 500 years of colonial brutality and genocide—leave us equally vulnerable to the risk of upholding difference as one of substance and thus keep us away from the more relevant analysis of difference as a political moment of truth formation. Moreover, whenever the self is conceptualized as preceding its social relations and difference as transcendent, we can expect this exclusionary move to come back to haunt the I, most often in the guise of a reconceptualization of the Other as that which impedes the I to achieve fullness (see Laclau and Zac 1994, 15–16; Zizek 1990, 253–254), and therefore needs to be excluded, erased, or reshaped. Not surprisingly, then, liberalism uses the Other as a political and ontological scapegoat. *

*

*

Why would U.S. liberalism use othering as a recurrent strategy of government? Othering fulfills several functions in liberalism. First, othering helps accommodate the liberal tension between the necessity to rule in the name of order and morality and the need to restrict government in the name of liberty. U.S. liberalism cannot define noncompliant subjects as autonomous individuals that chose to “do otherwise” or as a result of the systematic failure of the liberal biopolitics to secure the well-being and prosperity of the polity. However, if the noncompliant citizens are different in substance from the bourgeois subject, they cease being autonomous individuals toward whom liberal governing has responsibilities, either of nonintervention or of support. On the contrary, those Others fail to attain autonomy as a result of their own incompatibility with the universalism of liberalism. Second, othering prevents the dislocation of the liberal systems of power/knowledge. Since othering makes the critical interrogation of wider systems of subjectivization (patriarchy, neocolonialism, racism, positivism, Eurocentrism) increasingly difficult, the same rules of truth formation are repeated with each governmental investigation of sociopathology, “finding” each time the same subjects as pathological

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(an abbreviated list would include the unemployed; the poor; the homeless; the single and/or incompetent mothers; the dissolute women; the “abnormal family”; the immigrants; the racialized and ethnicized and especially the Black race, family, cultures, or genders; the addicts; the perverts; the lazy; the degenerate; the “dependent”; the “illiberal”). A glance at the history of liberal governing confirms that, irrespective of the elaborate contortions of liberal theories of governing, liberal sciences of the state, and liberal governmental technologies, for the past 300 years or so liberalism explains the social exclusively in terms of those pathologies and recurrently rediscovers those Others at the root of all social evil. And third, othering aligns with the liberal-political goals the irresolvable liberal tension between the universal and the particular— this is a most important function for this analysis and will be detailed in what follows. Othering makes it possible, whenever necessary, to translate those governmentally defined as “particular” into those governmentally defined as Other, and vice versa. Liberalism manages to use this tension between the universal and the particular as a foundational mechanism of governing, thus allowing liberalism to occupy those two contradictory ontological fields (universal and particular) at the same time. That is, liberal government operates through the formation of two types of knowledges, of the population and of the individual, and thus can fix any given individual either as a member of society or nation or as the possessor of a particular identity that ascribes her to a specific position in the governmental assemblage. The result is the “double bind” of simultaneous individualization and totalization that biopower achieves (Foucault 1982, 211). Since this hyphenation of individualization and totalization makes contemporary government so deeply enmeshed in the processes of identity formation, contesting simultaneously both arms of this double bind threatens the governmental subject with dissolution. Thus, symptomatically, the struggles against subjection seem to permanently oscillate between contesting particular identities and contesting total identities, between demands in the name of particularism (difference) and demands in the name of citizenship (sameness). By making the subject oscillate between those positions, the core liberal antinomy between the particular and the universal is not exposed as untenable but, on the contrary, allowed to persist uncontested. All throughout, the liberal state presents itself as already occupying the ground on which this oscillation takes place: as the entity that makes the natural difference between universal and particular intelligible politically and regulates it in equitable manner.


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All throughout, the liberal state denies that it has any contribution to bringing into being this difference. Othering facilitates this double bind of liberalism by explaining the particular citizens as different in substance from the normal liberal citizen. When the bourgeois subject is made universal, all specificity is removed from him: he is placed outside culture, gender, race, sexuality, or ethnicity.8 The “particular” cannot be but the inferior leftover of his process of universalization, the citizen that does not fit the universal ontological category and therefore is described as racialized, ethnic, gendered, or “cultural.” Described, that is, using the same nodal points that liberal apparatuses mobilize to fix difference as immanent in the process of othering (race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and so on) and that they edit out when they universalize bourgeois subjectivity. Thus, “particular” or “special” groups and the Other are made same in the liberal apparatuses, in that they are brought into being as difference from the universal liberal citizen. The ease with which this collapsing of particular and Other is operated stems from the already-mentioned assumption that identities are arelational substances that can be fully known and precisely categorized according to a scale ranging from “normal, universal, us” to “pathological, particular, Others.” Indeed, as Wendy Brown (1995, 153) argues, liberal equality’s Other is not inequality but difference: liberal injustice occurs when those that are same are treated as different and ontological difference, while founding liberal governing, is considered a problem outside the purview of liberal justice. The processes that make it possible for liberalism to self-represent as universal involve erasing patriarchy, gender, race, heterosexism, as well as time and space, from liberal history, rules, and practices. At the same time the universal liberal grids of intelligibility and systems of rules remain deeply structured by those “supplements,” since no understanding of universalism, of “we are all same,” is possible without securing what it means to be different and particular (gendered, homosexual, colonized, racialized, pauper). Thus, the double bind of liberal subjectivization operates as a crucial technique of power in U.S. liberalism: it allows governmental power to retreat in one of its guises—emphasizing sameness or difference—when the other is attacked and to reappear unscathed when necessary. Thus, it allows the United States liberalism to create the social qua polity as an entity with f luctuating boundaries, retracted or extended according to the governmental logics of the moment to include or exclude certain social identities from society. Indeed, as the following chapters will detail, the general mechanism between the marriage of liberalism,

50


racism, and eugenics seems to be this particular game of inclusion/ exclusion that forms “particular” identities as Other and projects them outside the boundaries of the society proper while also representing them as an inside threat, lodged within the majority and harming it with their pathological behaviors. Thus, U.S. liberalism can keep the identities it constitutes as particular in an in/out wavering position that permanently legitimates liberalism. The constitutive presence of the “abject Other” (see Butler 1993, 57–93) that polices the boundaries of normality remains well hidden when liberal political structures adopt their universalising mode while being spectacularly displayed in their particular mode (for example, in the various avatars of liberal multiculturalism or in the U.S. “War on Terror”). In both incarnations, liberalism manages to hold on to its aura of universalism while dealing politically with its particulars and its own particularism. *

*

*

When liberalism does attempt to deal with particularism (for example, gender, race, culture, sexuality) within its universalist framework, the political results are usually disastrous, since the bluntness of the political tool produces “collateral damage” for liberalism. In other words, when liberalism does not acknowledge its desire to reform or punish the particulars (the poor, the black, and so on) but pretends it operates in the name of an abstract and universal idea of good and truth that applies equally to all citizens, it finds itself inefficient politically. It is only when it manages to make the particular Other, and thus to legitimately mount an intervention focused on the degenerate social group, that liberalism governs with maximum efficiency. A historical example of tactical othering is described in Steve Martinot’s (2003, 28–73) rendition of the processes of racialization in sixteenth-century colonial Virginia. As long as the colonial administration justifies the exclusion of the Africans from miscegenation or from participation in the affairs of the colony using the argument of their heathenism, it has to operate with a blunt tool of governing. The Africans who convert to Christianity—and conversion represents an important aim of the colonization and a central justification of the captivity of indigenous and African populations—cannot be excluded from either reproduction or public affairs. Only when the Africans are made Other using the concept of “race” can the governing goals of exclusion and capital extraction be attained with ever-increasing efficiency and brutality. Some contemporary examples could be the grotesque forms taken by


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the French attempts to ban all religious symbols in state schools in order to punish French Muslims: or the Ontario province initiative to outlaw panhandling (The Safe Streets Act) without specifying its target that resulted in the concomitant ban of charity collection in the street and in a plethora of ridiculous legal implications such as a cab driver’s interdiction to asking money from a client after a taxi ride or the unlawfulness of asking one’s partner for change when making a public phone call. When, on the contrary, liberalism carefully isolates its target—the blacks, the poor, the Muslims—this governmental fumbling is avoided. However, such particularized interventions are against the liberal precepts of universalism and political neutrality; as well as contradicting the alleged absence of moral, racial, or gendered content of the liberal apparatuses, their status as a set of procedures not substantive policy. Hence, liberalism needs to make those citizens Other, so as to intervene legitimately on a particular group. Examples of successful liberal othering are apartheid in South Africa or Israel, or Jim Crow laws in the United States. The War on Terror needs to precisely Other the Muslim and Arab, internally as well as externally in the guise of the “Axe of Evil” or “terrorist States,” in order to intervene on them efficiently. Similarly, the prevention of “unwanted” or “illegitimate” pregnancy governing technologies in the United States is directed specifically at gendered, pauperized, and racialized Others. *

*

*

“Affirmative action” is an example of another liberal tactic, namely playing the game of universal/particular so that the liberal state occupies the ontological ground on which both particularism and universalism rest and thus interpellates and judges the subjects using either the universal or the particular yardstick. Contemporary liberalism agrees to “affirmative action” as a sign of its tolerance of the “particular” subject’s need to get special treatment. However, once this special treatment is granted, the subject is judged according to the principles of universal liberalism. Because the two identities, universal and particular, of the citizen tolerated are considered monadic, independent of their relation, and because the “universalism” of liberalism is itself an ideal-type of a particular (the European bourgeois man), the “particular” subject cannot be but in the wrong. For example, “community women” are allowed to hold positions as trainers in NGOs that provide services to immigrant women. However, those women’s services are considered inadequate since they are not sufficiently trained: they do not possess

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the language, knowledge, lingo, or habitus necessary for the job. The trick is that the norm of the “universal liberal citizen” used here in order to judge performance represents precisely what those subjects lack, what allows their subjectivization as “particular,” and what makes necessary affirmative action—their different knowledge, habitus, language. Liberalism demands of those subjects precisely the qualities that it signals as missing from their subjectivity when representing them as “particular.” In other words, in contemporary liberalism the difference from the ideal-type bourgeois subjectivity that makes the “particular” subjects able to demand and receive “affirmative action” is the same difference that makes those subjects inadequate to perform properly the conducts this “affirmative action” grants them access to. The same logic applies to race, sexuality, or gender (see Brown 1995). *

*

*

At this point we can affirm that in order to legitimize its constant intervention on the social, U.S. liberalism frames those interventions in terms of a “scapegoat” and of a “crisis.” While Franz Fanon, from whom I borrow the term “scapegoat,” uses it to describe how the identity of the black is utilized by the dominant colonial discourse, his metaphor retains all its evocative power in the context of liberal governmental tactics: [The] scapegoat for white society—which is based on myths of progress, civilisation, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement—will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths. This brutal opposing force is supplied by the Negro. (Fanon 1986, 194) Here, a scapegoat is an Other of the liberal citizen that blocks the natural unfolding of the modern trajectory of freedom and progress.9 Now, liberalism can directly intervene on social events since its interventions diagnose and aim to remove from within the polity a presence that threatens liberalism’s attaining of fullness and, thus, threatens to make it similar to the “illiberal” governmental regimes it defines itself against: stagnant, irrational, ahistorical, unfree, unfair, poor. No wonder, then, that the United States governmentality systematically defines this presence and those events as a “crisis” of the nation, one that needs immediate and decisive action from the—otherwise minimal—liberal state.


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To insist, those tactics explain U.S. social (and medical) pathology in a manner that preserves liberalism as the most adequate and efficient governmental regime since, first, they frame the destabilizing irruption of the scapegoat into the social as being independent of liberal apparatuses, engendered solely by the different substance of the scapegoat, and second, they make imperious the governmental intervention on the social, while also preserving liberal governing as objective, neutral, and fair—as governing through freedom. However, defining the social in terms of a scapegoat is not a conspiratorial decision or an unavoidable, natural propensity, but the consequence of the ways in which certain ontological, epistemic, and moral founding assumptions guide the contemporary U.S. governmental gaze, be that of the political leaders, technicians, bureaucrats, experts, or the general public. State-level othering in the United States is the result of the historically sedimented order of reality that makes certain options seem more evident and “natural” than others, makes certain objects and events more easily visible, and makes certain solutions more rational. Othering, then, is a necessary technique of power to the same extent to which patriarchal, misogynist, eugenic, or racist explanations of the social are necessary. It follows that whenever U.S. liberalism constructs a governmental scapegoat, its gaze will be naturally shaped by available historical discourses that make certain members of the polity particular—the poor, the racialized, the gendered, the delinquent, the mad, and so on. Paradoxically considering the liberal rhetoric of state neutrality, this means that the U.S. liberal governmental gaze is always-already “particularized,” that is, “sees” and aims to regulate preferentially those defined as ontologically different or particular. *

*

*

The grid of intelligibility of U.S. liberal apparatuses is structured by a dispersion of dichotomies—civilized/barbarous, white/nonwhite, European/non-European, modern/premodern, man/woman, dependent/independent, eugenic/dysgenic, normal/pathological, us/them, and so on—and made rigid by the expert-governmental obsession with discrete and fully knowable objects, unambivalent determinations, and absolute difference. In U.S. liberalism, then, difference from the abstract model of bourgeois civility is created and stabilized as otherness, a substance that is incompatible with the “governing through freedom” that liberalism practices. The presence of Others within the liberal polity is not a marginal side effect of governing through

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freedom; it does not represent random and scattered occurrences of deviance or the externalization of the (temporary or permanent) inability of a small group of subjects to realize the autonomy that liberalism makes possible. Similarly, bio- and anatomo-politics for the management of the Other are not a negligible and haphazard set among liberalpastoral apparatuses that otherwise remain self-same—that is, continue to subsume most of their governing technologies to the imperative of individual autonomy. Those presences and those apparatuses are central to what liberalism is: a systematic set of subjects and technologies inbuilt in the form liberalism assumes in the United States. Of course, Foucault’s (1990, 2003, 2007) understanding of biopolitics suggests just that when it represents the modern state as intervening on the social by way of identifying the “internal enemy,” the “dangerous” or “degenerate” individuals within society. The birth of state biological racism results precisely from the liberal state’s biopolitical investment into a healthy, vigorous population. Ann Stoler (1995, 193) affirms the same in relation to the formation of liberal subjectivity in relation to the Empire: “There was no bourgeois identity that was not contingent on a changing set of Others who were at once desired and repugnant, forbidden and subservient, cast as wholly different but also the same.” As part of the strategic struggles against liberal subjectivizations and their effects, this book is concerned with how pauper, racialized, sexed, and gendered Others emerge within the technical-scientific knowledges of family-planning policy. In the process of analyzing those emergences, it also tries to ref lect on the shape assumed by our political practices within the contemporary liberal apparatuses.

CH A P T E R

T H R E E


If liberal apparatuses are assemblages of rationalities and technologies structured according to a substantive logic, rather than transcendent ideas or sets of procedures, then what is this logic? This chapter discusses the assumptions that structure the apparatuses of health government in the United States, focusing on their strategic construction of race in relation to gender and sex. It will be argued that the apparatuses of health regulation always construct sexual identities in gendered and racialized terms; more precisely, they see reproductive events through a grid that opposes the prosperity and health of a normal population to a set a pathological, gendered, and racialized Others. Race, Gender, and Sexuality as Liberal Tools of Othering If the grids of intelligibility of U.S. liberalism are entwined with those of Enlightenment science and European colonialism, then liberal ideas of truth, subjectivity, humanity, and good governing are formed within a relationship with modern ideas of positivism, race, gender, and sexuality. That the classical European thinkers construct liberal universality in relation to particular Others defined in racial and gendered terms should by now be common sense. Eze’s (1997) collection of texts written by some of the foundational theorists of the Enlightenment illustrates precisely the central position of racialized worldviews in Age of Reason’s universalism.1 This “reason” we are still tributary to2 takes shape within the relationship between a rationally superior Europe and an irrational, primitive, or

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savage Rest (Eze 1997, 4). The uninterrupted murmur of ontological taxonomies that envelops the great critical texts of the Enlightenment is fully within the scientific truth of their time, as well of our own: philosophy, theology, and science (natural sciences, anthropology, geography, sociology, medicine, evolutionism). It is from the grids of intelligibility weaved by those discourses of reason that liberal reality stems. Carefully crafted tables of othering are indeed the foundation of Enlightenment rationality and of a reality brought into being through relentless cataloguing: in the “Great Chain of Being” described by natural historians such as Carl von Linné and the Comte de Buffon, where each identity occupies a natural position and status discovered by the patient and perseverant search of the scientist, the European is constantly occupying the top position3 (Eze 1997, 5). Hume’s (in Eze 1997, 33) footnote in his “Of National Characters” is by now infamous: “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.” Kant, unsurprisingly since he draws on Hume, makes similar racial assertions about the natural superiority of whites and especially of Germans. Talking about the difference between the whites and the primitive Negros, he asserts, “So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color” (55). The entries under “Negro” in the Encyclopédie and in the first American edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, two of the foundational compendia of modern truths, are equally disparaging. And Hegel, lying down the geographical bases of world history in his 1822–1828 lectures, affirms that where nature is too powerful, in a nutshell north, south, east, and west of Europe, it impedes the opposition of man and nature and of man against himself and thus the attainment of a superior level of being. Overpowered by nature, those living outside Europe fail to reach the level of internal ref lection and individualism that make possible high self-consciousness of the spirit, freedom, and independence: It must be said in general that, in the interior of Africa, the consciousness of the inhabitants has not yet reached an awareness of any substantial and objective existence . . . [the African] has not yet succeeded in making this distinction between himself as an individual and his essential universality . . . he is still at the first stage of his development: he is dominated by passion, and is nothing more than a savage. All our observations of African man show him as living in a state of savagery and barbarism, and he remains in this state to the present day. (Hegel in Eze 1997, 127)

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The African remains as foundationally different and incomprehensible to the European as a dog, or an ancient Greek (128). It is in the name of this difference that Hegel condones slavery whenever it helps the transition of those that didn’t yet achieve the ethical life of a rational state toward a higher state of existence (self-awareness). Unsurprisingly, Hegel engages in a lengthy justification of the legitimacy of the enslavement of the African by the European (135–136) and sanctions colonial conquest (151–152). As scientific discourses gradually secure for themselves the status of truth of our times, such debates are translated into the language of natural science and the inferiority of the Other is increasingly described in immanentist terms. Georges Cuvier, a founder of geology, paleontology and modern comparative anatomy; Charles Lyell, conventional founder of modern geology; and Etienne Serres, famous French anatomist all insist, in more or less aggressive terms, on the existence of some form of taxonomy of race, with the nonwhites as inferior (Gould 1993, 87–92). Of course, those accounts do not exhaust what Enlightenment thought is about4 or the types of power relations it makes possible today. However, relevant for the present analysis is that all those Enlightenment discourses of truth use othering both as a foundational ontological assumption and as a central strategy of knowledge formation. They base their statements on an understanding of the world in terms of difference as one of ontological nature. And in fact, the Enlightenment accounts that imagine identity to emerge in relation to the “natural” environment do not alter the immutable nature and thus the power effects of difference: the time and space scale of Enlightenment thought is so grand that for political purposes, that is, at any one particular historical moment, its hierarchies of identities and differences are inalterable. Even more importantly, those inferior and superior identities and their respective environments are understood as arelational. In either the “environmental” or the “worked from within” variant of Enlightenment ontology, identities are strictly either Us or Other, independent of and preexisting the power and knowledge relations between them. *

*

*

The substantive political theories of liberal universalism are always founded on racialized, gendered, and sexualized taxonomies. Marianna Valverde (1996, 360–361) notices how John Stuart Mill

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advocates despotic forms of rule for the racially coded “backwards” nations, not as a contingent exception but part of a consistent politicoontological theory of liberalism. James Tully (in Dean 2002, 48–49) shows that John Locke’s justification of the appropriation of indigenous land in North America is based on Eurocentric ontological and political norms of “humanity” that exclude the indigenous and their sociopolitical institutions from the status of civilized humanity. Beate Jahn (2005) similarly argues that liberal thought is always imperialist, that is, always classifies certain peoples and nations as ontologically lesser than the universalized European stock and in need of coercive civilizing intervention from the European states. And Foucault’s (2003) genealogy of state racism in Europe charts in detail the role of othering in bringing into being the forms of governmental power and of knowledge we consider today the epitome of freedom and democracy. Foucault’s lectures trace the transformation, toward the end of the eighteenth century, of a historical struggle that uses the idea of “race war” to contest the universalism of monarchic sovereignty5 into a discourse of race as an internal biological threat for the state (Foucault 2003, 70–72). By resignifying race as biological, liberal biopower replaces a narrative of the social as historical conf lict and domination with a racialized taxonomy of internal groups, designated in medicalbiological terms as a parasitic and degenerate form of life infesting the collective body of the nation (Foucault 2003, 61–62). More precisely, the story is not anymore “You are our enemy because you are of a different race with which we have a history of conf lict and domination,” but rather “Your race, which is who you are, has a high correlation with degeneracy and is therefore a threat for our society, of which your race is part” (77). Which is why in “modern” Europe the biopolitics of race are intimately related to a discourse of degeneracy that crystallizes in the nineteenth century into eugenics. This new discourse of race appears precisely when the liberal apparatuses of security start their endeavor of ruling the biological, by disciplinarizing medical knowledge and hygiene as science of the state and by mounting medical campaigns to regularize the biological processes specific of the population: reproduction, birth rate, mortality, sexuality, and so on (240–247). This is to say that the shaping of biopower is coterminous with the processes through which the state makes race into a biological universal. At this point, Foucault’s account presents racism not as just a historical correlate of liberalism but as a necessity of state biopolitics, as a

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technique that allows biopower to work: So racism is bound with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The juxtaposition of—or the way biopower functions through—the old sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction, and activation, of racism. (258) Thus, modern state racism (81) is a governing strategy that uses medical-normalizing techniques to preserve the sovereignty of the liberal state, to defuse conf lict and to legitimize state violence and domination against its own citizens (and, we should add, colonial dependents). More precisely, state racism is a biopolitical strategy of social purification that allows separating between what must live and what must die, in a type of governing that affirms it exists in order to nurture life. “Death” is, of course, not only literal within liberal apparatuses but also consists in exposing one to death, in increasing a group’s risk of dying, in political death, in expulsion, in marginalization, and so on; by describing a threat to the well-being of the nation in racial terms, biopower justifies death as fully within the state’s duty to protect life (256). And evolutionism is mobilized by liberal apparatuses as the dominant modality of framing race when those apparatuses think about issues such as colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness, or the history of societies and social class: “Whenever . . . there was a confrontation, a killing or the risk of death, the nineteenth century was quite literally obliged to think about them in the form of evolutionism” (257). What is more, by making a genealogical thinking of the nation irrelevant, those bio-racist codifications of the nation confine the political to the present moment, the ahistorical moment of full truth and of the fruition of liberal state’s universality (222–228): state racism is the (self-)fulfillment of a Hegelian prophecy. In this account, then, racism is a central strategy and determinant of liberal biopower and an intrinsic part of the bourgeois self hood that emerges in synergy with those apparatuses of security. *

*

*

Implicitly corroborating Foucault’s hypotheses, Colette Guillaumin (1995) argues that since mid-nineteenth century (roughly the same

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period Foucault marks as the birth of state racism), our thinking of the world is characterized by an “endogenous determinism” that describes the social in terms of natural categories: Inequality, superiority, inferiority, difference in ability, are in fact no more than secondary aspects of an overall belief, never expressed because it is obvious and imperative, that human activity is a biophysical phenomenon. And this proposition is an invention of the industrial era. (36) Guillaumin charts the transformation of an older notion of race that is legalistic, is centered on self-description (that is to say, is used exclusively to describe the nobility), and is used to designate a temporal series (a genealogy of race) into a concept of race that is geneticist, designates Others, and designates spatial distributions of people (a geography of race) (29). This “endogenous racism” is not to be confused with the theory of race hierarchies that emerges in Europe between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, since any theory of race starts from the assumption of race as a signifier of natural difference.6 Rather, in Guillaumin’s account, the acceptance of race as a given sociobiological category is the result of a social group’s system of perceptions and signification being structured by racist ideology. Racist ideology operates as “mental schemata,” as a specific organization of perception that represents a universe of signs far more extensive than simply the “theory” into which it crystallizes in the course of the nineteenth century (35). Racist ideology is thus a specific principle of order that, even before theoretical discourses on race formalize it, posits race as the ontological category that permits ordering all identities into “same” or “different”: Racism is a specific symbolic system operating inside the system of power relations of a particular type of society. It is a signifying system whose key characteristic is the irreversibility which it confers on such a society’s reading of reality, the crystallization of social actors and their practices into essences. (30) Race ideology then “is what mediated the specific social practice of western society as it became industrialized, and as political activity was taken over by a class which had formerly been excluded from it” (35). Racism is the ideology of nascent modern liberalism and coincides with the seizure of political power by the bourgeoisie, with the birth of the industrial working class, with the height of European colonialism,

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and with the alleged birth of mass democratic society, all marked by the discourses of individualism, fraternity, equality, democracy, embracing of cultural difference and popular nationalism, as well as atheism and determinism (34 and 56). It is in this environment that the modes of perception shaped by racial ideology crystallize into the theory of racial inequality (35): in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, when a whole racist meaning of our semantic fields emerges, the term “race” gains the biophysical characteristics we associate with it today (phenotype, heredity, genotype) and becomes the social emblem of the rising bourgeoisie, a marker of bourgeois self hood as it was for the aristocracy it replaces. However, unlike the aristocratic understanding of race that was not founded on biophysical characters, the racial identity of the bourgeoisie is shaped in relation with notions of physiology and nature based on tangible physical characteristics and thus gains a “somatic density” that is consecrated by the “new metaphysics” of science (43–45). This account expresses the extent to which bourgeois self hood is shaped by the scientific taxonomies of the nineteenth century, as well as by the contradictory desires to distinguish itself from the inferior classes while also pretending it is the “universal class” to which anyone can accede (except for the degenerate). *

*

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However, an exclusively European focus cannot capture the whole extent of development and intermingling of race, gender, and sexuality in the apparatuses of government developed in the colonies.7 As soon as we enlarge our view to acknowledge colonialism as a constitutive element of Europe, Europeans, democracy, liberalism, and capitalism we can see how the European concept of “race” emerges within the imperial “ordering tables” of difference that precede and are coterminous with liberal order and that provide the terrain on which the nodal points of liberal governing—freedom, equality, civil society—are forged (Stoler 1995, 53). In the nineteenth century, this imperial order frames modernity, civilization, and humanity according to the organizing grammar of race and culture and uses those racialized constructions to legitimize the labor regimes, colonial exploitation, and hierarchies of privilege and profit of early capitalism. The nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality that are so central to bourgeois self hood mobilize racial discourses developed by the imperial technologies of rule8 (1995, 27). Liberal apparatuses, both in the colonies and in the core, are never simply racially codified but segment the social simultaneously along

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race, gender, sex, and class lines, in the sense that they always shape sexuality in relation with race and gender and vice versa, as well as in relation with class—in the colonies, racialized and sexualized taxonomies of inferiority are systematically applied to the European stock, not only to women but also to the sensuous, self-control-lacking working classes (see Stoler 1995, Valverde 1996). In the meantime, in the colonial core, discourses of social cleansing and invigoration of the social body produced by the liberal apparatuses of sexuality are used as an “anchorage point” for the discourses of racial purity (see Foucault 1990). Moreover, the colonial constructions of a racialized and sexualized grammar are used to establish and police class differences in Europe. That is, the framing of bourgeois propriety in relation with sexual restraint and the privatization of life within the nuclear family, with motherhood as safeguarding hygiene and proper education and as a woman’s destiny and with reproduction as a form of preserving and reproducing genetic purity, are defined in relation to the promiscuity of the lower classes, the sensuality of the colonized, and the disorder of unrestrained sexuality and of the resulting race mixing. The liberal placing of identities into schemes of otherness is presented, since the nineteenth century, as the natural order of biophysical, unequivocal states of being and is crucial in forging the identity of the emerging bourgeois political class and liberal apparatuses. It remains equally central to the shaping of bourgeois self hood and governmental reality in contemporary United States. Reproduction-Regulating Apparatuses, “Unplanned Pregnancy,” and “Undesirable Motherhood” To what extent are contemporary liberal apparatuses structured by and reproducing the foundational assumptions discussed above? To investigate family-planning apparatuses along these lines, this analysis focuses on documents outlining the national health promotion and disease prevention strategies, elaborated since 1980 for each decade by the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (DHHS). The first such document is the 1980 publication Promoting Health/Preventing Disease: Objectives for the Nation, which set the strategy for the 1980–1990 decade. The present analysis looks at the subsequent Healthy People 2000 (HP 1991), which established the health promotion strategy for the decade 1990–2000, and Healthy People 2010 (HP 2000), which does the same for the following decade. Since during the analysis I found that the

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Healthy People 2010 documents do not alter significantly the ontoepistemological assumptions of the previous, 2000, strategy, this text uses the documents in a nonchronological way. The truth and reality of the U.S. family-planning apparatuses are structured as an algorithm triggered by the pathologizing of one event, “unplanned pregnancy”: ●

●

●

●

There is an endemic of unplanned pregnancies in the United States: approximately 50 percent of births in the United States are unintended. Unintended births have pathological effects on the mother, child, and society. These pathological effects explain a national crisis in the United States, defined by ill health, crime, delinquency, dependency, and increased public spending. In other words, unintended pregnancy engenders the whole heterogeneous field of social and medical pathology that experts associate with “abnormal reproduction” and more generally with social degeneracy. Unplanned pregnancy has specific, if multiple, causality: out-ofwedlock sexuality, illegitimacy, lack of maternal care and love, and irresponsibility in reproductive health and maternal behaviors. And there is a special category of subjects that tends to engage in the practices causing unplanned pregnancy, a group I term “irresponsible mothers”: single, often young, often black, poor women on welfare. It follows that, to redress social pathology in the United States it is necessary to prevent unplanned pregnancy. Since unplanned pregnancy is blamed on the immanent characteristics of the “irresponsible mother,” the family-planning apparatus, following the classical mold of liberal apparatuses of security, aims to first know her and subsequently to prevent her reproduction. This logic forms the irresponsible mother as a “scapegoat identity” that explains and solves the whole array of sociomedical pathology in the United States, that is, that explains and solves the social and governmental crisis diagnosed by the family-planning apparatuses.

This analysis will not focus on pointing out the sociological absurdity of an explanation of the social in which the whole spectrum of social pathology in the United States, from low IQs to poverty and to racerelated health inequalities, are explained using the event of “unplanned pregnancy”; nor will it engage in demonstrating the suspect epistemological status of those arguments by putting forward alternative

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explanations, methods, or measurements; at moments, it shall point the reader toward some of the numerous studies already engaged in this worthwhile effort. This analysis will rather attempt to show how the apparatuses that create unintended pregnancy9 are, often insidiously, explaining reproduction and more generally reality using criteria of truth, good, normality, and pathology that are established in relation to the genealogy of U.S. liberalism. How those apparatuses work by rearranging the relations between various elements that are already defining what the reality in the United States is all about and thus identify and solve governmental necessities in modalities that reiterate this order of reality. From this perspective, “unintended pregnancy” is a governmental construction that mobilizes and administers a whole system of relations between family, motherhood, illegitimacy, sexuality, autonomy, race, and poverty. Within this system of relations, the meanings of the linked elements, and those of unintended pregnancy, are (re)created as normal or pathological. The Healthy People strategies define family planning as the process of establishing the preferred number and spacing of children in a family and of selecting the means by which these preferences are to be achieved (HP 1991, 61). While this formulation mobilizes the liberal rhetoric of choice in manners that are vague enough to permit a plethora of interpretations, the stated and quantified objective of the governmental strategy is to prevent unintended pregnancies and to achieve planned, wanted pregnancies (HP 2001, 117). Thus, all post-1995 Healthy People documents adopt as an overall goal the recommendations made by the Institute of Medicine, in which the nation is summoned to adopt a social norm in which all pregnancies are intended— that is, clearly and consciously desired at the time of conception. Emphasising personal choice and intent, this norm speaks to planning for pregnancy, as well as avoiding unintended pregnancy. (HP 2000, 9–3) While the liberal rhetoric of conscious desire, choice, and intention is preserved, the governmental goal—inducing the population into adopting a specific conduct—is less accommodating of personal f lights of fancy. To avoid unplanned pregnancy seems rather to be posited as a social duty. This imperious shaping of conduct is justified by the framing of unintended pregnancy as a national crisis. The strategies estimate that almost 50 percent of all pregnancies are unintended, making “the goal of reducing unintended

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pregnancies . . . a significant public health concern in the United States”10 (HP 2000, 9–3). And further justified by taxonomizing all reproduction according to a central normal (planned)/pathological (unplanned) dichotomy. In a first step, the pathologizing of unplanned pregnancy proceeds by mobilizing the argument that the freedom and worth of the bourgeois subject are achieved through “informed choice”: planning or willed parenthood are framed as the fully informed and unequivocal choice (that is, act of will) of rational individuals, while the irresponsible mother, the subject who fails to plan and control her fertility, is by default the polar antagonist of the rational individual and, thus, a less than autonomous citizen and less than bourgeois self (I shall return to this argument in chapter 6). However, there is a supplementary, unacknowledged tactic of pathologizing at work: unintended pregnancy is pathological also because it is characteristic of an already pathological subject, the irresponsible mother. As already hinted at, the irresponsible mother is constructed along lines of visibility and enunciation deeply carved in the order of U.S. governing reality, and the following section will detail those lines further. However, the irresponsible mother is not an identity paraded by the Healthy People as an already pathological entity—this would mean being able to acknowledge that U.S. governing is structured by foundational a priori that are racist, patriarchal, and so on, a feat beyond the ability for critical ref lexivity of those apparatuses. Thus, the family-planning apparatuses endeavor to make unplanned pregnancy pathological de novo. The governmental system of diagnosing pathology is double; if we were to resume (the doubleedged irony of ) anthromorphizing liberal apparatuses, we could say that this double play reproduces the discursive play of the conscious and subconscious. The irresponsible mother is “discovered” by the governmental apparatuses exclusively because they are subconsciously shaped by foundational assumptions and nodal points that, whenever the statement “reproductive pathology” is uttered, systematically make visible a young, black, poor, single mother. However, the family-planning apparatuses do not acknowledge the historically patterned nature of their own gaze and feel the urge to actively and scientifically demonstrate the pathology of both irresponsible mother and unplanned pregnancy. Their impulse to pathologize the black, young, single mother on welfare remains inexplicable to liberal apparatuses; or rather, it is experienced and explained as the objective drive to discover scientific truth. Despite their venerable presence in the liberal psyche, the irresponsible mother, illegitimacy, and unplanned pregnancy are perpetually new

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entities to the contemporary liberal apparatuses and their (re)discovery a never-ending triumph of scientific government. Moreover, since the Healthy People strategies construct the irresponsible mother identity within a system of relations between already familiar signifiers—teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy, unintended pregnancy, abortion, race, culture, poverty—they reinforce the meaning of each of these elements as pathological. That is, each element in this chain is brought in because it is already thought of as pathological, considering that since the end of the nineteenth century the U.S. governmental reality makes these elements intelligible exclusively for their “negative effects.” And it is reconfirmed as pathological within the family-planning apparatus through its introduction in the same series with the other (pathological) elements, in the process reconfirming the governmental order of reality. In the family-planning apparatuses, the pathology of certain identities is at the same time already known and always and repeatedly proved anew. The irresponsible mother is formed within this very system of relations and therefore emerges already thoroughly imbibed with pathology. In what follows I shall present a short and selective genealogy of the order of reality in U.S. governing of reproduction, after which I shall (re)introduce the family-planning reality in this genealogy. *

*

*

Before proceeding, it is worth reiterating that the historical arguments presented here, per force schematically, are meant to illustrate one thing only: that when the liberal apparatuses of government, both in Europe and in the United States, assume the shape we now term “modern,” they do so in a reality structured by understandings of identities as naturally and unequivocally divided into same and different and therefore construct their own realities by segmenting the world into such identities. The early discourses of race in the United States closely follow the template established by the European Enlightenment knowledges of the time, knowledges that gradually gain acceptance as the truth of modernity in the “civilized” social circles. The first 1798 American edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica mentions, under the entry “Negro”: “Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness, and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of

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conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself ” (in Eze 1997, 94). How, then, could Thomas Jefferson not read the world through a grid fixed by the racial assumptions of Enlightenment in his 1787 abolitionist Notes on the State of Virginia? There, he militates for the abolition of slavery as a political move aiming to strengthen the white nation’s future and moral fiber as a modern, enlightened nation. And proposes the expulsion of the freed slaves from this white nation on account of their unsurpassable difference from it. Unsurprisingly, Jefferson bases his analysis on the authority of science: I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of men as distinct as nature has formed them? (in Eze 1997, 102–103) When freed, therefore, the black is to “be removed beyond the reach of mixture” (103). Most of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. intellectuals never doubted the appropriateness of racial taxonomies with “whites” at the top, “negroes” at the bottom, and “Indians” somewhere in between: “all American culture heroes embraced racial attitudes that would embarrass public-school myth-makers,” including Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln (Gould 1993, 85). In the nineteenth century, the debate on race in the U.S. intellectual circles takes place between a cultural argument that states that the inferiority of the blacks is cultural and/or environmental and therefore that the blacks could be raised at the level of the whites through proper education. A similar “environmental” argument that states that the acquired inferiority of the blacks is ineradicable. And a third type of argument that states the biological, that is, originally immanent, inferiority of the blacks. But be they polygenists (asserting that phenotypical differences signify different species) or monogenists (asserting that all humans descend from one origin, but with various degrees of degeneracy), the U.S. scientists of the nineteenth century all codify blacks as Other: the present-day substance of the black is fundamentally different from and

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inferior to that of the whites. That all this scientific elite acknowledges the inferiority of the blacks without agreeing if they should be enslaved and colonized, expelled, or given the rights of a free person11 only further demonstrates the tactical polyvalence of race discourse (Gould 1993). *

*

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Race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status are foundational nodal points of the U.S. governing reality.12 Interestingly, the genealogy of the key term “dependency” undertaken by Fraser and Gordon (1994) paints a picture of the transformation of U.S. governing apparatuses similar to the genealogy of contemporary biopolitics put forward by Foucault or Guillaumin (see above). In their account, the contemporary category of dependency results from the replacing of a relational understanding of the subject with forms of monadic individualism and biologism that coincide with the advent of biopolitics in the United States: industrialization and the rise of the bourgeoisie. The transformation of the category is probably related to the association of dependency with powerlessness, an association stimulated by the American Revolution, as well as to the granting of civil and political rights to working men in the nineteenth century. Both events place individual freedom and choice as the pinnacle of the “good” and translate waged labor, hitherto a form of dependency since it means working for someone else, as the epitome of independence. As opposed to designating a position in relation to the means of production and a certain experience of labour, independence now designates the individual condition of earning a family wage and the individual choices involved in spending it. The granting of political rights transforms the meaning of the relation between the rich and the poor from “dependency” to “legitimate inf luence” (Donzelot 1980, 65), while “dependency” starts describing not only the condition of the subjects excluded from waged labor but, more importantly, the biophysical characteristics that cause this inferior state of being. Dependency then describes the “pauper” living on poor relief, the “colonial native” and “the slave” whose political subjection results from the dependency-prone character of the Negro, and finally the “housewife” figure that concentrates the social, legal, political, and economic subservient status of the nonworking woman (Fraser and Gordon 1994, 315–319). By the end of the nineteenth century, the definition of economic dependency is itself split into “good” (children and wives) and “bad” (relief recipients).

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Thus, while the preindustrial use of the term “dependency” designates the lower position of an individual in a hierarchy of socioeconomic relations, the industrial era makes dependency into a moral-psychological trait, that is, makes in into a biophysical characteristic of the subject. As an “entirely worked from within” characteristic of a social group dependency is inscribed in the legal, political, and economic codes and in the ontological schemes of U.S. liberalism. It is thus its insertion into a new system of relations, ordered by othering, that endows dependency with its patriarchal, pauperist, and racist dimensions. Those dimensions continue to structure not only the governing apparatuses that administer relief but also those that regulate reproduction. One of the earliest legislative measures that regulates sexuality and reproduction, the already mentioned “miscegenation law,” illustrates how gender, class, and race interpenetrate to form the governing reality in the early North American colonies. Maryland in 1661 and Virginia in 1662 pass statutes banning all sexual relations between Christians and Negroes and make mixed marriage a crime (Martinot 2003, 55). The law establishes that the children of a mixed couple will inherit the mother’s status as either property or as a free person (56). This matrilinear property principle makes a woman’s subjectivity coextensive with her reproductive and sexual function: African women’s reproduction and sexuality, by producing more slaves, enhance the value of the real estate, while English women’s reproduction and sexuality guarantee both purity of the race and the proper transmission of real estate wealth from Englishman to Englishman. By color-coding sexuality, then, those early statues begin a process of biologization of race (57) that, sedimented historically to the level of self-evidence, is used in the national legislation of the early 1990s as the natural category that makes intelligible sexuality and reproduction for governing purposes. The aim of most governing apparatuses targeting women during the Progressive era in the United States—minimum working hours, special work safety regulations, widows’ pensions, and the establishment in 1921 of the federal Children’s Bureau—is to foster “educated motherhood”: the expert training and guidance of mothers so that they can effectively perform their duties of providing adequate care at each developmental stage of their children (Skocpol 1995, 333). In 1921, for example, the Children’s Bureau is put in charge of the administration of the first federal social welfare legislation, the “Federal Act for the Promotion of the Welfare and Hygiene of Maternity and Infancy” (also

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known as the Sheppard-Towner Act). The federal program creates a nationwide system of administrative units that promote child welfare reforms, with a focus on education and prevention. The actions carried under the act include distributing parental education literature, conducting health conferences, establishing prenatal centers, organizing home visits, and the prenatal as well as the child health education of mothers in small towns and villages by public health nurses. While the program is obviously aiming to instill the expert-driven bourgeois practices of motherhood into the poor and/or uneducated mothers, it provides them with no financial help to the poor mothers (Skocpol 1995, 481). I was arguing above that the modern ideas of race, class, and sexuality are developed within the relation between core and colonies that the liberal apparatuses always have to manage. It is not surprising, then, that, wherever its location, the moral mission of bourgeois liberalism invested enormous cultural capital, and specifically pedagogical energy, to make children into moral citizens and to attach those skills of self-discipline and the learning of civilities to the strength of the nation, to the “redemption of the republic” (in the case of the US), and to the survival of a master race. (Stoler 1995, 143) This liberal positing of the causal connection between mothering practices and the destiny of the nation shapes governing apparatuses that regulate motherhood as a simultaneously private and public practice. The central assumption of the Progressive apparatuses that regulate reproduction, as is the case with most such apparatuses, is that since a child is not only the member of a family but also a citizen of the nation, the mothering practices that determine the child’s development are partly a public responsibility. However, this regulation is not imposed forcefully on mothers, but acts to shape the gendered bourgeois subjectivity around the nodal points of femininity and motherhood: the early U.S. feminist militantism that partly inf luences those Progressive policies is based on a Victorian understanding of the family as the only proper environment for a woman and of motherhood as the primary duty and fulfilment of her femininity. Women’s emancipation is to be achieved through making motherhood into an exalted and prestigious occupation, of which a first step is the making of all maternity voluntary through the liberation of female sexuality and reproduction from male tutelage (see Gordon 2002a, 68–92). The nonstate expert

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regulation of subjectivity thus seamlessly translates state objectives: “the mother is not only the heart of the home, she must be the heart of the world,” and the whole body politic will feel the repercussions of the way she performs her “God-given work” (Child Welfare Magazine, April 1919, cited in Skocpol 1995, 312). The self-avowed aim of the inf luential organization the National Congress of Mothers is the integration of mothering and governing, through the carrying “of mother-love and mother-thought into all that concerns or touches childhood in Home, School, Church, State or Legislation”13 (cited in Skocpol 1995, 333). Then, according to this early maternalist feminism, the acceptance of women in the liberal polity is to be achieved by aligning their conducts with the governmental aim of a “race of free, well-poised, liberty-loving, justice-practising children” (Helen H. Gardner’s address at the National Congress of Mothers 1897, cited in Skocpol 1995, 334). In a similar vein, Julia Lathrop, the first leader of the Children’s Bureau, titles one of her 1916 public addresses, “Education of Mothers as a Problem of Democracy” (Skocpol 1995, 495). In 1911, G. Harris Robertson, president of the Tennessee Congress of Mothers, expresses unequivocally the contractual state-mother relation: We cannot afford to let a mother, one who has divided her body by creating other lives for the good of the state, one who has contributed to citizenship, be classed as a pauper, a dependent. She must be given value received by her nation, and stand as one honoured. (cited in Skocpol 1995, xxi) The 1909 Washington DC Conference on the Care of Dependent Children convened by Theodore Roosevelt concludes that “home life is the highest and finest product of civilisation” and the “great moulding force of mind and character” and gives further nuance to the contract between state and mothers by relating the right to state aid exclusively to the proper performance of femininity and motherhood: the community’s help in case of financial need is given to only the children of parents of “worthy character” and of “reasonably efficient and deserving mothers” (cited in Skocpol 1995, 425). Between 1905 and 1910, Roosevelt also supports the “race suicide” argument that relates the nation and maternalism in a eugenics-inspired argument: birth control should be rejected since it constitutes a sin, hampers the growth of the nation and the formation of stable families, allows the immigrants, nonwhite, and poor to overwhelm numerically the northern European

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stock, and, finally, represents the rebellion of women against their destinies as mothers. When Roosevelt brands the proper (white) woman who avoids having children as “criminal against the race . . . the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people” (cited in Gordon 2002a, 88) and compares that “cowardly” or “selfish” woman with the man who refuses “to do his duty in battle when his country calls him” (cited in Pateman 1992, 26), he reiterates motherhood as both the primordial feminine social function and the duty of mothers to foster the “good stock” of the nation. Mothers’ pensions, the first governmental measures aimed at helping financially poor mothers, particularly widows, propose to allow mothers to get “out of the economic struggle and put them where they properly belonged, in the home” (from Resolution 172 adopted at the 31st Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labour, 1911, cited in Skocpol 1995, 431). Strict moral criteria for defining mothers’ efficiency and worthy character remain the central elements of the program: deserted and unmarried mothers are usually refused assistance and the great majority of recipients are widows, for fear of sanctioning illegitimacy and home desertion by males (Skocpol 1995, 467). Black single mothers are systematically defined as “undeserving” and excluded from assistance, either because most of them were not deemed virtuous enough or because early U.S. welfare excludes from benefits domestic and agricultural workers and, thus, the majority of the black population. Thus, while the Progressive initiatives encourage “desirable motherhood” to ensure the formation of the proper future U.S. citizen, the focus on preventing “undesirable motherhood” that dominate the U.S. governing landscape in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries represents a new tactical use of the very same discourse of proper reproduction, under conditions of increasing governmental confidence that the bourgeois subjects willingly shape their parental tasks according to the exhortations of experts and therefore do not need state tutoring and supervision. The Social Security Act (SSA) adopted in 1935 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms contains two social insurance programs, unemployment insurance and old-age pensions, and three relief programs: elderly persons’ Old-Age Assistance, Aid to Dependent Children in families with one caretaker (ADC), and aid to the blind (AB), as well as a number of smaller programs (Patterson 2000, 65). Prefiguring the contemporary debates, the 1930s supporters of the ADC conceive of it as a way to keep women in the domestic sphere, while their political opponents fear that it will weaken traditional family ties, undermine

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male responsibility, and encourage single motherhood (Handler and Hasenfeld 1991, 25). The ADC program, amended in 1950 and renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), would become the epitome of U.S. “welfare,” synonymous with state provision for the undeserving poor and the bone of contention for 60 years of political debate. Indeed, in the United States the dichotomy dependent/ independent is constructed to a great extent in relation to the provision of “welfare,” a term used to describe “non-contributory” benefits granted to able-bodied citizens not participating in the market— AFDC, Food Stamps, and Medicaid (medical care for the poor)—as distinct from the “contributory” programs, known as Social Security: pensions, unemployment benefits, and Medicare (medical care for the elderly). In the governmental discourses it is only benefit receipt that is considered to foster dependency, not Social Security receipt (Fraser and Gordon 1994, 320), a profoundly gendered and racialized understanding since “welfare” programs cater for mothers, children, and families, in contrast with the “contributory” programs that provide mostly for male workers. Welfare, then, addresses recipients not as liberal individuals but as members of “defective” families from which the man is absent and offers benefits not to a worker but to an unpaid domestic worker, homemaker, and mother (Fraser 1989, 149–150). These initial assumptions allow a rigorous institutional separation between social insurance and social welfare, with the latter narrow and stigmatising (Patterson 2000, 74). Since U.S. governmental reality is shaped by othering, it connects fairly early welfare relief, eugenics, and birth control. Margaret Sanger, one of the central figures in early U.S. birth control struggles, writes in 1919: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control” (cited in Gordon 2002a, 196). She structures her militant rhetoric in terms of the cost of supporting the unfit to society. Later on, Sanger develops a strong racist rhetoric, and eugenics becomes a prominent theme at birth control conferences in the 1920s and 1930s (196–197). During the New Deal era, birth controllers argue that babies born of parents on relief are of “unfit” lineage, that social unfitness is hereditary, and that the lack of planning in reproduction shows the lack of the judgment skills required of a proper liberal man. Paul Popenoe, a pro-birth control eugenicist, measures IQs in order to prove objectively that welfare children and their mothers are less intelligent (Gordon 2002a, 214), an argument Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve will use in identical form 50 years later, and argues that, in terms of IQ, 10 million people should be sterilized. In the 1930s, along with

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the argument that welfare encourages the breeding of the poor, the state authorities, backed up by birth controllers, suggest that the poor could not use birth control properly and promote the introduction of compulsory sterilization laws for the feebleminded and others incapable of using contraception. Sterilization propaganda uses the argument of the cost of institutional care for the socially inadequate to the nation and causally relates feeblemindedness and economic dependency, pitting birth control funding against welfare funding. By 1915, 13 U.S. states have such laws in place, a number that increases to 37 by 1932 (Gordon 2002a, 216, 219, and 222). The association of racial minorities with dependency, pauperism, and aberrant reproduction is indeed one of the most pervasive and enduring characteristics of U.S. governmental apparatuses. Before the Second World War, U.S. social reformers emphasize the “disorganization” of black family life characterized by illegitimacy, free sex, and female-headed families. And when, in the 1960s, black women gain access to the AFDC as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, of welfare expansion during the Great Society initiatives, and of the curtailing of the political inf luence of the Southern Democrats, the social control features of the program are increased. From the “War on Poverty” initiatives and until the dismantling of the AFDC in 1996, the benefits are frozen, real benefits decreased, stricter accountability rules with greater sanctions introduced, and work requirements imposed on recipients (Handler and Hasenfeld 1991, 34–35), and the constructions of the subject of welfare as deviant using the categories of “underclass,” “dependency,” and “culture of poverty” become more prominent. After 1965, the epitomal welfare recipient is systematically constructed as a black single mother, be it the independent matriarch of the 1970s or the irresponsible teenager of the 1980s. It is also during the post-1965 War on Poverty that the federal government becomes actively involved in birth control, providing funding through maternal and child health grants and including in the AFDC guidelines the stipulation that state welfare agencies have to provide family-planning services to women receiving assistance. Most such family-planning clinics are located in poor black communities, and Alabama is the first state to establish a tax-funded birth control program. The clinics tend to promote the use of long-lasting form of birth control, and several Southern states attempt to impose sterilization laws to reduce welfare rolls, until stopped by federal threats of funds redrawal. (Gordon 2002a, 290). In 1970, with bipartisan support, Title X of the Public Health Service Act creates a comprehensive federal program to

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provide family-planning services on a national basis, resulting in the establishment of jointly state and federally funded birth control clinics (Gordon 2002a, 289). The 1972 Social Security amendments expand federal support for family-planning programs by requiring states to reimburse family-planning services offered under Medicaid. The federal government provides 90 percent federal reimbursement for state family-planning services to ensure that all welfare recipients would receive contraceptive services. The same year, the Congress authorizes maternal and child health programs under the Social Security Act, available to the states for family planning (Critchlow 1999, 173). By the mid-1970s, as the clientele for the services increases, the financial federal support of family planning begins to weaken, and during the Reagan and Bush Sr. presidencies the funding for birth control under Title X falls by 72 percent (Gordon 2002a, 291). However, this decrease is not to be taken as a sign that the government is less interested in regulating the reproduction of the poor and racialized single mothers. It is rather another tactical rearrangement of the governing apparatuses of reproduction, to accommodate governing events that the conservative neoliberals find highly alarming: the increase in abortion, the increase in public spending, and the dependency-inducing nature of social provision. Accordingly, the governing apparatuses are readjusted so as to accomplish the same tasks—regulate reproduction—through different means: dissuading undesirable reproduction by reducing the funding of public programs. The order of reality that made family planning into a governmental problem to start with remains unchanged. Thus, the Reagan administration prohibits the funding of family-planning services that offer abortion counseling, referrals, or services and redefines family planning as “natural family-planning methods, adoption, infertility services and general reproductive health care, abstinence and contraception” (Gordon 2002a, 336). In 1976, the Hyde amendment successfully bans federal funding for abortions unless for health reasons. The main source of public support for abortion continues to come in 1994 from states; only 282 federally funded abortions were performed that year (Critchlow 1999, 202 and 221). The sexuality and reproduction of adolescents play a particular part in those neoliberal governmental apparatuses: by 1985, $15 million is spent on demonstration projects aiming to discover the proper techniques to dissuade teenagers from premarital sex as part of the 1981 “Adolescent Family Life Act” program (Critchlow 1999, 212). The liberal governing of reproduction in the United States, either through welfare benefit apparatuses or through family planning, is

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shaped by the determinations between the capitalist economics of labour, patriarchal understandings of gender, and racism. The subjects of government are formed at the intersection of a network of relations these apparatuses establish between the government of motherhood, the government of poverty, and the government of race—between the image of the mother, the pauper, and the black. Hence the early tensions between the liberal understanding of work ethic and the patriarchal nurturing of the family, that is, between the principle of “less eligibility” and the pastoral duty to provide for the “mothers of the race.” While the patriarchal domestic codes as applied to the middle and upper classes stipulate the house-bound role of the woman and blame her for working, poor mothers retain an ambivalent status as members of the labor force, bound both by the obligation to work and by the duty to mother. Those early tensions are partly solved by making the motherhood function of women receiving AFDC “undesirable” in the eyes of the government. This allows positioning this mother as “undeserving” for both poverty relief and reproductive purposes and marks a split between good motherhood, honored and nurtured as a vital public activity, and bad motherhood, constructed as a national crisis. “Undesirable motherhood” gains increasing ascendancy in U.S. governing rationalities, so that toward the end of the twentieth century the policy initiatives aiming to govern it supersede in prominence, quantity, and importance the policies that foster desirable motherhood, an exacerbation culminating in the 1996 Clinton administration reforms that dismantle the AFDC program “as we knew it.” The extent to which the contemporary national family-planning strategies ref lect these same ontological schemes will be investigated next. Race in the Governing of Health Health promotion, as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), its major advocate, attempts to expand medical care beyond the biomedical model. It is a representative example of biopolitics in its desire to move beyond the biological body as the site of health and illness and toward an understanding of health in relation to the natural processes of the population. The well-being and natural capacities of the population are to be nurtured through a set of governmental measures that channel and stimulate those capacities and processes toward the achievement of health. Thus, health promotion mobilizes the empowerment and self-empowerment rhetoric of grassroots

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movements, social medicine, and psychobabble. At the same time, the tensions between health promotion’s continuing faith in expertise and the desire to empower the lay public, or between the rhetoric of personal and community control and the acknowledgment of structural determinants of health, translate the incongruities of liberalism into the governing of health (see chapter 2). Health promotion, then—which, despite its obstinate attempts to define, operationalize, quantify, and measure, remains remarkably muddled conceptually—is defined as the process of “enabling people to increase control over and improve their health” by controlling the political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, behavioral, and biological determinants of health. And the reduction of health inequalities remains a prominent preoccupation of health promoters everywhere.14 There is, therefore, a friction between a social-democratic language of health promotion and an order of reality founded on othering such as that of U.S. governing apparatuses. The following critiques are directed at the half heartedness and hypocrisy of the governmental health promotion incursions into “redressing historical inequality” (HP 1991, 46), incursions that never challenge their own understanding of the social and therefore are incapable to see and intervene upon the systems of power/knowledge, including governmental, that bring inequalities and exclusions into being. The avowed aim of U.S. national health promotion and disease prevention strategies is to restructure health governing in the United States toward prevention, apparently by diffusing even more exhaustively liberal discipline into the social: Each of us, acting as an employee or as an employer, a member of a family, community group, professional organization, or government agency, has both an opportunity and an obligation to contribute to the effort to improve the Nation’s health profile (HP 1991, 85) . . . Healthy People 2000 cannot be accomplished by the Federal Government alone. Leadership must come from institutions and individuals throughout the Nation’ (HP 1991, 5) . . . you [can] make positive changes in your community, whether you are a physician, government official, business owner, truck driver, store clerk, retired person, or almost anybody else.15 (HPHC 2001, 1) And at the same time, the Healthy People strategies extol an expert-driven, managerial, and positivist approach to health, since they aim to carefully taxonomize the health of the population into discrete and objective categories, quantify those categories, define “health improvement

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objectives,” and constantly monitor and measure the achievement of those targets. Thus, the stated objectives of the Healthy People strategy combine an individualist-libertarian understanding of identity, a quasifunctionalist view of society as an integrative system, and a positivist belief in an objective reality, amenable to full knowledge: preventing premature death and preventing disability, preserving a human environment that supports human life, cultivating family and community support, enhancing each individual’s inherent abilities to respond and to act, and assuring that all Americans achieve and maintain a maximum level of functioning. (HP 1991, 6) The focus is on creating environments that support the individual’s immanent, natural abilities, where the environment is described, using a “systems theory” variant of functionalism, as a system of autonomous elements that combine into a harmonious whole: biology and behavior, the “social” and “physical” environment, and the “governmental” sphere of policies, interventions, and health care (HP 2000, 6). The ontologies at work here mix a fairly rudimentary sensuous positivism that describes the physical environment as “that which can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, and tasted” (HP 2000, 19) and a liberal separation of the social into discrete and autonomous, if interacting, spaces: family, workplace, community, social institutions, such as law enforcement, places of worship, or schools (HP 2000, 19). The family and the community are imagined as small-scale versions of the wider system: fully bounded and knowable entities, with precise functions, operations, and necessities that appear to be f loating in a social vacuum, since all ontologically productive relations exist within them. Hence, the individual is positioned at all times within one of these elements and the individual-family-community-society ensemble is recurrently represented as a group of concentric spheres. Like all security apparatuses, the health promotion strategy makes the nation’s destiny dependent on the health of the population,16 while making population health dependent on instilling the desire to adopt the proper conducts into the individual: “responsible and enlightened behavior by each and every individual truly is the key to good health” (HP 1991, letter of the DHHS secretary). The implication is that contracting a preventable illness, understood as lack of self-control, is associated with moral dissolution and with economic waste, both detrimental to the nation: “the Nation continues to be burdened by

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preventable illness, injury, and disability” (HP 1991, 5). Once health is defined as a personal responsibility and (preventable) illness as produced by lack of self-control, the national pathology seems to result from the improper conducts of the inadequate citizens. Following the strategy Foucault identifies as structural of modern state racism, health promotion apparatuses use biological understandings of the self and of pathology to divide the nation into “good” (a healthy Us) and “bad” (the ill Them living parasitically among Us). The task of the governing apparatuses is now to discover, isolate, and reform those inadequate citizens. And as far as the governing of reproduction is concerned, this is to be done by devising scientific gradations of otherness in relation to the nodal points of race and poverty. In other words, the elements mobilized by biopower in U.S. apparatuses of health promotion in order to divide the social into a healthy Us and a degenerate Them that threaten the whole nation are race (and its correlate culture) and poverty. The effect of the apparatuses of health is to translate the events that liberal power perceives as crises of the nation into medical-technological terms and biologically defined social groups. This biologizing of the population within the apparatuses of health is what allows the exercise of liberal governmental power in the United States, of liberal sovereign power, of course, but also of those bio-apparatuses that clash with the self-understandings of U.S. liberalism as not directly involved in the governing the population. The Healthy People 2000 strategy makes the population intelligible and divides it into intervention groups by using two major taxonomic systems: age groups (infancy to old age) and the division between a wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon healthy majority and minorities in which the latter, classified according to socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and physical ability, are marked “special” or “high risk” populations. “Progressing towards a healthier America,” the strategy informs us, depends on dealing with the obstacles to such progress, precisely the “special populations”: the poor, the “members of some racial and ethnic minority groups, and people with disabilities” (HP 1991, 29). On one level, the social-democratic moral and discursive genealogy of health promotion instructs the state bureaucrats to single out “minority” groups as disadvantaged and especially prone to be harmed in the current U.S. social landscape. On another (deeper, one could risk saying) level, the statement formation mechanisms those bureaucrats unwittingly utilize remain tributary to foundational assumptions that impede the framing of poverty and race as social relations. Thus, those “special” social groups are understood as both the result of a history of

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oppression and as different in substance, both an opportunity, if they can be governmentally reformed, and a threat, if they don’t: The greatest opportunities for improvement and the greatest threat to the health status of the Nation reside in population groups that have historically been disadvantaged economically, educationally, and politically. These must be our first priority. (HP 1991, 46) Unfortunately, this politico-ontological tension results in a conceptual and political indecision and incoherence that, under the positivist imperatives that order governmental truths, subordinates the health apparatuses of truth to this dominant order of othering. It is apparent that the governmental experts discuss “race” as if it were a self-evident sociobiological category, showing that what they can see, think, and say is already structured by racial othering (Guillamin’s “racist ideology”). Structured by this primary logic of othering, the governmental taxonomies of risk define “minorities” as pathology and place them outside the normal society in terms of their “special” nature and also within it, thus harming it with the effects of their nature. And, to a certain extent, place them outside the time of the modern nation, since they are eluded by the “progress towards a healthier America” that preoccupies and shapes the rest of the society and constitute an obstacle to such progress (I shall return to this tactic in chapter 4). Arguably, an effective contemporary translation of degeneracy. Consequently, these groups need attentive and targeted governmental surveillance and intervention (see HP 1991, 29). The sway held by “race” on the governmental order of reality is evident from the introductory statements of Healthy People 2000 when the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of the American population are singled out as crucial demographic estimates: due to their faster reproduction, minorities are set to become a higher percentage of the U.S. population and, especially minority women, to enter the workforce in higher numbers, so that white men will comprise “only 25% of the net growth of the labor force” between 1988 and 2000 (HP 1991, 2; emphasis added). Here, “only” is a minor but nevertheless poignant signifier of the way in which the assumptions that structure the governmental reality are expressed in discourse as eugenic-racist alarm, not unrelated to the anxiety of the white colonist in the face of the unbridled fertility of the nonwhites, and as patriarchal-misogynist discomfort at the changing demography of the labor force. Of course, historically the governing of race and pauperism constructs its targets

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as oversexualized and overfertile, threatening with their unstoppable proliferation the (white) majority (see Fanon 1986, 165), while the contemporary Malthusian streaks of the international family-planning movements such as Planned Parenthood as well as the frequent reduction of “third world women’s health” issues to reproduction and family planning are illustrative precisely of this alarm. All the figures in the Healthy People 2000 documents are race segregated. While Healthy People 2010 does not disaggregate objectives according to race any more, it preserves the same understanding of “race” as a crucial ordering axis of the social. For example, we are told that according to the experts, health disparities result from the complex interactions between genetic variations, environmental factors, and specific health behaviors (HP 2000, 12). The political effects of othering are translated as the apolitical term “environment,” inequality is translated as being partly genetically determined, and certain “behaviors” are made specific to a social group, introducing eugenic racism in the national strategy under the guise of “culture.” Such statements attempt to be politically conciliatory, in that they are hesitant to point at the constitutive racism of U.S. liberalism as a cause of illness, while also trying to politicize the traditional biomedical understandings of inequality. Once again, though, since those statements remain subordinated to a biological positivism that understands reality as determined primarily by biology and only subsequently inf luenced by “social factors,” those strategies remain vague both ontologically and politically. A vagueness that supports the strategies and technologies of racist othering rather than thwarting them, precisely by allowing this othering to conceal itself under a layer of liberal scientism, technocratic language, and murky progressive political rhetoric. In fact, the translation of the social into technical-scientific terms represents itself an effective liberal tool of depoliticization, since it makes incontrovertible issues such as the structuring of the liberal social by racism, patriarchy, or pauperism into a matter to be decided by technocrats and their statistical tools and it thus postpones political intervention until after their interminable debates over method and results are settled. A quick glance at the cascades of studies debating the connections between race, gender or poverty, and ill health in some of the major journals of medical sociology, debates that have been going on for more than 30 years with no end, or policy intervention, in sight, can convince one of the hopelessness of technocratic truth apparatuses in addressing othering. That is, as long as they do not address critically their founding assumptions, those apparatuses cannot but act in

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alliance with the liberal strategies of othering, irrespective of their intentions. The conceptual vacillations of the governmental rationality make it acknowledge, on one level, its own limits by pointing out the “extreme heterogeneity” of the “special populations” it defines, “generalizations which characterize population profiles by definition are dangerous because the exceptions are many” (HP 1991, 29), while also impeding it from taking such epistemic contradictions to indicate the necessity to rethink governmental reality: the population remains knowable only in terms of whites/Others and majority/minorities taxonomies. Thus, while affirming that the race categories it utilizes are “gross simplifications,” Healthy People 2000 persists in using them as basic criteria for making the social intelligible. This is because, in its present form, the racist foundations of the governmental strategy remain invisible even as they continue to structure the formation of the governing realities; the strategy therefore cannot go further than to deplore our lack of sufficient knowledge of the biological differences within the racial categories those apparatuses use.17 And what the document deems necessary in order to correct the governing reality is to create more knowledge using the same racialized assumptions and methods: “to refine our knowledge and our understandings even further” (HP 1991, 29) so as to discover the various subgroups within the “special populations.” Thus, the governmental attempts at deconstructing race only manage to further define racial differences as biological, since U.S. health governing finds it impossible to make reality intelligible other than in terms of the biophysical racial categories: Many nonblack Hispanics share historic roots and genetic endowments that are closely related to those of many American Indian groups, while other have European roots and do not share the genetic make-up which may predispose to adult-onset diabetes. (HP 1991, 31) This pseudoscientific racism even allows for nonintentional irony: “Hispanics experience perhaps the most varied set of health issues facing a single minority population” (HP 1991, 38; emphasis added). The government is sufficiently enmeshed in its own constructions of the social to express wonder when a category created by the governmental apparatuses through the lumping together of a dispersion of heterogeneous social groups (“Hispanics”) exhibits such a high diversity. The status

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of the category “Hispanics” as ref lecting transparently and without distortion the reality of a natural object remains unquestioned. All this wealth of racialized data points to the higher morbidity and mortality of nonwhites: blacks have relatively higher rates of morbidity, mortality, cancer, diabetes, AIDS, and infant and baby mortality. This approach would be entirely legitimate if the purpose of the strategy was to document how “racist ideology” and racism determine the social in the United States and therefore the lives of those designated “black.” However, preserving the tactical f luidity of racist discourse, the national strategy never explicates the meaning it attributes to “blackness,” nor does it explicate the nature of the causal link between “being black” or a “racial minority” and “higher pathology.” We are rather told that life expectancy and pathology indicators for blacks “lag behind” those of the nation, a statement that reposits minorities on the outside/inside temporal and spatial borders of the nation, not really in and not fully outside. In fact, the statistical techniques of the health apparatuses translate race into a norm, with the “white” population indicating the “normal” of the nation and the “black” population its pathology. For example, when the document states that blacks suffer 60,000 “excess deaths” per year, “excess” is defined by the difference between the deaths observed in this population and the estimate of the number of deaths “that would have been expected if that population had the same age- and gender-specific death rates as the white populations” (HP 1991, 32). And, for the opposite example, we are told that, whenever realistic, achievable health targets cannot be set for the next 10 years because measurement tools are not available to provide baselines; it is the health status of the black Americans, for whom data are more readily available, that will be used to provide “proxy measures of our progress in moving toward the basic goal of equity in health for all our Nation’s people” (HP 1991, 47). The intensely scrutinized “black” population is symbol and norm of the nation’s pathology. While the governmental rationality never making explicit what race is, it does make clear that race is not an effect of the U.S. reality being exhaustively ordered by racist ideology: If the socio-economic effects are set aside, disparities experienced by these population groups will still be observed. Simply put, some differences in survival and health [between blacks and whites] are not solely determined by poverty or other environmental factors. (HP 1991, 32)

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To “be black,” then, is independent of racism and therefore must represent the visible expression of the biological and cultural substance of “race.” Of course, this is hardly surprising: for the racist discourse, the black is biology. And biomedicine was historically as instrumental in reinforcing and re-creating the synonymy of the black race and biology (while allowing the white to partially escape it) as were philosophy or the social sciences. *

*

*

The U.S. governmental strategies, like the early liberal apparatuses they are genealogically related to, causally connect child-and-motherrelated health practices and the nation’s fate. The Healthy People 2010 strategy posits the health and well-being of women, infants, children, and families to be of critical importance as a predictor of the health of the next generation (HP 2000, 16–3) and translates this concern with maternity into a focus on knowing and reforming the improper poor and black mothers who, by harming their children, hamper the nation’s (health and otherwise) destiny. While the formation of motherhood in relation to pathology repeats the above-mentioned oscillations between understandings of the poor, nonwhite mothers as being at a higher risk of disease than the majority and understandings of these mothers as themselves posing a risk to the nation’s and its children health, with the overall result of reiterating a poor and black “pathological mother.” This mother identity is pathological because it is characterized by pathological psychosocial and biological traits, ranging from low birth weight of the child, high prematurity, and high infant mortality and to drug addictions, young birth age or high birth order (both characteristics of primitive social groups in the family-planning logic), the mother’s lack of education, and finally her lack of maternal love and nurturing skills (HP 2000, 16–8). Her pathology is a governmental problem because she threatens the nation’s purity with her raising of “permanently damaged” children. In the same move, the high infant mortality rates in the United States are squarely blamed on the high-risk mothers: black, Puerto Rican, and American Indian infants die considerably more frequently than white ones, and among the infants that survive, many are harmed “often permanently, by unhealthy beginnings” (HP 1991, 9). The major causes of infant death are mobilized by those discourses to add new biomedical dimensions to the pathology of an already familiar subject of U.S. governing, since the black (25 percent of all new mothers) and poor (17 percent of all new mothers) mothers engage

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disproportionately in irresponsible behaviors: smoking, alcohol and drugs consumption, and low rates of breastfeeding or prenatal care. The slow rate of progress in preventing infant mortality, then, is in part explained by the changes in maternal characteristics, such as use of illicit drugs (“crack mothers”) and the high rate of “unintended pregnancy” (HP 1991, 366). The way is thus opened for the use of sweeping statistical figures that reiterate the identity of the black parents as drugaddicted, irresponsible, and inadequate and as sexually promiscuous and uneducated: Black children account for more than 50% of all children with AIDS. The proportion of AIDS cases associated with intravenous drug abuse is greater for blacks than for other AIDS victims, and higher rates of heterosexual transmission of the HIV virus and transmission of the virus from mother to infant occur as a consequence. (HP 1991, 33) No similar statistics are ever presented for the white population. So far, it has been argued that the apparatuses of health, by taxonomizing the population according to biophysical identities, and especially by reiterating the description of groups defined by race and poverty as dysgenic and degenerate, allow the functioning and redeployment of liberal biopower. Once isolated as a threat, or even as an underthreat, those “special” groups can be intervened upon by the liberal apparatuses that nurture life of leave to die. The discussion is continued and concluded in chapter 4.


CH A P T E R

FOU R

Governing the Nation’s Reproduction: Culture, Poverty, and Eugenics

Within liberal governing apparatuses the “pauper” represents the historical Other in opposition to which bourgeois self hood overtly defines itself (as opposed maybe to sexually, gender, and race-coded Others that are mobilized surreptitiously when the bourgeois self hood is crafted). I shall not insist on the construction of the poor as Other of the normal liberal citizen in the United States, since this theme is recurrently taken up in the specialized literature. What I would like to discuss instead are the modalities in which U.S. governing practices mobilize the signifier “culture” for othering on both racial and poverty axes. Passing through the nodal point of culture is a most useful strategy for a plethora of liberal apparatuses, especially since “culture” is contemporarily widely accepted as a discrete, concrete, and objective element of identification and self-identification. Therefore, “culture” becomes, surreptitiously, the tool through which in U.S. liberalism—and in liberalism in general—one’s identity is being made “special” or “particular” on racial and “pauperist” lines. Culture, in other words, is the term that in liberalism comes to represent the measure of the (natural) difference in race, civilization, civility, and pathology between the “dominant” and the “minority.” That contemporary state racisms change their emphasis from the genotype/phenotype of the subjects to their “culture” does not signal a foundational change in those biopolitical technologies, since their notion of culture is so profoundly “worked entirely from within” that it becomes as determining and ineluctable of what a person is as the biology it replaces. Like its biological cousin, this cultural racism others along “epidermal” coordinates, and when combined with

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the eugenic discourses that in liberalism define the pauper, it isolates a subject as absolute Other. The similarity, or even conf luence, between the characteristics of the black and those of the poor in the U.S. governmental discourse is not accidental. These discourses form race and poverty in relation to one another, and culture represents precisely the signifier that brings them together in the governmental technologies. Therefore, what the family-planning apparatuses can see and think when surveying the social for the causes and remedies of unplanned pregnancies is filtered through the “cultural” discourses of U.S. liberalism and more specifically its discourses of “culture of poverty,” “culture of dependency,” and “pathological black culture.” The othering that the U.S. family-planning apparatuses effect seems natural partly because it is supported by a discourse of culture whose far-reaching historical roots means that it is sedimented as truth. Culture, Race, and “Humanity” As “race” becomes in the nineteenth century the grammar according to which a reality of liberal-capitalist colonial exploitation is organized, as well as the grammar of bourgeois self hood in Europe and North America, “culture” becomes its correlative term in the Western ontological and psychological hierarchies of difference. Culture and its associate global-scale term “civilization” are historically paramount liberal tools for marking difference between Europe and its Others, in that European self-understandings historically depend on accounts that arrange “cultures” within hierarchical development schemes from the most primitive (barbarian, savage, or primitive non-Europeans) to the most advanced or developed (European civilization) (see Brickman 2003, 15–51). The conquest of the Americas, in particular, results in evolutionary theories of a universal ontological hierarchical scheme in which the natives represent an obligatory, if primitive, stage of evolution through which European civilization passed a long time ago. The Enlightenment philosophers engage in thinking various transcendental signifiers of civilizational difference, from economic, with capitalist exchange as the culmination of human evolution, to reason, with European thinking representing the embodiment of the highest capacity for rationality and the “primitive mind” representing the first stage in this mental development (34–35). As already mentioned in the previous chapter, by the nineteenth century, the meanings of civilization (and culture) mutate from sociocultural to biological or, more

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specifically, racial. That these theoretical racisms that emerge in the nineteenth century, and are still largely with us, perceive race and culture (for example, race and social conducts) as if they were identical is further indication that the liberal order of reality, which depends fundamentally on the term “culture,” equally depends on racist othering (see Guillaumin 1995, 36). And illustrates how easily racist discourses effect the two-way sliding between the biological and the social, a tactical function utilized to great effect by contemporary racisms to reiterate their ontological hierarchies without making appeal to the delegitimized term “inferior race.”1 To quote Paul Gilroy’s (1990, 265) diagnosis of new, “cultural” forms of racism in the U.K., a diagnosis that can be applied, at the most general level, to the United States: One of the ways in which this form or variety of racism is specific is that it operates without any overt reference either to race itself or to the biological options of difference that still give the term its commonsense meaning. Before the rise of modern scientific racism in the nineteenth century the term “race” did duty for the term “culture.” No surprise, then, that in its postwar retreat from racism the term has once again acquired explicitly cultural rather than a biological inf lection. Thus, within contemporary liberal orders of reality, the signifier “culture” is continuously mobilized as a tool of othering that translates racial difference as cultural difference. More explicitly, to “have” or “be” a culture within this reality means almost invariably to be ascribed or adopt an identity that is defined as “particular” in relation to liberal universalism. To be defined by one’s culture (for example, to be defined as Chinese, Polish, or Portuguese; as Muslim; or even homosexual) in a liberal apparatus means to be defined by conducts that are ritualistic, determined by immutable traditions, blood ties or social hierarchies, and often motivated by superstition or religious fanaticism. It means to be imagined first and foremost as one part of a “special” social group and as having a transcendent duty to obey the strong norms imposed by the group on each and every individual and to be imagined as living in a stagnant time, suspended in a form of atavist synchronism, like a display in a “natural museum of civilizations.” Of course, those constructions are opposed to the historically dynamic, ref lexive, modern, and universal attributes of “normal” liberal individual. Thus, insofar as they define it within the universal/ particular organizing dichotomy, liberal apparatuses make culture into

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the antagonist of rationality, individual autonomy, self-determination, self-actualization, contractual social relations, competition, strive, meritocracy, free choice, and so on. Indeed, culture is made in liberalism into the primitive term of an evolutionary teleology encapsulated by the dyads Gemeinshaft/Gesselshaft, or mechanical/organic solidarity, and in which liberalism stands for “modernity.” In other words, whenever liberalism frames the nation and itself as universal, “culture” becomes the signifier for the particularism and primitivism within the nation. Similarly, to be described as “cultural” means to be made a “minority” by comparison either with the universalism of the rest of the nation, whenever liberalism is in universal mode, or with the historically dominant and “true” culture of a country when liberalism is in particular mode (for example, in definitions of the nation as British, French, or American). While multiculturalism is usually portrayed as a liberal strategy of dismantling the dominant (racialized, sexualized, and gendered) liberal hierarchies of power/knowledge and of reimagining the ethos of the nation-state from the premises that all those present and all those yet to arrive have an equal claim to resources, including the symbolic resources of national identity and history, politically this portrait remains an idealization. Multiculturalism cannot be grafted onto liberalism precisely because liberal universalism is premised on the definition of “culture” as Other. To become multicultural, liberalism would need to renounce its pretensions of universalism, nothing short of a fundamental dismantling of liberalism as we know it. Quite on the contrary, as long as it shapes its order of reality through othering, the liberal multicultural nation remains a racially defined entity. As mentioned, the identity of the liberal nation is guarded from the intrusion of “cultural” Others by being doubly fenced ontologically: both in terms of historical presence, historical destiny, race, and bloodlines against newcomers and as universal (modern and liberal) against particulars (minorities). Therefore, what the nation is, to whom the country belongs and who belongs in the country, and who has the right and ability to speak in the name of the nation or, indeed, at all are never matters to be decided in a dialogue between “cultures.” They are rather decided using the universal, that is to say acultural, rationality of the liberal state or to be decided in relation with the interests of the racialized, authentic nation (British, French, American, Canadian, and so on). Whoever is defined as cultural/ethnic, being both special and Other, cannot become the nation’s voice. The following quote from a 1978 Margaret Thatcher public speech is illustrative


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of those multiple liberal slidings between race, culture, universal, and particular: People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture. And, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world, that if there is a fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react, and be rather hostile to those coming in. (Quoted in Husband and Chouhan 1985, 276) Thatcher employs “culture” to make the “British character” synonymous with “Enlightenment,” “civilization,” “progress” or “modernity,” and thus with universality as well as with a specific, racial group (the “British”). The racialized liberal nation is made both universal and particular, and its authoritative occupation of those ontological grounds makes it hard to contest. As long as these orders of reality hold, no form of liberal multiculturalism can challenge the foundational assumptions about what the nation is. All it can hope is to redefine the polity in terms of tolerance or integration, a redefinition that reiterates precisely the liberal schemes of difference that order identities from the superior universal substance of the majority group to the inferior cultural substances of the Other, either newcomers or pre-European inhabitants. Indeed, as long as those orders of reality hold, liberal tolerance is the governing tool that permits the separation between the universal hegemonic culture (Western liberalism) that signifies superiority and civilization and the barbaric, inferior Others to which the civilized culture grants or not tolerance, while also preserving the aura of neutrality, universalism, and benevolence of the liberal apparatuses that grant such tolerance (Brown 2006, 6 and 13). And of course, any such hierarchy of cultures, civilizations, or humanity cannot but draw, most of the time without being aware of it, on racist ontologies. “Differentialist” culturalism, evolutionary anthropology, and sociobiology are but forms of neoracism, that is, variants of the racist anthropological doctrines of the transhistoric universality of cultural differences (Balibar 1990, 288–289): Any theoretical racism necessarily refers to anthropological universals. It is even, in a sense, the way in which such a theoretical racism chooses and combines them that specifies it, and it is the succession of anthropological universals, backed up by the history of science, of law, of world economy, that constitutes its doctrinal evolution. (Balibar 1990, 290)

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Like all “differentialist” theories of culture and civilization, postEnlightenment racism is a form of humanism that looks for origins: it thrives to reveal the invisible cause of the evolution of societies and thus of their differences (287) and to order them into a narrative of a “humanity” eternally emerging from and menaced by the grip of animality (otherness qua primitivism, barbarity, savagery, or degeneracy). That is why racist discourses translate so easily into a theory of cultures and also why, when this translation between race and culture is effected, the resulting historical narrative must always attach that culture to a “heritage” that signifies the “imaginary face-off between man and its origins” (292). Thus, insofar as liberalism understands “culture” as hierarchy of anthropological universals, ordered by the organizing concept of nation and civilization, liberal culture remains a racial form of othering, layered with the permanent menace of exclusion and violence—be it as pogrom or as eugenics. And when culture is contemporarily mobilized as the nodal point of an increasing variety of liberal apparatuses, from primary and secondary education to public health campaigns, it operates to make a racialized notion of ethnicity/culture into the compulsory nodal point of any identity that needs to be recognized by the state (in “multicultural” liberal practices) and thus to atomize the social according to those racial and biological boundaries. In the United States, culture has played historically the role of sneaking othering in the governing apparatuses using the justification of the imperious governmental need to discover true difference in order to attain social happiness. The apparatuses that regulate reproduction, since concerned with identifying difference and using it as the principle that directs the interventions on the sexual and reproductive conducts of the population, constantly mobilize culture to rule the reproduction of the poor and racialized. Pauperism,2 Culture, and Reproduction in U.S. Governing Giovanna Procacci (1991) provides an account of the emergence of the idea of “culture of poverty” in France that, although historically and geographically specific, exhibits important similarities with the framing of pauperism in the United States and is, therefore, worth mentioning. In Procacci’s account, the concern with the “politics of poverty”— that is, with the formation of the poor as an object of knowledge and government—is a direct result of the liberal desire to nurture freedom by articulating the economic domain and moral order. As a result, by


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the first half of the nineteenth century, the category of “pauperism” is constructed to designate poverty intensified to the level of social danger. The “paupers” are a social category that French social economists variously describe as a “dangerous enemy of our civilization,” “the class of men injured by society,” or “a permanent nuisance to society” (Procacci 1991, 157–158). It is also a social category formed in opposition to that of poverty, since political economy imagines the working poor not as the enemy but as the as the counterpoint of wealth, a natural effect of capitalism and also one of the engines of capitalist wealth production, since they represent the inexhaustible source of needs extension. Therefore, while liberal apparatuses aim to preserve poverty as an economic incentive, they aim to erase the social aberration of pauperism. For those apparatuses, pauperism is the Other, unnatural, and primitive of the emerging bourgeois-capitalist governmental order of reality, whose stability and coherence it threatens with its f luidity, indefiniteness, insubordination, and potential eluding of the governmental gaze (154–158 and 159–160). English liberalism conceptualizes pauperism in very similar terms since, according to Chadwick and Bentham, the state needs to intervene to eliminate the conditions that turn the laboring poor into the indigent, mainly through responsibilizing this Other. Chadwick’s 1842 report on urban health notices the existence of a social group “whose moral perceptions have been obliterated” so that they have become prone to indocility, violence, wrongdoing, and loss of sociality and akin to beasts. The report goes on to pinpoint the etiology of urban diseases on the behaviors, conditions, and morals that constitute pauperization—pauperism is literally cause and effect of disease—and to propose as cure the modification of the habits and conditions found among the poor (Dean 1991, 208–209). And of course, the discourses on poverty and those on family and reproduction are intimately connected in the genealogy of liberalism. Malthus is not the only example of this connection: in 1833, Gaskell argues that the decline in the “moral, physical and social conditions” of the laborers is due not to poverty, conditions of labor, or lack of education but to the “separation of families” and “breaking-up of households” engendered by the introduction of steamdriven machinery (Dean 1991, 202). Moreover, as already mentioned, the concern with defining and regulating the bourgeois body and self through the policing of the community, morality, marital arrangements, sexuality, and reproduction is performed in relation not only with the figures of the colonized, racial, and gendered Other but also with the destitute, immoral, or working-class Europeans and mixed-blood subjects that populate the colonies in mid-nineteenth century. While the colonial fears of racial hybridity and the degeneracy it represents also

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police class and propriety in the colonial cores; hence the representations of the British urban poor as similar to “savage tribes” and the coupling of the pauper and the primitive in the liberal reformist language3 (Stoler 1995, 125). Colonial biopower links the racial and class superiority of both colonist community and metropolitan bourgeoisie to middle-class habitus: middle-class morality, nationalist sentiments, normalized sexuality, and a specific school and home environment, including maternal vigilance, proper child rearing, and milieu and other notions of social hygiene and civility such as sexual moderation and “productive sexuality” (46–48 and 100–115). The conceptualization of Otherness as a degenerate form of culture, parasitical on society, is therefore a constant recurrence in liberal discourse after the turn of the nineteenth century. Moreover, we cannot properly understand the emergence of a theory of “culture of poverty” in the U.S. governmental discourses without putting those discourses in a genealogical perspective that shows their direct dependence on forms of evolutionary sociobiological theories that emerge in the nineteenth century. In Herbert Spencer’s sociocultural evolutionism, social and cultural differences are understood as biological attributes distributed according to a racially ordered evolutionary scale. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics asserts that the traits acquired by an individual during her lifetime will be passed on to the next generation, while Ernst Haeckel, the “German Darwin,” incorporates the insights of Lamarck and Herbert Spencer into a “recapitulation hypothesis” that asserts that each new characteristic an individual acquires during the social life is added on and therefore preserved in the ontogenetic development of the next generation. In a nutshell, each generation’s responses to their environment, and specifically one’s socioeconomic position, are biologically encoded (Brickman 2003, 44–45). While this short genealogy was meant to reinforce the idea that liberal apparatuses are always already structured by patterned forms of othering, rather than to explain the contemporary shape of the reproduction-regulating apparatuses in the United States, it will become clear shortly that these historical constructions of pauperism contain remarkable similarities with the symmetrical endeavors in the U.S. governing discourses. *

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I have already suggested that within the medico-governmental apparatuses, “race” is straightforwardly encased in the biology of the


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Other under the protection of biomedical truth. Outside the protective boundaries of the medical-governmental discourses, making difference a matter of biology is more problematic and the emphasis when difference is being described moves from the genotype/ phenotype of the subjects to their culture. Starting before the turn of the twentieth century and peaking after the 1960s, the U.S. welfarist governmental discourses depict the black and poor as living in a pathological culture. Of course, it is significant that those representations emerge within the welfare discourses, from which they spread to infiltrate and partly colonize the entirety of political conducts in the United States. Liberal welfarism—despite the contemporary neoliberal outcries that portray it as a communist totalitarian regime—remains subsumed to the order of reality of liberalism. It is therefore structured in relation with the nodal points of free market and economic growth as undisputable goods of the modern society; of financial accountability and the elimination of public debt as forms of obtaining those goods; of individual autonomy and respect of the public/private, economy/society, and civil and political/social right divides as crucibles of freedom; of work ethic as the defining characteristic of the good citizen; and more generally of bourgeois self hood as the subjectivity to be fostered by the expert governing apparatuses. After World War II, welfarism is (re)introduced in liberal governing specifically as a modality to improve the functioning of the market and increase the individual’s ability to live a fulfilling and free life according to liberal-capitalist precepts. When Keynes and then Beveridge argue for the necessity to act upon the economic in the name of well-being and prosperity, they never intend to destroy the market; quite the contrary, they mean to save it from the political and economic forces that threaten it (Rose 1999a, 80). And T. H. Marshall, the postwar prophet of social-democracy in the U.K., maintains a strong liberal-capitalist ethos in his writings (see Rees 1995). As a result, the welfare apparatuses remain accountable to the liberal economic, universalistic, and libertarian criteria of good governing and thus always permeable to their imprecations of economic efficiency, deregulation, privatization, choice, and freedom. A 1977 U.S. government expenditure white paper is illustrative of this tension when it asserts that a modern civilised society needs an adequate level of public services. These are pre-requisites of efficiency, as well as welfare, and personal freedom . . . at this juncture, further social improvements

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must depend on the prior achievement of our industrial and economic objectives. (Cited in Plant et al. 1980, 3) That the entire welfare scaffolding is erected on liberal moral, ontological, and epistemological foundations explains both the rapid success of neoliberal “retrenchment” ideologies and the various technologies of othering—most prominently “dependency”—that welfarism, despite being a system predicated on solidarity, built itself around. These exclusionary technologies of welfarism become intensified in the contemporary political landscape when neoliberalism assesses welfarism solely in terms of market efficiency and represents it as a drag on the global economy that needs to be subordinated and minimized (these discourses, it must be added, typically “feminize” welfarism in relation to the robustness of a “masculinized” market). To survive, the welfare apparatuses must become more akin to the private sector and “re-masculinize” themselves through internationalization in the service of global capital and the enhancement of their coercive and surveillance capacities (Marchand and Runyan 2000, 14). Under such circumstances, welfarism becomes a powerful technology for identifying and ruling both the internal and external Others of the nation. Besides the internal forms of othering that I shall discuss below, welfarism is also used to construct the idea of “Us” in liberalism and thus to mobilize wide national solidarities and to legitimize governmental interventions that protect the objects of common responsibility and belonging. “Welfare” is transformed into the symbol of a history of pooling resources, a biopolitical tool for delimiting both the roots and the boundaries of the true nation; here, welfare apparatuses represent the contribution of the proper citizens, those that have been here before and all along, to the common good, and thus express one’s belonging to the nation and “our” fragile asset to be protected against the racially and culturally defined Others (scroungers, dependents, refugees, immigrants). In fact, in neoliberalism, welfare often stands in for the nation itself, since the social solidarity (the “Us”) constructed by welfare apparatuses invariably stops at the national borders; thus, welfare apparatuses make identity, the nation, and belonging to coincide, “naturally,” with the national borders. This is not surprising— welfarism remains tributary to the racialized self-understandings of the nation as different in substance from other nations, endowed with a specific destiny and with natural characteristics that characterize all forms of liberal nationalism (see Anderson 2006). Welfare replaces “blood,” “race,” and “history” in the racist-eugenic narratives of the


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nation, as illustrated by its active and constant mobilization in the anti-immigration discourses of both the United States and Europe, and participates in the further erasure of the systems of relations, dependencies, and exploitation on which liberal capitalism relies and that always-already extend beyond the boundaries of the state and nation. One example is the U.S. five-year ban on most welfare benefits for legal immigrants and the permanent ban on food stamps and Supplemental Security Income: The Congress makes the following statements concerning national policy with respect to welfare and immigration: (1) Self-sufficiency has been a basic principle of United States immigration law since this country’s earliest immigration statutes. (2) It continues to be the immigration policy of the United States that— (A) aliens within the Nation’s borders not depend on public resources to meet their needs, but rather rely on their own capabilities and the resources of their families, their sponsors, and private organizations, and (B) the availability of public benefits not constitute an incentive for immigration to the United States. (PRWORA, sec. 400) This symbolism of the protection of the nation against external Others that welfare comes to embody in contemporary neoliberalism is used in the same form in the state biopolitical interventions against its internal enemies. Welfarism-qua-nation always creates internal Others to which it grants neither inclusion in the nation proper nor, therefore, welfare aid, since they represent exactly the identities in opposition to whom the bourgeois subjectivity and society are constructed. It is in order to protect the liberal nation—its racial purity and its resources—that the U.S. welfare debate is historically so intensely focused on excluding from benefits the poor, the blacks, the immoral women, and, most of all, the black women, the ultimate Other of the bourgeois citizen. That is to say, welfarism represents for the contemporary liberal apparatuses in the United States both the symbol and the instrument of the state racisms Foucault discusses (see the discussion of state racism in chapter 3). It comes to represent the justification for the use of the state’s biopower to bring death. Between them, welfare and culture form a formidable technology of othering in

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U.S. governmentality. Interestingly, then, welfarism is both the illiberal system in opposition to which neoliberalism defines itself and a crucial element of neoliberal governing. *

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From the beginning of the century, the U.S. welfare governmental field is dominated by eugenic theories that focus on the degrading and corrupting effects of pauperism and on the atypical and pathological character of the pauper (Patterson 2000, 23). The U.S. governing of poverty combines classical “biological” eugenics and a post-Depression “environmental” form of eugenics, the latter stipulating the generational transmission of bad habits and behaviors. As such, it constantly remobilizes as axes for structuring reality the sociocultural evolutionary theories of Spencer, Lamarck, or Haeckel that I have already mentioned. During the Progressive era, various social reformers describe the U.S. poor as a world apart in which, once again as in the preindustrial societies depicted by Tönnies or Durkheim, a strong, homogenous, and rigid “collective conscience” envelops and determines all and each and acts to stif le freedom, autonomy, and difference (see Patterson 2000). Attempting to deal scientifically with the problem of pauperism, up to the 1930s the U.S. eugenic techniques involve investigations of familial genealogies among the pauper class, casual laborers, and immigrants. In 1925, in response to suggestions from her eugenicist supporters, Margaret Sanger redesigns her clinical records to show the nationality, heredity, religion, occupation, and even trade union affiliation of her patients (Gordon 2002a, 200). These systematic records of life histories and inherited traits, compiled by trained researchers, look for telling characteristics of culture on one’s character and conduct, like the effect of parental occupation on the children’s welfare or on birth rates (King 1999, 51–52). As will be further discussed in chapter 6, the relentless cataloguing of pathological subjects remains a crucial mechanism of truth production in the contemporary governmental apparatuses. And, through eugenicists such as Lewis Terman and Edward Thorndike for example, the eugenic field is always tightly connected with the development of quantitative and statistical techniques in the U.S. social sciences (Gordon 2002a, 200). Following this genealogy, postwar U.S. welfarism applies a whole array of such governing technologies devising systems for the calculation of differential birth rates according to class, ethnicity, or IQ, encouraging or compelling the faulty stock to use


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contraceptive devices or more directly sterilizing indigenous, minority, or black minority populations (Pateman 1992, 25). I was mentioning above that, in Procacci’s (1991) reading, pauperism is dangerous for the capitalist experts because it is indefinite and unthinkable enough to elude the governmental gaze—the fact that various U.S. experts “discover” the pauper after the mid-twentieth century is an example of this liberal governmental blind spot. It is after 1965, when as already mentioned African Americans gain access to state aid for the first time, that experts such as Michael Harrington and Daniel Moynihan start their “discovery” of what they call (the irony is, of course, unintentional) the “other Americans”: a permanent mass of poor parasitically reproducing itself at the periphery of the economy and society. Once explained using the above-mentioned environmental eugenics, this momentous discovery spawns the idea of a “culture of the poor,” isolated from mainstream U.S. society and multiplying in its dark corners. Chronic poverty in the United States, then, results from to the breakdown of the black ghetto family and the illegitimacyspawning “serial monogamy” of the black youth, behaviors that allegedly cause lack of ambition, aimlessness, juvenile crime, and ultimately welfare dependency. Lawrence Mead (in Schram 1995, 105), for example, diagnoses a social decline in the United States and attributes it to the pathological “psychological attitudes,” moral standards, and social practices of the poor, mainly the black single mothers. It is also around this time that Harrington proposes his concept of a “deviant culture of poverty,” a separate nation with a different way of life and feeling characterized by fatalism and futility—a different “inner America” with a “twisted spirit” (Patterson 2000, 116) that mirrors negatively the true and proper culture. Low organization levels make this culture marginal, anarchic, local, oral, passive, and lacking of a sense of history (Oscar Lewis cited in Patterson 2000, 116). The idea of an “underclass” becomes even more prominent during the 1980s, when the specter of an increasing group of black ghetto-proletariat that can permanently destabilize the entire society raises antiwelfare arguments to panic levels (209). This framing of the poverty debate in terms of an “underclass” positioned both outside and in the obscure cellars of mainstream society is inf luenced by Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, and George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty. The argument is by now a classic: public provision creates an intergenerational culture of dependency, undermines work ethic, and encourages family breakup and the father’s failure to support his children:4 “the current poor . . . are refusing to work hard . . . [They] choose leisure not because

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of moral weakness, but because they are paid to do so” (Gilder cited in de Goede 1996, 324–325). Those discoveries, diagnoses, and treatments are, of course, performed using the knowledge arsenal of social sciences and are always part of or aligned with, in more or less direct manners, the governmental welfare apparatuses. Similar statements emerge from the White House throughout the history of U.S. welfarism, including during the administrations that enacted the most daring, by U.S. standards, welfare reforms: F. D. Roosevelt made clear his belief that “continued dependence upon relief indicates a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber” (cited in Patterson 2000, 58). In Richard Nixon’s 1971 State of the Union address, welfare is described as a “monstrous, consuming outrage”; in his 1967 inaugural address, Governor Ronald Reagan of California states that a guaranteed minimum income is inhuman as it perpetuates poverty by eroding the very substance of moral fiber: self-reliance, dignity, self-respect (167–168). Statements like that of the governmental Council of Economic Advisers’ 1964 economic report of the president, “The Problem of Poverty in America,” further exemplify this construction of the poor as Other and of their “culture” as an abnormality reproduced generationally: The poor inhabit a world scarcely recognizable, and rarely recognized by the majority of Americans. It is a world apart, whose inhabitants are isolated from the mainstream of American life and alienated from its values . . . Poverty breeds poverty . . . the poverty of the fathers is visited upon the children. (Cited in Patterson 2000, 112) Of course, this statement also works to reinforce the patriarchal logic of those constructions since it only deems the paternal line relevant for economic consideration. The CEA concludes that poverty’s byproducts are “ignorance, disease, delinquency, crime, irresponsibility, immorality, indifference.” That poor black mothers remained poor in the United States further stabilizes the theory of a “culture of poverty” for the entire century (Solinger 1999, 23). By 1988 near unanimity is reached in the United States Congress that welfare dependency was a major problem that had to be tackled through dramatic changes in welfare policy (Schram 1995, 131). While, as already mentioned, the conservative political rhetoric and governing apparatuses in the United States also depend fundamentally on “welfare,” without which much of their relevance in the 1980s and 1990s would have dissipated.


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In all these accounts culture lodges itself inside the self of each individual and determines her behavior with the immutability of biology.5 The “germ-plasm” that in the eugenic theories of the 1920s determines the defective somatic characters in the offspring of the degenerate subjects such as the poor, the feeble-minded, the criminals, or the sexual delinquents (King 1999, 54) is replaced by a sort of “culture-germ,” outside the blood and genes but just as inescapable. Once culture is made into a “worked from within” and ineluctable signifier of one’s difference of substance, the articulation of eugenics and biology can be extrapolated to culture. That is, once the contemporary governmental rationalities signify poverty and dependency, in their epidermalized guise, as a “culture”—that is, as a fully bounded, particular, and determining entity—they can push them “outside” the boundaries of “normal American society.” Poor blacks become part of another world, literally Other, characterized by all the deviant and pathological traits “our (normal, white) world” lacks.6 Subsequently, they can be ruled in all impunity; as the U.S. governmental programs and technologies demonstrate, racism and eugenics preserve all their ability to dominate and exclude. Poverty, Race, and Culture in the Reproduction-Regulating Apparatuses Contemporary security apparatuses in the United States operate racial and pauperist othering by mobilizing the signifier “culture.” Thus, in the already mentioned functionalist accounts of the Healthy People documents that represent the social as an ensemble of integrated but discrete entities functioning in organic harmony (biology, family, community, social institutions, government), “culture” is added to this ensemble as the ingredient that marks one’s ontological difference: a person’s environment is “unique because of cultural customs, language; and personal, religious, or spiritual beliefs” (HP 2000, 19). This section starts by briefly showing how U.S. liberal welfare apparatuses form their subject as Other, before moving back to an analysis of the construction of race and poverty in the health and family-planning apparatuses. Those oscillating analytical moves are an attempt to capture the complex and shifting relations between heterogeneous liberal apparatuses, while also emphasizing their common assumptions or rules of statement formation. The first part of the analysis is structured around the text of the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996” (PRWORA), a law intended by the governors and considered

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by analysts to be the most important welfarist legal act of the 1990s and 2000s. The PRWORA is introduced by the Clinton administration as a radical policy break, meant to redress the perverse social effects of welfarism since the 1960s Great Society reforms and to create a fundamentally new type of welfare subject. As such, it distils the dominant governmental understandings of U.S. welfarism, its target identities, and the methods used to know and affect them and shapes a politico-epistemic space where dominant governmental discourses of identity and reproduction converge, are reconfigured, and gain new tactical valences. The Bush Jr. administration unconditionally embraces the PRWORA and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families7 (TANF) program that the document introduces as the new welfare apparatus in the United States, making them the probable blueprint for the definition of the welfare subject for some time to come. The TANF adopts the main elements of the “culture of poverty” theory. Specifically, it affirms that welfare dependency, single parenthood, and illegitimacy (with teenage pregnancy and parenthood as their most detrimental forms) cause a chain of social pathology and create a degenerate population responsible for the society’s dependency, poverty, unemployment, and crime, in a nutshell for dragging the United States into a social, moral, and economic national crisis. I shall not insist on the figures the PRWORA displays in order to form the image of an exuberant and unstoppable growth of AFDC rolls and the severe effects of this growth on public finances. Various U.S. social scientists have put a fair amount of work into disproving those welfare myths of dependency, even if with no significant political gain as yet.8 What is important is that the PRWORA explains social pathology, including the increase in people on welfare rolls, through one crucial governmental event: the increase in births to unmarried women, with “nonmarital teen pregnancy” singled out as particularly problematic risk category. However, to justify contemporarily a governmental intervention, even in a Christian liberalism like that of the United States, it is not enough to invoke an event’s going against the patriarchal religious moral codes. The event has to be made into a social crisis and those engendering it into Others using the norms of truth of our time: science. We are thus presented with the scientific data proving “the negative consequences of an out-of-wedlock birth on the mother, the child, the family, and society” (PRWORA 1996, sec. 101). I shall quote it at


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length since it is relevant for the subsequent analysis: (A) Young women 17 and under who give birth outside of marriage are more likely to go on public assistance and to spend more years on welfare once enrolled. These combined effects of “younger and longer” increase total AFDC costs per household by 25 percent to 30 percent for 17-year-olds. (B) Children born out-of-wedlock have a substantially higher risk of being born at a very low or moderately low birth weight. (C) Children born out-of-wedlock are more likely to experience low verbal cognitive attainment, as well as more child abuse, and neglect. (D) Children born out-of-wedlock were more likely to have lower cognitive scores, lower educational aspirations, and a greater likelihood of becoming teenage parents themselves. (E) Being born out-of-wedlock significantly reduces the chances of the child growing up to have an intact marriage. (F) Children born out-of-wedlock are 3 times more likely to be on welfare when they grow up. [PRWORA 1996, sec.101; (a); (8)] In line with the liberal attempts to connect social ills and the reproduction of the racialized pauper already mentioned, the governmental discourses forcefully connect causally illegitimate and teenage pregnancy and the depletion of public funds and increased public debt; increases in poverty, translated as the increase in people depending on financial aid from the state; perinatal morbidity; child abuse; sexual promiscuity and the decline of bourgeois familism expressed both as divorce and as the transgression of the interdiction to have sex or children outside the nuclear family; and finally the inferior intelligence and lack of social achievement of the social groups targeted, the racialized paupers. I have already argued that “scientifically” those statements are not far from absurd for anyone who takes the time to study historically liberalism, capitalism, the bourgeois family, and the relations between them (and the list in note 8 is but a fraction of the existing titles that support this argument). I take as my task to point out how those governmental statements, once again, remind us Foucault’s insight that the contemporary liberal state devises racism to defend society against those “enemies within” that block the progress of the

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nation and engender its degeneration. However, besides being singled out as the subject guiltiest for the systematic and critical level of degeneration of the social in the United States, the “teenage mother” does not represent an unequivocal epistemological category in the governmental apparatuses of truth. It is not a category defined either by age or by the combination of age and reproductive status, but by the more complex combination of age, reproductive status, marital status, and socioeconomic status. Therefore, it is solely when a young woman has an illegitimate child and applies for welfare support that we see emerging the “teenage mother” as a governmental risk category, as an Other that is visible for the reproduction-governing apparatuses. Once visible, the “teenage mother” is further scrutinized by various systems of knowledge that unearth and map her characteristics and relate them to an array of other governmentally relevant data (psychology, morality, pathology, education, dependency, family, gender, race, culture, society, the nation). The “teenage mother” emerges invariably as a subject unable to make the rational decisions that constitute the mark of liberal freedom and, therefore, is included in the category of “irresponsible” citizens along with children or the mad. It is in this form that she is made malleable by the various governmental technologies that make the prevention of teenage pregnancies nationwide an imperative goal of governing,9 techniques that compel her to acquire the bourgeois self-discipline she lacks: work skills, job-seeking skills, financial and planning skills, and child-rearing skills. In the process she is to be supervised, assessed, and counseled by doctors, law enforcers, psychologists, social workers, or her parents. Consider for example the ways in which, in order to receive welfare benefits, the teenage mother is compelled to live in adult-supervised settings or in a state-located “second-chance home” defined as an entity that provides . . . a supportive and supervised living arrangement in which such individuals are required to learn parenting skills, including child development, family budgeting, health and nutrition, and other skills to promote long-term economic independence and the well-being of their children. (PRWORA 1996, 103; “408”; a; 5) Previous programs even proposed federal grants “to establish and operate closely supervised residential group homes for unwed mothers” (WDRA 1992, sec. 441). Here undesirable mothers should be incarcerated for better surveillance. Evidently, not only the single and


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teenage parent but all welfare dependents lack the ability to function autonomously. The “Individual Responsibility Plan” that the states are required to implement as part of the TANF—and that aims to move the individual “into whatever private sector employment the individual is capable of handling as quickly as possible”— (ii) sets forth the obligations of the individual, which may include a requirement that the individual attend school, maintain certain grades and attendance, keep school age children of the individual in school, immunize children, attend parenting and money management classes, or do other things that will help the individual become and remain employed in the private sector; [...] (v) may require the individual to undergo appropriate substance abuse treatment. (PRWORA 1996, Title I) And in order to receive benefits, all TANF recipients must demonstrate that their children are immunized and have completed the well-child examinations prescribed by the secretary,10 as well as demonstrate that their children are enrolled and attend school regularly. That those individuals’ lack of capacity for autonomy makes them prone to “substance abuse” is always implicitly assumed. A whole federal law is dedicated to requiring a drug test for any individual requesting or receiving AFDC (DTA 1989). Similarly, people lose the housing benefits eligibility if they engage in any “drug-related criminal behavior,” and the public housing agency decides one’s situation on the basis of successful completion of a drug or alcohol rehabilitation program and the ceasing of the offensive (alcoholism) or illegal behavior (HOPE 1996). Impromptu domiciliary visits and controls by social workers, law agents, or other state-connected experts, restrictions on travelling between states and abroad, restrictions on residency and the compulsion to live with an adult for unwed teenage mothers, compulsory work, training, education, surveillance of sexuality, compulsory psychological and psychiatric counseling meant to help the unwed teenage mothers acknowledge their deep emotional problems (Fraser 1989, 155), and compulsory drug testing are all mandated by legislation. Thus, the state and expertdefined incompetence of the welfare subjects legitimates a particular surveillance in a self-amplifying cycle in which increasingly more minute surveillance reveals increasingly more pathological details. The governmental mandate for “normal” citizens is quite different.

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For example, no student shall be required, as part of any applicable program, to submit to a “survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals information concerning: political affiliations; mental and psychological problems potentially embarrassing to the students or their family; sex behavior or attitudes; illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, and demeaning behavior; critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships; . . . income” (EAA 1994, sec. 416) without the consent of the student or the parent. *

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It has been argued that, while the construction of poverty in the WHO-inspired Healthy People strategies aspires toward a holistic and social understanding of the determinants of health inequalities, the governmental inability to assess critically its foundational assumptions make it reiterate the othering order I have discussed so far. Healthy People 2010 acknowledges the prevalence of poverty in the United States, the existence of a mass of working poor, the increase in income inequality over the past three decades, and the distinct race, ethnicity, and household composition axes that structure poverty distribution. Respecting the dominant format of health promotion discourses, Healthy People relates poverty to disease and death: “for all the chronic diseases that lead the Nation’s list of killers, low income is a social risk factor,” or “health disparities between the poor people and those with higher incomes are already universal for all dimensions of health” (HP 1991, 29). And finally, again respecting the dominant rhetoric of the WHO,11 social justice is introduced as a legitimate governmental aim: “for the coming decade, perhaps no challenge is more compelling than that of equity. The disparities experienced by people who are born and live their lives at the lowest income levels define the dimensions of that challenge” (HP 1991: 29). Unfortunately, in the international field of bureaucratic health expertise, the chasm between governmental interventions and the bombastic statements of the health promotion establishment was never bridged and is, in fact, increasing, while in the U.S. governmental field, the rhetoric of social justice sits side by side with statements produced through othering. Once again, the assumption that the poor are a social group situated somewhere outside and behind normal society in space and time permeates the governmental texts, reiterating the teleological narrative of leading “modern” nations and their colonial Others trailing behind somewhere along the line of evolution from primitivism to liberalism.12 This belief in the


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primitive-to-civilized progression is expressed more innocently when we are told that the nation’s epidemiological “health gains” of the past decades seem to ref lect the gains of the higher socioeconomic groups, while the poor “continue to lag behind” (HP 2000, 13), or when the DHSS experts muse over “how far most Americans, especially those with low incomes, are from . . . [the] potential” for disease prevention offered by biomedical knowledge (HP 1991, 1)—a potential implicitly realized in the proper bourgeois citizens. Or it is expressed more brutally when the strategy implicitly understands the poor as an isolated culture that cultivates pathology, as in the assertion that “infant mortality, homicide, violence [are] problems that burden the poor in our society” (HP 1991, DHHS secretary’s letter). Clearly, it is not “Us,” the nation, who are affected by crime or infant mortality—“we” are compelled to help carrying the poor’s burden, which is not ours. And since the poor’s burden results from their culture being eluded by the values of U.S. liberalism, to extend the benefits of good health to all our people, it is crucial to build in the vulnerable what I have called a “culture of character”—or way of thinking and being, that actively promote responsible behavior and the adoption of lifestyles that are maximally conducive to good health. (HP 1991, DHHS secretary’s letter) Thus, when poverty is associated with maternal and infant health, the social-democratic rhetoric of the WHO and the pauperist, racist, and eugenic assumptions of U.S. governing reality intertwine. We are told that prematurity, low birth weight, birth defects, and infant death are linked to low income, low educational level, low occupational status, and other indicators of social and economic disadvantage (HP 1991, 30). The introduction of lack of education in this enumeration results from the systematic assumption of U.S. governing that education represents a form of transcendent good that can correct all social pathology. Unfortunately, there is not enough space here to discuss the implications of this liberal assumption for the structuring of the social, unless it is to point out that if a citizen is deficient in liberalism, it must be because the knowledge necessary to make the proper rational choices is unavailable to her. This knowledge can be made available through the epistemologically infallible and moral-ontologically objective liberal education (as the highly trained experts whose statements I am here analyzing undoubtedly illustrate).

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We are also told that poverty is associated with “significant developmental limitations” in the child: iron deficiency, growth retardation, high blood lead levels, infections, and other debilitating conditions (HP 1991, 30). At the same time, the children of the poor suffer from all the aff lictions that eugenic sciences associate with the threat the degenerate Other poses to the nation: Mental retardation, learning disorders, emotional and behavioural problems, and vision and speech impairments all appear to be more prevalent among children living in poverty, often in inner cities than among those at higher economic levels. An accurate profile of the health of the US children . . . must also consider emotional, psychological, and learning problems, the social and environmental risks to which they are related, and the total costs to the Nation. (HP 1991, 12) It is fairly transparent that the list of pathologies and risks aff licting the degenerate Other is the same that documents like PRWORA or authors like Murray and Gilder ascribe to the “culture of poverty.” And since the inferior intellectual, psychological, and behavioral characteristics of poor children result from the degeneration of the culture they are raised into, the solution is, again, education: the “complex developmental problems” that hamper the children of the poor must be addressed through “more and better preschool education,” while the (poor black) parents in “high-risk environments” need to be enrolled into educational programs and tutored by a plethora of experts—primary care health providers, socials service professionals, health educators, housing officials, community groups, and concerned individuals—so as to reduce their rates of child abuse and teach them to properly raise their children (HP 1991, 15). Irresponsible Motherhood as a “Chain of Pathology” Within the family-planning section of the Healthy People documents, the construction of the “irresponsible mother” identity seems at this point to proceed according to a familiar algorithm: to justify the focus on certain identities and conducts, the governmental experts introduce us to a list detailing the adverse effects of “unintended pregnancy” on the mothers, their children, and the nation. Using the same assumptions about the damaging presence of the degenerate Others in the midst of


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the nation, the strategy starts from the premise that unintended pregnancy “is expensive no matter what the outcome,” where these costs to the nation are on one hand measured in “unintended births, reduced educational attainment and employment opportunity of the mother, greater welfare dependency, and increased potential for child abuse and neglect” (HP 2000, 9–5) and on the other measured in terms of a panoply of motherhood-related pathology that reappears systematically in all medico-governmental texts that discuss “irresponsible motherhood”: unintentional mothers are less likely to seek or obtain prenatal care and to breastfeed and more likely to harm the fetus by smoking or drinking alcohol, to give birth to a child at higher risk of low birth weight or of dying during its first year, to abuse their child, or to provide insufficient monetary and familial resources for healthy development of the child (HP 2000, 9–5). The negative effects of the special category of “unintended teenage pregnancy” include “induced abortion . . . emotional and psychological disruption, social and economic effects on the adolescent and her child, and economic consequences for society at large” (HP 1991, 191). The family-planning strategies further translate the pathology of the welfarist “teenage mother” in the biomedical and developmental psychology register: Infants born to teenaged mothers, especially mothers under age 15 years, are more likely to suffer from low birth weight, neonatal death, and sudden infant death syndrome. The infants may be at greater risk of child abuse, neglect and behavioural and educational problems at later stages. (HP 2000, 9–5) All this pathology focuses on the teenage woman’s inability to be a good mother; since irresponsible by liberal standards, she is the one abusing, neglecting, providing insufficient care and money, poisoning with intoxicants her child, and so on. The governmental pathologizing also focuses on her failure to become a liberal citizen since she fails the bourgeois performance of work, education, and independence. Indeed, the negative effect of “unintended teenage pregnancy,” the most dangerous type of unintended pregnancy in the governmental eyes, is the interruption of the linear progression of the liberal individual toward the final goal of freedom as economic independence and, for a woman, toward becoming a good mother and wife. In the governmental reality, this trajectory is fuelled exclusively by self-control and motivation, and anything less than evolving toward the promised independence is retardation: “adolescent pregnancy and child-rearing generally retard an

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adolescent’s achievement of independence” (HP 1991, 190). More precisely, teenage mothers are more likely than others not to finish school, to be unemployed, and to lack parental skills (HP 1991, 18), as well as less likely to get or stay married and more likely “to require public assistance and to live in poverty than their peers who are not mothers” (HP 2000, 9–5). The similarities with the welfarist discourses on the reproduction of the poor black women are not accidental. Among the pathology that the family-planning strategy associates with unintended pregnancy, the welfarist-economic elements are at least as prominent as the biomedical and patriarchal ones:13 In addition to the personal costs to teen parents and their babies, societal costs of teen childbearing are immense. In 1985, an estimated $ 16.6 billion in public finds were spent to support families begun by teenage mothers, with virtually all of these costs associated with public assistance programs including Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, and Food Stamps. (HP 1991, 190) However, despite the confident tone of the experts, the biomedical pathology associated with teenage pregnancy is even more ambiguous than the moral-economic one mobilized by welfarism. Most of these statements are speculative: only 1 percent of teenage mothers are under 15 years old; sudden infant death syndrome has no known risk factors (hence its “suddenness”); the issues of child abuse are not as uncontroversial as the government documents suggest (for a discussion see, for example, Hacking 1999); and the arbitrary (but always useful and used for such eugenic purposes) nature of any measurements of “normal behaviour” are well known. Moreover, the biological mechanisms causing the pathology attributed to teenage pregnancy, for example, low birth weight, remain obscure (I return to a discussion of the epistemic status of the governmental truths in chapter 6). Indeed, one document comes to openly acknowledge that teenage pregnancies are not in themselves pathological from a biomedical point of view: Recent research suggests that the higher frequency of poor health outcomes among adolescents who give birth do not stem from intrinsic medical risk, but from socioeconomic and behavioral factors, such as low income, low levels of education, and poor nutritional patterns . . . healthy teens can have healthy pregnancies. (HP 1991, 190)


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Somewhat predictably, this is not taken as an incentive to increase the resources available to the poor teenage mothers—even less to analyze the governmental practices that make them Other. Having correlated the mother’s lack of procreative intention at the moment of copulation with this array of pathology, the experts introduce us to the subjects that the “irresponsible mother” identity brings together. And, surprise: the subjects that lack the ability to plan their pregnancy are the same individuals, poor, dependent, uneducated, unhealthy, reckless, lacking parental skills, and devoid of parental love, who engender “illegitimacy” and the string of pathology that the governmental discourses relate to welfare dependency. The Healthy People 2000 family-planning strategy focuses on the “teenage mother” as the most relevant kind of irresponsible mother and a risk factor for unintended pregnancy, while, trying to move away from the exclusive focus on teenage pregnancy of its predecessor, the Healthy People 2010 strategy declares that it aims to include all pregnancies in its planning strategy (HP 2001, 119). This remains a failed attempt since, after affirming that unintended pregnancy is a problem aff licting all age, socioeconomic, and race groups, the strategy continues to understand unintended pregnancy as resulting from the lack of foresight and education of the poor, black, teenage mothers: Unintended pregnancies occur among females of all socioeconomic levels and all marital statuses and age groups, but females under age 20 years and poor and African American women are especially likely to become pregnant unintentionally. (HP 2000, 9–11) In contrast with the attention given to teenage mothers, Healthy People 2000 summarizes in one laconic phrase the effects of old age on the fetus and infant, a trend specific to the middle class and exacerbated by its increasing demand for IVF treatments: “Infants born to women over age 40 experience higher rates of congenital anomalies, such as Downs Syndrome” (HP 1991, 11). The strategy offers no further figures, trends, or extrapolations, no data related to marital status, no correlations between the pathology induced by this practice (both in terms of pathology and the high cost of IVF treatment) and the costs to the nation, and no comments about the potentially beneficial effects of the cessation of this “unhealthy” practice on the well-being of the nation. Moreover, unlike adolescent mothers, older women are not included in the “high-risk” category (which also includes poverty and

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race). On the contrary, while teenage pregnancy is made into a public threat, infertility is presented as a fully private concern of the bourgeois family, thus made asocial: “Diagnosis and treatment of infertility are very costly, time-consuming, and invasive, and they can place immense stress on marital and family relations” (HP 2000, 9–29); however, “infertility itself does not represent a serious public health threat” (HP 2000, 9–29). The document concludes by stating that “teenage pregnancy remains an intense national issue, within the context of public health and welfare reform, concerning the optimum potential of the Nation’s youth” (HP 2000, 9–20) and that, “clearly, the solution to the [teenage pregnancy] problem needs to be found” (HP 2000, 9–5). However, the governmental document never addresses the question of what ordering of the governmental symbolic, epistemic, and visual fields makes possible the isolation of teenage pregnancy as an “intense national issue.” Indeed, teenage pregnancy cannot be pathological or immoral per se—it has to be actively made so. To give but an example, Robson and Berthoud’s (2006) study of teenage mothers in the British Pakistani and Bangladeshi “ethnic minorities” argues that the disadvantaged outcomes of teenage motherhood stem from their departure from the dominant social norm. In contrast, the authors show that when the early fertility represents the social norm of a group, it does not lead to any higher disadvantage than that experienced by the entire group. Thus, rather than being “found” by the transparent gaze of government, as an object endowed with its own reality and pathology, teenage pregnancy is formed as real and pathological within the system of relations that the governmental rationality establishes, and its formation already depends on a set of assumptions that make it into a visible object of government. The biomedical apparatuses of reproductionregulation translate in their own discursive grammar the very same objects that the U.S. governing reality has been busy discovering for the past 150 years. *

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The construction of the family-planning field around an identity defined as the “irresponsible mother” depends on the authority of expert truths. Such truths are presented as uncontroversial and objective and, by “founding” governmental statements and technologies, lend the latter the same aura. Nevertheless, the ambiguous epistemic processes such expertise is based on and perpetuating are not


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themselves incorporated in the governmental strategy documents. The analysis of the “non-State” production of truths on family planning, which I start presenting here and will continue in chapter 6, hopefully contributes to the elucidation of these processes while also illustrating how governing apparatuses always transcend the boundaries of the state as defined by liberalism. Most of the articles used come from Family Planning Perspectives, a journal acting as the porte-parole of the Planned Parenthood Association and edited by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, an organization on which the truths of the Healthy People strategies rely heavily.14 The great majority of this research on the consequences of unintended pregnancy in the United States focuses on infant pathology, mostly low-birth-weight but also prematurity and intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR), and on the maternal behaviors deemed determining of this pathology, always selected to be smoking, drinking, or using drugs during pregnancy, the woman’s use of prenatal care and her breastfeeding behaviors.15 The expert studies are unequivocal about the identity of those mothers who fail to plan: Poor, young and never-married women are the least able to plan pregnancies successfully and jointly with their partner. Unmarried pregnant women are less likely than married or cohabiting women to have wanted to conceive, to carry the pregnancy to term and to know the father’s intentions. (Santelli et al. 2003, 98) Or again: Unintended pregnancy that results in a live birth is associated with physical abuse and violence during pregnancy and the 12 months before conception and with household dysfunction and exposure to psychological, physical, or sexual abuse during woman’s childhood. (95) These are strong assertions of the subject’s pathological environment, an environment that irrevocably stains both mother and child. In their paper, Speizer et al. (2004) see no problem in collecting data supposed to reveal the factors underlying pregnancy intentions exclusively from women attending an inner-city public prenatal clinic and an innercity public family-planning clinic in New Orleans. Since the women queuing in these clinics were low income, mainly (95 percent) black women, thus already defined as “undesirable mothers” within the

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governing order of reality, their classification as “clearly at high risk of unintended first and higher order pregnancies”16 fails to stun (Speizer et al. 2004, 204). Equally unexceptional is that although most of the women attending the free family-planning clinic (90 percent) were there for issues concerning their contraceptive method, this did not affect their classification as irresponsible subjects/mothers (199). And, in their study looking at the correlation between very-low-birth-weight and unwanted pregnancy as measured by timing (without finding any), Sable et al. (1997, 80) feel justified to make policy recommendations related to child abuse, although their study didn’t include in any way measures of child abuse or child neglect, concluding that “further research on the impact of unwanted childbearing on child abuse and neglect is warranted” (81). Race is maintained as an immanent and ineluctable characteristic of the subject, either in its cultural guise or, even more frequently, in its unapologetically biological one. For example, when looking to correlate “race” and “negative infant health,” a study includes “race and ethnicity” among the variables measuring the “physical characteristics of the mother” along with, for example, “body mass index” (Kost et al. 1998a, 227). The same study uses “race-specific birth-weight standards” to disaggregate according to race a measure of infant health that includes low birth weight and prematurity (Kost et al. 1998a, 224). Here, race supersedes as a determinant of weight and health all other possible determinants and becomes the uncontroversial biological determinant of one’s identity. An interesting symptom of how racial ideology structures the order of reality and perception of those experts is the implicit “hierarchy of races” that some of the studies construct and that is supposed to allow the positioning of each and every subject in a scheme of biomedical and implicitly behavioral characteristics; a hierarchy that cannot fail reminds us of the hierarchical taxonomies of races that scientists remained so fond of from the heyday of the Enlightenment until way after the middle of the twentieth century. Thus, the Kost study concludes that the bio-behavioral characteristics of Hispanics place them somewhere in between blacks and whites and that the “births to women of other ethnicities—who were mostly Asian, with some native American and Eskimo—were assigned the standard used for whites” (Kost et al. 1998a, 224). Why race-specific standards apply to only blacks is never explained. Or, similarly, “on all measures, women of other races fell between white and black women, usually closer to white women” (Henshaw 1998, 27). Being “black” is now scientifically confirmed as the negative pole of a white/black


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organizing dichotomy, that is, as the pathology that stands in explicatory opposition to the white’s normality. What Makes the “Irresponsible Mother” Possible? What makes it possible to rest a credible and legitimate national familyplanning strategy on the figure of the “irresponsible mother?” And what makes it possible for those reproduction-regulating apparatuses to “discover” this subject and diagnose the social crisis she provokes? The algorithm of the family-planning apparatus establishes a system of relations between familiar, if dispersed and heterogeneous, governing objects to produce more truths and more governmental objects (“unplanned pregnancy,” the “irresponsible mother”). Thus, while seemingly new, the objects, subjects, and truths of the family-planning strategy are founded on well-sedimented orders of reality and seem real, self-evident, and natural not only because they are backed up by the authority of biomedical truth but also because they emerge along lines of vision and enunciation that have been ordering governmental reality in the United States for a long time. In other words, the true and natural substance of “unplanned pregnancy” and the “irresponsible mother” and the enormous attention and resources they command in U.S. political debates are a result of those objects being structured according to foundational assumptions that order governmental reality in the United States since at least the nineteenth century. The emprise of this specific order over the formation of governmental reality is insured through the constant reiteration of those assumptions within the various U.S. governmental apparatuses, including family planning, while the necessity of those assumptions to be reiterated in order to survive means that each such governmental apparatus both keeps alive and transforms the structures of this reality (see Derrida 1978, 278–295). The analysis so far suggests that in the United States, the governmental order of reality preserves race and pauperism as the ontologically immanentist substances that determine one’s subjectivity, often under the guise of culture, while the ceaseless talk of culture in U.S. governing is a liberal tactic that sneaks Euro-colonial discourses of race and difference into the contemporary ruling of the social. More precisely, the statements about the black and poverty culture already mentioned are formed in part by the insidious mobilization of historical discourses, such as (a) the image of the “black slave” as the epitomal dependent, (b) classical liberal and Malthusian understandings of

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pauperism and race, and (c) racist-colonial construction of the “primitive” black culture. When the Bush Jr. administration officially praises Daniel Moynihan for having “discovered” illegitimacy as the “underlying cause of several of the Nation’s leading domestic problems including violence and welfare dependency” (WTI 2002, 4), it refers precisely to the 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” where Moynihan blames chronic poverty in the United States on the pathological traits of the black culture (illegitimacy and single-mother families) and explains this culture in terms of the moral-psychological damages caused by slavery (cited in Patterson 2001, 99–100). Here, culture is the transhistorical substance that keeps African Americans’ subjectivities fully determined by the mentality of the slave, either childlike and submissive or savage, but in any case, different in substance from the culture of the bourgeois slave-owners that is the template for the U.S. “majority.” At the same time the polymorphous seepage between racist and pauperist arguments remains central in the recurrent discovery of a national crisis in U.S. liberalism defined in eugenic terms—suffice to remember that Charles Murray’s “underclass” arguments, including the unabashedly eugenicist arguments in the best seller The Bell Curve, are foundational for the 1996 reforms. This book, published in 1994 by Murray and the eugenics aficionado and Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein, argues in favor of significant correlations between intelligence and various social and economic outcomes, including outcomes segregated along ethnic/racial lines. For instance, the book argues that among non-Hispanic whites, intelligence level (cognitive class) is a better predictor of poverty than parents’ socioeconomic class. Herrnstein and Murray recommend the elimination of welfare programs, since they encourage the reproduction of the “wrong women”: We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these


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policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. (1994, 548) The Bell Curve sold over 500,000 copies in hardcover and was endorsed by surprisingly high numbers of prominent U.S. magazines and researchers on intelligence, including by names like Milton Friedman. A look at the book’s endorsements on www.amazon.com will convince even the most skeptical of the central position eugenics occupy in the minds of contemporary U.S. academics. No wonder Murray sees the increase in births to unmarried black women as “dangerous,” “devastating,” and “the cause of social deterioration” (cited in de Goede 1996, 327). This obsessive fixation in the U.S. governing discourses of the Negro—and implicitly the poor—with the genital, a penis symbol and a symbol of unbridled fertility, reiterates the racist-colonial articulation of the black with the sexual, while, as already argued in chapter 3, the contemporary U.S. governmental fear of illegitimacy among black and poor people, more precisely of their potentially unstoppable proliferation, reminds one of the colonial fear of the black as the “biological danger” (see Fanon 1986, 165). Consider how close the following stereotype, used ironically by Fanon, is to the much more solemn concern with black teenage pregnancy in contemporary governing: The Negro symbolizes the biological. First of all, he [sic] enters puberty at the age of nine and is a father at the age of ten. (167) Then, the framing of “unintended pregnancy” in terms of a teenage, poor, black, “irresponsible mother” in the Healthy People strategies is made possible by the central role played by those racist and pauperist forms of othering in structuring governmental realities. This framing facilitates the easy translation between family planning and state eugenics that becomes salient, for example, once we query the Healthy People strategies’ notion of “optimum time” for having a pregnancy—a notion central to its definition of “lack of planning” and of proper pregnancy, since we are told that the severe costs the governmental discourses attach to an “unintended pregnancy” are centrally determined by the “lost opportunity to prepare for an optimal pregnancy” (HP 2000, 9–5). While at bureau-technocratic level the notion of “optimum time” refers to pre-conception check-ups for health and genetic risk identification and management,17 at a more foundational level it reveals the government’s selective concern with certain subjects’ reproduction without thorough preparation. More precisely, considering

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the way “unplanned” pregnancy is framed by the Healthy People strategy as a pathology of the black, poor, teenage, single mothers, lack of optimal preparation refers not so much to reproducing without having performed the adequate medical-genetic checkups, but to reproducing without having achieved liberal autonomy and bourgeois propriety in financial, sociopsychological, racial, cultural, and moral terms. By stating, as the government discourses do, that the main risks of teenage pregnancy are the “solidification” of poverty and low educational attainment, they insidiously bring us back to the eugenic square one— the (already) poor and uneducated should be impeded from reproducing, since it is their “worked entirely from within” deficiency that causes their poverty and it is their as-inexorable-as-genes pathological culture that guarantees that their children will inherit this deficiency. And it is as part of the long-standing liberal eugenic dream of weeding out deficient citizens that the federal government continues to commission studies that compare subjects (and especially illegitimate children) with the “norm” in terms of “verbal cognitive attainment,” “cognitive scores” or “intellectual development,” or demonstration projects that study the changes in the reproductive behaviors of welfare recipients when they are subjected to diverse incentive/disincentive interventions (for example, time limits for receipt, financial incentives for getting married, or penalties for additional births while on welfare). From this point of view, “unintended” is not governmentally meant to designate the intentions, feelings, conducts, or desires of the parents, but those parents’ location in the eugenic governmental taxonomies of otherness that divide pregnancies into either beneficial or harmful for the nation. The entire medico-governmental epistemic edifice that culminates in the discovery of teenage pregnancy can be reduced to one governmental plan: that the poor, black, and uneducated should be prevented from reproducing, since their reproduction results in suboptimum citizens. To insist, biomedical government can legitimately and logically divide pregnancies into “good” and “bad” according to the criterion of “planning” only if “unplanned” is understood to signify the lack of resources that those same apparatuses fix as necessary for the development of a healthy citizen, child, and mother. And since, as argued so far, this lack is defined as ontologically constitutive of the “bad”— poor, single, nonwhite, young women—subjects, these subjects will never be fit for pregnancy. Their opportunities for an “optimal pregnancy” do not exist to start with, since they are governmentally made sense of exclusively as the Other of a bourgeois citizen whose propriety is in great part defined by her correct performance of familial, sexual,


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reproductive, and parenting conducts.18 In fact, it would not seem completely out of place for the current governors to state that separating motherhood into “desirable” and “undesirable” is a “rational, humane and rapid system of selection by which to ensure the progress of the race” by identifying the individuals that should be prohibited from becoming parents (Leonard Darwin, activist in the U.S. Eugenics Education Society, writing in 1912; cited in King 1999, 51). The U.S. governing strategies and techniques of othering in relation to race, pauperism, and culture seem to lean on several axioms: 1. The black/poor live in a world apart, fully isolated from the mainstream society. The governmental rationality claims that it is possible to have a homogenous, intransient culture, “worked from within.” Since the governmental rationality asserts that to “be black” or “poor” has meaning outside any systems of relations with the “white” or “non-poor,” any person signified as “black,” “poor,” or “pathological” becomes already knowable and known, exhaustively determined by the elements that the governmental discourse itself articulates with those identities. This makes those social groups not only self-referential but also responsible for their position in the governmental taxonomies of difference and destitution. The subject is thus trapped “under” her own identity in the sense that the critical interrogation of the power relations that create subjects and agency is made impossible. In this understanding, “dialogue” becomes a relation between two fully constituted entities rather than a relation that forms the two entities in interaction. The Other has therefore to be subdued. 2. The governmental notion of “culture-as-substance” becomes as determining of what a person is as the biology it replaces. This cultural reproduction of the physical and behavioral characteristics of a group cannot but remind one of the “environmental eugenics” popular before Mendelianism and that recurrently come back in favor. 3. The time-honored marriage of liberalism, racism, pauperism, and eugenics seems to be sanctified by the projection of the degenerate subjects and their culture outside the boundaries of the proper society, and at the same time inside, since they picture those groups as lodged within the majority and as harming it with their pathological behaviors. This game of inclusion/exclusion makes these subjects and their culture open to state racist interventions that aim to make them useful, docile, and harmless, all the while

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Contextualizing Family Planning remaining within the liberal principles of the respect of individual autonomy.

That these racist, eugenic, pauperist, patriarchal, and misogynistic nodal points, mobilized since at least the eighteenth century by the liberal attempt to govern both poverty and reproduction, continue to order the formation of statements of governmental strategies we have come to consider as rational-scientific and liberal-democratic shows the resilience of certain ways of seeing and knowing. It also shows that the practices that regulate statement formation in the governing discourses allow few things to be said; once uttered, a statement receives status in institutions, is preserved and appropriated, as well as transmitted, repeated, reproduced, and transformed by exegesis, commentary, and internal proliferation of meaning or collected in unifying totalities and its meanings multiplied (Foucault 2002, 134–135). The value of a statement, then, is not defined by its “truth” but by its capacity for circulation, exchange, and transformation to adapt to new circumstances (134–135). In this context, governmental arguments of the type “No person shall, on the basis of race, color, national origin, or sex be excluded from participation in . . . any program or activity funded under this subtitle” (COAT 1998) are void. While ref lecting the ongoing governmental attention to present the United States as a nondiscriminatory, equal-opportunity society, they have no purchase on the modalities in which power relations are formed and on the effects those have on the subjects’ lives. More importantly, they ignore the central contribution of the government in propagating the same order of reality it denounces as unjust in its more elated social-democratic moments.

CH A P T E R

F I V E

Patriarchal Orders of Reality in the Apparatuses of Sexuality Regulation

This chapter continues to analyze the liberal deployment of othering as a core element of the liberal ability to intervene upon reality. The term “patriarchy” in the title is used as an umbrella concept to designate forms of othering structured by the nodal points of gender/sex and (hetero) sexuality, that is, to designate an array of mechanisms that work to construct an order of reality in which both woman and the homosexual are Other and inferior to a man defined as both the normal liberal citizen and the naturally dominant father. The use of the term “patriarchy,” therefore, does not assume there is one universal form of power/knowledge relations that describes the oppression of women or homosexuals, but affirms that the vast diversity of such forms of power and knowledge relations has its foundations in a process of othering in relation to the nodal points of gender/sex and sexuality. The analysis in this chapter insists on “family,” a governmental element that as undoubtedly already apparent from the analysis so far, performs crucial tactical functions in liberalism: in the same way in which replacing the term “race” with “culture” allows the legitimate continuation of racist liberal othering, imposing the family as the natural (true) and optimal (good) form of “private” social organization permits dressing up patriarchy as neutral governmental quest for the social well-being. More precisely, contemporary U.S. liberal “familism,” or the discourses of patriarchal othering formulated in the language of the “bourgeois nuclear family1 as natural and ultimate social good,” allows the legitimate reproduction of othering along gendered and sexuality axes under the banner of securing the happiness and

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prosperity of the nation according to scientific (biomedical and psy) knowledge. *

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I shall not dedicate much space to the discussion of the family’s (and, implicitly, sexuality’s) role in the organization of biopower since this topic has been already explored, especially after the publication of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Of course, Foucault’s book is dedicated to the (preliminary) analysis of the relation between bourgeois selfhood and the deployment of sexuality as a political technique, in which deployment the family represents a central element. Foucault succinctly sketches the elements of an analysis of the family as biopolitical relay that reveals the double conditioning between intrafamilial power tactics and the wider strategies of power that make the family into a support for their “maneuvers”: for the “Malthusian control of the birthrate, for the populationist incitements, for the medicalization of sex and the psychiatrization of its nongenital forms” (Foucault 1990, 100). It is also within the family that the bourgeoisie begins considering its own sex as something important and starts constituting itself as a “class” around power techniques focused on the body, vigor, longevity, hygiene, race, progeniture, and descent (123). At the same time, the discourses on bourgeois respectability and sexual morality and the focus on the familial environment as that which cultivates those class qualities and ensures proper child rearing cannot be understood in isolation from the discourses on sexuality emerging in the European colonies, where sexual practices separate bourgeoisie and its Others. In the colonies, eroticism, sensuality and sexuality are systematically associated with the (lack of ) purity of bourgeois European blood. And an orderly family life; sexual, and especially reproductive, habits confined to the heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family; and sexual normality (as opposed to perversion) represent crucibles of the classical bourgeois self hood; in this racialized economy of sex of the colony, European women and men win respectability by investing their desires in legitimate paternity and intensive maternal care, in family and in conjugal love (Stoler 1995, 106–115). Moreover, in Foucault’s analysis the family is a crucial site for the liberal apparatuses because it is the interface that allows, from the eighteenth century on, the coupling of juridical law and biopolitical norm, more specifically the coupling of alliance (marriage, development and fixation of kinship ties, transmission of name and possessions) with

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the new apparatuses of deployment of sexuality (106). The bourgeois family, then, must not be imagined as a social, economic, and political structure of alliance that represses sexuality or reduces it exclusively to its useful functions: the bourgeois family is, in the liberal order, the most active site of sexuality. This affective intensification of the bourgeois family space by biopower is what gives the family its “modern” form; while also opening it to the endless examination by a plethora of experts (doctors, educators, psychiatrists, priests, and pastors) who would listen to the “long complaint of its sexual suffering” (109 and 111). At the same time, the trials and tribulations of the bourgeois family are those of a location where the apparatuses of biopower (sexuality) wrestle sovereign power (alliance). Donzelot (1980, 229) agrees when he affirms that the emprise of the psy sciences on the (French) family resides in their focus on that space between the intra- and the extrafamilial, a space opened through the connection of the family to the biopolitical apparatuses of sexuality and traversed by “the ceaseless coming and going of those tormented within the family and of those unable to survive without it. The psy specialist thus furnishes a neutral terrain for the resolution of differences of regime between the management of bodies and the management of populations.” The family, among other mechanisms of power, ensures that the heterogeneous and contradictory elements of liberal governing are able to present themselves as coherent and, even more importantly, natural and allows the emergence of a type of subject that embodies those power frictions as the natural ground of her identity: the bourgeois subject. As Nikolas Rose (1999b, 123–217) points out, contemporary techniques of governmental power continue utilize the family as an indispensable point of support. Rose’s insightful analysis concludes that the present neoliberal strategy of respecting the family privacy does not represent the state’s abandonment of family regulation; on the contrary, the liberal state’s recent retreat from the direct regulation of the family is a proof of the success of liberal biopower “to construct a family that will take upon itself the responsibility for the duties of socialization and will live them as its own desires” (213). Today’s experts do not need to directly intervene upon the family—they regulate it from a distance, from their “neutral” positions in the media, through peers, neighbors, or counselors and through the “unceasing ref lexive gaze of our own psychologically educated self-scrutiny” (213). All the while, the family remains intensely governed, through the promotion of subjectivities and the incitement of pleasures, ambitions, guilt, anxiety, envy, or disappointment so that “each normal family will fulfill its political

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obligations at the very moment it conscientiously strives to realize its most private dreams” (213). The incessant and heterogeneous discourses on sexuality, reproduction, and motherhood that structure contemporary subjects must, at least in part, be conceptualized as strategic redeployments of an assortment of older liberal discourses on race, class, and gender in the form of truths about the most private facets and practices of the liberal subject. And, to the extent that those facets and practices of the self are shaped and displayed in the realm of family and sexuality, the family and sexuality are themselves points of support of othering. That is, the family represents a social location where the gendered, heterosexist, racialized, and pauperist othering that the liberal subjectivity depends on is translated into the bourgeois language of normality, nurturing, success, and responsibility. Through an analysis of familism in the welfare and health governmental texts, this chapter attempts to show that the growing mass of expert-governmental studies that, over and over again, “discover” and “prove” the social failure of the children from “broken families,” works to reiterate the brutality of liberal othering and to reduce complex mechanisms of social determination that includes poverty, misogyny, racism, and homophobia to one variable: hetero-marriage as transcendent social good. U.S. familism makes a plethora of assumptions about “black pathology,” underclass and feminine promiscuity converge in one, allegedly neutral, ideology that all studies of the family propagate: the (white, heterosexual, and aff luent) “normal” family is the necessary and sufficient element for the formation of the good and successful liberal subject and any deviation from it is pathological. The Family in the U.S. Welfarist Apparatuses To introduce the discussion on how the governing of family-planning articulates family, patriarchy, and misogyny, I shall go back to welfarism as the terrain of crucial struggles over the nature of reality in the United States. I have already argued that since their inception, the liberal apparatuses in the United States reduce women to mothers. Familism is the lens through which liberal apparatuses perceive that part of the social with which they are not supposed to interfere, and by actively reproducing, regulating, and nurturing the nuclear bourgeois family, those liberal apparatuses claim that they do not intervene in the social.


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That liberalism is fundamentally a patriarchal discourse and that its continuing legitimacy as a universalist and egalitarian regime depends on the legal and symbolic separation of the family form the public sphere has been revealed by feminist critique with powerful acuity. Feminists like Carol Pateman (cited in Brown 1995, 135) argued that the sexual subordination of women in marriage is foundational for liberal political orders, since the social contract to make civil society and the state cannot come into being without such a sexual contract of subordination. Relocating patriarchy from the public domain to the family works to make patriarchy apolitical in the liberal perception and the family a “private” domain, distinct from civil society (Brown 1995, 136). Catherine MacKinnon also shows that while liberalism makes equality a matter of sameness, it makes gender a signifier of difference; if gender difference represents the opposite of liberal human sameness (between men), then being a woman represents the opposite of the liberal human ideal (man) and is refused access to liberal equality. Equality as sameness is a gendered formulation of equality, because it “secures gender privilege through naming women as different and men as the neutral standard of the same” (Brown 1995, 153). Wendy Brown (1995, 137–138) takes this critique one step further and affirms that gender subordination is now inscribed in the very terms of the liberal discourses that organize law, public policy, and popular consciousness. She thus shows how, in the classical liberal theory of Locke, the family is the domain that permits explaining the persistence of relations of dependency in liberalism, of children on women and of women on men. Women are attached to men and obligated to children, and it is on this presupposition that liberal possessive individualism is built. In other words, liberal individualism and liberal familism are reconciled only by assuming women’s natural subordination to men and woman as supplement to man (150). In fact, the “natural peace” of the family, its evasion of the “war of all against all,” is explained precisely by positing woman’s and children’s natural inferiority in relation to and therefore natural subordination to man. Thus, “liberal ontology is fundamentally rather than contingently gendered as male dominance and female submission” (150). And when liberalism specifies civil society as the domain proper to justice, it opposes civil society to the family, making the liberal family outside the purview of liberal justice from the start and by definition (151). Thus, Brown demonstrates how the liberal formulations of personhood, citizenship, and politics contain women’s subordination and that, while it is possible to

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extend these formulations to women, they do not lose their masculinism in the process: The gendered terms of the liberal discourse solicit the production of a bourgeois feminism that emancipates certain women to participate in the terms of masculinist justice without emancipating gender as such from those terms. In short, gender and class converge here, as every middle- and upper-class woman knows who has purchased her liberty, personhood, and equality through care and “household help” provided by women earning a fraction of their boss’s wages. (Brown 1995, 164–165) *

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As has been the norm in this analysis so far, and since these points have been amply hinted at in the previous chapters, I will provide only a basic scheme of the way in which the family is made a relay of liberal apparatuses in the United States. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Progressive policies firmly reinforce the normative heterosexual twowedded-parents family with a male breadwinner and dependent wife as the best possible form of primary social organization, and it is in order to discourage any social arrangement that does not rest on marriage that they refuse benefits in cases of illegitimacy or desertion. Here, the nuclear bourgeois family represents the ideal environment for the development of the child and the only appropriate environment for a good woman as far as sexuality, childbearing, and morality are concerned (Skocpol 1995, 450). And it is in 1939, when widows’ assistance is transferred under the Old Age and Survivors Insurance Plan (OASI), thus removing the main category of “deserving poor” from the AFDC rolls and leaving it to cater for the divorced or deserted mothers, that this program becomes the main target for accusations of governmental subsidizing of broken homes and illegitimacy, accusations that culminate in its 1996 dismantling. Moreover, the ideas of the proper family are from their inception racialized in U.S. liberalism: since the turn of the century, certain mothers—the single, black mothers—are made into the epitomal “dangerous subject” that perpetuate “illegitimacy,” “single parenthood,” and thus dependency and a national crisis. Before World War II, U.S. social reformers already emphasize the “disorganization” of black family life that they describe as characterized by illegitimacy, free sex, and female-headed families. As already argued, for welfarist purposes the “proper woman” is the one who accepts the male-headed heterosexual family as the ideal social


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arrangement and therefore actively seeks the financial security offered by the dependence on a man, performs the duties expected of her in order to preserve the “healthy family” at all costs, and does not engage in promiscuous sexual relations or illegitimate reproduction outside the marriage.2 Only a worldview that understands “woman” in such a way can categorize certain types of reproduction as “illegitimate” and certain women as “irresponsible” and direct the governmental effort toward preventing “bad” motherhood and encouraging the transformation of the bad subjects into worthy women through marriage. More precisely, a woman’s dependency is normal as long as it happens within the nuclear family but is irrational when in takes place outside it and especially when the demands are placed on the state. This patriarchal double bind of dependency as both natural (in the family) and irrational (outside it) is fixed by discourses that expand throughout the U.S. liberal social spaces: in the psychoanalysis-dominated apparatuses of truth of the 1950s independent, “masculine” behavior in a woman was considered to lead to frustration, hostility, destructiveness, frigidity, rejection of one’s children, and eventually mentally illness.3 And while in 1980 the American Psychiatric Association creates a “Dependent Personality Disorder,” diagnosed mainly in females and characterized by a pervasive pattern of dependent and submissive behavior and by the inability to make important decisions (Fraser and Gordon 1994, 325–326), early variants of the “culture of dependency” theory blame the pathology of the black family on the black woman’s refusal of the position of dependency natural to her. This black matriarch’s lack of intrafamilial dependency on and refusal to submit to the male destabilize normal gender roles and child socialization and undermines the morale of the family males, father and son, directly resulting in dependency on the state: The key problem of the welfare culture . . . is the women’s skewed and traumatic relationship with men. In a reversal of the pattern of civilized societies, the women have the income and the ties to government authority and support. This balance of power virtually prohibits marriage, which is everywhere based on the provider role of men, counterbalancing the sexual and domestic superiority of women. (George Gilder cited in Adair 2001, 462) Of course, there is a parallel discursive strand that sees the undesirable mothers as able-bodied dependent paupers, to be made independent through integration in the market. Nevertheless, the injunction to work is in the U.S. liberalism formulated in relation to the goal of marriage promotion and with the understanding that children raised outside

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marriage, or by anyone else but the biological mother, are defective. Thus, the work incentive remains in the U.S. liberalism subordinated to the familist assumption that a woman cannot and should not be completely independent of a man, financially, psychologically, or morally. This tension is internal to the argument that all mothers should work: while it affirms that working is the “normal experience” of contemporary motherhood, implying that welfare-dependent mothers refuse this obligation, this argument implicitly assumes that working mothers will be working part-time or for short periods of time.4 The ability to have such f lexible work participation evidently suggests the presence of a middle-class male breadwinner that secures the family income and social status. While the PRWORA implicitly exempts married mothers from work, since the TANF work requirements are satisfied with just one working adult in a two-parent family (Mink 2002, 95). *

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Familism continues to represent an uncontested crucible of “bourgeois civility” in U.S. liberalism, as Title I of the PRWORA illustrates: The Congress makes the following findings: (1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children. (3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children. (PRWORA 1996; sec.101) Using the family as the primary principle of social intelligibility is by now such a self-evident statement within the U.S. liberal apparatuses of truth that contesting it amounts to contesting the whole liberal social organization, morality, prosperity, and democracy, as well as the expert knowledges it is synergic with and that include the biomedical and psy orthodoxy on normal development. In the same move, any analysis of the relationship between bourgeois familism and liberal othering is made unthinkable. *

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The PRWORA considers that it has indubitably proved the determination between social pathology, a national crisis and illegitimacy. And


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in the best interest of the nation, “normal” families, pregnancies, and children must be encouraged; single mothers determined to find either an employer or a husband and discouraged from reproducing; and any other social arrangement but the bourgeois nuclear family must be eliminated. As in the case of the Progressive policies, the contemporary welfarist apparatuses derive the primary role of the nuclear family in liberal order from it being the environment in which the child, as future normal liberal subject, is formed: “it is in the interest of the nation to ensure that all families . . . are able to raise healthy, competent children” (FIA 1992). Indeed, one of the implicit assumptions of the PRWORA is that it defends the interest of the nation’s children, an assumption made clear in 2002 when the Bush Jr. administration stipulated that “the overall goal of the TANF reauthorization is child well-being” (WTI 2002, 14). A strange assumption considering that the reforms explicitly dismantle sources of state aid to dependent children, but not irrational in the context of U.S. governing, where any child outside the nuclear bourgeois family is an abnormal child anyway. Thus, U.S. liberal governmental technologies often display tensions between the representation of certain parents as inadequate and the belief that the biological family is the best environment for the development of the child and thus has to be “preserved”. Or between the governmental need to intervene upon the deficient family and the description of the family as the epitome of the private sphere, defined by the absolute right of the parents to self-govern: Nothing in this Act is intended to disrupt the family unnecessarily or to intrude inappropriately into family life, to prohibit the use of reasonable methods of parental discipline, or to prescribe a particular method of parenting. (ASF 1997, sec. 401) Thus, for example, certain governmental interventions focus on the child without a “proper” family—orphans, children growing up in single-parent families, or children at the risk of being removed by the state from their “deficient” families—and aims to recreate the ideal familial environment through services that promote “healthy marriages” and provide “family support” in the form of “family-based crisis intervention programs” (for example, counseling, substance abuse treatment, foster care maintenance payment, or child support enforcement) that aim toward the preservation, strengthening, or reunification of families and parental relationships (examples of such programs are ASF

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1997; CADV 1992; CSRA 1992; CFSA 1990; FIA 1992; FPA 1992; FCIA 1999; OBRA 1993; PSSF 2001; see appendix 1). Other governmental technologies make a priority the removal of children from the pathological environment of the “risk families” (that is, poor) and into an environment more favorable to the development of bourgeois self hood. Hence, the measures aiming to promote and speed up adoption, to decrease discrimination in the practices of adoption (ASF 1997, sec.221), to remove the child “at risk” to foster care, and to speed up of the procedures for the termination of the poor mother’s custody or parental rights (ASF 1997, sec.103). Loss of custody can, for example, result from noncompliance with the work or paternity establishment requirements of the AFDC or TANF or from “neglect charges” brought by the inability to pay for food or rent. While the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASF 1997) threatens mothers who have lost their children to foster care with the termination of parental rights if the child remains in care for 15 out of the previous 22 months (see Mink 2002, 104–105). The Bush Jr. administration 2002 document that reauthorizes the PRWORA employs a martial-macho rhetoric well suited for an initiative tackling as devious an enemy as the “abnormal family”: the 1996 reforms are described as the “first major attack on the problem of nonmarital births” (WTI 2002, 9) that introduced “bold” new abstinence programs (WTI 2002, 9), and while the states “have not been as aggressive in launching programs to increase the number of children in two-parent families” as in pushing people off welfare rolls, they have taken steps toward a “robust and multi-front attack on the problem of family composition” (WTI 2002, 9). This rhetoric, like that of the PRWORA, designates the nuclear bourgeois family using words like “intact” and “healthy,” making any other reproductive arrangement damaged and unhealthy. It is equally illustrative that the Bush administration uses “single-parent family” and “female-headed family” as synonyms (WTI 2002, 2): the assumption that female-headed families are the Other of the normal (“maleheaded”) ones makes it self-evident for the governmental experts to think that whenever the male is present, he will, naturally, lead the family; a woman can head the family only when she is single and thus, by governmental definition, can head only an abnormal family. As expected of a science-bound Christianism such as U.S. liberalism, the Bush Jr. administration supports its militant familism by mobilizing “research” that “shows that both adults and children are better off


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in two-parent families:” Children reared by married parents in intact families are more likely to complete high school and are less likely to be poor, to commit crimes, or to have mental health problems than are children reared in single-parent families. It is no criticism of single parents to acknowledge the better outcomes for children of married-couple families. Rather, it is simply wise and prudent to reorient our policies to encourage marriage, especially when children are involved. (WTI 2002, 2) We rest reassured, then; suggesting that single-parent families are “bad” for the nation is not a moral judgment but a neutral, objective, scientific fact, condoned by rationality and good sense. How is marriage fostering those abilities in the bourgeois individual? We are not told directly, but one can only imagine that the higher morality and superior psychological makeup of the bourgeois subject either determine or result from getting married. Other than that, positing, like the WTI does, that the effects on the future adult of a general tendency of its parents to spend more time together and be more “connected to community” is essentially debatable from a social science perspective, while the—equally debatable—higher stability of the married couple does not explain much besides financial status either. There is a whole array of “independent” para-studies whose correlations confirm the nonmarried couples’ deviance while remaining as epistemologically nebulous: one such research implies that the devastating social pathology attributed to illegitimacy—poverty, crime, violence, drug abuse—is caused by the children in “cohabitating” couples getting lower math scores and less reading than those in married couples (Berrick 2002). Very few of those independent researchers seem aware that in the U.S. socioeconomic context, the family represents an instrument of patriarchal discipline and oppression, enforcing misogynist ideals of femininity. Therefore, they do not find it problematic to utter statements of the type: For some groups, poverty and welfare dependency became a way of life, inculcated during childhood and passed on from generation to generation through a variety of adaptative and maladaptative behaviours, including unwed childbearing. (Lichter and Javakody 2002, 123)

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The same authors applaud the “turnaround in key family indicators” after the 1996 reforms, mainly the decreases in illegitimacy, while positing increases in abortions as a “feared” development (124). The assumptions that allow them to select illegitimacy as a “key family indicator” are never questioned. Further, the same unstoppable team hypothesizes that by acquiring working status, single mothers “may improve their chances of marriage and thus of escaping poverty” (123–125). For these women, then, getting a job is not a modality of becoming independent financially, but of becoming more attractive for men and thus of fulfilling their fundamental destiny: marriage. “Good news is, singleparenthood may be abating” rejoices another of these proudly independent researchers, before exclaiming, “Few can dispute the benefits of strong, healthy marriages” (Berrick 2002). Few indeed do so. Familism in the Health-Regulating Liberal Apparatuses The Healthy People strategies adopt in wholesale manner and add supplementary pathological valences to the founding assumptions of U.S. liberal familism: that the nuclear bourgeois family is the normal form of social life in a society defined as modern—“the bedrock of our society” (HP 1995, 13)—and that any reproductive arrangements that could be considered healthy, sane, and normal take place within this family. Subsequently, only the proper family can act as the “laboratory of health” that biopower aims to make it into, while “single parenthood” is one of the social pathologies that the national health promotion strategy needs to deal with alongside poverty, insufficient education, and violence (HP 1995, 13). Its concomitant “health promoting” ethos makes the health strategy become even more riddled by contradictory understandings of the social. Since violence and abuse are considered “preventable causes of ill health” in the health promotion repertoire, the Healthy People must acknowledge, even if using conservative estimates, the systematic nature of child and gender abuse within the nuclear bourgeois family. It has, therefore, to posit the same social model it promotes as a precondition for health as intrinsically “unhealthy,” at least for women and children: Intrafamilial violence is more prevalent than often recognized. In 1986 an estimated 1.6 million children nationwide experienced some form of abuse or neglect . . . Studies also suggest that between


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2 and 4 million women are physically battered each year by partners . . . Between 21 and 30 percent of all women in the United States are estimated to have been beaten by a partner at least once. (HP 1991, 61) The way out of such conundrums is the usual strategy of U.S. liberalism, othering: by focusing on a racialized, patriarchal, and pauperist model of pathological family, the Healthy People exonerates the bourgeois family, that is, prevents itself from engaging into a critical analysis of the power relations that this model of the family is founded on and produces. *

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The family-planning strategy systematically asserts that marital status represents a valid criterion for dividing practices into normal and pathological, as indicated by statements of the type: “Most adolescent childbearing occurs outside marriage, a trend that has increased markedly during the past two decades” (HP 2000, 9–20). It does not comes as a shock, then, when the stated aims of the national family-planning strategy is defined in familist terms: to prevent pregnancies among “all adolescents under age 18, with the assumption that most of such pregnancies are unintended pregnancies among unmarried teens” (HP 1991, 189; my italics), thus suggesting that it does not target married teenage mothers. Further, not all of these [teenage] pregnancies are among unmarried women. The targets for both black and Hispanic teenagers can be met by reducing unintended pregnancies. Intended pregnancies are not targeted for reduction. (HP 1991, 190) The pathology of “teenage pregnancy” suddenly becomes determined solely by marital status, while the goal of the strategy becomes the prevention not of “unplanned pregnancy” but of illegitimacy. Any pregnancy, teenage or not, is legitimate and healthy as long as it happens under the financial and moral protection of a male, within the heteronormative family. That the effects of childbearing on the professional advancement, income, and eventually socioeconomic status and “independence” of all women are f latly ignored further suggests that a woman’s autonomy is perfectly compatible with financial dependency on a male. And that the impact of motherhood on a woman’s subjectivity is

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all but irrelevant for liberal governing, while her psychological ability to be a good mother and the impact of an unwanted pregnancy on this ability are, as we shall see subsequently, objects of great scientific interest, is only one more proof that for governmental purposes, a “good” woman is a subject with two relevant dimensions: mother and wife. In this manner, the family-planning translates in biomedical language the patriarchal definitions of the normal family, the women’s role as a dependent within it, and the norms of feminine propriety: chastity, obedience, caring, and nurturing. *

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The technologies devised for redressing this pathology, unplanned pregnancy, focus on rescuing the unplanned children from the toxic environment of the abnormal or risky family and introducing them into proper bourgeois families. As in the case of the illegitimate children of the welfare recipients, mothers suffering an “unintended pregnancy” are encouraged to put their children up for adoption so as to provide them with a “loving, stable home.” We are told that there are relatively few infants available for adoption each year (25,000) and that only 4 percent of teenage pregnancies end up in adoptions, while 43 percent end up in abortion (HP 1991, 199). And, since one of the family-planning objectives of Healthy People 2000 is to “increase to at least 90 percent the proportion of pregnancy counselors who offer positive, accurate information about adoption to their unmarried patients with unintended pregnancies’ ” (HP 1991, 199), the suggestion is that instead of aborting, the unfortunate mothers should go through with their pregnancy so as to replenish the failing stock of adoptable children. If we recall the recent welfarist stipulations on the termination of parental rights, this outlines a form of governmental “child transfer” project, from the undesirable to proper, but infertile, families. This approach, of course, continues a long practice of “transferring” the children of young single mothers into proper middle-class families through adoption and foster care.5 *

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Part of the same effort to prevent any behavior that transgresses patriarchal codes, be they related to gender, family or Christian religion, abortion remains a main concern in the family-planning strategy. Thus, as already suggested, the Healthy People strategy constantly lists “the


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likelihood of abortion” as a pathological effect of unintended pregnancy, along with the “increased likelihood of maternal and child illness,” interestingly including what is today a medical intervention among the pathologies engendered by unplanned pregnancy. This is, however, not incongruous in the U.S. governmental landscape: throughout the national strategies and the “independent” expert studies, family planning and in particular the prevention of “unintended pregnancy” are framed as instrumental in preventing abortion, thus explicitly making the family-planning strategy into an antiabortion strategy. Indeed, the NSFG, as already mentioned, includes abortions among “unintended pregnancies,” making any governmental effort to reduce unintended pregnancy implicitly include the goal to prevent abortion, a conduct assumed to be abnormal and damaging for the individual, population, and nation. Being an unequivocal signifier of pathology and evil in the U.S. liberal discourses, abortion plays an important role in making “unintended pregnancy,” illegitimacy, and teenage pregnancy pathological and legitimizing the governmental focus on unintended, illegitimate, and teenage pregnancy: Abortion results when women have unintended pregnancies, and adequate access to family planning services reduces the number of unintended pregnancies. (HP 2000, 9–6) We are also told that “abortion rates among American teenagers are considerably higher than for many other countries” (HP 1991, 59), an extremely vague statement unless we are told what “many” means or why this statistic is supposed to alarm us, or, further, that “96 percent of abortions among women aged 19 and younger are to unmarried women” (189). Here, illegitimacy is made pathological by being designated as a cause of abortion, while the lower number of abortions within marriage is made to mean a thoroughly planned, wanted pregnancy. These understandings are common in the “independent studies.” The oftquoted Hershaw6 (1998, 24) study analyzes “pregnancy intention” as a proxy for reducing abortion and explains the higher proportion of black women’s pregnancies ending up in abortion as simply resulting from higher rates of unintended pregnancies among blacks (Henshaw 1998, 24). In fact, making abortion pathological cannot be justified in biomedical terms. In the United States, “abortion-related morbidity and mortality—including long-term psychological problems such as depression—are less common than birth-related mortality and morbidity” (Santelli et al. 2003, 95). The failed attempt of the National Rights

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to Life Committee to construct the existence of a post-abortion trauma syndrome is another example of the difficult relation between abortion and pathology; many studies not only did not find any evidence of such a syndrome but stated that depression was far more common after childbirth than after abortion, when what women mostly felt was relief (see Gordon 2002, 316–317). However, the pathological nature of abortion in the scientific family-planning discourses necessitates no further proof either than it being frowned upon, in certain theological opinions, by God himself. Moreover, significantly for the focus of this research, the focus on preventing abortion makes the governmental health promotion strategy into one that actively impedes the processes of “critical ontology of oneself ” of the subject designated as “woman.” It is not hard to accept that, given the complexity of the power relations involved in the formation of a “woman’s” identity and therefore self-understandings in relation to sexuality and motherhood, as well as the impossibility of complete self-control, the relevant reproductive decisions concern what happens after insemination. Thus, abortion is a practice central to a woman’s ability to refuse being given meaning in the form of the “mother.” That is, deciding not to become a mother by having an abortion is a form of actively engaging in transforming the processes of subjectivization that make one an intelligible subject only in the form of “mother.” By actively engaging in curtailing abortion, the family-planning apparatuses attempt to prevent any interruption of the reiteration of certain subjects, “women,” as synonymous with “mother” and therefore as different from and inferior to the disembodied individual that is the normal liberal citizen. It tries preventing the subversion of the repetitions that ensure the persistence of gender and sex, defined exclusively in relation to heterosexual reproduction, as defining traits of any liberal subject. It therefore actively attempts to depoliticize the social. *

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The governmental technologies for reducing unplanned pregnancy are also dominantly conceived in terms of tutoring the incompetent subjects into the self-control characteristic of bourgeois propriety: A successful approach [to preventing unplanned pregnancy] is one that promotes development of mature, responsible individuals who understand the consequences of their actions, and who are goal-oriented and self-disciplined. (HP 1991, 190)


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It is this managerial understanding of identity as an outcome-oriented, cost-benefit analysis that frames the major family-planning governmental technologies to be education into sexual abstinence and into healthy lifestyles, preconception and prenatal care, and so on. I shall brief ly discuss them. Following the discussion of the welfarist apparatuses, it is not surprising that the major model of responsible individual action in the context of governmental family-planning strategy is abstinence from sexual activity. The statement that occurs with obstinate regularity in all reproduction-related governmental documents of the past 15 years or so and that we equally retrieve in the Healthy People is that “abstinence is the most effective means of avoiding unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases” (HP 1991, 191 and 196). The issue of sexual abstinence refers, of course, to illegitimate sex, since throughout we are informed about the “negative consequences of nonmarital sexual intercourse” (HP 1991, 195, emphasis added), thus reinforcing the idea that unplanned pregnancy is a matter of illegitimacy rather than one of planning. However, even if bracketing the very specifically Christian understandings of the “good,” the above quote remains vacuous, akin to saying, “Never using motor vehicles is the most effective means of avoiding accidents” or “Never having a partner is the most effective way of avoiding domestic violence,” and so on. While accurate from a formal logic point of view, these statements seem absurd to us precisely because they are abstracted from the social realities that confer our experiences meaning. The Christian logic of the governmental statements on sexual abstinence, once translated in secular scientific terms, becomes identical to the logic of these examples: an attempt to govern reality by pretending it is not social, that is, by suggesting that we can and should get healthier by eliminating all risk, and thus power and ultimately social relations, from our lives. The governmental promotion of abstinence, its abhorrence and interdiction of abortion, and its side-tracking of contraception is justified, of course, scientifically, and so we are presented with a selection of research findings that attempt to demonstrate that adolescent sex both has pathological effects and is a behavior characteristic of morally, intellectually, educationally, and “psycho-socially” deficient subjects. Mobilizing a linear model of the evolution of subjectivity and lifechances from the irresponsibility and dependency of adolescence to the autonomy and self-control of the proper liberal citizen, the government states that adolescent sexuality can have “negative effects on social and psychological development.” More precisely, the Healthy People affirms

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that sex affects negatively the attainment of the central characteristics of the bourgeois subjectivity, rationality, and rationally-made choice as embodied in liberal education: one cited study finds that adolescent white males having sex had lower grades in school, while the early sexualized white females had lower college aspirations. Another states that “youth who have had early sexual experiences are more likely at later ages to have more sexual partners and more frequent intercourse” (HP 2000, 9–22), and a third that teenagers who score high on intelligence tests, are academically motivated, and are doing well in school are less likely to initiate sexual activity at a young age. Young people are more likely to be sexually experienced if they perceive themselves to be in poor communication with their parents. (HP 1991, 194) Of course, supervision from the bourgeois parental figures is a central element of the adolescent’s developing of bourgeois propriety: the students who report sexual abstinence are the ones whose parents are interested in their “grades or in their personal achievements (sports, music, dance, etc.)” (194), while, on an even more apocalyptical note, the sexually active adolescents are more likely “not to attend church regularly and not to attach a great importance to religion” (HP 1991, 198)—in the U.S. governmental order of reality, a clear sign that the nation’s morality, and thus the nation itself, is in danger of dissipation. Finally, proper “family structure” is introduced as a major inf luence on the proper (non)performance of adolescent sexuality: “one of the strongest predictors of adolescent sexual attitudes and behavior is the marital status of the parents.” Adolescents living with both parents “have the least permissive attitudes toward nonmarital sex, followed by those living with a parent who has remarried” (HP 1991, 198–199). All these “research findings” that the Healthy People mobilizes construct a grotesque dichotomy between the “good” (abstinent) and the “bad” (sexually active) adolescent, where the former is intelligent, church-going, interested in school, sports, music, and comes from healthy, proper families with understanding and educated parents, while the latter is a drinking, drug-taking, smoking delinquent raised in a broken family. Of course, all these determinations are spurious once put into a comparative perspective. To give but one example, despite the fact that the age of consent in other Western countries is lower or comparable to that of the United States, most of these countries have considerably lower rates of teenage pregnancy (6 percent in the Netherlands).


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Once again, it is women who are the exclusive target for intervention; the male’s participation and responsibility in sexual/health practices is largely made invisible. On the contrary, policing the patriarchal norms of female chastity, liberal governing targets the sexually dissipated female teenagers: Sexual relationships among teenagers are often characterized by extreme impermanence. As a result, 58 percent of sexually active young women aged 15 through 19 have had two or more sexual partners and seven percent have had 10 or more partners. (HP 1991, 193; emphasis added) And adolescent female sexuality is further confirmed as a social pathology when we are told it is more prevalent among “young people from low socioeconomic families, and among adolescents who smoke, use alcohol or other drugs, or have evidence of delinquency” (HP 1991, 193). Moreover, young women’s sexuality is for those experts an irrational, erratic behavior, impossible to understand and control: “when young adolescent girls begin having sexual intercourse, it is generally infrequent and unpredictable” (HP 1991, 195)—even more reason to have it performed exclusively in the stable and rational environment of the nuclear bourgeois family, where it can be productively channeled into normal, state-sanctioned reproduction. Familism as Tactic of Depoliticizing the Social It is probably clear by now that two incontrovertible assumptions structured the U.S. reproduction-regulating apparatuses since the beginning, the first being that normal reproduction is exclusively performed within the nuclear bourgeois family and the second, and related, being that the nuclear bourgeois family is the universal form assumed by normal social relations between adults or, in other words, the universal form of organization of normal “private” life. Those assumptions are rooted in Christian morality, more precisely in the forms assumed by Christian moral codes once integrated, transformed, and diffused by the apparatuses of truth of Enlightenment. It is no secret that U.S. liberalism imagines itself as a Christian form of governing. However, this is not the space for a discussion of the deeply Christian selfunderstandings of the European and North American liberal regimes, or of the—paradoxical in the light of liberalism’s persisting Christian

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mysticism—usage of “secularism” for tactical othering in the “war of civilizations” liberal governing recently reinvented.7 I shall therefore give but an example that, while seemingly minor, illustrates with precision the manner in which liberal discourses of freedom, science, modernity, progress, and rationality combine with Christian mysticism to shape a self-understanding of the United States as God’s tool for perpetuating liberalism on Earth: after the 1783 ratification of independence, the expansion of the new U.S. nation toward the West, including the 1845 conquest of Mexico, was justified by certain intellectuals as an enactment of the United States’ “manifest destiny” to extend over the entire Continent. A destiny, as U.S. editor of the Democratic Review John O’Sullivan writes in 1845, “assigned by Providence, for the success of that great experiment of liberty and self-governing.” Thus, God gave the U.S. people the sacred mission to explore, conquer, and bring into the light of divinely sanctioned civilization—that is, democratic republicanism—all people in the French, Spanish, or Indian territories.8 It must be emphasized that this liberal Christianism is also fully imbibed with ideas of racial purity—an article on the Digital History website reveals that in the same editorial, O’Sullivan goes on to argue that conquering Texas, New Mexico, and California would leave Latin America as “the only receptacle capable of absorbing that [African American] race whenever we shall be prepared to slough it off—to emancipate it from slavery and, simultaneously necessary, to remove it from the midst of our own.” All the discourses that reinscribe Christian familism into the secular scientism of governmental apparatuses—discourses as varied as political economy, urbanism, biomedicine, psy sciences, sociology, and so onreiterate the family as the universal and natural foundation of modern social life and therefore mask that this family regulates the coming into being of a much more specific and historically contingent form of subject: the bourgeois individual, replete with all its constitutive otherings. This section further discusses the implications of this militant liberal familism and implicitly points out the inability of a liberalismharnessed political imagination to critically analyze familist othering, despite the rich antifamilist critical archive made available by analytical traditions such as Marxism, feminism, or queer. The apparently irrepressible desire for liberal familism exhibited by contemporary subjects, academic experts included, is not restricted in any way to North America, but pervades the internationalist liberal order of reality. For example, Jacques Donzelot (1980, 53) notices that in the French governmental field, the socialist antifamily critique is gradually modified to


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exclude the family from the critiques of the established capitalist order; demands for the improvement of the conditions of “disadvantaged” families subsequently become an intrinsic part of the socialist rhetoric. The French socialists, therefore, reposition the nuclear bourgeois family as a possible solution to the problems raised by the neoliberal definition of the state, rather than as an element of resistance to social change. The result is that familism gets to occupy the very ground on which the liberal political debate is taking place. In other words, the political debate, especially in the United States, starts by assuming familism as normality and tries to discuss what precise sociopolitical arrangements are compatible with familism and how to stimulate those arrangements (for example, “Is welfare provision encouraging or discouraging marriage? Is poverty encouraging or discouraging out-of-wedlock reproduction?”). In such debates, the social effects of marriage are never interrogated, and alternatives to the nuclear bourgeois family never enter the researcher’s horizon of intelligibility. Familism is thus posited as the apolitical, natural condition of reality, while any position contesting familism automatically either becomes an attack on civilization itself or, because it contests natural order, is labeled “political,” therefore “biased,” therefore unacceptable in a liberal debate. Pretending that one’s political position represents apolitical normality is a recurrent political tactic in a liberal order that so fervently seeks the “objectivity” on which to found both truth and justice—a tactic feminists, Marxists, or post-structuralists unmasked a long time ago, unfortunately without any effect on the devotion it commands in liberal polities.9 However, accepting this state of affairs leaves unasked a crucial question: What relations of power and what forms of knowledge, what forms of subjectivization are we leaving uncontested and thus perpetuating when we assume the bourgeois family to be the natural social order? The present questioning of the types of othering that liberal familism nurtures does not refer principally to the issues of patriarchal violence that the bourgeois family sanctions or restricts political activism to the issue of extending legal rights to the women and children within the family. If we understand the bourgeois nuclear family as a privileged site of othering, then extending rights within the family can only superficially address the role of familism in constructing liberal realities. Indeed, if the family represents a haven of stability and security in liberalism, it is so because it operates as a sanctuary for othering and as the assembly line of the bourgeois subjectivity. Thus, the deeper critical questions refer to the forms of othering that the bourgeois family naturalizes. And indeed, it is in the bourgeois family that the gendered

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division of labor, with women as naturally dependent, bonded, embodied, nurturing, or affective, appears to the liberal analyst at its most natural, undistorted by the political world (that is, civil society and its unnatural feminist or queer politics). It is also in the family that the natural mother is to be found. In other words, it is in the family that the natural difference between man and woman is exposed and perpetuated. By using the tool of the bourgeois family, the normality of the white folk is opposed to the abnormality of the black pathological family, and therefore by scrutinizing the family the naturalness of race difference can be demonstrated. It is also the family that protects against the dangers of miscegenation and degeneration brought by unregulated sexual encounters. It is also on the family that the natural difference between the normal heterosexual couple and the abnormal homosexual one is predicated, and it is in the bourgeois family that homophobia is privatized and naturalized. It is also through the political tool (lure) of the family that a “bourgeois queer” subjectivity is formed, privatized, and domesticated according to bourgeois precepts of normality. Finally, liberal familism normalizes the definition of the social good (“proper family”) in opposition to poverty (the “pathological dependent family”) and single parenthood (the “pathological single mother” and, again, the “pathological teenage mother”). *

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What I call here “biological privatization” is a mechanism of subjectivization that allows the bourgeois subject to legitimately implode her imagining of the social and make a familist and overwhelmingly biologically defined “kinship” the only relevant form of social relation, responsibility, and solidarity—in a word, of politics. As a technology of othering, biological privatization, of which the family is a major vehicle in U.S. liberalism, allows the legitimate definition of the relevant elements of the liberal self as being the genetic and/or social environment of the family, effecting both political privatization and the naturalization of this privatization. That is, the politico-ontological immanentism of this familist biological privatization allows defining whatever comes out of the family—“bourgeois subjectivity” and liberal order—as normal and natural. I was previously quoting Collette Guillaumin’s (1995, 43–45) affirmation that the racial identity of the bourgeoisie is bound by notions


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of physiology and nature based on tangible physical characteristics and thus, unlike the forms of class definition that precede it, gains a “somatic density” that is consecrated by modern science (see chapter 3). And here, Guillaumin is once again coming very close to Foucault’s (1990, 124–125) account of the birth of the bourgeoisie, which insists that the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie not only recycles many of the caste manners of the nobility but also translates them in the register of biological, medical, or eugenic concerns—most prominently so in the case of heredity, which the bourgeois understands as a biological term directly related to the perils of degeneracy. The bourgeois family, then, gives reality to the idea that both the self and social relations, thus the political, are fundamentally defined by biology. If the bourgeoisie enacts the most draconian regulations to relieve its permanent fears of biological contamination, it is because for a class constituted though bio-othering such as the bourgeoisie, biocontamination means loss of self. The ongoing obsession with “biological parents” that animates the understanding of kinship in the United States is but one further example of this biological privatization of politics. Be it in expert documents or Hollywood movies on adopted children, the truth about one’s self is revealed, always, through biological genealogy. Because biology is nature, one’s deepest resorts of self hood are not shaped by the social environment, of which an adoptive family is part, but hidden in one’s biology and revealed during the interaction with the biological parent. In other words, the bourgeois family makes the “nature = biology = truth” equation central and unsurpassable for any understanding of reality. Moreover, liberal familism regulates femininity along the coordinates of proper motherhood: child-raising ability, devotion, sacrifice, openness and receptivity to expert regulation and advice on nutrition, hygiene, child development, and so on (see chapter 1). Without insisting further, the biological privatization of subjectivization encouraged by liberal familism also stimulates the imagining of the relationship between the bourgeois woman and her offspring as mystical—not only as the supreme, most significant social relation ever experienced by either mother or child but also as transcending simple sociality, because located on a different, magical plane, be that magic explained by religion or nature. Bourgeois maternalism, therefore, is often “mystical motherhood” and, by claiming that the mother-child relationship brings enlightenment, self-discovery, purification, and ultimate meaning, traps both subjectivities within

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this relation and erases any form of social responsibility outside the mother-child monad. The biological privatization of subjectivity that the bourgeois familism realizes also regulates masculinity along the coordinates of proper fatherhood—ability to fulfill the financial and moral responsibilities of the pater familiae through professional achievement, competitiveness, Christian moral rectitude, and more generally bourgeois propriety in all conducts. Familism further regulates the social by translating the central tenets of liberal order—individualism, acquisitive competition and consumption, privatization of lifestyle and of the self—into the “intimate” conducts that construct the normal liberal subjectivity, a translation realized by encouraging the equation of politics with familial responsibility: “I have to think of my family first, my primary responsibility lies with my family.” Thus, the central tenets of liberalism become, once one “starts a family,” “necessities” of the good life—and here one has only to think how the good Western family and childhood are defined in terms of the ability to consume, from a family house and family car, to baby food, a big refrigerator, intellectually stimulating toys, nappies and clothing, private schooling, or electronic devices that allow the older child to create and reproduce self-esteem amongst its peers. Within the U.S. expert-governmental apparatuses, familism makes a subject especially permeable to the imprecations of “proper choice” and thus makes one into a most reliable and diligent perpetuator of the power and knowledge relations that make possible liberal othering, brutality, and domination. This is precisely why there is such an intense, systematic, and concerted effort to integrate the family into the governmental apparatuses in the liberal governmentality. *

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The emprise of the psy sciences over the U.S. bourgeois self has a lot to do with the success of the biological privatization of subjectivization, from two slightly different perspectives: On the one hand, psychoanalysis traps the self into imagining the entire secret of subjectivization hides in the family. Deleuze and Guattari (see Buchanan 2000, 17–25) famously denounce the Oedipal scenario as a scam that confines the formation of all and every desire to one mommy-daddy scenario: thus, psychoanalysis operates as a sort of psychic Procrustean bed, reshaping all stories of subjectivization in the Oedipal mold, with the subsequent impoverishment of political imagination. On the other hand, even when we accept the Oedipal scenario, we still need to make clear that it is specific of the bourgeois family


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and age; we therefore need to relate the historically contingent structure of the nuclear bourgeois family and the structure of bourgeois subjectivity. Thus, to the extent that the Oedipal produces, in Freud’s account, unhappy and tormented subjects and an oppressive social reality, those result from the familial structuring of the intimacy, affectivity, and sexuality of its members. The needs and the sexuality of the bourgeois child are fully shaped by the investment of the parents in the construction of this sexuality and of those needs, in the context of the utter social and affective isolation of the bourgeois nuclear family (Poster 1978, 5). The internalization of the idea of the penis as the naturally superior organ and the subsequent Oedipal processes of formation of gender and sexuality, thus the formation of gendered power hierarchies, and the social insecurity of bourgeois self, created through a deep emotional need to emulate the father and thus to be successful and channeled by the superego toward achievement in work and deferred gratification, thus toward confirming liberal reality, are both connected to the specific processes taking place in the family (7–23). *

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The family is a central instrument in marking racial difference as natural and in the same move pathologizing the “black family,” as the discussion in chapter 3 already detailed.10 Not only is the idea of the proper bourgeois family racialized but, moreover, it represents a central instrument in repositing race as natural difference. It does this through the implicit anti-miscegenation imperative that commands the choice of a good partner, one that will ensure the purity and strength of the filiation line when “starting a family.” This is exemplified by the discussion of adoption in governmental documents: underlining the necessity to increase adoption opportunities, the family-planning strategy states that 33 percent of children in foster care are black: therefore, “greater efforts should be made to reach black couples who want children with information about adoption” (HP 1991, 35, my italics). Matching colors becomes the imperative necessity of a successful social strategy. Romano (1998, 230–231) investigates this issue in relation to white mothers marrying black men and that have been historically labeled “unfit” by the U.S. courts, for putting their white children at risk of abuse and maladjustment by giving them a black father. Transgression of the norms that regulate sexuality in relation to race becomes in the language of U.S. juridical-discursive power the symptom of a “bad mother.” This is not simply white supremacist ideology but rather a common-sense understanding that, for the well-being of

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the child, race boundaries should not be transcended in the family, as further illustrated for example by the black leaders’ urging in the U.K. of black families to adopt black children (see Gilroy 1990). As usual, the policing of race boundaries within the family is done with the interest of the vulnerable bourgeois children at heart, so as to protect them from future abuse from an intolerant society or from the psychosis generated by a “mixed race” child’s loss of the self-certainty conferred by a “worked from within” race, culture, ethnicity, or any other center of subjectivity that liberal othering compels. *

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The privatization of subjectivization that contemporary liberal familism effects in the United States is poignantly analyzed by Lauren Berlant’s (1997) The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, where the result of Reagan political campaigns is diagnosed to be a collapse of the personal and the political into a world of “public intimacy” through which “a nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children” (1). This “public intimacy” to which the definition of the political is restricted contemporarily in the United States reduces politics to the public display of an unending series of privatized traumas. It thus manages to represent the political as a collection of events happening exclusively in the privatized spaces of the family and/or the intimate spaces liberalism calls “personal” and to ridicule forms of public and collective political action as being atavisms, irrational, or lacking pragmatism, in any case a sign of social degeneracy. One of the effects is f lattening the political ground into an undifferentiated plane, where dominant historical power relations are drowned, and lost from sight, in the homogenous heterogeneity of a collection of “everyday intimacies.” Thus, narratives of loss coming from the, previously unmarked, hegemonic icons of the U.S. social (for example, the “angry white men”) are legitimately fighting for political space against the political claims of the Others of U.S. liberalism. This is, in Berlant’s account, no less than a revolutionary resignification of citizenship as intimacy, as something sacred, private, proper, reserved exclusively for members of the family—a relocation of the core context of the political in the sphere of private life: In the patriotically-permeated pseudopublic sphere of the present tense, national politics does not involve starting with a view of the nation as a space of struggle violently separated by racial, sexual,


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and economic inequalities that cut across every imaginable kind of social location. Instead, the dominant idea marketed by patriotic traditionalists is of a core nation whose survival depends on personal acts and identities performed in the intimate domains of the quotidian. (Berlant 1997, 4) Social membership and therefore subjectivity are redefined as acts originating especially in the private sphere—family, community, home— reducing political identities to the practices of subjectivization imagined by the bourgeois self as her most intimate; the very imagination that denies the regulated nature of these processes and therefore naturalizes them. Interestingly, considering the already-mentioned deep connections between liberal governing, subjectivization, bourgeois self-understandings, and psy expertise in the United States, Freud, a profoundly liberal theorist himself, posits the privacy of the bourgeois family as the fundamental principle of order of modern society and therefore disqualifies at a sleight of hand all collective action as nothing more than regressive, childlike action, unable to create a new social system (Poster 1978, 38). By making politics synonymous with personal morality, character, and events, “a virulent form of revitalized heterosexuality has been invented, a form that is complexly white and middle class” (19); characterizing certain forms of “immoral” sexual and reproductive practices as “un-American” and in need of drastic regulation is a direct consequence of this “public intimacy” politics (177). And in the same move, Berlant notices how the equation of happiness and politics with subjective, privatized performances of citizenship, manages to seduce a number of scholars and activists on the left who, by celebrating the privatized demands placed on the state by marginalized groups in the name of their subaltern (“particular”) identities, lose from sight the reiteration of a “normal” reality, with its adjacent exploitations, that those demands perform (9). *

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If it is correct that liberal capitalism is foundationally predicated on a form of subject called here “bourgeois,” and if this bourgeois subjectivity is also fundamentally predicated on heterosexual familism, then a radical contestation of patriarchal heterosexism and its correlative homophobia cannot take place but though a contestation of liberal capitalism. Co-opting the queer movement within the liberal-capitalist

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circuits, with the lure of extending bourgeois respectability and legitimacy to a contingent of the queer population, results in such interesting political expressions as the U.S. “gay neo-cons.” More importantly maybe, it makes the co-opted contingent of the queer population fall into precisely the trap that Foucault (1990, 101) was talking about: political mobilization around a “homosexual” identity created using the same vocabularies and categories that the dominant heterosexual discourses use to disqualify homosexuality as pathological socially and medically might result in a form of resistance that is a prolongation of familist heterosexism. Therefore, a “bourgeois queer” depends on heteronormative liberal power for its legitimacy. Thus regulated, “to be gay,” instead of challenging the given bourgeois patriarchal orders of reality, can become a simple mirror reversal of “being heterosexual,” reproducing its exclusions and regulations of performance. For example, since heterosexist discourses are interested in the figure of the gay only as an embodiment of sexual perversion, a bourgeois queer identity cannot but reduce the identity of its members to this defining trait of what they “are,” their Other sexuality. It therefore reduces its political options to reappropriating the identity imposed on one by the dominant power relations and making it “positive,” while being left unable to radically contest the order of reality that makes certain forms of sexuality unnatural, abnormal, or simply “special” or “particular.” The uncertainties and lack of critical ref lexivity that the bourgeois queer self hood embodies are expressed poignantly by Judith Butler’s (2004) discussion of gay marriage. Opposing gay marriage remains, of course, a political attitude fueled by homophobic fears over the dissolution of natural reproductive relations and of the normal heterosexual familial environment and, as Butler shows, fueled in France and Germany by fears over the degeneration of a national “culture” that carries implicit norms of racial purity and domination (110–111 and 112–211). However, once on this political terrain, we are also faced with the questions “What are the effects of reducing gay politics to the issue of marriage as the only act which confers legal status to sexuality and, therefore, confers legitimacy to certain types of sexuality and not others? Are we foreclosing . . . any other alternatives to kinship, sexuality and child raising,” especially since “gay marriage obviously draws upon profound and abiding investment not only in the heterosexual couple per se but also in the question of what forms of relationships ought to be legitimated by the state” (105)? Is it, then, that when queer politics focus on the family and on gaining recognition from the liberal state, they simultaneously invest their political energies in supporting


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the ideology of the universality and impartiality of this state as well as the bourgeois orders of reality this state dreams up? The important question then is not so much, Are we for or against gay marriage? but rather, How come the terms of the political debate have been reduced to marriage as the only meaningful political discourse? Lee Edelman’s (2004) No Future most daringly explores and refuses this depoliticizing blackmail of oppositional queer politics—either bourgeois queerness or dangerous degeneracy. Edelman follows a line of theorizing that most directly references Lacan, but also echoes Derrida and Foucault, to show that radical politics cannot aspire to a political order; they can only refuse the stultifying lure of such order and the fixation of subjectivities and conducts that the desire for any political order inevitably enacts. And he identifies what is probably the most potent contemporary form assumed by the imperious command to subscribe to such a political order as a condition of one’s political intelligibility, viability, and, one could say, humanness: what he calls “reproductive futurism,” that is, the invariable political logic organized by the image of the Child as symbol of a future in the name of which any politics must be performed. Here, the Child is that which makes politics meaningful, as well as that which embodies the ideal citizen, with an entitlement to its share of the future good of the nation. Since reproductive futurism commands that this good be pursued by any present political conduct, it reduces all political conducts to heteronormative familism (and to bourgeois civility in general). Reproductive futurism “imposes an ideological limit on the political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (Edelman 2004, 2). This Child “marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism” (21). Which is to say that, as long as they take the form of a fight to shape reality for the sake of “our children,” politics cannot be but conservative, irrespective of the particular shape they assume, since they work to affirm a structure and authenticate a social order that has as horizon and beneficiary the phantasm of the Child (3). Such “affirmation politics” always work toward a future moment when the fullness of identity will be finally realized and history really finalized. This is why queer politics cannot simply take the shape of an oppositional political identity—opposition confines politics to the same terrain

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of power it opposes (and here the terrain of the U.S. left is as rigidly bounded, since it represents the antibourgeois potential of queerness as a mere sexual expression, another voice in the choir of liberal “particulars”). Rather, queerness must embrace its position as Other of the normal socio-reproductive order embodied by the heterosexual family, an order that defines itself through its refusal to grant queerness any role in producing its future.11 Queer politics, then, should dissociate themselves from the “coercive belief in the paramount value of futurity” (6), accept their position as that which disturbs the fixity presupposed by any affirmed social structure, refuse to reiterate the present reality that the Child qua future commands, and thus enable the free f low of the signifier (including in its guise as the subject). Only by embracing the death drive, the drive to undo what is already constituted so as to start again (8–30), can we avoid the rigor mortis of a politics performed in the name of a, always one step away, future represented by the Child; a politics that in order to continue its march toward this forever-unrealized but rigidly framed future needs to embalm present power relations. This reproductively defined future is “mere repetition and as lethal as the past” (31). *

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The obsession with “preserving the family” in U.S. liberalism might be due, as Judith Butler (2004, 116) suggests, to the family being made into the symbol of a phantasmatic, thus an always endangered, social order and coherence, into the guarantee of a social space consisting of homogenously patterned bourgeois selves in which individual conducts and liberal technologies of power would, at last, coincide perfectly. This would imply that the obsessive liberal investment in the family is a longing to reproduce the forms of othering that found liberal sociality. And this thinking of the “normal” family as (semi, partly, and so on) autonomous from liberal apparatuses holds as much truth as the thinking of the “normal” liberal subject as autonomous from those same apparatuses and can only paralyze us politically.

CH A P T E R

SI X

Strategies of Truth and the Formation of Governmental Reality

This chapter discusses the strategies and technologies through which the governmental truths are formed and argues that, since liberal biopower is founded on a concept of truth derived from the Enlightenment “taxonomic positivism,” the governmental ability to see and know is fundamentally tethered to an onto-epistemology that impedes it from understanding identities but as full presences. As long as the foundational assumptions on which the production of governmental truth is based remain the same, the possibility to escape from the power relations that found our reality is slim—meaning that each governmental effort to know and affect the social will discover, over and over, the same Others as responsible for the social pathology that hampers the nation. As shall be seen in this chapter, the epistemic, biological, and governmental reality of the pathological mothers emerges within those apparatuses in manners similar to the classical making of the subjects of disciplinary power epitomized by the “delinquent”: once the offender becomes an object of possible knowledge for a corrective technology, she is transformed into someone known not through her acts but through her life, that is, through a biography that places her in a particular governmental category. Once the “biographical” is introduced into the governing apparatuses, the criminal is established as existing before the crime, characterized by a whole psychological causality. Similarly, the dangerous individual in the guise of the risky mother emerges at the intersection of the welfarist, biomedical, and psychological discourses, linked to her “offence” (unplanned pregnancy) by a whole complex of instincts, drives, tendencies,

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and character dispositions that describe her through the “affinity with . . . [her] crime” (Foucault 1977, 253). Moreover, against our persistent desire to legitimize our forms of government as good because true, we should remember that it is not our advanced scientific knowledge that first discovers the connections between planning and ill health; those relations are already established at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, according to Linda Gordon (2002a, 76–77) most U.S. writings on voluntary motherhood between 1890 and 1910 assert that unwanted children are likely to be morally or physically defective because of the “mental impressions” received by the fetus from the abnormal mother during pregnancy (77). The connections between alcohol consumption and “child damage” (77) are similarly old. Contemporary scientific apparatuses of truth simply try to reiterate in the language of truth of our time orders of reality and morality that have been structuring liberal apparatuses for more than 150 years. I shall start with a discussion of the formation of truth in welfare documents and then move to a discussion of the mechanisms of truth in the family-planning expert truths, both within the federal policy strategies and in the nonstate documents. Positivism and Truth in U.S. Governing Governing in the name of truth means that liberal apparatuses need to operate within and on a reality that is natural and objective, that is, within a reality known according to scientific epistemological norms. Once the alignment between governmental and scientific truth is achieved, contesting the governmental worldview becomes akin to contesting a gigantic epistemic edifice as well as to opposing the objectively determined best interest of the nation. In the welfarist apparatuses, the scientific investigations initiated by the federal government are omnipresent and exhaustive. Those compulsive truth-generating practices focus on experimental studies, surveys, and screening and are underpinned by an undaunted belief that governmental success and social amelioration can be attained by improving research and demonstration programs, the transport of information to the centers of calculation, decision making, public awareness and education, the training of staff, response time, the use of multidisciplinary teams and interagency protocols, or the coordination of governmental agencies (see for example CADV 1992). Indeed, what we witness at work here is

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the governmental attempt to extend its networks of knowledge—and implicitly power—until they become coextensive with the social (see Latour 1987). The proper methods for discovering truth, as defined by the DHSS and the diverse governmental expert commissions, are firmly committed to a positivist onto-epistemology. For example, all estimates of welfare program performance must be obtained through the use of scientifically acceptable sampling methods approved by the Secretary . . . the Secretary shall provide the States with such case sampling plans and data collection procedures as the Secretary deems necessary. (PRWORA 1996, sec. 103; 411; a; B) Also consider the following fragment: (15) The term “scientifically based leading research”— (A) means the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain valid knowledge relevant to reading development, reading instruction, and reading difficulties; and (B) shall include research that— (i) employs systematic, empirical methods that draw on observation or experiment; (ii) involves rigorous data analyses that are adequate to test the stated hypotheses and justify the general conclusions drawn; (iii) relies on measurements or observational methods that provide valid data across evaluators and observers and across multiple measurements and observations; and (iv) has been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal or approved by a panel of independent experts through a comparably rigorous, objective, and scientific review. (COAT 1998, sec. 103) In all the documents investigated, the assumption is that the full and final understanding of the social will be yielded as a result of methodologically correct and ontologically transparent scientific observation and experimentation. Since in this brand of positivism it is the accuracy of method that decides the epistemic status of the statements, all those documents display an obsessive attention to methodology,

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experimentation, controlled trials, indicators, modeling, (uni- or oligo-)causal determinations, predictability, and measurable outcomes. To replicate the best scientific methods, many governmental studies go as far as dividing the welfare beneficiaries targeted into “control” and “treatment” groups (for example, FPA 1992). The experts then use their grids of intelligibility to scrutinize and rule the target groups they construct—for example, the state and private experts “set forth objective criteria for the delivery of benefits and the determination of eligibility and for fair and equitable treatment” or make sure that the welfare services “are provided in a manner appropriate to local populations” (PRWORA 1996, sec. 103; “402”; 4). Thus, governable identities emerge as knowable and known from the relentless processes of observation, measurement, classification, and mapping exerted by an array of scientific disciplines and through the relations established within the governing apparatuses between those dispersed modalities of seeing and knowing. Expert discourses— criminology, medicine, psychology, psychiatry, education, law, economics, sociology—are connected by the liberal effort to govern and combine their specialized grids of decipherment to provide a complete map of the essential characteristics of the objects of government. Hence the pervasive concern with the “coordination” of services and with the development of links between different sectors that the state considers should be part of the management of the governmental problem (see for example FAIRA 1996, CADV 1992, and also ASF 1997, sec. 303, and CSRA 1992). The gaze of the great majority of policyrelated research—its hypotheses, analytical categories, target groups, measures, and variables—is fully subsumed by those practices of truth and implicitly by the founding assumptions that make those practices and positivist truth itself possible. Indeed, it is through the endless repetition of the same epistemological rules, algorithms, and statements that the self-evidence of the governmental “social reality” is created. Again, it is not surprising that the onto-epistemologically relevant characteristics of the subject looked for and measured by welfarist apparatuses match perfectly the profile of the welfare recipient put forward by the “culture of dependency” theories: gender, race, marital and sexual behavior, education and age in relation to the issues of out-ofwedlock birth, teenage pregnancy, employment rates, welfare dependency, the beginning and end of welfare spells, and the causes of repeat welfare spells (PRWORA 1996, sec. 103, “413”; (a) and “414”; (a)). Likewise, the various annual reports about the welfare recipients that the DHHS has to prepare for the governmental committees under

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TANF requirements must show: (A) The percentage of each group that has dropped out of secondary school (or the equivalent), and the percentage of each group at each level of educational attainment. (B) The percentage of each group that is employed. (C) The percentage of each group that has been convicted of a crime or has been adjudicated as a delinquent. (D) The rate at which the members of each group are born, or have children, out-of-wedlock, and the percentage of each group that is married. The identities of those subjects are “discovered” using an already assumed grid of visibility of the social, which assimilates the social performance of those subjects exclusively with (un)employment, dependency, dropping out of education, criminality, or illegitimacy; they are visible, intelligible, and governable only in relation with the pathological behaviors considered typical of them. *

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The same strategies of truth shape reality within the family-planning apparatuses. In what follows, I shall detail those strategies of truth and their effects, insisting on how they trap the subjects formed as Other in an inalterable state of sociobiological pathology. Several strategies of truth appear recurrently in the documents analyzed, of which I shall insist on a teleological ontology of the self and the social, correlation and inference masquerading as causal relationship, and a “Popperian falsificationism” brand of positivism. Before discussing them, a short introduction to the technicalities of measuring “unplanned pregnancy” is necessary. The construction of unintended pregnancy as a statistical and governmental entity is usually based on postpartum reports of mothers about their intentions, wants, and planning status of their pregnancy at the moment of conception. It is defined conventionally as “designed to ref lect a woman’s intentions before she became pregnant” and made to comprise several subcategories, including abortions, pregnancies reported as unwanted (i.e., the woman declares that she wanted no or no more children at the moment of conception), and mistimed pregnancies (i.e., the woman declares that the pregnancy occurred sooner than desired). Moreover, in most of the studies analyzed,

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“unplanned pregnancy” is operationalized in the following manner: an unplanned pregnancy is defined as one occurring while the mother is using a contraceptive method or if she does not use contraception but declares that she does not desire a child, while intended pregnancies are those in which the woman does not practice contraception at the moment of conception and those cases where the woman declares that she does not care if she becomes pregnant (Santelli et al. 2003, 94). The onto-epistemological category of “unintended pregnancy” is brought into being during the post–World War II baby boom in order to measure a married couple’s “excess fertility,” that is, the number of children the couple had in excess of their initial plans of family size1 (Luker 1999, 248; Paterson and Mosher 1999, 252)—meaning that those 1950s and 1960s fertility surveys were restricted to married women and that the category of “unplanned pregnancy” was comparing actual family size with the idea of family size that the couple had at some previous moment. Today, “unintended pregnancy” is used as a considerably more encompassing indicator of motherhood-related practices: Accurate measurement of pregnancy intentions is important in understanding fertility-related behaviours, forecasting fertility, estimating unmet need for contraception, understanding the impact of pregnancy intentions on maternal and child health, designing family planning programs and evaluating communitybased programs that prevent unintended pregnancy. (Santelli et al. 2003, 94) The primary data source on unintended pregnancies in the United States today remains the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), which asks mothers questions assessing the timing and desire for more children (see appendix 2 for a list of such survey questions). Misogyny, Patriarchy, and Teleological Individualism in the “Psy” Sciences The ability to form the “irresponsible mother” as a governmentally relevant identity depends on the axiomatic postulation of the exceptional role played by the mother in shaping the child’s subjectivity and destiny. Expert studies focus exclusively on determining the psychosocial traits, caring skills, and behaviors of the mother that affect the child’s biomedical and social fate and ignore the shaping of this fate by

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any other social entity—be it the experts, the state, or the father—and by any other social relation outside the child-mother dyad. Indeed, the NSFG included men among the respondents for the first time in 2002. More precisely, these studies scrutinize obsessively a particular chain of determination: pregnancy intention, maternal behavior, child development (see Joyce et al. 2000, 85). The expert-governmental gaze that can see and know the social, gender, and parenthood in this manner is, of course, relatively recent in the Western European discourses of motherhood 2 and prominently shaped by the “psy” discourses (psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, pop psychology, self-help, and so on). And since “psy” discourses on motherhood and child development share the misogynistic, patriarchal, and positivist foundational assumptions of all other Enlightenment “sciences of the Man,” the governmental expertise those “psy” discourses make possible is itself comprehensively shaped by those assumptions. Moreover, the family-planning knowledges add to those assumptions a strong individualist and teleological coloring that makes one’s fate inexorably determined by the moment of origin that is the relation with the mother. Indeed, the governmentalexpert investment in the child-mother relationship (considered to start with the intrauterine experiences) is quasi-mystical, to the extent that it places this relation on a transcendent plane, from which it infuses and shapes each and every social relation and event of the child’s future. One’s future is fully predestined by the mother-child relation: No period of life is more important to good health than the months before birth. The prenatal period can be the starting time for good health or it may be the beginning of a lifetime of illness and shortened life expectancy. (HP 1991, 9) Or, childhood is posited as the prime time of human development. This is no less true for development of good health than it is for educational, emotional, and moral development as well as for general life hygiene and behaviors. (HP 1991, 14) That early-childhood experiences play such an ineluctable role in forming adult identity is dubious from both a sociological and a medical perspective. This is not to deny that childhood can be a consequential period, but rather to say that similar statements can be made about any other period of life. This obsession with early childhood

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results from the assumption of life as evolutionary progression that the “psy” sciences—as well as the psychosocial theories of health determination popular in health promotion circles—rely upon. In this ontology, one’s life is the unfolding of an essence represented by the original moment of childhood experiences. In developmental psychology the culmination of this teleological unfolding of the essence of early childhood is represented by the “independent” subject: the subject capable of responsible action, that is, the subject that possesses “autonomy” as a defining ontological characteristic (Riley 1983, 20). As the discussion so far has tried to argue, the similarity with the liberal model of subjectivity is not coincidental. The construction of the individual within liberalism and of the human subject within social psychology share the positioning of the self as the center of experience, a coherent and unitary whole separated from other selves and in an antagonistic relation to “society.” In other words, both make the individual into a relatively autonomous agent, the origin point of experience and therefore the causal unit of any explanation of the social (Potter and Wetherell 1987, 101; see 95–110 for the full discussion). No wonder that the expertgovernmental discourses make “lack of planning” into a sign of one’s lacking the self-control skills necessary for liberal autonomy. Since developmental psychology discourses restrict subjectivization to the mother-child dyad understood as a closed, autarchic, timeless, and ahistorical couple, any difference between concrete subjectivities depends on the mother’s “sensitivity” and “competence” in fostering normal growth (Riley 1983, 20). The mother-subject described here is fully tributary to the self-evident value we ascribe today to psychoanalysis discourses—not only Freud but also Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Donald Winnicott, Helene Deutsch, and John Bowlby all insist, in various forms, on the essential role of the mother in the development of the normal psyche of the child, of its adjusted or maladjusted ego (see Riley 1983, 42–109; Rose 1999b, 151–200). Those “psy” discourses are extensively diffused into and shaping the bourgeois liberal social spaces through mediums ranging from counseling to self-help books or to sexual and lifestyle advice in popular magazines. And since Freudian discourses usually define “woman” and “mother” in ways that are extrapolated from each other to the extent that they become synonymous, they represent the “bad mother” as simultaneously malevolent and abnormal (Badinter 1981, 260–261). That is, the good mother is the normal, “feminine” woman constituted by the harmonious interaction of narcissistic tendencies and masochistic abilities to tolerate suffering, in opposition to the abnormal woman who is macho, masculinized, neurotic, or lesbian (Badinter 1981, 273). These mechanisms of

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subjectivization assume dominance throughout the nineteenth century, when there is an abundance of public and expert vehement condemnations of the “bad mother” that does not put all her love, devotion, and ability to self-sacrifice in the service of her offspring, thus producing corrupt adults (238), and gain mass popularity after the Second World War through formidable press campaigns as well as through academic and intellectual writings. Those are poignantly patriarchalmisogynistic accounts. In her 1954 “The Therapeutic Abortion,” the psychoanalyst Mary Romm considers the woman who decides in favor of an abortion pathological, while many experts of the time classify as psychotic any unwed woman who decides to keep her baby (Solinger 1999, 10). In the 1950s, behind every governmentally “risky” American—psychotic, psychopathic, neurotic, impotent, homosexual, frigid, promiscuous, asthmatic, and ulcerous—lurks the shadow of an inadequate mother (see Badinter 1981, 289; Solinger 1999, 10). In a survey of 125 articles published in nine major health journals in 1970, 1976, and 1982, Caplan (1998, 135) and her collaborators found that mothers were blamed for 72 different kinds of problems in their offspring, from bedwetting to schizophrenia, from the inability to deal with color blindness to aggressive behavior, and from learning problems to “homicidal transsexualism.”3 By being integrated into the expert-governmental grid of intelligibility of the social, the misogyny of these statements is masked in the sense that, since not expressly uttered and in the absence of a genealogical understanding of the truths of our time, it goes unrecognized by the contemporary producers and consumers of expert-governmental truths on motherhood and child development. This misogyny remains, nevertheless, an intrinsic part of the liberal circuits of family-planning governing and is reproduced every time governmental truths about the child and the mother are formed according to this grid—much in the same way in which “cultural” racism and institutional racism maintain racism as a core element of liberal governing despite the best knowledge and even intention of the liberal subjects (Miles 2005). In other words, to the extent that “psy” discourses collapse social pathology, the “bad mother,” and feminine pathology, contemporary family-planning discourses reproduce this subjectivization maneuver uncritically. *

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It must be made clear that the term “development,” as presently used by the brand of psychology that U.S. liberal apparatuses incorporate, represents a teleological category that assumes the existence of “primitive”

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and “civilized” evolutionary stages of which the latter term is always defined by a Western bourgeois subjectivity (white, male, aff luent). Celia Brickman’s (2003, 4) already mentioned (see chapter 4) study of the imbrications between racist evolutionary thought and Freudian psychoanalysis exposes the resulting racializing subtext in the discourse of psychoanalysis. By founding his critique of the Western civilization on a notion of “primitivity” and of the “primitive” as the Other in opposition to which the modernity of Europe and the bourgeois subject are constructed, Freud retains the very terms of a racist order of reality (5). Those evolutionary theories operate an analogy between the evolution of humanity from the ignorance of the primitive to the apotheosis that European reason represents and the development of the individual from infancy to adulthood, to create a theory of a distinctive “primitive mind” that also characterizes, as a form of evolutionary atavism, European children (35). Interestingly, considering the way in which “unplanned pregnancy” is constructed in the expertgovernmental truth apparatuses as the result of reckless sexual behavior, Herbert Spencer’s theories assert that civilization is measured by the ability to defer gratification, thus not to succumb to “immediate impulsive responses,” and thus describes those unable to act in this manner as having an unsurpassable primitive psyche that makes them into the equivalent of the “adolescence of civilized people” (46–47). Thus “Freud’s idea of primitivity, which correlated the infantile stages of the development of the contemporary European psyche with early stages in the psychological evolution of humanity, made use of this legacy of European theorizing about so-called primitive peoples, drawing on its culmination in the social evolutionism of the nineteenth century” (2003, 17). Psychoanalytical readings then, and especially “psy” theories of development, can perpetuate and legitimate colonialist representations of primitivism, with their associated racist implications (51). The figure of the racially coded teenage and, more generally, irresponsible mother insidiously and unwittingly conditions contemporary U.S. governmental realities on the redeployment of those evolutionary discourses, this time to explain the genesis of the bourgeois individual and why certain subjects are incapable of attaining the maturity (emotional, psychological, behavioral, intellectual) characteristic of this individual. On top of the more subtle racist and colonial valences that the concept of “development” already and always contains by virtue of its genealogy, the expert studies analyzed imbibe it with overt eugenic connotations, by assessing development in relation to a standard of normality

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constructed from various measures of a child’s physical, cognitive, and social skills. For example, IQ; the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) that measures intellectual development as being the child’s skills in reading and math; or a similar Peabody test that assesses word recognition, math attainment, and the receptive vocabulary of the children for Standard American English. Other measures that predict socioemotional development are based on the mother’s reports of problem behaviors in her children ( Joyce et al. 2000, 87–88), a method that associates pathology with the improper internalization of bourgeois discipline, as assessed by an epitomal bourgeois subject. It should be remembered that, although devised by Alfred Binet to measure the correlation between “chronological age” (for example, three years old) and “mental age” (the tasks, knowledge, and so on that an average child of three years can perform in a given social group), that is, to measure a child’s response to educational disciplining, IQ was gradually transformed, once imported in the United States and United Kingdom, into a measure of innate and unchangeable quantity, fixed by genetic inheritance: “intelligence.” From then on, a historical link between various forms of IQ measurement and eugenics was secured. Consider the assertion of Lewis Terman, who introduced the StanfordBinet IQ test in the United States: “[a very low level of intelligence] is very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families in the Southwest and among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come . . . The writer predicts that . . . there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture” (cited in Kamin 1984, 129). In the contemporary studies of unplanned pregnancy, the individual ability and intelligence assessed by those tests is explained in terms of maternal intention and care. Thus, one’s origins as an “unwanted” child remain determinant throughout her life, more or less overtly. In an oft-quoted study performed in pre-1990 Prague on women who were refused abortions twice, the children from unwanted pregnancies were tested for “cognitive development” as estimated through IQ scores. Although the researchers found the unwanted children’s IQ “unaffected,” they found evidence of a lower rate of language acquisition, as well as impaired socioemotional development. By age 9, stronger evidence of socioemotional problems and maladjustment emerged, especially among (“unwanted”) boys. (cited in Joyce et al. 2000, 84)

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The “unwanted females” were more likely to be “emotionally unstable” ( Joyce et al. 2000, 84). The pernicious effects of bad mothering seem to affect predominantly the males—and indeed, this preoccupation with the son is not a novel articulation. In the 1940s and 1950s, bad mothers were accused in the United States of raising sons that lacked the codes of masculinity required for a healthy and productive citizenship (see Feldstein 1998, 164). Of course, all these psychological measures of normality and intelligence are a powerful weapon for eugenic statements about the nature of the social allowing the singling out of the unplanned children as degenerate. Another reminder of the connection between these medicogovernmental understanding of the social and eugenics are the titles of the journals referenced by Santelli et al. (2003) to exemplify non-Western studies of the relation between pregnancy and intention: Social Biology (for a longitudinal study of reproductive intentions in Sri Lanka) and the Journal of Biosocial Science (for a study of reproductive attitudes in Morocco). A study4 by Udry et al. (1996) represents a poignant illustration of family-planning expertise’s reliance on teleological and misogynistic understandings of subjectivity, patriarchal understandings of social roles and institutions, and eugenic constructions of personhood in terms of “psychosocial types” derived from measurements of the subjects’ intelligence and of the “good stock” of their environment. The study aims to identify characteristics in a woman’s early-childhood and teenage years that will predict if she will have a nonmarital pregnancy and, if she does have one, if she will opt for an abortion (Udry et al. 1996, 113)—for an insight into this study’s methodology, see appendix 3. The authors unequivocally define abortion as an undesirable behavior to be impeded and forge a chain of determinations that takes the reader back to the childhood and adolescence of the incriminated women, where the seeds of her adult irresponsibility and lack of caring for the others, especially her baby, are visible in the form of her early pathological, harmful, and “unconventional” characteristics. These “unusual” early characteristics are systematically framed as being a “sense of independence” that allegedly explains the young adult woman’s deviance from normative femininity, exemplified by her unnatural refusal of marriage and motherhood. More precisely, the study relates the women who have a nonmarital pregnancy and their desire as children and teenagers’ not to be tied down, their “boyish” or “socially undesirable” behavior, and the relatively lower importance they ascribed to obeying the law. Those children and teenagers “had felt free to disagree with . . . [their] father, had been temperamental and had had nightmares.”5 What is

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more, the abnormal women were also found to be promiscuous, since to the authors’ horror, a whopping 94 percent of them were sexually experienced while unmarried (Udry et al. 1996, 114). The women in the sample that opted for an abortion were “found” to be “especially notable for their low regard for obeying the law” and to have “had a long streak of irresponsibility when they were adolescents” (Udry et al. 1996, 115). In a translation that is illustrative for the present argument, to disobey the liberal legal codes is a sign that these “psychologically unconventional” women are also likely to disobey the bourgeois patriarchal laws that forbid sexuality and reproduction outside the marriage and for which a normal woman is gentle, fearful, reliable, submissive, chaste, nurturing, and so on. Here, the autonomy and conduct required from the “proper”—male—liberal individual are considered abnormal when exhibited by a subject whose ontology and social role constitute the organizing polar term of this individual—the woman as mother. As a final note, two studies that Udry and collaborators place in the direct genealogy of their own demonstrate similar understandings of gender and family: the first such study, by Costa and collaborators, argues that “psychosocial unconventionality,” defined through characteristics such as having large numbers of sex partners and having liberal attitudes regarding sex roles, is a primary predictor of a woman that will have an abortion, while the second, by Cooksey, asserts that an early adolescence spent in “an intact, two-parent family” decreases the probability of nonmarital pregnancy and of an abortion in the case of such a pregnancy (cited in Udry et al. 1996). I will now move to a discussion about the construction of “intention” in the expert-governmental apparatuses of truth, a construction that crystallizes a great part of the discourses mentioned so far. *

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In an ontological move reminding one of the stubborn quest for the origin of truth in Enlightenment history and science, the family-planning discourses posit “intention” as the moment that—as completely and as ineluctably as destiny—determines the future of all those involved, mother and child. Of course, the parallel with Enlightenment sciences is not gratuitous, since “intention” in its various guises, including as rationality and agency, represents the explanation and destiny of the humanist subject of this science, the “a priori characteristic that makes him human and that explains both this subject and the history he actively creates in his image” (Foucault 1980, 117). As mentioned, the

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Healthy People documents summon the nation to adopt a social norm in which all pregnancies are intended— that is, clearly and consciously desired at the time of conception. Emphasising personal choice and intent, this norm speaks to planning for pregnancy, as well as avoiding unintended pregnancy. (HP 2000, 9–3) Here, intention is the transparent translation of desire to consciousness. In other words, one’s subjectivity—desires, behaviors, intention, understanding of the world, rationality, self-knowledge—is accessible to one’s awareness without mediation, in a complete and nonambivalent manner. This transparency and rational coherence of self hood is what allows liberal humanism to place the onus of its ontology on “choice” and it is this particular ontology that allows the founding of the family planning reality on “intention” or “planning” as the nodal point that allows the separation of statements into true and false and of subjects into normal and pathological. Thus, what all expert studies systematically reconfirm is that the failure to plan one’s reproduction is a predictor of a future bad mother. The “irresponsible” mother that fails to follow the liberal blueprint of bourgeois reproduction— prudently planned and confined to the nuclear family—is both unnatural and unfit for motherhood, since her lack of reproductive prudentialism marks her as unable and unwilling to ensure the survival and healthy development of her offspring. “Intention,” measured at the moment of conception, is thus reified into an intransient and ineluctable essence of the mother, of the child, and of the pregnancy, and unintended pregnancy becomes the signifier of a woman’s lack of adequacy for maternity and more generally for citizenship. As usual, this regulation of reproduction according to bourgeois patriarchal codes is legitimized by “objective” science; the most frequent explanations of the relation between intention and pathology are that, first, the mothers that fail to plan do so because they are intrinsically deficient liberal subjects: teenager, black, poor, unmarried, or from a dysgenic environment; second, that lack of intention results in the mother’s frustration and resentment and thus in attitudes that punish or neglect the fetus or infant as exemplified by late entry into prenatal care, smoking during pregnancy, or refusal to breastfeed; and third, that ignorance of the pregnancy during its early stages—an ignorance related to the deficient nature of a subject incapable of autonomyqua-self-knowledge—yields similar behaviors to those engendered by

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the mother’s frustration (for examples, see Kost et al. 1998a; Sable et al. 1997; Joyce et al. 2000). Thus, “unintended pregnancy may be associated with lower personal commitment to promote the baby’s health both during pregnancy and after the baby is born” (Kost 1998a, 223), or a mother’s “ambivalence towards pregnancy is a barrier to early and continuous prenatal care” (Sable et al. 1997, 76). Here, the conducts associated with “bad mothering” in the reproduction-regulating apparatuses are considered to be directly determined by one’s lack of original intention. At points, these correlations between lack of intention and a medically and socially pathological subject are made more direct, as in a study showing that women indicating lack of intention during the early prenatal care were “twice as likely as other women to deliver an infant who died within 28 days of birth” (cited in Sable et al. 1997, 76), which, in the rhetoric of health education sloganeering, translates as “Lack of Intention Kills!” *

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It becomes increasingly clearer that contemporary biopolitical thinking, at least within these reproduction-regulating apparatuses, views subjectivity as largely determined by a kernel, planning-qua-intention, an inner substance formed during intrauterine life, infancy, or early childhood, for which the mother is primarily responsible. Evidently, this means that the adult subject’s conducts are an expression of this substance, making it intuitively correct to look for “laws of development” that explain and predict behavior and further depoliticizing an already impoverished liberal understanding of the social. If one’s “psychosocial identity” is fully formed in early childhood and one’s “health identity” more or less fully established during onto- and phylogenesis, all subsequent relations are made insignificant in the determination of subjectivity and conduct, or at least subordinated to this original event that determines with invariant logic the structure of the subject’s future conducts. This constitutes an efficient shielding from critical investigation of the hegemonic relations that form the social, making increasingly unthinkable any analysis of identity as constantly reformed through the power/knowledge relations in which the self is enmeshed and of early-life inf luences as constantly acted upon, reformed and reinterpreted by new power and knowledge relations. The social as a system of relations that dynamically affects one’s “development” is left unexamined, and so are the assumptions that permit dividing “development” into “good” and “bad.”

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In a similar vein, the “psy”-governmental reduction of all processes of subjectivization to an original individual choice—intention at the moment of copulation—ignores how both choices and their consequences are formed within power/knowledge systems. Once power relations are represented as being fixed once and for all by the event of planning, they are impossible to dispute or alter. Intention at the moment of copulation becomes a totalizing structure, a “radiating point” that fully determines the mother and child. By making “unplanned pregnancy” its onto-epistemological center, the family-planning strategy rests all the weight of its normal/pathological divisions on the core of bourgeois subjectivity as defined by liberal ontologies: “intention,” with its correlatives of “informed choice,” “consent,” and “rationality.” If, on the contrary, we understand reality not as a transparent and stable ontological field but as an interweaving of frequently clashing discourses and unstable power relations that form ambivalent and always contradictory subjectivities, then distinguishing between the “intended” or “unintended” nature of a practice, and assessing its effects exclusively in relation to this distinction, becomes particularly difficult and generally futile. While framing “decision” as an exclusively private, individual, autonomous event, in isolation from the meaning and power systems that structure reality and the subject, erases precisely what gives specificity to the social. Even more so when the practice in question is the formation of a woman’s childbearing decisions, since these are shaped and reshaped within discursive fields saturated with sexuality and motherhood at the same time as they are saturated with universalist liberal discourses of subjectivity centered around masculinist concepts of autonomy, dynamicity, competition, and achievement in the public sphere. That is, childbearing decisions are shaped within systems of meaning making structured by the binary law of gender that defines femininity in relation with heterosexual desire and motherhood as a woman’s ultimate confirmation, destiny, and fulfillment, while also having to accommodate discourses of liberal worth as being the opposite of the particularism femininity represents and of the feminized nurturing, domestic, and biologically rooted subjectivity (see Butler 1990, Brown 1995). More specifically, how can one ignore such issues as the construction of adolescent and adult female sexuality in the United States, the gendered power relations involved in each sexual encounter, or the part played in the processes of subjectivization by the very prevalent and insistent discourses on family and motherhood as well as on independence and careerism; in other words, how can one reduce the f luctuating and conf licting desires and conducts

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that the contemporary fields of subjectivization create, as well as the complex connections between desire, intention and behavior, and so on, to a “clear and conscious desire” at the moment of insemination? “Intention” as a signifier of mothering performance or pathology cannot be but vapid, since it valorizes this vague metaphysical humanist substance (intention) over the analysis of the concrete relations that give meaning to a reproductive sexual encounter and since it reduces the power relations—including patriarchy, poverty, and racism—that form subjects as mothers to a matter of competent choice.6 *

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The tactics of knowledge formation that look for childhood trauma and maternal inadequacy in order to explain the adult’s subjectivity also nurture the dream of childhood as a fully blissful epoch and of adult identity as trauma-free fullness. This assumption is problematic from two points of view. First, there is no pristine childhood—as long as the child becomes a liberal subject (that is to say, a subject selfimagined as autonomous) as a result of power relations, and therefore of potentially traumatizing relations and events, it is as naive to assume the possibility of a trauma-free identity as it is to assume a powerfree identity. One would think that Freudians would only agree, since for them bourgeois subjectivity is arrived at through trauma. Second, trauma is not an ahistorical, universal constant. On the contrary, what counts as a trauma for an adult is determined by the complex and diachronic interaction of events that shape one’s identity: that a particular event is made or not into a trauma, that is, into a nodal point of subjectivity that cannot be easily expurgated from one’s mechanisms of subjectivization, depends on how subsequent events shape one’s self-understanding and relation to reality. An event that completely determines one’s subsequent identity might only come to represent a memory among others if the same person is placed in a different configuration of events. Of course, the understandings of trauma and intention that the expert-governmental utilize are founded on a simplistic psychoanalytical representation of the self as a f ly trapped in the amber of the original Oedipal relationship. By always reverting one’s subjectivization to that initial relation, it reduces the political to an individualized search for the original, inalterable self that the relation with the parent shapes, a simultaneous privatization and mummification of identity. Hence, the contemporary psy knowledges have a central part to play in the reproduction and legitimization of the

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liberal-capitalist power relations that they refuse to question (see for example Deleuze and Guattari 1988 and Foucault 1990) and more generally in the reproduction of the mechanisms of othering liberal reality is established on. This is particularly interesting in the light of Judith Butler’s (1993, 96) reiteration of the Lacanian argument that the abject others, the gay figures of the feminized fag and the phallicized dyke, police the boundaries of heterosexual subjectivization. Could it be, then, that psychoanalysis, by the implicit incorporation of those abnormal figures in the metaphor of castration, itself polices heterosexism and patriarchy and the proper bourgeois subjectivity that depends on them and that it depends on? I must add, as a hypothesis to be further explored in subsequent work, that the need to cultivate trauma as a central process of subjectivity formation is enhanced in a society where identities are founded on mass production and consumption as well as on mass techniques of subjectivization, while one’s worth is judged in terms of “specialness,” “originality,” or “uniqueness.” I would speculate that the contemporary spaces of subjectivization are made permeable to extensive colonization by the “psy” sciences precisely through this split construction of the North American subject. In these social spaces the subject is instructed to be aligned with all others, thus striving for sameness— one can think of the assembly lines of subjectivization in the United States and more generally liberalism, from the uniformization of forms of speech, grooming and self-presentation, bodies, and public social interaction to the expert regularization of one’s sexuality, family, diet, physical activity, dating, hobbies, career aspirations, political opinions, ontology, self-improvement techniques, and self-understanding vocabulary. While the same subject is also summoned to prove his or her individuality, exceptionality, and distinctiveness to be socially esteemed and to preserve self-esteem. Thus, considering the force and span of the apparatuses of regularization of the self in the Unites States, the only forms of exceptionality left for this bourgeois subject to mobilize are one’s personal life events. Hence, trauma, and in general a very particularized account of sociopsychological experience, is the only stable terrain where the imperative of uniqueness can set roots. If this speculation is more than just that, then there is no surprise that teleological and individualistic understandings of the self in terms of childhood events, such as those put forward by developmental psychology or even psychoanalysis, are so powerful in the United States. Those “psy” accounts of subjectivity connect with the liberal concept of the self in complex interdiscursive webs that reiterate immanentist and

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teleological accounts of subjectivization and reality in various registers, from Hollywood dramas to counseling experts, constituting a most forceful tool of stabilizing this reality as natural (Berlant 1997 suggests a similar use of trauma for the privatization and depoliticization of the contemporary U.S. political spaces). Expert-Governmental Strategies of Truth Most of the studies of unplanned pregnancy analyzed use a common mode of problematization of family planning and therefore form their knowledges by repetitively testing the same cluster of correlations. Nevertheless, the differences in their findings remain significant. Rather than discussing in detail the particular methods and findings of the studies, I will focus on the social identities their expert gaze enfolds—that is, on what and how the scientific apparatuses of truth can see and say. Since the expert truth-apparatuses seem to remain intact after each such study, irrespective of their particular findings, to be reutilized by the next study, it is the structure of the apparatus that ultimately determines the identity of the Other in family-planning studies. The majority of the studies analyzed test a hypothesis using the statistical manipulation of data collected during one or more of the NSFG surveys up to 1995. Such truth techniques involve at least three steps: a first step in which the experts establish the hypothesis they are interested in elucidating, a second step in which they construct variables that are supposed to accurately and transparently capture the essential dimensions of the social (identities, conducts, and pathologies), and a third step in which statistical (cor)relations are established among these variables, a process that allows truths about the objects investigated to be discovered and stated. I shall not insist on the first step but say that the formation of scientific hypotheses is obviously regulated by what one can see and think within a particular apparatus, discipline, and historical time. Thus, that it is “impossible to think the unthinkable” is, in fact, an ontological statement of our inability to create meaning, even in our wildest speculations, outside the discourses that make reality intelligible in our time and space—in our case, outside a, by now familiar, set of foundational assumptions and nodal points. These assumptions are not intrinsic to family planning, biomedicine, or statistics discourses but result from historical processes of thinking the social in relation

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to the processes of government in the United States. Unsurprisingly, then, they place the “irresponsible mother” as the causal determinant of national pathology—unsurprisingly, that is, because the possibility to explain family planning through the culpable identity of the “irresponsible mother” is opened by the availability of subjects historically formed as Other. I will also add that there are well-known problems with the model of the subject that results from survey questionnaires, not least concerning the translation of these responses into a rigid category of “attitude” (for a discussion, see Potter and Wetherell 1987, 43–55), and that extrapolating from the responses of a sample of 11,000 women to the rest of the U.S. population, as the 1995 NSFG does, assumes that the nature of these subjectivities is fully knowable and amenable to taxonomy or lawlike formulations. Irrespective of this, the resulting “unintended pregnancy” and “irresponsible mother,” as shall be seen, are reified by the medicogovernmental networks into coherent entities, whose formation, nature, and effects are independent of social relations. *

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What is striking within these studies is that, despite their unabashed adoption of a positivistic methodology and epidemiology, their foundational assumptions are never discarded, despite being apparently falsified by their own results. I shall return to discuss this aspect below and relate it to a brand of Popperian “residual positivism.” At this point I would like to suggest that the inability of any of those studies to discard the grid of intelligibility that founds their quest for truth is partly caused by the positivist method’s chronic failure to critically ref lect on its own assumptions about the nature of truth, the good, and the world, and this despite positivism’s self-description as the epitome of critical analysis. The unplanned-pregnancy studies perpetuate this chronic lack of ref lexivity through a simple strategy: at the end of each such study, truth is not taken to be the proving or disproving of a causal mechanism, say of the causal determinations between an “unplanned pregnancy” and a “bad mother.” But rather, the reader is left with the impression that truth is the hypothesis the study starts from. That is, the reader is left with the impression that, irrespective of the findings of the study, there are causal connections between unplanned pregnancy and bad mothering. In other words, the system of relations that forms the expert apparatuses of truth is never discarded, because each new study assumes it as foundational truth, even while affirming that it is actively testing its truthfulness. In the end, the meanings of the

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expert objects and truths remain subordinate to their initial assumptions and the studies systematically reiterate as true the assumptions they start from. The result is that the positivist studies of unplanned pregnancy systematically posit as true the (cor)relations they start by presupposing. For example, since the expert apparatuses of truth are a priori calibrated to “provide a scientific foundation for public health efforts to prevent unintended pregnancy” (Santelli et al. 2003, 95), they unquestionably assume “unintended pregnancy” and the “irresponsible mother” as causes of the sociomedical pathology they are concerned to elucidate. Moreover, since they uncritically adopt the primary logic of U.S. liberalism, whenever they (enthusiastically) engage in deciphering the “irresponsible mother” (her desires, intentions, wants, feelings, behaviors, psychosocial types, and so on) in order to explain her pathological type and behavior, they systematically rediscover the poor, “dependent,” unmarried, black, young women as the cause of the national pathology. Dietz et al. (1999), starting from the assumption that “unplanned pregnancy” is a pathology whose explanation may be found in the dysfunctional character of the “irresponsible mother,” proceed to manipulate the NSFG data in order to yield a correlation between “unintended first pregnancy in adulthood” and the mother’s “exposure to childhood abuse or household dysfunction.” But once this relation between unplanned pregnancy and maternal abnormality is actively formed by the authors’ statistical manipulation of data, nothing further can be said about its nature. The authors conclude that additional research is needed to fully understand the causal pathway, without for a moment contesting the reality of this connection they actively create or analyzing the epistemological steps though which they arrived at it. What remains with one from this study is that “unintended pregnancy” is responsible for the national pathology and that therefore the causes of “unintended pregnancy” must be discovered—and further, that subjectivization is a linear development from childhood-as-origin to adulthood. Therefore, since “unintended pregnancy” is a behavior characteristic of an abnormal subject, the causes of “unintended pregnancy” are best looked for in the mother’s history of childhood pathology. Alternatively, when a direct correlation between “unintended pregnancy” and child and maternal pathology is assumed as a starting point of the study but not found through statistical manipulation, additional variables such as “parental and familial characteristics” are devised and made to determine both “unintended pregnancy” and the mother’s psy pathology,

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thus preserving unscathed the relation between them (for examples, see Joyce et al. 2000 and Sable et al. 1997). In whatever form, the causal relations between intention, the pathology of the irresponsible mother, and the national degeneration caused by “unplanned pregnancy” are never contested or discarded. In the absence of other possible interpretations, the expert categories, variables, and correlations between them become the stand-in for truth and, implicitly, reiterate the assumptions that found them. All the studies investigated are similarly speculative about the cause and, thus, about the precise meaning of the correlations they construct, for example between unintended pregnancy and child abuse. Indeed, any assertions about the nature of the truths they produce that go beyond the simple stating of such relations are outside the epistemic boundaries of any one such study. *

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The epistemic principles that separate good from bad and true from false remain internal to the discourses that make possible those studies of unplanned pregnancy in the first place. For example, the expert truth-apparatuses separate mothers into “normal” and “pathological” or “good” and “bad” subjects by setting arbitrary “break points” in the data. Subsequently, these points are used to normalize (see Foucault 2007), that is, they serve as norm for normal/pathological organizing dichotomies. For example, a “break point” is set at 24 weeks during the pregnancy. If the mother seeks prenatal care before that threshold (“early”), she is a “good/normal mother”; if she does it after that threshold (“late”), she is a “bad/pathological” one. However, there is no external justification for using this particular break point to identify relevant differences in pregnancy outcomes. The same epistemic wobbliness characterizes the variables and pathological entities supposed to express the truth of “unplanned pregnancy” and the “irresponsible mother.” I shall refer mostly to low birth weight (LBW),7 an expert-governmental category used by family-planning studies as an umbrella signifier of fetal, infant, and child injury and posited as “the greatest single hazard to infant health.” As usual, the expert apparatuses of truth are happy to assume the onto-pathological substance of LBW as uncontroversial and as the starting point for assessing maternity-related pathology. However, even using the most elementary logic, “low weight” cannot, in and by itself, be either a “condition” or an original cause of infant morbidity and mortality; it must be

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a symptom, an effect or a correlate of some other pathology. In fact, when the Healthy People 2010 attempts to clarify the meaning of LBW, it initiates a cascade of biomedical signifiers. For example, newborns with LBW are disaggregated into “pre-term infants” and “small-term infants,” the latter further termed “intrauterine growth retardation” (IUGR). Little is known about the risk factors of “pre-term birth” (HP 2000, 16–15), making difficult to understand the whole epistemological purpose of disaggregating LBW to start with. At the same time, IUGR proves to have no physiopathological substance in itself and must be f leshed out as a “real” pathological entity by being related to a web of “risk factors” such as the LBW of the mother herself, reconfirming early infancy as the law of truth of adult and maternal health; that woman’s prior history of giving birth to LBW children, indeed a circular category with zero explanatory power; the mother’s low prepregnancy weight and low pregnancy weight gain (themselves the result of a multiplicity of possible factors including malnutrition); multiple births, a similarly vague risk, since IUGR affects a very small percentage of all multiple births; and finally the default bad behavior of the bad mother, cigarette smoking. Finally, being told that LBW babies are at higher risk of correlate developmental or congenital disabilities only further reinforces the idea that there are underlying and unexplained causes engendering both LBW and these pathologies (HP 1991, 9; HP 2000, 16–14). Despite its epistemic precariousness, the expert studies maintain LBW as a proxy for the baby’s “health,” so that “all premature and LBW babies are considered to have been born at a disadvantage, even if they were not small for gestational age” (Kost et al. 1998a, 224). No further explanation of causality is given. That these positivistic expert truth apparatuses maintain LBW as a central category despite its unsolvable epistemological vagueness signals how convenient LBW is in relating, without having to clarify, the otherness of the irresponsible mother and biomedical pathology. Once LBW becomes an explanatory category in itself, as opposed to an entity in need of explanation, the power relations that might cause LBW, for example racism or poverty, become irrelevant. Rather, LBW condenses the array of heterogeneous causal factors of biological, social, behavioral, and economic order that expert apparatuses associate with “unplanned pregnancy” into a discrete pathological entity that directly indicts this mother: this dangerous condition has been linked to several preventable risks, including lack of prenatal care, maternal smoking, use of alcohol and other drugs, and pregnancy before age 18.8 (HP 1991, 9–10)

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Or again: Low socioeconomic and educational levels are often associated with low birth weight. Black infants are twice as likely as white babies to be born weighting less than 2,500 grams. (HP 1991, 9–10) The Healthy People strategy mentions that LBW can be caused by stress, inadequate nutritional intake, strenuous physical work during pregnancy, or chronic illness (HP 1991, 377) and refuses any further comment. Similar diversionist tactics of truth are used when discussing congenital anomalies as a major cause of newborn death. Although the causality of this pathology is largely obscure and famously heterogeneous, the document chooses to focus solely on preventing smoking and alcohol and illicit drug consumption among pregnant women and systematically ascribes these bad behaviors to black and poor mothers (see HP 2000, 16). The iatrogenic causes of congenital anomalies are downplayed, as are pollutants of various sorts (with the exception of lead poisoning due to insalubrious housing). Thus, that, historically, the impact of teratogenic9 medical drugs on the health of the mother and child is incommensurably higher than that of maternal behavior is willingly ignored: teratogenic pharmaceuticals such as isotetrin are mentioned once in the whole document as a risk factor. It is only when discussing the harmful effects on reproduction of workplace toxins that the document admits that these effects are “still uncertain and controversial” (HP 1991, 12). Unlike the maternal risk factors that aff lict mostly the poor, uneducated, incompetent mothers, the relationship between employment in unskilled jobs and illness is made uncertain and open for debate. In the end, all these epistemic maneuvers and the resilience of certain mechanisms of truth formation and of the “irresponsible mother” identity itself are justified by nothing more than a willingness to believe in these categories as valid. To realize to what extent this is true, it is interesting to look at a group of studies that start by critiquing the validity of “unintended pregnancy.” I shall present the grounds of this critique and argue that, in the end, it reproduces the dominant understandings rather than disrupting them. *

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Some expert articles are more cautious to point out the internal contradictions of the epistemic practices that shape the category of “unplanned pregnancy.” The critical questioning put forward by these studies is,

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therefore, relevant both because it contests the medicogovernmental truths from within their own paradigm and because they expose the limits of any critique that remains confined to the internal rules of truth of one discourse. There are two types of critical approaches: First, some studies expose the central problems with data reliability faced by any survey and statistical manipulation based truth. For example, some authors note the discrepancies between answers given by the same women to different surveys: a 25 percent discordance rate is found between the same women answering both NSFG and DHS questions about their most recent pregnancy (Santelli et al. 2003, 94). Moreover, “intentions” change quite importantly over time. Of the unwanted pregnancies in 1992, only 38 percent were still reported as unwanted in 1995. Some studies, following their positivist fixation on method, note the inadequacy of the samples used for statistical truth production (see Kost et al. 1998, 79). Second, and more importantly for a critical political ontology, there are studies that point out some of the inevitable contradictions created by an understanding of the individual in terms of a perfect correspondence between knowledge, intention, and behavior and by using contraceptive practices as a measure of intention. Thus, Trussell and colleagues (1999) start a discussion of the shortcomings of the present understandings and measurements of intention hosted by the Family Planning Perspectives journal. In particular, their work points out that almost half of all the pregnancies measured as “unintended” occur when no contraception is used and, moreover, that 32 percent of the pregnancies that occur when the woman uses a contraceptive method are reported as “intended.” The results are not more straightforward when “intention” is replaced with “happiness” in the survey questions. Ninety percent of the women whose contraceptive failures are classified as intended report they are happy or very happy about their pregnancies, as are 25 percent of the women whose contraceptive failures are classified as unintended. The authors suggest that the use of contraception might not capture the complexity of pregnancy-related desires, intentions, and behaviors, that “pregnancy intention” might not be a valid measure, and that “intention” and “want” are distinct phenomena. Moreover, they argue that “planning” does not have the same meaning for all women, or indeed any specific meaning at all (Trussell et al. 1999, 247). On the other hand, what the article does not assess critically is the relevance of their own truth apparatus, more precisely the continuing use of “unintended pregnancy” as a category that has ontological weight and explanatory power. The authors conclude that, instead of rethinking the entire project of family planning, the contradictions they point out suggest the need to further refine the concept of

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unintended pregnancy, reiterating the drive toward discovering laws of social behavior and predicting reality: Given that reducing unintended pregnancy is an explicit Health of the Nation objective, it is important that we develop a greater understanding of these alternate concepts of pregnancy intention, [and] the best intention measures for predicting pregnancy outcomes. (246) Their unref lexive commitment to the version of reality constructed by the U.S. reproduction-regulating apparatuses makes for the authors’ unwitting consolidation of the understandings of unintended pregnancy as an ontologically self-standing object that precedes its being made meaningful by the experts: “despite the frequency and the consequences of unintended pregnancy, its definition—and therefore its measurement—remains elusive” (246). Although its reality status is uncertain at best, “unintended pregnancy” has for these authors very firm effects and a very reliable frequency of occurrence—a bit like UFOs, another enduring U.S. obsession. In fact, most of the authors participating in this debate respond to the critiques of “intention” by proposing more adequate, precise, or easily measurable categories for mapping the “self ” such as unhappiness, ambivalence, or pregnancy denial (for example, Bachrach and Newcomer 1999; Peterson and Mosher 1999; Sable 1999, Santelli et al. 2003, Zabin 1999). This approach is nothing but another attempt to patch up, and thus keep alive, an already failed positivist project, an attempt that maintains both the faith in the world as knowable through measurement and quantification and an explanation of pathology through the “irresponsible mother” identity. Instead of reading the contradictions present in the truths that they yield as symptoms of the inability of those truth apparatuses to provide any interesting critical representation of the social, these studies continue to blame errors on imperfect measurement techniques. That this is so shows the resilience of certain master articulations in policing what it is possible to think and say and illustrates how their systematic repetition in a plethora of heterogeneous but complementary texts and practices further consolidates their self-evidence. Closer to the understandings of this research, Luker (1999, 248) points out the lack of caution of most experts when using models of human behavior that ignore the complexities of identity formation. She also reveals that in the case of “unintended pregnancy,” part of the

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problem lies in the genealogy of the term in measurements of “excess fertility.” Since the decision to become a parent is considered to be much more complicated than the decision to have five as opposed to four children, the NSFG set of questions is deemed inadequate for what they attempt to measure (Luker 1999, 248). Moreover, the lack of equivalence between behaviors, desires, and intentions is such that we can legitimately ask what is the true meaning, for example, of a contemporary couple’s having sex without contraceptive use: is it commitment or carelessness? In addition, to use another of Luker’s examples, becoming pregnant “accidentally” might allow women to avoid the responsibility for the decision to enter or not parenthood or be a test of the commitment of her partner (Luker 1999, 249). The attempt to excise ambivalence from this model, Luker argues, can only lead to the appropriation of the debate by parties for whom the world is much simpler, be they positivists or Christians.10 Of course, this is simply to say that the model of subjectivity used by family-planning studies is rudimentary. We can think without much effort of reasons why hoping to measure accurately “intention” and its causal relation with pathology is naive: for example, since the “intendedness” of a pregnancy is measured through self-administered questions, the women who are younger than 20, older than 40, unmarried, poor, or black might find it more acceptable to declare their lack of desire for a child than does an epitomal bourgeois subject like the heterosexual married white aff luent woman. The latter will be submitted to increased pressures from an array of sources, including experts, to declare her pregnancy as intended and herself as happy and to keep the child under any circumstances. On the contrary, since the majority of the subjects on which the expert studies focus are already defined as “undesirable mothers” whose unbridled fertility is the object of public opprobrium and of direct governmental intervention, once questioned by experts these women might decide to rather declare their pregnancies “unwanted” and themselves “unhappy.” Similarly, if the rate of teenage pregnancy is higher among black women, then any explanation must start by analyzing the way these women are formed as (subaltern and excluded) subjects on whom maternalist discourses have a forceful emprise. Science and Othering What part do the mechanisms of truth discussed in this chapter play in liberal othering? I have suggested that identifying the “irresponsible

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mother” is possible only insofar as Othering remains a self-evident tactic of truth for the governmental experts. It follows that, each time the expert-governmental gaze is cast on the population so as to respond to an event,11 it systematically discovers the same pathologies that have been used to explain liberal social pathology for the past 200 years: “bad mothers/women,” “dependency,” “illegitimacy,” “black culture,” “the underclass,” or “broken families.” Each such truth operation reconfirms, deepens, and details those pathologies. In other words, governmental truth is created not through the selection of statements according to a transcendent and infallible rule of truth but through the systematic and regulated reiteration of the same epistemic and power relations. Or, paraphrasing Judith Butler’s (1990, 187–189) account of gender formation, we could say that governmental reality seems true and rigid because a particular ontology is made into a normative injunction, is installed insidiously into political discourse as its necessary ground, and increases its power regime through a constant repetition of its logic and naturalized ontology. What are the epistemic tactics that insulate the governmental order of reality from critical inquiry? Partly, this insulation is the effect of the governmental adoption of a certain brand of positivism as its standard of evidence and truth. As mentioned in the previous chapter, once an equivalence is created between governmental truth and scientific truth, contesting the governmental worldview becomes akin to contesting the entire Western scientific epistemic edifice and to opposing the objectively determined best interest of the nation. Only people having access to carefully monitored and guarded resources can undertake such contestation (see Latour 1987, 108–121). While at a deeper epistemological level, the reiteration of self-same truths is made possible by the way positivism defines the nature of objects. All expert-governmental studies analyzed adopt practices of knowledge formation situated somewhere between the positivism of Carnap and Popper’s falsificationism: they set a hypothesis and test it through the statistical manipulation of data collected by U.S. national surveys of reproductive behaviors. Of course, as clear by now, this onto-epistemic narrative assumes that reality and identities are finite, nonambivalent, and invariant substances whose characteristics can be discovered by the use of the correct scientific methodology. It also suggests that the progressively accurate production of scientific knowledge can ultimately exhaust the truth of reality that, one can only guess, will elicit an “end of history” moment when liberal governing and truth finally coincide perfectly.12 The theoretical impasse this belief pushes itself into is sufficiently well known: within

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Popper’s theory at least, there are no logical possibilities of proving that one theory is closer to truth than another, leading to an accumulation of knowledge that is random according to its own precepts (see Hindess 1977, 178–179). The above-mentioned persistence of the same hypotheses, categories, identities, and methods in all the studies investigated exemplifies this falsificationist impossibility to “objectively” compare statements in terms of absolute truth-value—an impossibility that does not refer to a failure to obey the rules of proper scientific investigation, but to these positivist truth-apparatuses being confronted with such an amount of uncertainty when truth and method are concerned that no test can conclusively refute any one universal statement. The only rules for refuting a hypothesis remain the prevailing scientific metaphysics of that time and space (Hindess 1977, 167–175). Meaning that, as long as the expert-governmental order of reality is structured by the founding assumptions and nodal points described in this book, the hypotheses connecting unplanned pregnancy, the irresponsible mother, and U.S. national pathology are here to stay. Moreover, within those apparatuses of truth, and as already illustrated above, getting closer to truth is not understood as a need to rethink our practices of truth but as a need to amplify truth production using the given model. This drive toward exhaustive knowledge through increasingly more minute positivist inquiry leads to a compulsive demand for more data: improved reporting of abortion data, more data on the race, ethnicity, and the economic status of young women who become pregnant as adolescents, more information on who puts their children up for adoption and who adopts them, and more data on the determinants and consequences of early sexual intercourse (HP 1991, 200–201). While the governmental concern to regulate in detail all risky behaviors—in this case irresponsible sexuality outside matrimony—results in recommendations of exhaustive pastoral care: “because of the potential adverse consequences of unwise sexual activity” preconception care should precede sexual activity. Thus, clinicians should obtain “a detailed sexual history from all adolescent and adult patients, male and female,” including the assessment of the risk of unintended pregnancy (HP 1991, 200–201). I would suggest that, contrary to its aims, this accumulation of knowledge generates even more acute doubts about the epistemic soundness and utility of the governing apparatuses in understanding the social. Producing increasingly accurate knowledge about an object is usually made to mean the multiplication of the categories that describe and measure that object, with the implicit assumption that this proliferation

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will in the end come together into one coherent and complete knowledge of the object’s nature: In seeking to identify the conditions that lead to outcomes such as abortion, lack of prenatal care, substance abuse, low birth weight, lack of infant attachment, low educational attainment, poverty and violence, it makes sense to pursue these questions to focus specifically on women with negative attitudes toward their pregnancy, rather than on those with a pregnancy that is simply unintended. (Sable 1999, 150) As the quote amply illustrates, rethinking the Other requires much more radical steps than simply substituting “negative attitudes” for “intention,” since this substitution preserves the same a priori indicators of pathological behavior (abortion, addiction, lack of infant attachment); the same understandings of poverty, violence, or lack of education as outcomes rather than causes; and the same thinking of U.S. society as attacked from within by the malicious Others that nurture “negative attitudes.” What interests the researchers in all such studies is not the question, What are the foundational moral, epistemological, and ontological assumptions that make it possible for this ever-growing cascade of expert studies to all identify as pathological the black, poor, young, single mothers?” but Why and how do they harm their children and the nation? Moreover, those apparatuses never envisage that, if identities result from power/knowledge relations, each new relation devised to know the object more intimately not only fails to exhaust the identity of the object investigated but might in fact actively reconstruct the object. The end result is a string of discrete objects (LBW, intention, happiness, race, woman, teenage mother, development, character, dependency, and so on) that appear unitary only because grouped under a common signifier (for example, “unplanned pregnancy”) and true only because their unresolved onto-epistemic status is shielded from critical inquiry. Therefore, the governmental apparatuses work with successive sets of internally generated approximations of the subject, often involving metonymy or even metaphor (for example, “black” or “teenage pregnancy” stand in for “pathology”), but never question the truth and reality status of those approximation. Within those apparatuses, a certain set of questions is never seriously asked, for example: What are the relations and demarcations between affect and cognition, and into what category do entities like desire or intention fall? What is the relation

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between the subject (identity, agency, desire, and behavior) and her “context”? What is the meaning of culture, and what is its role in and means of shaping the subject? What is the role of power and government in this assemblage? What is the relation between the medicogovernmental knowledges and the reality they describe? Unless willing to engage with these questions, the positivist apparatuses will reproduce the same, pernicious truths. Moreover, the subjects described by these measurements will be forced into a relation of equivalence (that is to say, will be made to fit into a single epistemic category, such as “unplanned pregnancy” or “teenage mother”) only to the extent that governmental knowledge production maintains and reinforces the characteristics it considers defining of those subjects—race, gender, socioeconomic or marital status—as homogenous, invariant, and ineluctable. Attributing independent effects to a set of substances (“unplanned pregnancy,” “irresponsible mothers,” “race,” and so on) hides the processes through which these substances are formed, making those substances increasingly “real.” As a result, the governmental multiplication and gradation ad infinitum of individualized and essentialized truths and categories distances us progressively from their founding operations of power/knowledge, that is, interposes a thick layer of particular instances between oppression (for example, ill health) and the systems of fixation that make it possible (for example, othering) (see Brown 1995, 96–134). Truth, Segmentation, and Liberal Subjectivization Liberal governing remains tethered to an onto-epistemic and moral project inaugurated by the Enlightenment that makes knowing reality dependent on the relentless will to segment and classify objects into “same” and “different” according to a strictly regulated but everproliferating set of criteria. The scientific segmentations and taxonomies on which creating a governable reality depends operate exclusively with discrete, bounded, and nonambivalent identities that reveal themselves to the observer using the correct methodology, while biopolitical governing is crucial in this process of making positivism the law of truth of our times. This idea is central for many of the authors that inspired the present analysis. As Colette Guillaumin (1995, 68) phrases it, the object of eighteenth-century thinking is “to impose an intelligible order upon a disorder no longer capable of interpretation as the decrees of Providence or the will of the Prince”. While Foucault

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(2007, 180–184) argues that the moment of discipline in the West also represents the moment of the struggle for the control over and centralization of dispersed knowledges, through the disqualification and elimination of “useless” knowledges, the normalization of knowledges that makes possible fitting them together, the hierarchical classification of knowledges, and finally the pyramidal centralization of knowledges that ensures that they can be selected and transmitted. This allows a control over knowledge enacted not in terms of false or true but in the disciplinary terms of the regularity of enunciations (180–184). Those accounts are, indeed, not at all dissimilar to the processes of “translation” that Latour (1987) discusses, in which a center achieves knowledge authority by making distant events, places, and people mobile, stable, and combinable. This is achieved by devising, within the expert-governmental apparatuses, systems of inscription that represent those dispersed objects as uniform and malleable forms, as traces (223). Once in the center, the traces—which are the objects for the purposes of the center—suffer successive stages of inscription, simplification, and recombination that make appear new differences and similarities, periodicities, connections, determinations, and effects between previously disparate elements. In other words, they are submitted to operations that allow their organization into a system of differences and that reveal new modalities of intervention upon them (236–238). Finally, Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 208, 223) point to the same process of knowing and ruling by translation and classification when they affirm that a center like the state links itself to an “abstract machine of overcoding” to translate f lows into intelligible, comparable, classifiable, totalizable segments so as to produce a homogenous space, striated in all directions. It follows that liberal governing depends on operations of truth that form the objects of interest within a regular system of relations and thus makes those objects—for example, the irresponsible mother— localizable as just another point on a governmental map, known and therefore possible to act upon. The expert-governmental apparatuses see the social as a constellation of cutoff points that each define a polar relation of transcendent identities or organizing dichotomies (woman/ man, adult/child, worker/nonworker, autonomous/dependent, white/ nonwhite, citizen/noncitizen, autochthonous/newcomer, sane/mad) and thus can only operate in terms of rigid lines of segmentation. As long as this process of striation, of tabulation of identities, is based on the assumption of difference as one of substance, liberal governing cannot encourage any process of transcending othering—its ability to rule the population depends precisely on the universal, unambivalent, and

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unsurpassable nature of the boundaries between “same” and “different” it posits. Through these strategies of truth, othering becomes a tactic usable by any power relation and governmental apparatus claiming to be modern, liberal, and democratic. It must, however, be made clear once again that this process of knowing that makes othering possible is not a characteristic of liberalism, in isolation from scientific inquiry, but rather the characteristic of a particular scientific way of knowing that has been structuring reality since the Enlightenment. It is the obsession with exhausting the truth of an object through increasing segmentation and taxonomy that translates contemporary political debates—over, for example, poverty, misogyny, homophobia, or the relation between health and capitalism—into endless and fruitless quandaries over measurement technicalities. The role of Enlightenment science in creating those Others should be fairly clear even without a thorough genealogical description. There is a vast array of studies that point to the dramatic effects of nineteenth-century science—and the way it was regularized, crystallized, and centralized within liberal apparatuses—in consolidating race, sex, sexuality, gender, and biology as nonambivalent scientific truth, thus opening the way for all the known excesses of twentiethcentury biopolitics. See, for example, this quote from Carl von Linné, from his 1735 “The System of Nature”: Man . . . is, by his wisdom alone, able to form just conclusions from such things as present themselves to his senses, which can only consist of bodies merely natural. Hence the first step of wisdom is to know these bodies; and be able, by those marks, imprinted on them by nature, to distinguish them from each other, and to affix to every object its proper name. These are the elements of all sciences; this is the great alphabet of nature: for if the name be lost, the knowledge of the object lost also; and without these, the student will seek in vain for the means to investigate the hidden treasures of nature. (in Eze 1997, 12–13) As an anecdote further illustrating this point, Louis Aggasiz, a Swiss disciple of Cuvier, important European theorist of natural science, and later a major figure in the U.S. intellectual and scientific circles, is described by Gould (1993, 94) as “an extreme splitter in his taxonomic practice . . . He once named three genera of fossil fishes from isolated teeth that a later paleontologist found in the variable dentition of a single individual. He named invalid species of freshwater fishes by the

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hundreds, basing them upon single individuals or upon single, variable species.” Guillaumin (1995), in her genealogy of the concept of race, concurs: The attempts to divide humans into categories, which are coincidental with the intensification of slavery, began to take shape in the eighteenth century. And it was in Europe that this happened, where modern science was being created and was working out a set of rules and laws concerning the material world. For these attempts at classification were only part of a whole system of taxonomies dealing with everything that was “thinkable,” not merely the morphological and geographical aspects of the animal and vegetable [sic] kingdom but also inert matter, systems and social forms, both historical and contemporary. (67–68) Conclusion Borges (1970, 29), in his short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” describes a quest for a mythical land called Uqbar that starts from a note on Uqbar in a version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “The note seemed to fix the boundaries of Uqbar, but its nebulous reference points were rivers and craters and mountain ranges of the same region.” The practices of truth making in U.S. liberal governmentality are of such nature that they segment and taxonomize the social into governmentally relevant identities but exclusively using self-referential points, determined by the founding assumptions of U.S. liberalism. The truth of the social identities formed in the process of governing have no determination, necessity, and way of being verified outside the particular rules that form them as true, that is to say, outside the particular articulations that the expert-governmental discourses establish in order to make the social intelligible. The minute focus on discovering the substance of the governmental identities through a proliferating segmentation of those identities and of the governing reality takes the reader progressively farther from the power/knowledge processes of formation of these truths and identities. It shields the knowledge formation from inquiry and fixes the governmental identities as natural substances. “Unintended pregnancy,” for example, is an expert artifact, a composite entity created by an expert gaze moulded by historical assumptions about the nature of truth, race, family, poverty, motherhood, society, government, and so on. Nevertheless, “unintended pregnancy” is

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postulated as a self-standing, scientific object with etiological significance, thus also fixing the identity of the “irresponsible mother” as pathological in the universalistic language of science and law. That is, postulating an objective truth is never an inoffensive practice. As a result of such postulates, the U.S. process of government makes signifiers like “welfare recipient,” “black,” “poverty,” “culture,” “single parent,” “illegitimacy,” and “teenage pregnancy” into increasingly “real” identities and hides from inquiry the fact that these signifiers are unintelligible before their meaning being formed within the governing apparatuses. This suggests that placing claims for political emancipation on the liberal state, insofar as the power relations we find unacceptable result from othering, is a naive strategy. Biopower, being founded on segmenting and classifying the social using the ordering principle of othering, cannot act but as a block in this political process. I shall turn to a discussion of those issues in the final chapter.


CH A P T E R

SE V E N

Liberal Governing and the Contemporary Political Imagination

The purpose of this analysis has been to provide an example of how governmental forms of power that are “implanted in bodies, slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison d’être and a natural order of disorder” (Foucault 1990, 44), create the identity of a subject or category of subjects. And throughout, this analysis has attempted to show that it is a crude reduction to analyze liberalism as a purely procedural form of thinking about governing that is informed exclusively by a ref lexive skepticism over the state’s ability to know and do. Quite on the contrary, what liberal apparatuses can see, think, and do, and therefore the types of questions that liberal governing asks and the types of subjects it forms whenever “ref lexively” reshaping itself, are structured by the genealogy of this form of governing. More specifically, liberal apparatuses function by recodifying in law and norm the violences that found Enlightenment universalism, among others: positivism, patriarchy, Eurocentrism, colonialism, racism, heterosexism, homophobia, eugenics, slavery, and genocide (see Foucault 1998, 378) and make the reality of their objects of government concrete and malleable through processes of othering in relation to a plethora of nodal points like race, sex, sexuality or gender. In brief: the order of reality of liberalism is, and always has been historically, a patriarchal, misogynistic, racist, eugenic, and pauperist one. In particular the U.S. apparatuses that govern reproduction, often with brutal effects on the lives of subjects they other, operate as follows: (a) by

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first positing “special” identities as substances and then making them pathological in the universalistic language of biomedicine and law, pathology is secured as the essential characteristic of those identities; (b) once the “special” groups are exhaustively defined as Other, the governmental intervention on those groups is both necessary and legitimate; and (c) since the way in which liberal apparatuses structure reality makes the critical interrogation of their power and knowledge strategies increasingly difficult, the same relations of subjectivization are repeated with each governmental investigation of sociopathology, each time isolating the same identities as pathological. Thus, returning to Wendy Brown’s (1995) analysis already mentioned in chapter 6, we can say that in their present form, the liberal juridical-discursive operations of truths and power cannot tackle what produces groups as subaltern, since they cannot tackle the systems of signification that bring into being difference, but only the symptoms of those systems. That is, liberal apparatuses construct systematically particular events and subjects as if unconnected to the wider systems of relations that create identities as intelligible objects and, by privatizing and individualizing issues that refer to hegemonic structures, operate as a technique of depoliticization of the social. It seems, therefore, that not only liberalism is far from embodying some golden ideal of ref lexive governing but, on the contrary, is a form of governing that, under the guise of permanent self-vigilance and continuous problematizing of governing and the social, systematically and relentlessly reiterates the same power and knowledge relations that mark its birth. Liberal rationality is fundamentally predicated on methodical attempts to reduce the complexity of events to metaphysical substances, to deny the power relations that constitute the social and its own role in these practices and to expurgate all ambiguity from the reality it constructs. While, on the contrary, the systematic effects of the liberal order—patriarchy, misogyny, racism, inequality, eugenics, and colonial and racist genocide—are made to appear exceptional and therefore impossible to intervene upon as part of a sustained political strategy. The rhetoric of the nation, truth, freedom, good, science, and progress is all throughout the vehicle for this systematic, if often unintentional, exclusion and brutality of liberal othering. Because of this, liberalism actively solidifies power relations into relations of domination and, for the entire length of its history, stigmatizes and punishes the same subjects. Those currently marginalized by the U.S. governmental apparatuses that regulate health and reproduction are the same

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subjects that have been marginalized systematically for over a hundred years in the West. *

*

*

The substantive analysis suggested that the family-planning governmental apparatuses explain the social through the Us (good)/Other (bad) dichotomy and construct the “irresponsible mother” as this Other: the polar antagonist of the proper woman, mother, individual, and citizen. This mother-as-Other, or mOther, is a “scapegoat” that permits constructing, explaining, and mending a national crisis in the United States, a governing strategy central to liberalism’s legitimation of its persisting “will to govern.” As a construct, the “irresponsible mother” concentrates a group of assumptions about what is wrong with U.S. society and who is responsible for these wrongs— assumptions embodied in a grid of historical decipherment that connects, in ever new configurations, master signifiers resulted from over 300 years of governing through othering. Within this governmental order of reality, and exclusively within it, the “irresponsible mother” is a solid, uncontroversial object. More specifically: that the irresponsible mother acquires an uncontroversial substance within the U.S. familyplanning apparatuses depends on translating the world into a system of dichotomies—Us/Other, proper/improper, responsible/irresponsible, and normal/pathological—mapped perfectly on the ontological divide between a bourgeois “majority” (white, heterosexual, married, and economically successful) and “minorities” (the opposite). It is exclusively within this system that the irresponsibility of the “bad” subject; intention at the moment of copulation; race; child, teenage, and adult poverty, pathology and delinquency; and so on can be thought of as causally related. Thus structured, the governing of family planning depoliticizes not only social identities, as argued at length, but also the practice of motherhood. By aiming to prevent “unplanned pregnancy” and to encourage “planned pregnancy,” the governmental strategy never opens the practices of parenthood to critical discussion or questions dominant assumptions about the nature and social role of women, the structure and function of the family, the social and political consequences of parenthood, and more generally about the nature of the social and the good of the nation. It is not that pregnancy should not be planned. Indeed, it would be positive if the formation of parental yearning, love, practices, and identities were to be submitted to a systematic process

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of critical ref lection and deconstruction to reveal their intimate mechanisms and their connections to the bourgeois (heterosexist, familist, eugenic, patriarchal, individualist) apparatuses of truth and desire. And, related, if the political signification and effects of the practices of parenthood as they are performed contemporarily in the United States, would be constantly appraised in the light of our struggles against othering and domination. The avowed governmental goals “to insure that all pregnancies are intended” and to make all adolescents aware of the nature and severity of the consequences of parenthood are in one sense reasonable ones (HP 2001, 117) and from this they derive part of their power. So, too, is the idea that educating young potential parents about the financial, welfare, and social costs of pregnancy may improve decision-making, which, in turn, may reduce the likelihood of an unintended pregnancy. (HP 2001, 117) Nevertheless, this rhetoric is made vacuous once the governmental effort is to weed out “bad pregnancy” and “bad motherhood” while reinforcing bourgeois pregnancy as unequivocally good. To reiterate the historical collapsing of the “good mother” with “good woman” and “good citizen,” thus encouraging women to understand themselves as, above all, wives and mothers. Or, finally, to completely erase from the social the “pathological mother”: since women are only made visible in the governmental documents analyzed as mothers (besides this identity, the governmental rationality affects gender blindness, in classic liberal manner), when the irresponsible mothers are refused the identity of mother and thus of citizen, they become impossible to accommodate in the liberal order and need to be fully expelled from it, through whatever means. Bourgeois Subjects as “Vessels of Power” At the same time as I have presented the persisting inf luence of the state in shaping identities and experiences, I have tried to consider the possibilities of thinking the state as a f luid, heterogeneous and often contradictory assemblage of apparatuses, rather than as a monolithic institution with immanent propensities. Implicitly, I have suggested an understanding of identity formation that goes beyond the traditional clear-cut separation of politics into “top-down” and “bottom-up” or into “state” and “grassroots.” I can now detail further the consequences of our stubborn

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belief in such clear-cut dichotomies: First, this belief ignores that the separation between the private and the public is a central trope of liberal discourse and, therefore, sanctions this liberal strategy and the power relations it makes possible, including the politically impairing separation between negative freedom and unfreedom. Thus, it further dissimulates that the most important political apparatuses of subjectivization are placed precisely where the liberal state tells us that the political stops: within “civil society” and within our practices of “personal freedom.” Second, it perpetuates the illusion of the state as the center of power. As repeatedly argued, it is dubious that the state is a coherent machine of social control. One look at how liberal apparatuses function will reveal heterogeneous—and frequently ill-coordinated or contradictory—discourses and technologies at work. Moreover, the foundational assumptions of liberalism do not originate in the state, nor do they express the will of a ruling class.1 Rather, the great molar centers are always “immersed in the molecular soup that nourishes them and makes their outlines waver” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 225). Third, and finally, continuing to think politically in terms of a clearcut boundary between the state and “grassroots” reproduces the sentimentalism of the pure and authentic subject, untouched by power and, therefore, having a privileged relation to truth—what Wendy Brown (1995) terms a “politics of resentment.” As a result, our political practices take the form of either moral condemnations or demands for rectification, retribution, and revenge placed on the state; and thus self-defuse their own transformative potential. I have repeatedly argued that the formation of the contemporary subject—including as able to imagine herself as free and self-actualizing—is not prior to its relation with the governing apparatuses that regulate “bourgeois self hood,” but takes place in relation to (expert) knowledges and technologies that are at some point engendered by, encouraged by, organized by, or intersecting such apparatuses. If this is the case, then positing power as always forbidding or the state as the unambiguous center of power can only enhance our uncritical want for those liberal apparatuses that function “at a distance”, through the diffusion of grammars of living and that equate freedom with “unconstrained choice.” Thus, all three cases have a similar outcome: our failure to analyze the most critical aspect of liberal politics: subjectivization, and therefore the risk of reproducing, in our political demands and actions, the power and knowledge relations that shape identities as Other, subaltern and particularly prone to being harmed. In what follows, I shall brief ly refer to those aspects of our present political engagements and point out to their strategic blind spots, under the twin themes of our conduct

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operating as “vessels” of governmental power and of our continuing desire for the liberal order of reality. *

*

*

This analysis has argued for a conceptualization of subjectivity, agency, and autonomy as the result of strategies of power and knowledge, rather than as the immanent force always resisting power. I can now suggest that the power/knowledge relations we denounce as being oppressive or unjust are operating, partly, by making us imagine our own political identities as self-referential, known, and closed and, therefore, are reiterated in the very process of our denunciation. This is because the trope of the self-referential identity, and its correlate trope of the unequivocal separation between private and public political conducts, impedes us from realizing the extent to which the identities we mobilize in the moment of political action are created within webs of power and knowledge weaved by the liberal apparatuses. If we consider that any liberal identity and, indeed, reality result from practices of tabulation performed according to various systems of difference: same/different, I/Other, true/false, good/bad. If, moreover, we accept that in order to imagine the political, the bourgeois subject needs to mobilize a nonambivalent self-identity that is constructed within those systems of differences and in relation with Others they rigidly position. Then any political strategy founded on “full presence” cannot but reiterate the exclusions and dominations that found it. That is: if our deepest, most personal impulses are the result of the power and knowledge relations that form our subjectivity, then a subject’s first impulse in a political situation is to engage in conducts that reiterate her formative power relations. And the more self-evident a political conduct seems to the subject, the more dominant, ubiquitous, strong, and relentless, thus the more dangerous, are the power relations that shape that conduct—structuring one’s conducts around the nodal points of culture, ethnicity, race, sexuality, reproduction, sex, or gender is an obvious example of such self-evident political reaction, and it is precisely the self-evidence of those nodal points in liberalism that accounts for the conducts they determine being so often described as natural or instinctual. For example, it is considered natural in liberalism to prefer social relations that are gender-, sexually, or race-coded, or it is considered an instinctual behavior for the liberal subject to desire and engage in certain forms of sexual practices, and so on. Then, assuming as natural truth the historically sedimented understandings of the difference

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between I and Other locks our politics in a cycle of endless reiteration of the same selves and Others. And as long as we do not realize that our political conducts must be performed as a permanent critique of our political identities, we will act as “relays” or “vessels” for the very forms of power we try to dislocate, that is, we will propagate the power relations we try to overcome—racism, patriarchy, homophobia, eugenics, misogyny, colonialism, and so on—even while we think we are engaging in the most natural and private conducts or in the most politically emancipating struggles. For example, it is not at all surprising that certain feminists think politics as “politics of the female body” and sexuality, reproduction, and maternity as crucial political resources in fighting patriarchy. It is precisely as embodied, sexed, and reproductive subjects that women are formed and ruled by a patriarchal liberal order, and it is precisely the body, sexuality, and reproductive characteristics of women that are politically relevant to such an order. It is therefore an obvious antipatriarchal political tactic to mobilize those most easily accessible, since already selected and politicized by liberal patriarchy, resources. At the same time, those “body politics” are political maneuvers that do not interrogate critically the relation between, on one hand, the systems of power and knowledge that form an inferior, Other, or particular subject, in this case the liberal patriarchal systems that form one as woman and on the other hand that “woman” subject’s desires, goals, conducts, body, or politics as effects of power. Rather, since “body politics” are founded exclusively on the resources and ontological traits of the subject “woman” as defined by liberal patriarchy, in the long run they end up reinforcing the system’s ability to fix such subjects as Other. Or, that in situations of crisis, and not only, liberal individuals resort to the tropes of masculinity, aggressiveness, and a brutal Hobbesian understanding of property, survival, and identity simply goes to show how deep into the structure of our self hood such liberal-evolutionist discourses are lodged. Or, think of the persisting obsession of the bourgeois subject with personal liberation, discovery, or self-affirmation through desire and sexuality. Such constructions of sexuality as liberation unwittingly confirm “sex” as the core of bourgeois subjectivity, as the presocial and either hidden or repressed truth of the subject that awaits liberation, as the explanatory and emancipating nodal point of contemporary subjectivity. To the extent that it never seriously questions the construction of its desires, this stubborn bourgeois investment in sexual liberation confines our truth and freedom within the circuits of various expert technologies of sex, while failing to engage critically

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with sex as a “fictitious unity” that is strategically essential in the construction and ruling of the contemporary bourgeois subject (see Butler 1990, Foucault 1990, Rose 1998). More generally, the political imagination of the liberal subject is structured by the nodal points of liberal subjectivization and therefore thinks politics in the register of freedom, autonomy from repression, and more generally from power, equality in difference, individualism, difference as one of substance, representative democracy, or sovereignty. This subject hopes to achieve fulfillment or emancipation precisely by using the tools liberalism makes available for one’s shaping and self-shaping as a bourgeois subjectivity: legal or human rights, sex, (ethical) consumption, liberal achievement (education, financial status, social status, employment status, bourgeois habitus), improved individualism (securing and defending personal space, making one’s voice heard in the liberal sociopolitical arena, being recognized as special or particular) and self-affirmation (discovering and asserting one’s real self, removing obstacles toward self-fulfillment, letting one’s specialness shine), and so on. All those political tactics remain firmly grounded in liberal understandings of the self and the political and are therefore incapable of contesting liberal rule and least of all its subtle technologies of othering. While the already discussed imagining of the political as a struggle between top and bottom—and therefore as an emancipation of desire and the true self from technocratic, state, and expert control—acts in synergy with a liberal biopolitics equally skeptical of the state’s possibility to know and equally convinced of the need to respect, nurture, and elicit the natural order of the social, population, individual, or market. Thus, our contemporary political imagination fails to see how longing for emancipation from repression makes us especially prone to being seduced by liberal apparatuses that operate not through coercion but through enticement, channeling, or arousal—in a word through the construction of subjectivity. Giving in to such seduction replaces the analysis of the power/knowledge strategies that shape our subjectivities with a compulsive desire for a conservative form of “self-affirmation.” The critiques of the state and of professions and expertise that bloomed in liberal-capitalism since the late 1960s are epitomal of this trend, based as they are on a renewed emphasis on personal needs and expression, on difference, on the culture of the self and its actualization. They equate political activity with various techniques of consciousness raising, empowerment, self-esteem, alternative pedagogy; with the rhetoric of voice and representation; with a focus on “active citizenship,” and “active society” (Dean 1999, 161); and with a

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“post-modern libertarianism” that, in its insistence on “responsibility” and “self-determination” as the crucial political moments is hopelessly seduced by the neoliberal strategy of dividing social spaces into “private” and “public” and describing them as “pluralism,” as for example is Jacques Donzelot (1994 and 2008). The contemporary liberal subject is a product of those critiques and techniques and in its compulsive search for self-affirmation actively reinvests its desire for self-discovery into the neoliberal apparatuses that make the bourgeois self around the compulsory moments of gender, sex, or race and in opposition to its gendered, sexualized, pauper, and racialized Others. We could indeed say that all political struggles that attempt to contest liberal othering using liberal political tools and the discourses of bourgeois self hood, for example identity politics that demand resources from the state in the name of their identity, affirm a compulsive, and masochistic as Wendy Brown (2001, 45–62) shows, desire for liberal order and its constitutive othering. Those are political subjects that desire to believe the rhetoric of equality and freedom of the system that creates them as Other, that desire recognition precisely from the order that constructs them as inferior, and that remain within the patriarchal model of power relations, in which demands to be recognized as an independent adult are placed on the (castrating) father. This secret desire for liberalism seems to structure most of our political strategies and most of our political thinking. And if it is true that the political imagination of our moment seems unable to detach itself from liberal political ontologies and technologies, and appears more than ever subordinated to liberal principles when it thinks of itself as engaged in shaping radical alternatives to liberal order, then our present political actions reproduce the order of liberalism each time we imagine we contest this order. In what follows, I will illustrate this argument—our unsuspecting complicity in furthering liberal othering—using what I consider to be three prominent facets of this contemporary political imagination: “maternalist feminism,” “strategic essentialism,” and these “governmentality studies” that openly critique liberalism. *

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This analysis aims to make suspect any politics operating in the name of a feminine, or indeed racial, essential identity. Any attempt to recuperate an extradiscursive femininity, race, or ethnicity, be this transcendent kernel of identity located in motherhood, ethnic-geographical origins or in “objective social location,” mirrors the hegemonic fixations that

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create race, gender, or ethnicity. As Judith Butler (1990, 189) phrases it, foundationalism presumes, fixes, and constrains the very subjects it hopes to represent. This critique of transcendental substances extends to “maternalist” forms of feminist theorizing, those exalting the reproductive instincts and telluric creative f lows of motherhood as the liberating model of subjectivity to be extended to the entire social space. Following Butler (1990), then, I would argue that, far from emancipating women from liberal patriarchy, maternalism (a) fixes unequivocally what it is to be a woman on the “embodied,” “instinctual,” or even “primitive” and “Oriental” side of a divide that upholds men as the opposite (Butler 1990, 113–114). In this manner, it reconfirms woman as the “particular” of the liberal man’s universalism; (b) polices the identity boundaries it fixes, assuming the role of ultimate arbiter of what it means to be a true or a failed woman; (c) fails to analyze the ways in which the (patriarchal) system of signification, instead of repressing maternal energies, might be producing them, that is, the ways in which the perceptions, desires, feelings, and routines related to motherhood represent effects of social practices and not their prediscursive determinants; and (d) moreover, by interpreting the subjectivizations that form “woman” through a naturalistic vocabulary—instincts, drives, etc.—it renders the power mechanisms that construct them invisible and helps the patriarchal institution gain “a permanent legitimation in the invariant structures of the female body” (Butler 1990, 115). It is, for example, common practice in certain strands of medical sociology to understand pregnancy as being “medicalized”: colonized by medicine. This is a “maternalist” understanding that, tacitly, resorts to understanding of power as repression and of the female as body as “natural,” presocial. Or mobilizes a form of positivist solipsism where only “women” can know their bodies, since experiences are revealed to their consciousness without mediation. Medicalization is made to represent an appropriation of power by male doctors, through an expropriation of the female power represented by the mother, the female community or the midwife. Thus, medicalization critiques assume that medicine, and generally scientific rationality, more or less forcefully take over a preexisting, presumably natural object, be that the body, pregnancy, or another. Medical power is once again understood as the sovereign ability to say no, to take away, to distort, to corrupt, or to dissimulate truth. And freedom, or more generally subjectivity, and power are once again posited as antagonistic. While resorting to the all-too-comfortable political trope of resentment (condemning your adversaries for their connection to power and simultaneously affirming that the oppressed

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lack of any such relation), such understandings also corner themselves theoretically, in the same ways positivist truth does when it pretends to know the exact location of the boundary between the “natural” and the “social.” They operate with an understanding of their subjects— woman, women, females—as unambivalent, homogenous, and intransient substances. And, crucially, they fully exclude from critical analysis the modalities in which power relations create their objects—the ways in which contemporarily the body, pregnancy, motherhood, and womanhood have no possible signification prior to their emergence from operations of power/knowledge among which patriarchy, biomedicine, the “psy” sciences, and more generally the “sciences of Man” are central. This exclusion makes the medicalization critique sanction, even if from a position of antagonism, those discourses as well as other Enlightenment avatars such as truth, autonomy, progress, modernity, science, rights, freedom, agency, or the state/civil society dichotomy. In a nutshell, the notion of “repression” to which the notions of medicalization resort is “rotten from the outset” analytically since it depends both on a juridical understanding of power (whenever it invokes the sovereign subject of rights) and on a disciplinary understanding of normality (whenever it invokes the natural subject) (Foucault 2003, 40). *

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Strategic essentialism, like all identity politics, addresses and contests liberal universalism from the position of particular or Other it is ascribed or, if you prefer, pursues political gains through strategically assumed otherness. My discussion should not be taken as dismissing such politics en bloc: the necessity for resistances to liberal sovereignty is not contested, and the political outcomes of such strategies remain impossible to predict. At the time of writing, the struggle for a separate Afrocentric educational system in Ontario, Canada, seems hope-inducing, since it promises to rupture the insidiously racist technologies of liberal governing by opting out of the purportedly universal liberal polity as epitomized by liberal education. However, what this discussion doubts is the ability of present essentialist, or indeed multicultural, strategies to achieve such a rupture or, in fact, their ability to achieve anything but command more resources—rights, recognition, money, institutional networks—within a political landscape defined in liberal terms. To counterbalance the by now impossible-to-ignore critiques of a “worked-from-within” identity on which politics are to be founded,

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while continuing to keep political struggle on the terrain of identity as self-affirmation, some contemporary critics envisage “essentialism” as a momentary strategy to be surpassed once political gains are obtained, as a conservative moment that makes possible a more radical political struggle in the future. However, can this strategic reconfiguration of identity politics transcend a reduction of identity to a “center” more easily than its older, “unstrategic” versions? Or is it forced to reduce the collective selves to a defining trait of what we “are,” be that race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, or genotype, with little hope of ever reversing this reduction? If this is the case, then there ensues a whole list of political consequences: strategic uses of identity politics do not and cannot militate for an ontological dislocation of the liberal framing of difference since they depend on this frame to self-define as “special” and thus to justify their demands. The political critique of liberal othering is then reduced to an apolitical competition for resources within a liberal-pluralist framework. Moreover, since essentializing erases the formative “I/Other” relationship from its makeup, each such political affirmation of self-identity unsuspectingly internalizes and reinforces the original ontological hierarchy. Thus, strategic uses of identity politics consolidate the universal and civilized status of the dominant identity—white, European, bourgeois, man, heterosexual— and its own othering (particularism and primitivism) with every affirmation of self-identity. And, once an identity is strategically made into a substance, both the political demands placed on the state in its name and the processes of identity formation subsequent to those demands being met work toward the further naturalization of the identity in question. That is, the deconstructive moment that we expect to follow from the moment of strategic essentialism is made increasingly improbable and difficult precisely by its essentializing of identity, either in the liberal language of law or science, since the state responds to claims for additional resources, for example from women, by devising laws and policies that fix “woman” as natural difference (see Brown 1995, 96–135), or in the subsequent mechanics of identity formation of the subjects defined by this identity, since, for example, once one gains sociopolitical recognition as a “woman,” it must systematically and in every mundane power relation assume the “specialness” this identity signifies and thus assume that is signifies true, natural difference. The transformation of gynocentric second-wave feminism into the insidiously patriarchal-misogynist discourse of “post-feminism” illustrates the political perils of being compelled to identify with an identity defined as pure difference. The more resources are demanded

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or mobilized in the name of one’s difference, the more rigid the boundaries of that social group have to be and the more natural the liberal game of universal/particular seems. The Desire for Liberal Order in “Governmentality” Critiques of Liberalism I have previously presented a critique of governmentality studies’ stubborn reiteration of the formula: “liberalism represents a political system defined by its constant critique of reality.” This formula, this book argued, prevents a productive analysis of what liberalism is and does, by creating a dichotomy between a pure liberalism (of procedure) and a messy reality of liberal apparatuses that represent, for those theorists, but an imperfect ref lection of that true liberalism. I would like now to resume this critique and make more salient the question of our political blockages, and masochistic desires, when theoretically analyzing liberalism. My critique of the impoverishment of our political imagination when it comes to contesting liberalism will discuss a text by Mitchell Dean, a central governmentality theorist, and then will critique one of the few existing critiques of governmentality studies, by O’Malley and collaborators. *

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While Mitchell Dean’s (1999) analysis of neoliberalism raises a different set of critical questions to that of Nikolas Rose discussed in chapter 2, I would argue that they stem from the same desire to analyze liberalism as an ideal-type. Dean’s analysis sharply points out that historically liberal biopolitical apparatuses are never free of “illiberal” excesses directed toward “internal” populations defined as Other, from racism to eugenics and genocide practices. And at the same time, Dean insists on the possibility to strictly delimit liberalism from illiberalism and from authoritarian nonliberal practices of governing, which he defines as governing practices seeking “to operate through obedient rather than free subjects or, at a minimum, endeavor to neutralize opposition to authority” (131). It is immediately evident that this definition and this distinction adopt as natural liberalism’s definition of freedom as negative and use such liberal self-definitions to feed the theorist’s desire for liberal rule as expressed in the clear-cut distinctions between liberalism (good governing) and everything else that is

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nonliberal (bad governing). Dean’s free/unfree and liberal/nonliberal taxonomies, therefore, ignore that liberal citizenship presupposes a strictly regulated “space of freedom” for the subject and that liberalism’s toleration of dissent is confined to those spaces and bounded by specific and incontestable notions of contract, work, self-reliance, market choice, private property, inheritance rules, and so on. Therefore, Dean decides to ignore that liberalism always-already contains certain citizens whose dissent, or whose sheer presence, it does not tolerate. Moreover, by upholding those dichotomies, Dean ignores his own previous insight that if what Foucault (1998) calls the “effective history” of liberalism is never free of such “excesses,” then “illiberalisms” are neither atypical nor an exaggeration of liberal apparatuses, but constitute them. For example, in a historical analysis of liberal rule, one would be hard pressed to sustain the argument that (neo)colonialism is an abnormality of liberalism rather than a “nonliberal” form that is constitutive of liberalism throughout modern history. And if liberalism, since Malthus, utilizes eugenics as a constant inspiration for its biopolitics, it is similarly puzzling that Dean both posits eugenics as the logical conclusion of a certain type of liberal biopolitical logic and affirms that eugenics, especially in the form of sterilization or confinement of the feeble-minded, the criminal, or the poor, cannot be accommodated by a liberal concept of freedom and thus cannot exist easily within a liberal rationality. Dean’s use of Chinese antinatalist policies as an example of nonliberal rule is similarly based on an ideal-type logic at odds with his analyses of effective liberal policies. Why is this rule nonliberal2 in Dean’s opinion? Quite simply, because it does not rely on the aspirations, choices, or capacities of the individual liberal subject. Because it attempts to unite “market-style economic norms with biopolitical ones” while entertaining ambitions to know and regulate all—a pastoralism considered preliberal in governmentality studies (144). All three points are incongruous coming from Dean. First, the coincidence between the liberal subject’s techniques of the self and the governmental ambitions in the Western states should be analyzed as a successful translation between governmental rationalities and our capacity, as liberal subjects, to imagine self-governing, rather than asserted as governmental respect of individual freedom. Second, it is nothing short of astounding that Dean exempts the economy from being a form of biopolitics and upholds it as an autonomous field, whose natural functioning must not be interfered with by any governing qualifying as “good.” Third, as already mentioned, it is rather tricky to uphold a strict opposition between liberalism and pastoralism. As Dean himself argues, elements

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of discipline and sovereignty are not eliminated by biopolitics but made even more necessary within liberalism; thus liberalism always nurtures pastoral ambitions and always contains pastoral elements. While Dean’s decision to illustrate nonliberalism using China, a traditional Other of Western liberalism and civilization, rather than using, say, United States liberal laws concerning gay marriage or abortion, is theoretically rather untactful. The questions that remain unanswered in this account are as follows: Why, short of adopting a metaphysical, transcendent, and universal definition of freedom, is the liberal engineering of freedom different or superior to alternative forms of freedom? Is freedom the concept we should mobilize to explain the difference between a liberal citizen punished for not finding work, for not paying child support, for being unmarried, or, indeed, for being identified governmentally as racial, gendered, or homosexual and a Chinese citizen punished for having too many children? Is freedom that which clarifies the difference between the compulsively minute, exhaustive, permanent, and subjectivity-shaping policing of the body in liberalism and such “nonliberal” governmental policing of childbearing? Is it less legitimate to forbid the entire population from having a second child than to forbid the liberal Others from reproducing at all? In fact, if governing is an always failed project, one that permanently fails its regulatory aims,3 then isn’t “illiberal” governmental regulation less strict than the relentless (self-)assessment of the liberal subject? Must we, then, continue to sanction the boundary between liberal and illiberal? Or rather admit that “illiberalism” is an intrinsic part of “liberalism,” while classifying a type of governing as liberal or not only makes sense once we accept as true the liberal definitions of state, power, freedom, or society? Dean’s persistence in upholding a liberal/nonliberal distinction founded on freedom places liberal freedom and rationality somewhere outside the “effective” rationalities and practices of liberalism, and therefore reiterates the possibility of two liberalisms: one ideal and the other effective. But how can a governmentality theorist justify the ontological status of an ideal liberalism that is nowhere encountered, not in the writings of the classical liberals and even less in the biopolitical technologies of the liberal democracies? And where will such a theorist hope to find liberal freedom in its pure form, uncontaminated by nonliberalism? Dean is at his most acute when accepting that modern politics cannot dissociate the sovereign elements of territory, blood, and death from its biopolitics and, therefore, that biopolitical racism is bound to remain an element of contemporary biopolitics, one deeply

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inscribed in “the elements by which we are compelled to think about and imagine states and their population and seek to govern them” (145). But, surprisingly, he also suggests (143) the absence of logical or necessary continuity between biopolitical terror (for example, genocide) and the political rationalities we employ today in liberal democracies. It is this understanding of othering as an exceptional event, atypical of liberalism, that makes Dean preserve the theoretically and politically constraining boundary between liberalism and illiberalism. *

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There are already a few theorists who attempt to assess critically the “governmentality” approach all the while remaining cognizant of the analytical horizons it opens. I shall brief ly discuss one such critique, an article on the relation between governmentality studies and politically relevant critique by Pat O’Malley, Lorna Weir, and Clifford Shearing (O’Malley et al. 1997). The paper argues that the critical potential of the governmentality studies has been thwarted by those studies’ exclusive focus on “rationality of government” understood as the political rulers’ framing of the nature, functions, and proper forms assumed by governing and on “programmes of government” in the form in which they are elaborated at this level—white papers, discussion papers, manuals, evaluation reports, and so on, in a word state policy texts. This focus on the “mentalities of the rulers” (510) works to exclude the “messy” moments of implementation of the program and implicitly the transformations, deviations, errors, miscalculations, reappropriations, and resistances that are inevitable whenever the technical details of a governmental savoir encounter “reality.” In other words, the authors argue that governmentality studies ignore that error and contestation, both among rulers and between them and the ruled, are not distinct from, but a constitutive part of the governmental program, while the focus on savoirs of such governmentality studies wrongly assumes that it is possible to capture the governmental program in some pure moment in which it exists, in all its fullness, at the level of governmental thinking, between its various moments of failure, (re)evaluation, and (re)implementation (1997, 512). Poignantly, the authors also notice that the field of governmentality studies has a tendency to schematize and overabstract, generating ideal typifications and describing overall logics that, as Lorna Weir (cited in O’Malley, 504) argues, often represent little more than “systematized self-representations of rule.” And they are right indeed when pointing out that the governmentality

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field’s ignoring of postcolonial, race, queer, or feminist critical analyses is crucially reducing its analytical potential (506). Equally relevant is their critique of governmentality studies for aiming to perform a “diagnostic,” since the “cost to existence” of liberalism would need a way more thorough investigation of the effects of liberalism as revealed by the “ ‘messy actualities’ of social relations” (509). Finally, the various authors in the field of governmentality are hold to task for their reluctance to adopt a critical lexicon, prompting O’Malley et al. to perceptively conclude that, as long as they do not aim for a different angle of analysis, governmentality studies might be consigned to political irrelevance and degenerate into “ritualized and repetitive accounts of ‘governing’ in increasingly diverse contexts” (514). Those are cognizant and timely critiques of the field of governmentality. I would, however, like to bring further elements into those critiques and, against the authors, argue that the causes for the potential irrelevance of the field are not entirely those identified in the article. Or, to phrase more sternly, that their critique partly misunderstands the purpose and nature of the critique of political governing as performed by a governmentality approach. To start with, despite the authors’ assurance that they consciously avoided falling into simplistic humanism, something of this humanism recurrently seeps into their study in the form of an understanding of contestation and resistance as fully autonomous from the governing apparatuses. If, as the authors observe, resistance to governing programs needs critical analysis, I would reiterate my argument that this is so only to the extent that the subjectivity of the governed emerges in strict relation to those programs—that is, to the extent that resistance is symptomatic of the power relations that make possible certain identities in a certain place and time. This understanding of subjectivization precludes making the empirical analysis of resistances into the only authentic moment of critical analysis. On the contrary, subjectivization—and thus the possibility of resistance—can be analyzed critically in a variety of locations, including in contemporary “truth discourses.” From this perspective, Nikolas Rose’s analysis of the processes of subjectivity formation within contemporary governmental networks (1998, 1999a, 1999b) are poignant critiques of both subjectivization and the possibility of resistance that do not requiring further empirical validation of the ethnomethodological or anthropological type. Then, the investigation of mentalities of rules can be a poignant analysis of those discourses that shape social reality and that always transcend any one individual and social group, especially so if we accept that governmental

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discourses do not operate against but as a particular codification of “social” discourses. While resistances might represent one of the elements that make “reality” inertial for liberal apparatuses, upholding them as the sine qua non element of critical analysis represents an unjustified slide from studying the emergence of the subject at the intersection of various power relations and into a brand of humanism that tries to extol prediscursive agency, as well as into a form of analysis that upholds as unambiguous the distinction between the “theoretical” and the “empirical.” Thus, while contemporary political critique must equally address governing and self-governing and most of all the relation between them, O’Malley and collaborators seem to approach the subject and the state as two full identities that precede their governmental relationship. This is evident in a series of assertions in the article: for example, the authors believe that ignoring resistance represents an exclusion of “social relations” from governmental analysis, making one ask of them the same question they address governmentality studies: “Where precisely can we hope to observe ‘social relations’ in pure, empirical state? Aren’t ‘social relations’ and ‘reality’ the object of any form of analysis of power and knowledge, from the archival study of carceral systems, of sexuality or of the family to the most abstracted discussion of genealogy and discourse? And isn’t equating ‘social analysis’ with ‘empirical analysis’ also upholding the very same dichotomies—state/civil society, subject/ power, text/reality, and indeed material/ideal—that the authors try to distance themselves from?” The same dichotomous understanding makes the authors affirm that “social relations” cannot be captured in a critical manner without representing “diversity” (or “social variation,” as the authors term it), without, that is, recognizing the multiplicity of voices and discourses both within rule and not aligned with it (505). I would contend that using diversity as the norm against which good analysis is assessed unwittingly reproduces the central tropes of the contemporary governing apparatuses, thus acts to shield the foundational assumptions of those apparatuses from critical analysis. And that diversity and difference are not empirical or ontological givens, or an unproblematic “good,” but discursive elements whose construction is in acute need of analysis and whose tactical polyvalence allows their use for an entire range of political purposes and with various effects. Liberal apparatuses, as this analysis has tried to argue, constantly build and legitimize their power relations and their knowledge practices in relation to the problem of diversity and difference, understood both as a given to be protected

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and a goal to be achieved. Thus, liberal constructions of difference and diversity are more often than not used to mask the otherings— including in their racial and eugenic forms—that found and legitimize contemporary liberalism. Thinking that by simply adding diversity to our already existing analytical tools, we will reveal contemporary governing apparatuses in their true light without analyzing the precise forms assumed within liberal apparatuses by diversity and difference, will rather impede an acute analysis of liberalism. And will demonstrate an ongoing desire for the constructions of difference as diversity, multiculturalism, tolerance, culture, ethnicity, or freedom of speech produced by the liberal apparatuses themselves. I would also suggest that problematic in governmentality studies is not their ignoring of the “multiplicity of voices” present in liberalism, as the authors’ romanticized upholding of a notion of “social reality” that exists outside and against the state suggests, but rather their lack of interest in investigating the constancy of certain liberal voices, what this analysis termed the foundational assumptions of liberalism, as well as their obstinate limiting of political analysis to the boundaries of the nation-state. It is therefore debatable that the aims of political critique should be those identified by the authors: to develop strategies for “selecting and evaluating among elements of new liberal programmes [those] that may be turned to progressive purposes” (513), to intervene so as to “def lect programmes onto more open trajectories,” or to reshape liberal apparatuses and programs (510). This assessment once again subsumes itself to the dominant liberal definitions of the scope and aim of politics being either pluralist competition within the liberal governing framework or the progressive reform of a liberal governing system in which dominations do not result from structural characteristics of the system but are temporary and rectifiable abnormalities. The latter stance, evidently, reiterates the existence of a clear dichotomy between an “ideal liberalism” that is a sound and desirable tool for political emancipation, prosperity, and equality and an “effective liberalism” that is an imperfect but perfectible ref lection of the former at social reality level. How, then, can we channel the shortcomings of those forms of theorizing so as to open new lines of attack for a radical rethinking of contemporary liberal governing? By pointing out their inconsistent use of “freedom,” one that ignores the redefinitions of the concept of freedom as a power relation and as tool of governing, the very redefinition that makes governmentality studies so relevant. By pointing out that an unref lexive use of language reproduces the central self-understanding of liberal government as coinciding with its ideal-type. By replacing

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their downplaying of liberal specificity with a historically aware analysis of liberal apparatuses that is attentive to how governmental reality, like any reality, is made real through the reiteration of its foundational discourses, thus is attentive to the presence in those apparatuses of recurrent historical discourses about “truth” and “the good.” By showing that liberal ref lexivity that is, the way liberal apparatuses identify an event as constituting a governmental problem and devise a response to it, is always structured by such foundational assumptions. And by exposing how governmentality studies’ stubborn ignoring of the effects of neoliberal subjectivization practices on both their internal and their external Others leads to politicotheoretical sterility. *

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At this point we can ask once again: Is there any way in which we can divide political governing into liberal and illiberal? Or is this liberalism against which we assess “effective” governing a myth and a desire that exists purely at the level of the intention of either the theorist or the governing experts? Is persisting in upholding a liberalism/illiberalism dichotomy in fact a sign of an impoverished political imagination that cannot imagine fulfillment and freedom but as defined by Enlightenment and as framed by the liberal-democratic institutions and codes of rules? Is our persistent talk about liberalism a ref lection of our desire to protect our political systems from an analysis of what they do that will make untenable organizing dichotomies we still seem to hold dear: freedom/unfreedom, power/agency or power/authentic subjectivity, state/civil society, silencing/diversity, or totalitarianism/ difference? This seems to be the case since, once we analyze liberal apparatuses as systems of social relations, we observe sets of foundational assumptions that organize grids of intelligibility, power relations, governmental technologies, thus liberalism itself. A move toward thinking governing and the world in a more politically imaginative way might require us to abandon liberal organizing dichotomies and theoreticalpolitical investments and to accept that investing our desire in liberalism and its political order might make us blind to the way in which brutality is reiterated with every reiteration of liberal sovereignty. Moreover, while the present analysis is itself guilty of remaining confined to the internal contradictions of the U.S., and Western, governmental regimes and the critique of their politico-ontological polarities, our analyses of governing will remain incomplete as long as they do not engage fully with the dichotomy “Western liberal

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democracy/non-Western, nondemocratic regimes.” This West/Rest separation that structures contemporary governmental power/ knowledge systems translates the “free/un-free” dichotomy in the form “modern/premodern” and “civilized/uncivilized.” It is nothing less than politically pernicious to persist in a representation of reality in which liberalism and in general the part of the world identified as the modern West are characterized by their ref lexivity and politicohistorical dynamism, while the nonliberal “Rest” is characterized by authoritarian paternalism, tradition, self-same identities and practices and thus sociohistorical stagnation. Deconstructing this dichotomy is foundational to any effort that aims to transcend the impoverished and ultimately sterile nature of the political debate founded on it, while continuing to equate substantive Western governing with freedom and democracy only serves to further calcify structures of power and knowledge whose dislocation should, in fact, be the crucible of our politico-theoretical efforts. Political Malaise and Desiring U.S. Liberalism The questions that arise at the end of this analysis are: Can we rest assured that the power relations we find in need of fundamental restructuring— patriarchy, misogyny, racism, homophobia, eugenics, neocolonialism, in a word othering—will be eliminated when the expert-liberal prophesy of attainment of pure universalism by the state and full knowledge by state sciences is fulfilled? Should we patiently wait for that moment in which the liberal tools of political emancipation—legal rights, representative democracy, multiculturalism, tolerance—will become same with their ideal-type and definitively eliminate domination, oppression, exclusion, inequality and othering? And the answer offered was: hoping that liberalism will redress the consequences of its processes of othering is possible only if we systematically ignore the mechanisms through which identities are formed, reproduced, and addressed politically within the liberal circuits of governing. Once those mechanisms are analyzed critically it becomes obvious that liberal apparatuses reconfigure the identity of the Other to mask the ontological brutality through which it is formed (for example, substitute culture for race or multiculturalism for segregation), while reshaping the political claims of these Others to reproduce the othering processes that makes them inferior. The political tools of rights, multiculturalism, political representation, pluralism, “civil society”-based organizations like

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nongovernmental organizations or any other “independent” organizations, positive discrimination, and so on, insofar as they all operate within the liberal order of reality, are the tools through which the ontological brutality of othering is made to seem detached politically from the structure of liberalism, is represented as surviving exclusively in the allegedly apolitical “private,” and thus is reproduced as the foundation of liberal subjectivization. Even more so in a polity, such as the United States, that demands the dissolution of the state while simultaneously massively investing its conducts into the liberal governmental order. Here, the formative relationship between liberalism and the nation-state is ignored and liberalism is represented as a universal politico-institutional system symbolized by liberty, equality, prosperity, progress, democracy, free markets—the very same representation that permits the unpunished proliferation of the physical and metaphysical violences of liberalism, from neocolonialism and human trafficking to international debt, structural adjustment policies, and maquilladoras. *

*

*

Doing politics within a space bounded by terms such as rights, law, state/civil society divide, financial responsibility, client servicing, transparency, accountability, and so on makes conf lict into a bureaucratic matter, that is, into a technocratic struggle over the correct procedure. An example is the way in which politics in North America have been, for the past 100 years or so, confined to the debate “welfarism versus conservative libertarianism,” in its various guises like equality vs. freedom, state vs. market, individual autonomy vs. state planning, or universalism vs. targeted social policies. This reduction is symptomatic of the state of contemporary politics, in which older alternatives such as “liberal social redistribution vs. radical social transformation” are replaced by “some liberal social redistribution or liberalism with no redistribution at all.” Social change is completely erased from the spectrum of U.S. “left” contemporary political thinking and replaced by the political goal of resource redistribution to the extent that this redistribution does not hamper economic growth or threatens the social standing of the well-off—in other words, social redistribution as long as it does not threaten the sociopolitical status quo. In the context of the liberal discursive practice, then, the political “right” promulgates an increasingly narrow economic formulation of freedom and simultaneously manages to claim “freedom’s ground as its own,”4 while the

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“left” adopts a similarly narrow economic definition of equality and a state-administered “economic justice” combined with a panoply of private liberties (Brown 1995, 10). The politically desiccated nature of this choice is masked by the f lourishes of interminable technocraticbureaucratic debates, as illustrated by the vast amounts of resources being poured, since the turn of the nineteenth century, into demonstrating scientifically the effects of various social policy interventions on welfare dependency, on marital behaviors, on health or on reproduction. In the meantime, until we sort out scientifically the truth of those matters, the investigation of the ways in which liberalism stimulates racism, misogyny, war, famine, and immiseration and of the possibilities of transcending liberal order has been put aside. And as long as the debate is fixed within this welfare vs. no welfare dichotomy, liberal brutality is propagated through our everyday governing. Solving the problems of liberal governing would require a transcendence of its foundational assumptions that welfarism cannot achieve (also see chapter 4). *

*

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I was arguing above that, whenever acting according to her most selfevident intuitions, the liberal subject reiterates the power relations that construct her as Other and inferior. This might explain the often limited political ref lexivity we show when placed in extreme situations, since in those moments of crisis, when one’s self hood is under threat, we fall back on the most fundamental and seemingly unequivocal nodal points of our subjectivity (gender, sex, culture, ethnicity, religion, and so on). The recent 2008 electoral developments in U.S. liberalism have shown how deeply anchored into the structures of our self hood are the liberal definitions of political struggle as synonymous with representative democracy and legal rights. By then there was without doubt a political malaise at work in the United States. Unfortunately, in this moment of crisis, people once again turned toward the most self-evident conducts, liberal electoral politics, precisely the politics that according to this research will further othering. The massive display of electoral enthusiasm reconfirmed the continuing faith the U.S. populace has in liberal electoral politics, even in the face of their continuing failure to alter the makeup of liberal apparatuses in the past 150 years, a faith that is also a fear to confront the foundational dominations liberalism is founded on. It reconfirmed the liberal subject’s desire to believe the liberal stories of progress, civilization, modernity, equality, fraternity,

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and prosperity—to allow liberal history to take her on its wings and f ly her toward the “good” and the “truth.” And it reconfirmed our humanist and patriarchal desire for a “history of great men,” for an exceptional leader that will emancipate us. This discussion is not in any manner a comment on President Obama’s political merit; quite on the contrary, it suggests that, whatever his merit is, it is largely marginal in shaping the U.S. liberal things to come; nor is it meant to dismiss the popular hope placed in Obama, but rather to wonder if this hope and joy, which I read as a sign of political malaise, weren’t channeled into a sterile form of political action. And that President Obama’s political opponents appeared to some of us as vaudevillian villains is similarly irrelevant for a discussion of liberal governing in the United States, unless as a reminder of the grotesque and violence liberal electoral politics nurture, and often unleash on populations, under the banner of democracy. If anything, those almost self-parodying conservatives managed to simplify an already rudimentary political scene to the level of pantomime Manichean conf licts, further channeling the political fears and hopes of an anxious population toward liberal apparatuses. A channeling that rekindled those apparatuses’ pretenses of universality and democracy: the recent elections provided fodder for the U.S. patriotic machinery of propaganda that never tires of repeating the mantra of U.S. exceptionalism. U.S. news channels once again proudly posited the United States as the shining light of world democracy and, mobilizing the colonial arrogant ignorance that historically founds liberalism, claimed that U.S. elections changed world history and represented a great night on earth. I would rather interpret the significance of the 2008 U.S. elections to be that they confirmed how difficult it is for a liberal subject to transcend an understanding of the social founded on othering, in this particular case on racialized othering. The elections were significant, then, because they represented a translation into electoral terms of the politics of race in the United States—a sign of how in the United States, despite the permanent liberal denial of its structural racism, the political energies and fears of the population were massively polarized by those “inexistent” forms of othering. That racial and racist problematiques structure electoral politics in the United States to this extent, and the exceptional importance of Obama for the majority of the electorate was undoubtedly due to his epidermal nuance, is of course a symptom that race is a central nodal point of liberal reality. Unfortunately, as long as those political problematiques remain confined to liberal political tools—electoral politics and legal rights—they

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might miss the political point. First, I cannot restrain from reading the political significance of the popular hope placed in Obama as resulting from the naive idea that the (black) Other is free from power and can, single-handedly, carry the United States toward a better sociopolitical arrangement. Second, if contemporary liberalism cannot function but through racist, patriarchal, pauperist, and eugenic othering, then no radical solution to those political struggles can come from within liberalism. Here is an example: discussing the relationship established between the colonizer and the colonized, Franz Fanon (1986, 110) argues that once the colonized meets “the white man’s eyes,” the only possibility for defining the colonized is within the antagonistic relation with his “whiteness” and its truths, morals, history, culture, achievements, and universals. The black man’s [sic] subjectivity is possible only as the dark mirroring of the white: insular, contingent, ahistorical, atemporal, primitive, and so on (Fanon 1986, 32). This brutal othering makes Fanon argue “I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed” (Fanon 1986, 116). What is important here is that the first action of those defined as Other cannot be anything but a reaction to this fixating gaze: either become universal (white) or remain particular (ethnic/black) (Fanon 1986, 36–37). This simple observation captures the absurdity of the relationship between white and nonwhite in contemporary liberalism and the impossible situation the nonwhite subjectivity is put in: once othered, she is refused both ontological positions. She cannot become white no matter what, since, after all, her self is racial otherness. And she cannot take refuge into blackness either without reproducing the racist taxonomies of the colonial gaze. The self-racializing of the African American community, while put forward as a political solution by a particular environment in the 1960s, presently severs African American identity from its formative relation with the white identity and thus unwittingly selfdefines this identity using the colonial stereotyping of the primitive African and constructs its political position and ethnic pride around what, in liberal discourse, makes it inferior: ethnicity, naturalness, telluric life energy, rhythm, musicality, sensuality, orality, penis size, hair texture, and so on. President Obama illustrated the other arm of this impossible bind of the nonwhite subjectivity when he refused to make race into an electoral issue and demanded to be assessed as a U.S. citizen, that is, as a liberal politician and bourgeois subject, a law-abiding, religious, family, patriotic man. Obama’s tactic was to become universal, a requirement of liberal politics, by claiming a bourgeois self hood. However, we refused him this universalism: We identified him as a

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black man and as a black politician. We reminded him that he cannot be universal, since his self is racialized and it was largely into a black man, not a bourgeois politician, that we have put our hopes. And as long as we continue thinking of Obama as a “black leader,” as opposed to a leader, we shall reproduce all the violences of liberal othering. More precisely, we shall reproduce the “sliding games” of liberalism revealed by Steve Martinot’s analysis of the relation between the universal pretentions of white European ontologies and the construction of race in the United States. In his famous abolitionist ruminations “Notes on the State of Virginia” (see chapter 3), Thomas Jefferson grants black people accession to the status of “human” only in order to posit them as inferior to the whites in all respects of his taxonomies of subjectivity, thus as less than fully human. As Martinot (2003, 5) observes, Jefferson “must assume an inherent equality [in humanness] in order to assert an inherent inequality . . . The assumption of a hegemonic position from which to grant recognition thus withholds legitimacy in the very act of granting it, because it has appropriated that legitimacy as its own to grant.” The same tactic is at work some 200 years later, when the legitimacy of Martin Luther King is granted not to a “leader” but to a “black leader.” Classifying King as a “black leader” means that he is recognized by the white establishment but that his legitimacy, as bestowed by this establishment, is valid exclusively outside the white political community that continues to represent itself as universal (that is, liberal). King’s legitimacy is valid only within his particular community. Those practices have remained unchanged in the contemporary political field of U.S. elections. The imbrications between liberal governing and racism are in danger of being further obscured by an unref lexive investment of hope in President Obama. Which is not to deny that, in the long-term, this election might turn out to be a very interesting event, maybe especially in terms of challenging the self-understanding of some of the more oppressed African Americans and in terms of making radical militants even more attentive to the insidiousness of liberalism, seeing that U.S. liberalism just invalidated the political myth that “never will the white man allow a black man to become president of the United States.” *

*

*

I will conclude with a hypothesis that might start explaining the persistent desire for liberalism of the liberal subject. When the citizens of the

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Western world imagine themselves as free and autonomous by comparison with citizens living in any other type of government, it is because they imagine themselves as making choices that are unconstrained by a higher authority, especially choices related to “how to live one’s life.” As opposed to, say, societies defined as authoritarian—with communism and Islam the favorite scapegoats of U.S. liberalism—where the state imposes on the population rules for good living, in the Western world we are free of any such imposition, free of any directive about how to live our life. However, once we accept that freedom can never represent the absence of regulation and that subjectivities arise from power relations, we need to ask, Isn’t the illusion that we are free more insidious politically than the overt regime of “shaping of the self ” that so-called authoritarian regimes impose? Isn’t the liberal subject bound to its government in very intimate ways by the belief that whatever she does is out of freedom, comes from within, and is a personal, unconstrained choice? Is it that this self-assurance makes us invest our desire for freedom precisely in the mechanisms through which our subjectivities, and freedoms, are regulated? I would suggest that our desire for the liberal-capitalist regime is determined by the potential this regime has to f latter its subjects. Liberalism validates the proper bourgeois individual’s most self-evident, intimate, and pleasurable choices as always good since natural. Liberal biopower pretends it does not operate in terms of a normative code, but, by weaving the very fabric of one’s “soul”, it supplants the need for external injunction: the bourgeois subject self-disciplines. The result is that the private conducts of the bourgeois self are precisely the conducts liberalism demands from its good citizen—the very conducts that liberalism nurtures as “natural,” be they related to consumption, competition, sexuality, gender, reproduction, family, or health and the body. Once the liberal “grammars of life” are adopted as one’s own grammar of life (see chapter 1) and, moreover, as one’s own freedom, the critical potential of the liberal citizen is reduced and her acceptance and trust of the current political forms of government enhanced. Since the late eighteenth century, and through biopolitical strategies of which a few have been mentioned in this book, liberal apparatuses succeeded in making themselves an intimate part of ourselves. Thus, because of the particular genealogy of Western liberalism, and maybe unlike any other citizen, the liberal citizen develops a deep and honest personal identity investment in the liberal regime, a feat accomplished only by the most successful systems of governmental subjectivization. And what else could a governing regime ask for, but such a deep connection between its faith and the

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self-esteem of its subjects, such that the critique of our governmental regimes is at the same time a critique of who we are, of the deepest resorts of our self hood? Conversely, when liberalism hails itself as the best form of governing available, its aura extends to the liberal subject: exalting liberalism allows one to think of oneself as good, free, superior, emancipated, self-ref lexive, and dynamic. Interestingly, if this is accurate, then liberalism is much more advanced on the path to achieving a brainwashed citizen devoted fully to her government than the illiberal regimes that liberal theory characterizes in terms of such subjects. For the attentive analyst, it is obvious that the stilted, passive “communist man” never existed—the skepticism of the “communist citizen” toward her regime of government and her ability to engage in active strategizing on everyday bases were constant.5 On the contrary, the actively self-encouraged political ignorance and credulity of the bourgeois self are a structural feature of contemporary liberalism. Conclusion Is there an alternative to this political impoverishment that obsessively reiterates trauma, as opposed to attacking the political structures that make it possible; that obsessively nurtures the identities this trauma brings into being, as opposed to deconstructing them; that reinvests desire in the same ineffective and othering political language of rights, choice, freedom? At the most obvious level, this would be a politics focused on contesting both the apparatuses that make possible contemporary identities and the identities they encourage. If those hoping that the liberal apparatuses will emancipate them keep repeating that throwing away their vision—freedom, humanism, progress, modernity, rights, wealth, equality—means making politics impotent, then we probably do need to diagnose this mantra for what it is, political myopia, and start the painstaking effort of moving beyond it. Opening new political spaces necessitates renouncing the security and comfort of the old and known ones and letting go of our familiar and self-gratifying tropes of subjectivity. Thus, my hope is that this research will be another pebble at the foundation of the collective effort of giving some assistance in wearing away certain evidences and commonplaces [ . . . ] to bring it about [ . . . ] that certain phrases can

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no longer be spoken so lightly, certain acts no longer, or at least no longer so unhesitantly performed; to contribute to changing certain things in people’s ways of perceiving and doing things; to participate in this difficult displacement of forms of sensibility and thresholds of tolerance. (Foucault 1991b, 83)


A PPE N DI X

1

List of U.S. Policy Documents Consulted

1. Welfare documents The majority of the documents analysed here are public laws and enrolled bills (that is to say, policy documents ratified by both forums of the U.S. Congress—the Senate and the House of Representatives); it was assumed that those documents ref lect the type of statements considered acceptable in terms of “truth” and “good” by the highest U.S. political forum. The legal documents and enrolled bills relating to welfare and family passed in the seven Congresses (101st to 107th), between 1990 and 2002, were searched in the online Library of Congress at www.thomas. loc.gov and www.gpo.gov between October 2003 and March 2004. In the text, the referencing will take the form (PRWORA 1996; I; 402; (a)(1)(A)(iii)), where the first figure, I, represents the title; the second one, 402, the section; the subsequent ones, (a)(1)(A)(iii), the details of the quote’s location within the section, i.e., paragraph, subparagraph, line. Those being legal documents, their sections are thoroughly coded and thus easy to locate. ASF 1997—Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (H.R. 867). CFSA 1990—Children and Families Service Act of 1990 (H.R. 5135). CADV 1992—Child Abuse, Domestic Violence and Family Services Act of 1992 (S. 838). CSRA 1992—Child Support Recovery Act of 1992 (S. 1002). COAT 1998—Community Opportunities, Accountability and Training and Educational Services Act of 1998 (S. 2206).

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Appendix 1

CWAA 1996—Contract With America Advancement Act of 1996 (H.R. 3136). FAIRA 1996—Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (H.R. 2854). FCIA 1999—Foster Care Independence Act of 1999. FIA 1992—Family Investment Act of 1992 (H.R. 5973). FPA 1992—Family Preservation Act of 1992 (H.R. 3603). HOPE 1996—Housing Opportunity Program Extension Act of 1996. DTA 1989—Drug Test Amendment of 1989. EAA 1994—Goals 2000: Educate America Act of 1994. EOA 1990—Economic Opportunity Act of 1990 (H.R. 4916). FIA 1992—Family Investment Act of 1992 (H.R. 5973). FPA 1992—Family Preservation Act of 1992 (H.R. 3603). JTR 1992—Job Training Reform Amendments of 1992 (H.R. 3033). MLD 1990—Mickey Leiland Memorial Domestic Hunger Relief Act of 1990 (S. 2489). OBRA 1993—Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 (H.R. 2264). PRWORA 1996—Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (H.R. 3734). PSSF 2001—Promoting Safe and Stable Families Amendments of 2001 (H.R. 2873). RA 1992—Revenue Act of 1992 (H.R. 11). RWRA 1994—Real Welfare Reform Act of 1994 (H.R. 4566). SWOA 1994—School to Work Opportunities Act of 1994 (H.R. 2884). NEWA 1991—Nontraditional Employment for Women Act of 1991 (S. 367). WDMA 1991—Welfare Dependency Measurement and Assessment Act of 1991 (S. 1256). WDA 1992—Welfare Dependency Act of 1992 (S. 1256). WIA 1998—Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (H.R. 1385). WRA 1994—Welfare Reform Act of 1994 (S. 2134). WRDA 1992—Welfare Reform Demonstrations Act of 1992 (H.R. 6083).

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WWA 1994—Welfare to Work Act of 1994 (S. 2057). WTI—Working Towards Independence 2002. 2. Health promotion documents HHS 2002—Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Programs at HHS, Fact Sheet, available at http: //www.hhs.gov/news/press/ 2002pres/prevent/html. HP 1991—Healthy People 2000: National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Rockville, MD, 1991, Report No. DHSS/ PUB/PHS–91-50212. HP 1995—Healthy People 2000 Midcourse Review and 1995 Revisions, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995, available at www.odphp.osophs. dhhs.gov/pubs/hp2000/pdf/midcours, accessed May 2003. HP 2000—Healthy People 2010: Understanding and Improving Health, 2nd ed., U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, November 2000, DC 204029382. HP 2001—Healthy People 2000 Final Review, National Center for Health Statistics, Hyatsville, Maryland: Public Health Service, 2001, Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 76-641496. HPHC 2001—Healthy People in Healthy Communities: A Community Planning Guide Using Healthy People, 2010, Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office of Public Health and Science, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, February 2001. BS 2002—Brief Summaries of Medicare and Medicaid: Title XVIII and Title XIX of the Social Security Act as of November 1, 2001, prepared by Hoffman Jr., E. D., Klees, B. S., and Curtis, C. A., Office of the Actuary, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Baltimore, MD. THI 2003—Trends in Health Insurance Coverage by Poverty Status among Persons under 65 Years of Age: United States, 1997–2002, by Cohen, R. A., Ni, H., and Hao, C., USDHSS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Division of Data Services, Hyattsville, MD, available on the CDC website.

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Appendix 1

CTHA 2002—Chartbook of Trends in the Health of the Americans, Health, United States, available at www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nus/ nus02cht.pdf, accessed May 2003. DP 2002—Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Programs at HHS, HHS Fact Sheet, USDHSS, available at http://www.hhs.gov/ news/press/2002pres/prevent.html, accessed September 17, 2002.

A PPE N DI X

2

Questions Used to Assess Pregnancy Intentions in Major U.S. Surveys (from Santelli et al. 2003, 95)

Most of those studies attempt to assess “intendedness” of pregnancy by retrospectively asking a small number of questions about the “wantedness” of a pregnancy. In an attempt to refine this approach, the 1995 NSFG survey included questions relating to pregnancy wantedness, happiness to be pregnant, feelings about getting pregnant, and the partner’s pregnancy intentions, while the 2002 survey subsequently added questions about motivation to avoid pregnancy and about the want to become pregnant with her partner. The 2002 questions exemplified here are therefore the most complete set. The international surveys like the Demographic and Health survey or the CDC-assisted Reproductive Health Surveys ask only one question: • National Survey of Family Growth, 2002 1. Q: Right before you became pregnant with your (nth) pregnancy . . . did you yourself want to have a(nother) baby at any time in the future? A: Yes/Not sure, don’t know/No/ (and in an additional question) Didn’t care 2. Q: . . . Right before this pregnancy began, would you say you probably wanted a(nother) baby at some time in the future or probably not? A: Probably yes/Didn’t care/Probably not

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Appendix 2 3. Q: So right before you became pregnant . . . , you thought you did not want to have (any children/a nth child) at any time in the future; is that correct? A: Correct/Incorrect 4. Q: So would you say you became pregnant too soon, at about the right time, or later than you wanted? A: Too soon/Later/Right time/Didn’t care

• Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, 2002 (mailed survey) Q: Thinking back to just before you got pregnant, how did you feel about becoming pregnant? A: I wanted to be pregnant sooner/I wanted to be pregnant later/I wanted to be pregnant then/I didn’t want to be pregnant then or at any time in the future

A PPE N DI X

3

Measures That Predict Nonmarital First Pregnany and Abortion (from Udry et al. 1996, 114)

All these measures are collected by a 1960s Child Health and Development Study (CHDS) conducted in California. The authors group the measures they decide to use for their correlations into “family characteristics” and “psychosocial characteristics.” The “family characteristics” comprise: — The number of living siblings at home when the daughter was five years of age. — Daughter’s birth order. — Daughter’s scores as age 9–11 on Raven matrices (a standardised non-verbal test of cognitive ability). — Mother’s score on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT, a standardised verbal test of cognitive ability) when the daughter was aged 9–11. — Mother’s assessment of how good a student her daughter was (scale of 5, from excellent to poor). — Mother’s and father’s education. — Father’s age. — Daughter’s PPVT score at age 15–17. — Whether the parent’s marriage intact when the daughter was 9–11 and 15–17 years old.

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Appendix 3

The “psychosocial attributes” are considered to ref lect the daughter’s attitudes, personality and behaviours that are not directly associated with family status. They comprise: — Whether the daughter felt free to disagree with her father at age 15–17 (scale of 5, from always to never). — How strongly she believed at age 15–17 that it was important to be married, to have children, not to be tied down, to obey the law and to be dependable (scale of four, not important at all, not very important, somewhat important and very important). — Whether she was “boyish” at age 9–11, that is to say, described by her mother in terms more commonly used for boys than for girls: truthful (reverse-scored); takes things that do not belong to her; breaks things that belong to others; bullies others; shows off; hides thoughts or feelings; stammers; and seems to relax only at home. — Whether she was temperamental at age nine (based on the mother’s responses to a checklist including among many similar other: fights to get her own way; argues; is fretful; gets mad easily). — Whether she had problems with her parents at age 15–17 (base on the daughter’s reports of how well she got along with each parent; how important she felt she was to each; whether she respected each parent; whether she felt close to her mother; and whether she could stand being around her mother). — Whether she had nightmares and wet her bed at age five (as reported by mothers). Two additional psychosocial measures came from the respondent’s answers to a 1990–1991 questionnaire: — Whether at age 27–30 she engaged in socially undesirable behaviour (smoking cigarettes, drinking, using illegal drugs, or committing minor infractions like traffic violations and shoplifting). — Age at first intercourse.

NOT E S

One Government, Truth, and Subjectivity in a “Post-substance” Reality 1. By “pauperism” I mean the construction of poverty as abnormal and of the poor as the “other” of the normal citizen. 2. This abolition of the “trascendental signified” in the thinking of systems was initiated by a long philosophical tradition, from Marxism to feminism. Its more recent theorizations were elaborated, for example, by Butler (1990), Derrida (1980), Foucault (2002), and Laclau and Mouffe (2001, 107–112). 3. It is precisely the investigation of this process of formation of “Man” as a center of our reality that The Order of Things (Foucault, 1973) proposes to achieve. 4. The later Foucault defines power as preeminently a question of government. According to him, if to govern is “to structure the possible field of action of others,” then the relationships proper to power are not to be discovered in violence, struggle, or voluntary giving away of freedom, but in government (Foucault 1982, 220–222). 5. As Procacci (1991, 157) observes, “reality in relation to the technical details of a governmental apparatus is perceived in all its rigidity, inertia and opacity.” The order of reality fixed by governmental apparatuses is always confronted with that which escapes its grid. 6. For a related discussion of the relationship between the state and the social, or between the molar and the molecular, see Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 223–225). 7. See Brown (1995) for a detailed discussion of the relation between the demands for protection placed on the state and the reproduction of the power relations that make this protection necessary to start with. I will return to this argument in the subsequent chapters. 8. I shall be using “truth,” “knowledge,” and “facts” interchangeably. In a paradigm where the possibility of transcendent truth is denied, the epistemological differences between these terms are themselves abolished. 9. By “welfarism” I understand a particular manner of imagining the social and the “art of governing” it that founds the project of the Western welfare state. The term is therefore meant to designate a certain approach to governing rather than to subsume the specificity and heterogeneity of the welfare apparatus under some totalizing structure or capture all the facets of the welfare state performance. The term is used in a similar sense by Rose and Miller (1992). 10. For this reason, for example, social democrats are forced to uphold Sweden as an ideal of social organization and benevolence, obscuring that Swedish participation in the perpetuation of inequality, exploitation, racism, militaristic domination, and so on is comparable with that of any other Western nation-state.

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Notes

11. I use this terminology to avoid the totalizing structuralist interpretations of history and the social usually ascribed to the episteme by exegesis, to avoid having to refer exclusively to the field of science, to avoid endorsing strong statements about the episteme’s subscription of an entire field of scientific theoretical knowledges, and to place claims at a more modest level than that of the conditions of possibility of all knowledge in a time and space (see Foucault 1973 and Foucault 2002, 211).

Two


1. Used here to encompass a plethora of related terms such as “liberty,” “autonomy,” “independence,” “self-reliance,” or “sovereignty.” 2. Since I refer throughout to contemporary forms of governing in the United States, I shall not insist on a strict differentiation between “liberalism” and “neoliberalism.” Addressing all those forms with the term “liberalism” is also part of the effort to think government as a heterogeneous assemblage of practices, rather than as an ideal-type or as a definite historical phase. 3. For examples of the strictly coterminous nature of bourgeois subjectivity and liberal governing practices, see Brown (1995), Butler (1990, 1993), Dean (1991, 1999), Foucault (1990, 2003, 2007), Rose (1989, 1999), Stoler (1995). 4. It is indeed hard to reconcile Foucault’s enthusiasm for liberalism and his radical critique of governing and self-governing—and of freedom in particular—as technologies of power/ subjectivization (see Hindess 1997, 268–269). 5. I am using “translation” the way Bruno Latour (1987) does, to mean technologies of interest formation that, by means of strategically disposed authoritative truths, direct the subject toward a decision congruent with the “governor’s” goals. These techniques aim to form common modes of perception and to make visible certain events and entities according to particular rhetorics of image or speech (see Rose and Miller 1992, 184). 6. As probably clear, those understandings are indebted to Derrida’s (1978, 278–295, 79–154, and 154–169; also see May 1997, 77–129) critique of the possibility of the full presence, and especially as reinterpreted by Judith Butler (1990, 1993). 7. As Judith Butler (1990, 184) argues, constructing the I against the Other is the specific effect of an ontology that postulates a subject endowed with transcendent agency/identity and that enables the whole artificial set of questions about the knowability and recoverability of the Other. 8. It is understood that the universalism of the normal liberal citizen is an artifice: feminist and Marxist analyses exposed liberal theory’s universalistic prototype as being based on a specific historical and geographic model and unmasked this neutral, universal citizen as being, in the United States, quite specifically male, white, Anglo-Saxon, and prosperous. 9. Creating scapegoats might, indeed, be considered a characteristic of any process of governing and even of any identity formation, rather than as specific of liberalism. This is not the question the present analysis asks, though, since its aim is not to present liberalism as exceptional but to expose its techniques of power.

Three


1. Henry Luis Gates Jr. (1985) provides a very similar selection of texts from those masters of Enlightenment.

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2. Beate Jahn (2005) shows how contemporary liberal theorists continue to go back to Kant to frame “proper” international relations. 3. It is also interesting to see how the Enlightenment apparatuses of truth reiterate, regulate, and circulate statements: most of those theories draw on the travel accounts of Thomas Cook and Jean-Baptiste Labat. Immanuel Kant borrows from Comte de Buffon and David Hume for “proofs” on the character of the Negro. Johann Freidrich Blumenbach relies on Kant, Buffon, and Carl von Linné. Buffon as well as the Encyclopédie rely for evidence on Alexis Littré, and Jacob Winslow, while Thomas Jefferson relies once again on Hume, and so on (Eze 1997, 7). 4. Many of those authors attempt to think their own prejudice critically. Moreover, their racial thinking of inferiority sometimes allows itself to vacillate, a hesitancy completely erased by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century biologizing of difference in the European truth discourses. For example, Hume (in Eze 1997, 30–31) argues, “The vulgar are apt to carry all national characters to extremes; and once having established it as a principle, . . . they will admit of no exception, but comprehend every individual under the same censure.” Immediately after condemning such generalizations, he proceeds to declare that it is nevertheless not wrong to state that the common people in Switzerland are more honest than those in Ireland and to establish the racialized hierarchies already mentioned in the text. Hegel (126–127) equally warns that philosopher’s preconceptions determine his reading of data, just before stating the ontological inferiority of the Africans. 5. Foucault’s examples are the race conf licts between Gaul nobility and German monarchy in France or between Normans and Saxons in England. 6. Guillaumin is at pains to dissociate the theory of race from racist ideology and to place the analytical onus on the latter: while theories of race construct differences and hierarchies according to various criteria, they all assume race as given, as an “immediate datum of the senses” (1995, 36). Gobineau, for example, does not use race as a scientific concept but as a self-evident truth in no need of proof. Racist ideology, characterized by hypostasis of race and biophysical syncretism, makes the experience of race spontaneous, natural, and selfevident (35). 7. Foucault (2003) does take into the account the colonial endeavor, but he considers that the state racism developed in Europe is used to justify colonial genocide, rather than acknowledging the central role the colonial experience plays in the development of the ideas of race. He thus positions Europe as the center from which power irradiates, a positioning he would surely have preferred to avoid. 8. In fact, Stoler (1995, 26) points out that the colonial discourses of race and sexuality precede the similar developments in the center by 200 years: not only the 1600s segregation in Virginia but also the Dutch regulation of status in the East Indies in relation to religion and color some 50 years later precede and inform the framing of race and sexuality as defining of the bourgeois self in the European core. 9. The governmental documents use “unplanned”, “unintended,” and “unwanted” pregnancy interchangeably. 10. The more recent Healthy People 2010 strategy asserts that although the proportion of unintended pregnancies decreased from 57% to 49% between 1987 and 1994, “unintended pregnancy remains a common problem, and further progress is needed” (HP 2000, 10). 11. Figures such as Buffon, Thomas Jefferson or Charles Darwin insisted both on the unacceptable nature of slavery and on the inferiority of the nonwhites, with the black race at the bottom of their hierarchies. 12. My account of those historical developments, since aiming to provide a general background, is very selective. For comprehensive accounts of the government of gender and reproduction in the United States, see for example Gordon (1994, 2002a) and Petchesky (1986).

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13. This organization was the precursor of the PTA (Parents and Teachers Association), which is still considered as having a crucial role in the analyses of contemporary U.S. social by authors displaying a—sentimental and analytical—nostalgia for the “lost community.” 14. A vast amount of studies establish what health promotion is, what its methods and objectives are, and so on; for example, Abelin et al. (1987), Bunton (1992), Caplan (1998), and Downie et al. (2000). Some of those studies attempt a more critical approach, such as Davison and Davey-Smith (1999), Kelly and Charlton (1999), Bunton et al. (1999), Peterson and Lupton (1996), and Stevenson and Burke (1991). 15. Psychobabble-inspired motivational sloganeering seems to be taken seriously as a governmental tool in those strategies: “our physical and emotional well-being is depending upon measures that only we, ourselves, can affect” (HP 1991, the letter of the DHHS secretary); “a fuller measure of health, a better quality of life, is within our personal grasp” (HP 1991: 1); “but, first, take a moment to congratulate yourself. Because deciding to make this kind of change is an important first step to making your community a healthier and happier place in which to live, work, and play. And YOU can make a difference!” (HPHC 2001, 1). 16. The following quotes are from the document’s introductory letter from the DHSS secretary: “If we are to remain a vital society we cannot afford to waste human resources . . . health promotion and disease prevention represents perhaps our best opportunity to reduce the ever-increasing portion of our resources that we spend to treat preventable illness and functional impairment. Therefore we must seize the opportunity these interventions offer to: cut costs to healthcare; prevent premature onset of disease; achieve healthier, more productive lives for all Americans.” 17. The document divides U.S. populations into a white majority and five ethnic and racial groups: blacks, Hispanics, Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, and American Indians and Alaska Natives.

Four Governing the Nation’s Reproduction: Culture, Poverty, and Eugenics 1. As illustrated, for example, by Etienne Balibar’s (1990; 1994, 191–205) discussion of neoracisms or Robert Miles’s (2005, 109–112) framing of institutional racism. 2. To reiterate, by pauperism I mean an understanding of poverty as abnormality and of the poor as the pathological Other of the normal citizen. 3. Ann Stoler (1995, 127–128) insists that race and class are not substitutable; nor is class always emerging from a discourse of race, as Foucault (2003) argues. Rather, the two occupy a f luid semantic field, in which one easily mutates into the other. The chronic indulgence, moral laxity, and indolence of the lower classes in Europe could under certain circumstances be used to signify a different race, for example, in the case of the Irish, and served to distinguish them from the rootedness, orderly family life, and ownership that set apart the bourgeoisie as superior. 4. Those arguments were continued through the 1990s by Robert Rector of the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation (Waddan 2003, 23). His arguments are the same: welfare supports sexually indulgent women and emasculates and demoralizes black men. 5. Biological metaphors describe the poor throughout the history of U.S. welfarism, from the Progressive social reformer Robert Hunter comparing dependency with a cancer to the 1960s Saturday Evening Post comparing the culture of poverty to a disease, infecting one (welfare-dependent) generation after another (cited in Patterson 2000, 13). 6. For an example of how this technique was systematically applied in the practices of creating the West/Rest dichotomy, see Stuart Hall (1992).

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7. Title I of the document replaces the old Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the TANF and introduces significant modifications to the AFDC (PRWORA 1996, sec. 101). Under the TANF the states receive a federal block grant, with no specific directives about how to distribute it between the diverse obligations imposed by the federal government, such as offering benefits, reducing rolls, or promoting work. While under the AFDC the states were required by the federal law to provide assistance to all eligible persons, under the TANF entitlement is eliminated. Recipients can receive TANF for a maximum of two years before having to engage in some work-related activity and the lifetime welfare support for any individual is limited to a maximum of five years (PRWORA 1996, sec. 101). The states have the freedom to set more severe time limits. 8. See for example Burnham (2002), Katz (1989), Karger (2003), Patterson (2000), Reed Jr. (1992), Solinger (2001), Waddan (2003), and Schram (1995). 9. The document states: “(a) IN GENERAL—Not later than January 1, 1997, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall establish and implement a strategy for (1) preventing outof-wedlock teenage pregnancies, and (2) assuring that at least 25 percent of the communities in the United States have teenage pregnancy prevention programs in place” (PRWOPA, sec. 905). 10. And at the advice of the Recommendations for Preventive Pediatric Health Care made by the committee on practice and Ambulatory Medicine of the American Academy of Pediatrics. 11. Indeed, the health promotion establishment is not afraid of grand statements. WHO’s 1986 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion identifies the “prerequisites for health” to be peace, shelter, education, food, income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resources, social justice, and equity. 12. The European encounter with the American populations, as read through the European grids of intelligibility of the time, initially led to analogies between the Americans and European ancestors that soon became an identity: Americans “actually were contemporary examples of the earliest European—and human—ancestors” (Brickman 2003, 34). 13. Illustratively, the National Maternal and Infant Health Survey (NMIHS), which some expert studies use alongside the NSFG in order to conduct their analyses of unintended pregnancy, collects data on the employment and public assistance receipt of the mother: AFDC, food stamps, housing assistance, social security, or veteran’s benefits (Kost et al. 1998a, 224). 14. With the exception of three papers (Santelli et al. 2003, Speizer et al. 2004, Udry et al. 1996), all the other analyzed here are referenced by the Healthy People documents. The first two of these nonreferenced papers are directly connected to various relay points in the governmental health apparatuses, since their authors work for the Division of Reproductive Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, or wrote in consultation with the Demographic and Behavioural Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Office of Population Affairs at the DHHS. 15. Many feminist studies contest this focus and expose its patriarchal-misogynist and racist foundational assumptions. See for example Campbell (1999), Franklin (1991), Ladd-Taylor and Umansky (1988), McNeil and Litt (1992), and Pollitt (1988). 16. The risk categories in this study are defined in relation to Hernshaw’s (1998) study that establishes the national average for unintended pregnancies at 49% of pregnancies and 31% of births. Since 62% of the women questioned by the Speizer study reported their pregnancies as unintended, they were classified as “high risk.” 17. Implying, as the document does, that all prospective parents with the exception of the “irresponsible mothers” engage in health and genetic checkups prior to conception certainly seems exaggerated.

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18. This ethos manifests itself in the forced sterilization of recipients, reward systems at state level for welfare beneficiaries accepting Norplant implants, or proposals for the compulsory use of Norplant contraceptive implants to reduce pregnancy among recipients (Schram 1995, 190). In the 1970s several Southern states introduced bills denying additional benefits to women having more than two children, or making future payments conditional on their sterilization (Roberts 1999, 155). This same tradition made possible in the United States the testing of new medicines on welfare clients, inoculations of cancer cells to unknowing Jewish inpatients, the study of the effects of untreated STDs on black men, or examining of the effects of radiation on unsuspecting low-income pregnant teenagers.

Five Patriarchal Orders of Reality in the Apparatuses of Sexuality Regulation 1. I am using the formulation “bourgeois nuclear family” to avoid engaging with the lengthy debates about the connection between liberal capitalism and the nuclear family, for which there is no space here. This formulation eschews the discussion about original determinations and refers to the family structures that (re)produce bourgeois selves. 2. Feminist writers continue to debate the patriarchal assumptions on which the contemporary Western welfarism depends; for a classic discussion, see Pateman (1989, 180–204). 3. Lungberg and Farham’s 1947 Modern Women: The Lost Sex cited in Solinger (1999, 9). The authors recommended the reinforcement of women’s dependency through mass psychology. 4. During the congressional hearings for the 1988 Family Support Act, Senator Daniel Moynihan axiomatically posited that work is the motherhood behavioral norm, while also stating that “although most of these mothers do not work full-time, year round, the essential point is that a majority of all mothers, whether single or married, work at least part time” (cited in Naples 1997, 924). 5. For discussions of the generation-long social experiment of transferring white babies from the unwed mothers to white, mostly middle-class families between the 1940s and the 1960s, see Solinger (1992, 2001). 6. This study is central for the Healthy People strategy, since it established the classical estimate of unintended pregnancies in the United States. 7. Here is, for example, a reader’s comment retrieved from the Guardian website on January 16, 2009, on Israel’s 2009 attack on Gaza and the ensuing massacre: “Israel’s fight is a fight for western values of secular democracy and human rights against those that would unleash a medieval theocracy upon us all.” And while no one, from the critical analysts to the conservative right, would deny that the United States is a nation-state governed according to religious moral codes and in the name of the Christian God, this nation’s liberal patriotic-nationalist rhetoric is still able to designate any (non-Christian) religious form of governmentality as totalitarian. 8. I have obtained some of this information from a splendid exhibit on the Spanish presence in what is today the United States, organized between May 2008 and February 2009 at the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla, Spain. The exhibit, titled “The Threads of Memory: Three Centuries of Spanish Presence in the United States,” was conceived by Pilar Lázaro de la Escosura and Falia Gonzáles Diaz. 9. Take, for example, a recent declaration of the BBC in relation to its refusal to broadcast a humanitarian appeal for Gaza after the 2009 Israeli attacks on the area, made public on Stop the War Coalition’s website on January 23, 2009 (www.stopwar.org.uk). The BBC affirms it is blocking the emergency appeal “to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality.” Denying that the Israeli attacks engendered a humanitarian crisis is, thus, mobilized as the neutral, apolitical, and thus impartial ground of truth.

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10. The extent to which the family is central in the representation of racialized otherness—and lack of belonging to the true nation—both in the “common-sense” racism of the working class and in the racist rhetorics put forward by various political figures in liberalism in general, rather than being an exclusive feature of U.S. liberalism, is exemplified by Errol Lawrence’s (1982) discussion of racism in Britain. This does not suggest that familism is mobilized in identical ways by racisms in all liberal governing regimes but rather that strategies of othering, in which the family is an important symbolic resource, characterize most forms of biopower. 11. Here is but one of the examples Lee Edelman (2004, 16) provides, a 1997 declaration by Donald Wildmon, founder and head of the American Family Association: “Acceptance of indifference to the homosexual movement will result in society’s destruction by allowing civil order to be redefined and by plummeting ourselves, our children and our grandchildren into the age of godlessness. Indeed, the very foundation of Western Civilization is at stake.”

Six Strategies of Truth and the Formation of Governmental Reality 1. The first measures of “pregnancy intention” were developed starting with the 1941 Indianapolis study, a survey of fertility behaviors and intentions (Santelli et al. 2003, 94). 2. For examples of how ideas of good motherhood changed historically, see Badinter (1981) and Richardson (1993). 3. The “psy”-guided liberal governmental focus on the mother and child is equally poignant in France, where developmental techniques are applied to entire cohorts of children. See Castel (1991, 287) for details of the French GAMIN system that submits the totality of children to systematic examination in order to detect all possible physical, psychological, and social abnormalities of the child and mother. Also consider Donzelot’s (1980, 229–230) insistence on the role of the “psy” sciences in the contemporary government of the family. 4. This study is not directly referenced by the Healthy People strategies. However, Healthy People 2000 integrates the findings of an earlier study by the same author, a foundationally similar analysis that charts women’s premarital coital experiences (HP 1991, 194). 5. The significance the authors ascribe to having nightmares in adolescence is quite obscure. It is difficult to imagine someone not having such nightmares and the data on such occurrence is at best uncertain, since reported by the mothers. Besides this, it might have to do with a vaguely Freudian understanding of nightmares as a sign of inner conf lict, maybe caused by these subjects’ rejection of the natural femininity. 6. Ruhl (2002, 642) mounts a similar critique of the concept of “willed pregnancy.” 7. Less than 2.5 kilograms at birth; frequently it includes very low birth weight, under 1.5 kilograms. 8. While “lack of prenatal care” might seem an outlier among these terms, the documents subsequently relate it to the incompetence of the—uneducated, nonwhite, teenage— mothers; the suggestion is that these uneducated poor women simply refuse to let the doctors take care of them (HP 1991, 12). 9. That means drugs that can induce malformations in the fetus. 10. Luker (1999, 249) discusses the example of a study of unintended pregnancy produced under the auspices of the Institute of Medicine and of one produced by the Christian Coalition. 11. I shall reiterate that an event has no intrinsic signification, but is perceived as significant only from within an already structured system of meaning making.

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12. Indeed, the validity of the Popperian method of “rational criticism” is postulated on a teleological growth of knowledge in the direction of increasing verisimilitude (Hindess 1977, 177–179).

Seven Liberal Governing and the Contemporary Political Imagination 1. The issue of the relation between truth, ideology, and the ruling class is too complex to be discussed in this context. However, rather than adopting the idea of a bourgeoisie that builds an ideology to serve its purpose, I would argue that the bourgeoisie was itself born into and through the workings of a set of discourses and power relations. Like all subjects, the bourgeoisie is as much an effect of those relations as it is a relay for them. 2. Dean (145) admits that there are similarities between Malthusian liberal policies of limiting the reproduction of the poor and the Chinese one-child policy. 3. “All governmentality can only be strategic and programmatic. It never works. But it is in relation to a program that we can say that it never works” (Foucault 2007, 387). 4. I understand the admiration for liberal governmentality present in Foucault’s latter work as directed toward this ability to impose the idea that it governs in the name of freedom and to structure all its governmental aspirations around this problematic of freedom. 5. This idea is Raluca Parvu’s.

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I N DE X

abortion vs. adoption, 134 family-planning, 75, 134–6 irresponsible mother, 66 pathological, 159, 162–3 unintended pregnancy, 135 see also antiabortion abstinence, 75, 130, 137–8 see also birth control adoption, 130, 134, 145–6 AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), 73–4, 76, 102, 105, 126, 130 antiabortion, 135 apolitical, 31, 46, 81, 125, 141, 198, 208 see also depoliticization assumptions, foundational, 23, 27 governmental apparatuses, 65, 169–70, 179 governmental statements, 3, 80, 82, 106, 115, 157 governmental truth, 151 liberalism in the U.S., 2–4, 25, 27, 29, 42, 132, 184, 191, 205–6, 209 assumptions, founding see assumptions, foundational Berlant, Lauren, 147, 169 biological privatization, 142–4 birth control, 71, 73–5 the black as Other, 67–8, 97

black, irresponsible mother see black pathological mother black pathology, 83, 85, 88, 95, 99–100, 116, 119, 124, 127, 142 pathological mother, 1, 5, 65, 84, 99, 110, 113, 115, 118, 171, 180 see also bourgeois family blacks, welfare and poverty, 72, 74, 76 see also culture of poverty; culture of dependency; pauperism; underclass body bourgeois, 4, 93, 122, 213 female, 33, 71, 193, 196, 197 bourgeois body, see body, bourgeois family, 8, 33, 103, 112, 123, 124, 126, 129–30, 132–3, 141–5, 147 propriety, 4, 33, 62, 118, 136, 138, 144 respectability, 122, 148 self hood, 4, 15, 31, 39, 44, 59, 61, 70, 87, 88, 122, 191, 195, 211 breadwinner, male, 126, 128 Brown, Wendy, 15, 29, 49, 125, 191, 195 Butler, Judith, 44, 46, 50, 148, 150, 196 choice, 31, 144, 164, 166–7, 214 citizen, liberal, 12, 32, 49, 52, 70, 87, 95, 107, 136, 149, 213, 214 black mothers as failed, 97, 109, 189, 190 see also black pathological mother

242

Index

civil society, 18, 19, 20, 21, 31, 36, 61, 125, 191, 197, 204, 207, 208 civilization, 13, 15, 61, 88, 91–3, 141, 160 colonialism, 19, 24, 29, 55, 60, 61, 187, 193, 200 see also colonies colonies, race, class and sexuality, 61–2, 69, 70, 122 crisis, national, 3, 52, 63–4, 76, 102, 115–16, 128, 189 critical inquiry, 9, 42, 178, 180 see also genealogical analysis culture black pathological, 88, 95, 116, 178 of dependency, 88, 99, 127 of poverty, 74, 88, 92, 94, 99–100, 102, 108 Dean, Mitchell, 35, 199–202 degeneracy, 58, 63, 80, 93, 143, 146, 149 Deleuze, Gilles, 16 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, 144, 168, 182, 191 dependency, see culture of dependency depoliticization, 6, 11, 81, 136, 169, 188 see also apolitical Derrida, Jacques, 115, 149 desire, for liberalism, 26, 195, 212 DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security), 107, 153 difference, immanent, 24, 25, 27, 49 differences, system of, 8, 182 see also Enlightenment, and taxonomies of difference discipline bourgeois, 15, 32, 104, 161 liberal, 15, 32, 70, 77 domination, 6, 22, 39, 41, 58, 144, 148, 207 Donzelot, Jacques, 123, 140, 195 Edelman, Lee, 149, 231 Enlightenment, 14, 24, 26, 39, 42, 139, 151, 157, 163, 181, 183, 187, 197

and racist othering, 39, 55–7, 66–7, 88, 91, 92, 114 episteme, 16 essentialism, 195, 197, 198 Eurocentrism, 24, 47, 58, 187 exclusion/inclusion, liberal game of, 2, 3, 50, 119 familism, liberal bourgeois, 4, 103, 121, 140, 141–4, 146, 147, 149 U.S. government, 124–5, 130, 132 Fanon, Frantz, 52, 81, 117, 211 femininity, 70, 131, 143, 162, 166, 195 feminism, 26, 70, 71, 125, 126, 196, 198, 203 Foucault, Michel bourgeois self, 4, 32, 122 governing, 14–15, 16, 17, 30, 48, 68 racism, 58, 60, 62, 79, 97 truth and knowledge production, 2, 8, 13, 181–2 foundationalism, 196 Freud, Sigmund, 147, 158, 160 genealogical analysis, 29, 41 genocide, 24, 47, 187, 188, 199 Gilroy, Paul, 146 grid of decipherment, 154 grid of intelligibility, 25, 36, 39, 53, 55, 56, 154, 159, 170, 206 grid of visibility, 155 Guillaumin, Colette, 59–60, 89, 143, 181, 184 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 56–7 heterosexism, 4, 20, 24, 49, 147–8, 168, 187 hierarchies ontological, 13, 57, 88, 89, 91–2, 198 racial, 60, 89, 114 social, 15, 61, 69, 89 of truth and knowledge, 8, 90

Index homophobia, 24, 124, 142, 147, 187, 193, 207 HP (Healthy People 2000, 2010), 62–6 humanism, 11, 13, 40, 92, 163, 164, 203, 204, 214 ideology, racist, 60–1, 80, 83, 114, 145 immanent as natural essence/substance, 5, 12, 18, 27, 78, 114 identity/difference, 12, 24, 25, 27, 49, 63, 67 see also substances; transcendent; worked from within individualism, 4, 6, 10, 56, 61, 68, 125, 144, 194 IQ, 73, 98, 116, 161 Lacan, Jacques, 149 Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, 9, 10, 12, Latour, Bruno, 35, 153, 178, 182, libertarian, 3, 78, 95 libertarianism, 22, 195, 208 low birth weight, 1, 18, 84, 109, 110, 113–14, 172–4, 180 Malthusianism, 81, 93, 115, 122, 200 Marxism, 26, 140 masculinist, 126, 166 masculinity, 144, 162, 193 miscegenation, 50, 69, 142, 145 morality bourgeois, 4, 93, 94, 122, 126, 128, 131, 138, 150 Christian, 17, 139 multiculturalism, 50, 90–1, 92, 205, 197, 207, Nancy, Jean-Luc, 13, 34 nodal points of liberalism, 24, 26, 27, 49, 61, 95, 120, 192 of othering, see othering, nodal points of

243

Oedipal, 144–5, 167 Old Age and Survivors Insurance Plan OASI, 126 order, symbolic, 27, 60 order of reality liberal, 18, 26, 89, 140, 192 pauperist, 5, 27 see also pauperism othering, and Enlightenment, see Enlightenment and racist othering see also pauperism liberal, 26, 45, 51, 121, 124, 128, 146, 177, 198 nodal points of, 49, 79, 121, 187 pastoral(ism), 5, 21, 22, 76, 200, 201, pauperism and othering, 87, 101, 117, 124, and racism, 107, 116, 120, 133, 187 pluralism, 21, 195, 198, 205, 207 politics of resentment, 191 positivism, 5, 24, 55, 81, 151, 153, 155, 178, 181 expert studies, 11, 77–8, 153–4, 170–1, 175–6, 179 residual, 6, 170 poverty, culture of, see culture of poverty practices of the self, 32, 39, 124 progress, 24, 26, 42, 52, 79, 80, 91, 140, 197, 208, 214 PRWORA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act), 7, 97, 101–4, 108, 128–30 public intimacy, 146–7 public/private divide, 13, 19, 30, 36, 95 queer, 140, 142, 147–50 reproductive futurism, 149 see also Edelman, Lee resistance, 2, 141, 148, 149, 203, 204

244

Index

Rose, Nikolas, 30, 32, 36–40, 123, 199 Rose, Nikolas and Miller, Peter, 14, 15, 24, 32, 35, 36 scapegoat, identity, 5, 47, 52–3, 63, 198 signification structure of, 11, 60, 188, 196, 197 play of, 9 slavery, 24, 57, 67, 116, 140, 184, 187 social democracy, 77, 79, 95, 107, 120 solidarity, 90, 96, 142 Stoler, Ann Laura, 5, 25, 54, 62 subaltern, 147, 177, 188, 191 substances, natural, 25, 115, 184 transcendent, 13, 34 see also immanent; worked from within system of relations, 9, 14, 17–8, 64, 66, 69, 112, 115, 170 TANF, 102, 105, 129–30, 155 taxonomies, racial, 57, 58, 62, 67, 211, 212

scientific, 25, 61, 181, 184 social, 7, 25, 56, 57, 80, 82, 114, 118, 119, 200 teleology, 26, 31, 90, 106, 155, 157–8, 159, 162, 168 tolerance, 51, 91, 205, 207, 215 transcendent, 11–13 substance, see substances, transcendent trauma, 167–9, 214 underclass, 74, 99, 116, 124, 178 universal/particular, 51, 89, 199 violence, 59, 92, 141, 210 wife, 109, 126, 134 see also familism will to govern, of liberalism, 3, 36, 189 worked from within, 13, 25, 45, 57, 69, 101, 147, 197 see also immanent; substances WTI (Working towards Independence), 116, 129, 130–1

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