Militarizing Race

Social Text Militarizing Race David Theo Goldberg For Saba Recent events in Europe, most notably in France, have renewed and inten- sified the focus on racial articulations across the continent. The troubling proliferation of Islamophobia and the resurgence of anti- Semitisms have caught the traditionally liberal states of Europe altogether flat- footed. Left- critical commentators, by contrast, have drawn the connection of these current concerns to longer- standing unresolved and often altogether denied histories of European colonialism. There is, of course, considerable truth to this. Europeans largely are in denial of their colonial histories and their legacies, much as conservative Americans downplay the relational history of slavery. In the face of this denial, the once- empires scream back. But there is also a commonly overlooked history of European formation that in more local self- conception and constitution defined itself by racial excision. In the very act of delineating a European self- formation from the mid- fifteenth century on, not just Jews and Muslims but blacks too were marked as Europe’s constitutive outsiders, the latter two often intersec- tionally, as subjects of begrudging conversion and exuberant expulsion. Together these three groupings, discretely and interactively, constitute the haunting trinity shadowing Europe’s founding. From the outset modern Europe defined itself via the present absence of racial distinction. Secularizing the Religious Two significant considerations can be noted in this historical emergence. First, race of necessity is knotted from the outset of its formulation and social fashioning with religious resonance. Jews, Muslims, and black and Social Text 129 • Vol. 34, No. 4 • December 2016 DOI 10.1215/01642472-3680846 © 2016 Duke University Press 19 Published by Duke University Press Social Text New World Indian “heathens” represent Europe’s formative nonbelong- ing: think here of Shakespeare’s only slightly later characterizations in The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest. Race is adopted increasingly as a central technology of modern state constitution and reason (even at times in denial). It is conducive to such repeated adoption across modern time precisely because of its conceptual capacity to morph in meaning and significance in response to prevailing social and economic conditions. As it does so, race both displaces and assumes some of the resonances of the theological and religious. These include an account of origins, the passion and force of kinship convictions and commitments, and the undertaking to render natural the artifice of socially fashioned identities and identifications. These theological resonances likewise involve the imagining of mass community out of social anonymity, indeed, the projection of generalized characterization across the artifice of population from a narrow base of immediately familial or communal experience, the insistence on destiny, and the remainders of a hierarchical flock pastoral in racially shaped con- ceptions of population governance, as Leerom Medovoi has forcefully argued.1 But they equally cover romanticized belonging and sanctified exclusion and expulsion. And later, as race becomes the object of critical account rather than taken up as primarily productive of sociality, race is similarly dismissed as socially antique, a holdover from the premodern, the slippage into social regression. Race, in short, is the secularization of the religious. It abstractly assumes and pulls more or less silently into its own terms of articulation the technologies and expressions of religion’s productive socialities. I am not suggesting that as race takes hold in shaping modern socialities religion disappears. Rather, religious presupposition and conception in part become sublimated into racial expression in ways suggested above, the racial taking up some of religion’s driving terms. In secularizing the religious, raciality operates in much the way that commentators have characterized secular modernity regarding religious ways of being and think- ing. It embeds and embodies the latter’s terms and conditions in its own articulations. And these terms and conditions of racial articulation in turn assume differing social resonances reflecting the character of the more or less sublimated religious traditions in the state formation in question. The second consideration is that, consequently, not just in modern state formation has race been a key causal consideration in war making — that much is obvious. Less self- evident, race has been born, fashioned, and reproduced through warfare. If politics and war are of necessity extensions of each other (per both Michel Foucault and Carl von Clause- witz), the modern technologies of governing through and by race are war by other means, literally the raison d’état (and raison d’être) of the modern 20 Goldberg · Militarizing Race Published by Duke University Press Social Text state. Here war is not reducible merely to the firing of guns and cannon but consists of struggles. The transformational grammar of race histori- cally articulated as kinship, lineage, type, species, and post- Darwin sub- species is worked out over time as expressions and determinants of these social struggles, often prompted by or indexed to colonial conditions.2 In the broader, more abstract sense intended by Foucault in “Society Must Be Defended,” these struggles could be characterized as class struggles.3 Call this racefare. The modern state’s dance with death accordingly is no error or accident. It is not simply the externality of collateral damage, a marginal condition, however rationalized. It is part of its defining constitution, one might say its very nature. Allowance (letting live) and erasure (making die, or killing) become, in the reversals of the contemporary, enforcement (making live) and abandonment (letting die).4 More than a century and a half ago, Josiah Clark Nott and George R. Gliddon drew together race and war making in asserting that “looking back over the world’s history, it will be seen that human progress has arisen mainly from the war of races.”5 Is it the case, then, that perpetual war, not the Enlightenment’s perpetual peace, has come now to mark the very being of modern statehood, its abid- ing condition? If so, race seems as much a prompting configuration of its production as a rationalizing legitimation or outcome. The pervasive contemporary regime of global securitization pre- sumes that nations are now under constant attack from rogue forces, antistatists, quasi states, and terrorists. This supposedly necessitates in response a permanent war footing on the part of states, the primary responsibility of which is to protect themselves from those seeking to undermine its authority and well- being. An economy (really, a political economy) built on foundations of militarization — of defense industries at the center, of arms trading, of weapons supply as a central strategy of peacekeeping but more deeply also of foreign aid — entails the necessity of maintaining a war footing. The projection of constant threat or pos- sibility of violent events is taken to require not just vigilance but perpetual preparation. Such states are on a ceaseless war footing.6 War here must be taken not only in its narrow sense of a time- bound battle but as characterization of every battle or violent confrontation, every struggle, ultimately to the death (literal and metaphorical): of people, of the social conditions to which the state is opposed or unquali- fiedly committed. As Foucault puts it, war amounts to every antagonism, rivalry, confrontation, and struggle between individuals, groups, classes, and races (he is anything but modest).7 Race in this scheme of things becomes a (if not the) principal modal- ity of explicit state delimitation. It is found in all modern representations of the subhuman or substandard human, the inferiorized, the deviant, the Goldberg · Militarizing Race Social Text 129 • December 2016 21 Published by Duke University Press Social Text degenerate, the immature from whom (from which) society must distance itself, must (as Foucault formulates it) be defended. It is in defense against the barbarians at the gate and the barbarians within — from the inferior to the immature, from the deviant to the criminal, from the abnormal to the unbelonging, against the ungrateful critic as much as the unwanted (im)migrant, the corrupt, and the cancerous — that the military and the police are institutionalized as the first and last lines of defense. The military forms the bulwark against the socially threatening from without; the police, from the mid- nineteenth century onward, from those within. Together they guard against all those — the subraces — of which society must purge, must purify itself. That policing took over internal social defense from the military signals their integral relation. Race — or here more precisely subraciality — turns even the inside out, makes the mar- ginalized member stranger. It renders less surprising the reprisal of mili- tarized policing today. Modern Europe was conceived, as I have said, through a series of excisions together with global territorial extensions. Each slid together mature religious and incipient racial conception. Inquisitions, legal and policy debates, and empire building tied intra- European conditions and concerns to global contests. The skirmishes, battles, and wars that inevi- tably flared in and from the European imperial project pretty much from

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