"Waiting for the Barbarians": Contagious cultures, Strategies of Containment, and the Construction of Race in the Mexico "Drug Wars"

"...power is never something that someone possesses, anymore than it is something that emanates from someone. Power does not belong to anyone or even to a group; there is only power because there is dispersion, relays, networks, reciprocal supports, differences of potential, discrepancies, etcetera. It is in this system of differences, which have to be analyzed, that power can start to function." - Foucault "Psychiatric Power" November 7, 1973

"The outbreak narrative fuses the transformative force of myth with the authority of science. It animates the figures and maps the spaces of global modernity. It also accrues contradictions: the obsolescence and tenacity of borders, the attraction and threat, and especially the destructive and formative power of contagion. It both acknowledges and obscures the interactions and global formations that challenge national belonging in particular." - Priscilla Wald "Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative" 

"The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms also are sending more personnel to the border. The effort also will place a spotlight on existing technological programs, such as backscatter mobile x-rays, fingerprinting databases and ATF's weapons tracking system called e-Trace" quoted in Politico.com "Napolitano announces border plan"

Mobile x-rays, "e-traces", fingerprints, and databases. Such technologies and techniques, tactics and regimes, signify a series of methodological and categorical relations; they register and codify certain affects and effects, bodies and subjectivities, places and spaces. That is, they point to a particular associative vocabulary: medical (i.e in terms of the management and regulation of illnesses and diseases) eugenic (databases are enlisted for purposes of technical arrangement and categorization, they speak their own languages of bureaucratic memory, control, documentation, insidious detail, etcetera), and surveillance (not just a matter of what bodies enter the United States, but also about how, where, when, and why these bodies move.) All three vocabularies have been formalized and mobilized in recent public policies and discourses surrounding the so-called "Drug wars" in Mexico. They converge and disperse in new discursive formations that at one moment can be called a "preemptive response" (remember the "preemptive power" of the Bush Administration) and at another, a strategy of containment, or a form of benevolent "protectionism". Regardless of their shifting names, these formations contain within them (produced as their "effects") systems of references and representations that point to more pernicious narratives: narratives about globally "illicit" flows and economies, the populations that "carry" or disperse these flows into "our" first-world cities, suburbs, and paranoid selves, as well as the "necessary" preventive (again the medical language) measures, techniques, and epistemologies that must be mobilized in response. In light of the current media talk concerning Mexico's "drug wars" (a phrase that implies a battle on both sides of the border, a race war between purity and criminality.), it may be helpful to insert or translate Priscilla Wald's concept of the "outbreak narrative" in terms of the global flows of drugs, guns, and violence within the context of the U.S.-Mexico "drug wars". 

Dominant media have indeed reported (as they always do) that the convergence of cartel violence, weapons-trafficking, thousands of femicidal murders, and a centralization of police and military power in the border state of Sonora, "exploded" virtually out of nowhere. An "outbreak" implies a kind of chaotically corrosive, random emergence of a disease and a panic, one without a knowable/identifiable site of origin. Such a production is intentional: it establishes the validity of its own affects/effects by pointing to the ultimate uncertainty of its objects. The "outbreak narrative" can produce official reports, statistics, documents, and figures, but these assemblages point more to the fact that the object of analysis must become knowable (and thus regulated, surveilled, and conditioned) but never "known". This epistemological instability is created in order to make supposedly "obvious" conclusions become more visible, ready-made, and available. "Obvious conclusions" activate racial sterotypes formed in previous im(em)perial histories, projects, and formations. They channel previous, racially embedded figures, images,and  vocabularies into newly productive networks and paranoid national desires. From the immigration debates of the 1980's, 1990's, and 2000's, we "know" that Mexicans are "violent", "dangerous",and "threatening"; we "know" that the conditions of globalization, "free trade" and late modernity have established "promiscuously" porous borders, borders that "threaten" white security, supremacy, and privilege. 

The new side of this story can be found in Foucault's insight that power contains "discrepancies" as well as "differences of potential". Secretary of State Clinton's recent public admission that the United States has failed its own "Drug war", supposedly establishes a break in this narrative. These "breaks" or ruptures have recently increased in number, Senator John Kerry's recent op-ed noted that the United States is equally responsible for the flow of weapons into Mexico. However, even such breaks have a productive impulse. By admitting to U.S. failures, a discursive and material (real, actual) space of intervention is actualized. Now the the U.S. must "correct" its failures (which means discipline, punish, and intern its own "contagious cultures") and contain the failures of Mexican governance (of course those unruly, uncivilized people can't contain their reprehensible and infectious flow of drugs, violence, and death across "our" borders"). Further, this space of intervention acts as threat to racialized populations currently living within the U.S. (already constructed as "impossible subjects", who know full well the sinister scope of a digitized panoptic gaze that establishes the very texture of reality in terms of the constant threat of arrest, internment, disappearance, and death), as well a further convergence between state-security apparatuses and immigration control. What under Bush was a convergence between the "war on terror" (a phrase that Obama administration, under advice from the pentagon, has removed from official discourse) and immigration control, has become under Obama , another racialized project of "protectionism" that decontextualizes as it narrates. What is apparent from this rhetorical "shift" is that power contains the ability to cut-off certain narrative flows and reterritorialize or "disperse"( in Foucault's terms) them in other moments, conjectures contexts, and events: 

"1.Yes the U.S. does sell weapons to Mexican drug cartels, but those who sell weapons are "criminal" individuals, not actors of the state. The mexican cartels however, are clearly state agents that constitute a threat to "American" sovereignty, security, and life. 

2. Look what globalization has done! We give them "free trade", new "economic opportunities" and incentives, and "they" return the favor by killing "our" citizens and themselves. 

3. Mexico is the site of origin where drugs, violence, criminal culture "enters" "our" communities and now "we" are forced to "respond". The U.S. state clearly has no investment in illicit economies and black markets, "we" are the ones that since Regan, have declared a "war" on all drugs (and thus propped up murderous authoritarian regimes in almost every country in South America, impoverishing millions and creating the global labor chains that "give" "third world citizens" the "opportunity" to "find" a "better life" in the "land of tolerance and equality").

Discursive Sovereignty and the decision: Part II on the U.N. Conference on Racism

A word on the recent Israeli military campaign in Gaza in relation to Obama's boycott:

The recent "invasion" of Gaza, a word which is disarmingly curious, demands an occasion for reflection, and indeed there are numerous things of which I have considered worthy of reflection. The use of the word "invasion" is curious in itself along all lines of its deployment, from American protest movements, social action networks, IDF media scripts, Israeli government appearances, to Hamas statements and speeches. It is curious for the reason, (especially in the context of Israel and its allies), in that it affirms, in the violence of the present, a strange rhetorical reality or figure of rights, duties, and sovereignties that Israeli occuption, ghettoization, dispossession, and annilihation of Palestinian political, material, and social life has attempted to bury beneath its bombs and the violence of its narratives. The particular historical-legal-military framework signified by the use of such a word, carries with it a particular structure of recognition (an ironically Hegelian kind of murderous recognition) and legitimacy. However it is a grotesque irony that recognizes Palestine not as a nation and the Palestinians as a people, but as victims, as blood-stained corpses or tearful women and children- faces Western media outlets have greedily lusted for as images of a Palestinian national culture of death, tragedy, helplessness and sorrow. The white polity of the west has always demonstrated a collective desire and will continue to desire these endless images of suffering, contorted, and charred brown bodies, whether in the discourses of human rights and military intervention (Darfur) or as signifiers of Western superiority, decency, civility, and above all-empathy- the great insult of those whose tax dollars fund the IDF's military technology. The grand irony of course being that this cycle repeated itself as the "humanitarian crisis" of the Gaza campaign worsened. But let me be absolutely clear on this point, what took place in the streets of Gaza, in its hospitals and in its morgues, was not a "humanitarian crisis" at all, rather it was a totalizing violence (epistemic, ideological, material, political, even aesthetic) against the rights of the Palestinian people to exist. Its targets have ranged from cultural and educational institutions (always the target of a colonizing force that seeks to humiliate, degrade, and destroy the highest hopes of a people forced to live in the exhaustive and rotten squalor that only Israel- with its stolen wealth robbed from the graves of all Palestinians, and its immense depositories of Western aid- could dream up), to ambulances, demonstrators, journalists, doctors, aid workers, and anyone who dares to dream that their streets are indeed their own and not pathways for IDF tanks.

In my previous post, I examined the Obama administration's decision to boycott an upcoming U.N. conference on racism. In this post, I intend to revise and expand several previous points in the hopes of widening the frames of understanding through which President Obama's regimes of governance can be theorized. The concept of "discursive sovereignty" is a phrase I have coined in order to establish a general way of looking at political language, discourses, speech-acts, and networks or "circuits" (Foucault) of textuality under the Obama regime. "Sovereignty" in the sense I am using it, refers to executive judicial power, power that intervenes, narrates, and conceptualizes its own particular logics, epistemologies, concepts, and methodologies in terms of a "decision" or a response. However, the space of this "decision" is one that is in itself, constituted through sovereign claims and representations. What initially sounds like a vague tautological construction, a circle and circling of statements, is in essence, the dizzying core of a right of power that has no demarcations of limits or conditions of application. 

The space of the "decision" is a network of densely active channels, zones, and sites; a network firmly located outside of communicative politics and foundational liberal notions of governance i.e. : consent, debate, the division of powers etc. Carl Schmitt calls this space the "situation":

"... For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal decision situation actually (concretely) exists. ... The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality." 

To return to Obama's own sovereign decision to boycott the upcoming U.N. conference on racism, we can ask what is the "normal situation" of  the state "global racism"? In what ways is the state of Israel an "exceptional" state, and how have these "exceptions" been actively produced, constructed, and guaranteed? The possible answers are of course, to complicated to attempt here. However the purpose of such questions is to open considerations of the particular logics, truths, and rationalities embedded in such a sovereign decision, a decision rooted not in legal "situations" and norms, but in a discursive regime that decides upon something far more important than a particular legal event or act, the definitions, truths, and specific content of global classes of racisms. The sovereign power to not only decide what constitutes racism, but also narrates the content and histories of racism, is a power that intervenes at the precise moment that it begins to loose its grip. 

 As an event, the decision to boycott the conference marks a deeper relation between what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call the project of "racial neoliberalism" and new regimes of tolerance; tolerance as an impossible response to a "problem" that both the United Nations and the U.S. have failed to understand. At a time when "rabid neoliberalism" (Giroux) has reached an untenable crisis, the post-racial impulses of the Obama administration points to a politics of cynicism so embedded in the "hope" of American exceptionalism, that it cannot even see the realities that are everywhere apparent. Obama's televised spectacles of emotion, from his recent "anger" over the AIG bonuses, to his insulting style of presidential humor on the tonight with Jay Leno (insulting in the sense that he would address the nation on the state of the economy from a location as deadly mediocre as Jay Leno's studio) , are so removed from genuine political despair and the 

What the Obama U.N. Racism Conference boycott means Part I

 The Obama administration's recent decision to boycott a U.N. conference, (focused on the state of progress made on a 2001 World Summit Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance) has already be criticized in the liberal-left blogosphere from Alternet to Race Wire and beyond. The specific criticisms can be summarized under the claim that Obama's decision reflects one of the first "Post-Racial" acts of state, lending one to believe that the intent of a such a maneuver was rooted in the basic tenets of post-raciality and the end of racism. However, it appears to me that these criticisms, have in some sense, entirely missed the ideological and discursive subtleties of Obama's political gesture of refusal. To begin, I will briefly summarize both the two central issues that led the Obama administration to boycott the conference and some of the alternative media's receptions, criticisms, and arguments made against the boycott. Read together, I hope to demonstrate how these two ideological positions work to obscure the central project of Obama's decision. That is, 1. Obama's decision does reflect an official "post-racial" act of state,  in a newly inaugurated state that has been rhetorically and discursively imagined as "post-racial". However, the notion that this decision is a reflection of post-raciality's central claims, is to me, an error. At least, in the sense that I have written and theorized the "post-racial" until this time. What is new about the specifically "post-racial" content of Obama's decision is not that it follows the logic of the annilihation of identity politics from the sphere of international politics, or that it attempts to proclaim the ends of global racism (i.e. that enough progress has been made on those goals from 2001, I don't even known the U.N.'s method for measuring such "progress"), but rather, such a decision indicates that the U.S. has declared the power to decide what exactly racism is and what it isn't. From this decision it has become perfectly clear, that post-raciality as a mode of global govermentality (Foucault), narrates and decides the terms and conditions from which official definitions of racism can emerge as "objectively" valid or confirmed classes of racisms. "Objectively" means of course, that it has been sanctioned by the U.S, and I don't think I need to remind anyone that the Bush administration drafted a similar politics of "objectivity" concerning its interactions with the U.N. during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. Further, by declaring the power to decide on the ontology of global racism, the Obama administration has completely depoliticized, decontextualized, and annihilhated any concept of racism rooted in historical, social, and economic histories of white supremacy and domination. 

In the case of the specifics, (that certain provisions of the draft document on the conference had to be removed before the U.S. would participate), the first condition: "that the United States would reconsider its position only if the negotiators stripped out provisions criticizing Israel's occupation of Palestinian Lands", demonstrates perfectly the notion racism is only racism when it has absolutely nothing to do with American geopolitical interests. That the specific provision is essentially concerned with the violence of settler and colonial occupation, (forms of colonial rule) firmly embedded in the history of the U.S., attests to the particularly post-racial notion that racism is more of a concept than a historical, living actuality. 

Ryan Seacrest and the "Slumdog Millionaire" Interview

Seacrest interview

TV Guide interview

Two days before the Academy Awards, an article appeared in the New York Times pointing to the not so subtle fact that the Award ceremony, had in no sense altered its budget or its pointless spectacle of nauseating extravagances, despite the ever-looming "financial crisis" (which to the credit of dominant media, has still not been named a "collapse", ""rupture" or even a "depression"). It is unfortunate however, that the Academy couldn't excercise at least some right to the preservation of its own "decency "by allowing Ryan Seacrest to skulk the red carpet (with a microphone and a cameraman) freely. At a time, when the Oscar's sheer stupidity and utterly grotesque display of capital couldn't have been more obvious, (it's obviousness was part of the point), Seacrest's "interview" full of loosely veiled condescension, (although I think he is too stupid to understand the difference between condescension and the inane "pleasantries" required of red carpet interviews, that is, the duties of his "job") and visibly racist commentary on the children standing in front of him, demonstrated how "post-racial" racism was equally present in all the competitive stupidity of the night. 

That Seacrest interviewed the cast collectively and not individually (they were introduced as "a whole bunch of kids from "Slumdog Millionaire"" is just one indication of the ways in which individualism (and with that, a whole world of seeing and doing, speaking and thinking) is reserved only for white adult subjects. That is, "kids can be spoken to collectively as a horde because they are not fully human, and thus silly or irrational. (Keep in mind that Seacrest did not even introduce the cast as actors, but as "a bunch of children from Slumdog Millionaire"). Children of color from India, enforce this kind of blindly paternal chauvinism, because they are assumed to be "wide-eyed, kids from a "backwards" and a completely different country. Their ignorance is "natural" and "obvious", they are "afraid" or "nervous". This fear and nervousness is obvious enough, but it is the condition of child actors who are afraid and nervous in the presence of a nakedly ignorant creep. It might even have been more than those two conditions, it could have been boredom or anxious irritation, but either way the child cast of "Slumdog Millionaire" understood in some sense the ways they were being interviewed, and they did not like it. 

Seacrests's inability to pronounce all of "their" names (again the collectivizing impulse that understands children of color as a mass and not as individuals with agency, personality, or identities) and his decision to hold a piece of paper (not even to hold it up clearly or directly so that it could be properly visible to the camera) with all of "their" names written on it, was an indication of his "post-racially" racist style; the logic of which is: "It's not my fault I cannot pronounce "their" names", its "theirs". At least I attempted to give "them" some sort of identification". Victimage, arrogance, stupidity, and a whole pattern of blatantly obvious assumptions characterized an interview that "peaked" with Seacrests' comment, "she speaks good english". His first attempt at a question in the form of an actual address, failed when he received no response, but it actually failed, when he repeated "he doesn't speak English" to the listening audience. If one watches other red carpets interviews with the cast, it becomes perfectly clear that members of the cast gave incredibly articulate (for young children) responses to all kinds of questions. Seacrest's perfectly post-racial moment, from his stress on the importance of English, to his lack of concern with his own racist condescension, demonstrates the structured ignorance and disavowal at the heart of post-raciality.