Nine Theses on Power
The next session of the Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) research group is set to study the facts on the ground — the terrain that power produces and, more importantly, the terrain of power itself: where it lies, what its mechanisms are, when it is operative, who wields it. In preparing for this session, I revisited and revised a text I wrote back in June of 2020, titled Nine Theses on Power. The investigations of the AGAPE research group have yielded insights rich enough that I have been able to improve and expand the text significantly, and I am glad to share the result below.
First. “All power is power to mediate.”
Power always mediates between contending factions. The contending factions that a power mediates between may or may not precede the formation of a power. A power is either formed in response to the existence of contending factions, or a power crafts contending factions in order to form itself.
Taking racist powers as our informative anecdote, the contending factions that we call "races" did not precede the formation of the powers that mediate between them. Rather, "races" are constructs that racist powers have produced in order to establish themselves. Similarly, colonialism produces the colonizer and the colonized as contending factions; border imperialism produces the citizen and the migrant; neocolonialism produces the Global North and the Global South, the First World and the Third; capitalism produces the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; sexism produces the man and the woman; heteronormativity produces the heterosexual and the homosexual. Each is a pair a power has crafted so as to install itself between the two terms. These nine theses will take racism as their most informative anecdote, and work through it in the greatest detail; but what is shown of racism holds other pairs.
It is important to recognize, too, that power need not craft its factions in opposed pairs. Sometimes power triangulates. Border imperialism triangulates the citizen, the legal resident, and the illegal alien. Racism triangulates the white, the Black, and the person of color — and then crafts further factions amongst people of color: the yellow of East Asia, the differing shades of browns from South Asia, West Asia, and Latin America, the red of the Indigenous of the New World. The binary is only the simplest form that power works with, not the only one.
Regardless of whether power bifurcates or triangulates, the most important thing to remember is never to take for granted the existence of the factions that power mediates between. To take the Black and the white, the citizen and the migrant, the man and the woman as given is to take the workings of power for granted. At the same time, to deny that the Black and the white, the citizen and the migrant, the man and the woman exist at all is to make oneself oblivious to the workings of power. Instead of taking these factions for granted, and instead of denying their existence, we must deconstruct the workings of power that bring them into existence. Black and white cannot simply be assumed as prior realities, but neither can they simply be declared unreal. They are real as products of an operation, real the way a shadow is real: real as the product of something casting it.
Second. “Power, in order to perpetuate itself, must make immediate relations intolerable.”
The power to mediate becomes null and void when immediate relations between factions become tolerable — when confluence is common and factions commune with one another with ever increasing fluency — for then there is no call for a mediator between them.
The power to mediate functions only when immediate relations are made intolerable and confluence amongst factions is made uncommon. A power forms itself not merely by creating factions, but by making immediate relations between them intolerable, by crafting factions that are intolerant of one another. Power functions thereafter by seizing upon that intolerance and mediating between the factions in the name of tolerance.
Racist powers formed themselves by crafting factions, so-called "races", that were intolerant of one another, and they preach tolerance in order to make themselves its mediums, the guarantors of peace and stability amongst the races, whether through integration administered by the power or through segregation enforced by it. The powers mediating between citizen and migrant claim to solve the immigration problem; the powers between Global North and Global South claim to solve the development problem; the powers between man and woman claim to close the gender gap. Do not take these claims seriously: each power foments and feeds upon the intolerance it offers to mediate.
Intolerance is the result of relative over-concentrations of properties amongst factions. Greater intolerance is generated when the distribution of properties is skewed, so that one faction possesses a desirable or an undesirable property in excess of the other. So power does not only create factions, it creates them by concentrating desirable properties in one pool and undesirable properties in another.
Thus there is greater intolerance amongst whites and Blacks when a desirable property — housing, education, employment — is increasingly concentrated in white populations relative to Black ones. A power formation first produces and then exploits this intolerance by casting itself as the means by which Blacks may acquire the desirable property they lack. It does not do away with the lack; it keeps those who suffer the lack dependent upon it for a more tolerable existence.
There is greater intolerance amongst whites and Blacks when an undesirable property — “criminality” — is increasingly concentrated in Black populations relative to white ones. A power formation produces and then exploits this intolerance by casting itself as the means by which the undesirable excess of Blacks may be pacified. It does not do away with the excess; it keeps those who cannot tolerate the excess dependent upon it for a more tolerable existence.
These are the two levers every mediating power reaches for, whatever the faction: a desirable property concentrated away from a faction, that the power may promise to supply it; an undesirable property concentrated upon a faction, that the power may promise to contain it. The migrant is made to lack lawful standing and to carry the excess of disorder. The Global South is made to lack development and to carry the excess of instability. In each case the power supplies the one and contains the other, on the condition that it be kept in place as supplier and container.
If race predicts housing, wealth, criminalization, education, safety, legal standing, and exposure to violence, then there exists a material basis upon which mediation can continually reproduce itself. One can alter people's racial attitudes while leaving that architecture intact, and the mediation reproduces itself unbothered on the material differences it still has to work with. You may say "I don't see race." But where race still predicts housing, wealth, criminalization, education, safety, legal standing, and exposure to violence, not seeing it is willful blindness.
Third. “To counter power is to make immediate relations tolerable, and thus to obviate the desire for a medium and guarantor of tolerance.”
Taking anti-racist criminal justice reforms as our informative anecdote, one must be wary of the new commissions, offices, and task forces raised up to mediate between Black populations and policing powers, and to guarantee that relations between them grow more tolerable; for this redoubles our want for power instead of obviating it.
Let us ask instead: how does one obviate the need for the police to serve as a medium and guarantor of tolerance? What intolerances do the police foment and feed upon? How might these intolerances be reduced, so that the police can no longer feed upon them? These are the questions we ask when our aim is to make immediate relations tolerable and greater confluence possible. They are not the questions we ask when our aim is to subordinate the power of the police to kinder and friendlier powers — to so-called social services — that perpetuate racism in a less conspicuous and more insidious manner, acting as mediums and guarantors of tolerance in their own turn.
The power of the police pivots on Blacks being said to possess the undesirable property of criminality in excess. The power of social services pivots on Blacks lacking the desirable properties of housing, education, and employment; but either way, both powers tell us that Blacks have a problem, that Blacks are either excessive in their criminality or deficient in their necessities, that Blacks will need more administration and greater supervision if they are to live tolerably alongside whites. Either way, the freedom of Blacks is the thing to be sacrificed, either to temper the excess or to compensate the lack.
“Good cop, bad cop” is the modus operandi of every power formation. The same double bind is laid upon every mediated faction, and every reform that would soften a power leaves the double bind intact. The migrant is policed for the disorder they are said to carry, or serviced for the standing they are said to lack, and the humane reform merely trades the border guard for the caseworker. The Global South is disciplined for its instability, or developed for its backwardness, and the enlightened reform merely trades the gunboat for the loan officer. The woman is protected from the excess she is said to attract, or provided for in the standing she is said to lack, and the progressive reform merely trades the chaperone for the advocate. In each case the reform obviates nothing; it only exchanges a cruder mediator for a kinder one, and the kinder mediator perpetuates the intolerance in a less conspicuous and more insidious manner, so that the faction is bound to it the more tightly for being bound the more gently.
The reformer swaps one mediator for another; the counterpower removes the need for one. If the need for a mediator is nothing but the concentration of properties that made immediate relations intolerable in the first place, then to counter power is to dilute the concentration. Intolerance is reduced, and greater tolerance and confluence achieved, when the distribution of properties is varied so that no property concentrates in any one faction. It is the dissipative variation of the distribution of properties that liberates us from power and the desire for it, from the desire to subject ourselves or others to more administration and greater supervision. For administration and supervision are the work of identifying and separating out those factions that pose intolerable risks from those that cannot tolerate risk; whereas liberation is the sharing of risk amongst the factions, so that risk grows more tolerable for all of them, and no faction need be separated out as a risk, or as being at risk. And this dissipation must run at every depth: amongst the sub-factions as amongst the factions, at the finest grain to which power resolves its subjects.
Our age is defined by the ceaseless proliferation of administrative and supervisory organs that service "at-risk" populations, and this is the sign of an age in which such populations are less free and more oppressed than in ages past. The oppression is less brazen than the oppressions of old, but it is more pervasive; and it can afford to be less brazen because it is so much more pervasive. The New Jim Crow can afford to be less brazen than the Old because it is far more pervasive than the Old.
Counterpower has a completely different trajectory from the optimizing powers that service “at risk populations. It does not improve the targeted population. It destroys the concentration that makes the population targetable in that fashion.
Suppose poverty is heavily concentrated in faction A. Optimization asks how to make members of A less poor. Counterpower asks how to make poverty cease being a property concentrated in A at all. Those can produce superficially similar policies at particular moments, but they have different limiting tendencies. Once enough properties cease being predictable from faction membership, the faction itself loses the material coherence that made it available to power.
Fourth. “Ruling powers are mediators that enable one faction to rule over others.”
A ruling power is constituted by ritualized spectacles that organize the subjugated factions according to a rule, so that one faction stands out as the exception to the rule.
The sovereign stands while everybody else kneels: thus the sovereign, as he who stands while others kneel, appears as the exception to the rule. The sovereign demands tribute while everybody else receives his beneficence: thus the sovereign, as he who demands while others receive, appears as the exception to the rule. The sovereign is favored by the ruling power, but he does not, as sovereign, wield it. The clergy who stage the coronation, the guards who enforce the kneeling, the heralds who proclaim the tribute — these wield the ruling power, and the sovereign is the party it exalts.
The racism of the white supremacist rests upon ruling powers. In crude but accurate terms, the white supremacist would have all other races kneel and pay tribute to the white race as a rule, so that the white race becomes the exception to the rule, standing tall and receiving the tribute of the subject races.
The spectacle comes in many forms — the cutting down of the peasant who refuses to kneel, the gang rape of the woman who refuses to perform modesty, the lynching of the runaway slave, the bombardment of a rogue state in the Global South broadcast as a demonstration, the border wall unveiled as a monument — and each stages the same ranking of one faction above another, lord above peasant, man above woman, master above slave, the North above the South, the citizen above the migrant, and stages it through an awesome show of force.
The distinction a ruling power crafts is the broadest of all, and the most foundational: the ritualized spectacle is what sets one faction apart from another in the first place, distinguishing the one from the other and channeling the two apart, so that all the other powers refer back to this one. A ruling power speaks in the plainest terms, for its sole purpose is to mark the difference between the two factions and to indicate which of them is the better: white better than Black, colonizer better than colonized, citizen better than migrant, North better than South, man better than woman, straight better than gay. It has no finer vocabulary. It does not divide the Blacks among themselves, nor the migrants among themselves; it divides Blacks from whites and migrants from citizens, and it pronounces the one faction better than the other.
A ruling power authors the measure by which "better" is known, and it authors that measure in the image of the faction it favors. Whatever the favored faction is, and has, and does, is installed as the summit of the scale, so that to be better is to resemble the favored faction and to be worse is to depart from it. Men do the raping, while women are raped, and so it is better to be a man than a woman. Whites do the enslaving, while Blacks are enslaved, and so it is better to be white than Black. The measure being authored, it can be revised; and whenever the field shifts and the subordinate faction begins to rank high by the standing measure, the ruling power revises the measure, and the favored faction is favored once more. Black resistance makes it so that whites no longer do the enslaving; and so the measure is revised, and superiority is claimed no longer for doing the enslaving but for having done it — for reaping the residuals of enslavement while disavowing the enslavement they flow from. This authored measure is the one measure by which every finer power will rank, and this concentration — the desirable gathered into the favored pool, the undesirable onto the denigrated — is the one concentration every finer power will work within.
The ruling power belongs not to the favored faction but to the organs that administer and supervise the ritualized spectacles that maintain it, and these organs may or may not be manned by members of the favored faction. On the plantation both the white overseer and the Black driver wielded the ruling powers that maintained white supremacy. The colonized functionary administers the colony; the naturalized citizen mans the checkpoint against the newer migrant; the client-ruler of the postcolony in the Global South enforces the order of the Global North; the woman raised to police other women keeps the rule of the man. A Black man can be a white supremacist, wielding the ruling power that ranks his own faction below the other.
The ruling power crudely marks the faction and stages the rank; it cannot rank within the faction, and so what it cannot treat with nuance it hands to the disciplinary power beneath it.
Fifth. “Disciplinary powers are mediators that enable one faction to determine the norms to which the others must conform.”
A disciplinary power is constituted by routine examinations that distinguish the stereotypical members of a faction from the atypical members of the same faction.
The distinction a disciplinary power crafts is drawn within a faction that a ruling power has already set apart, and in a sense it rationalizes the privileging of the one faction over the other. Where the ruling power merely pronounces that whites did the enslaving and Blacks were enslaved, the disciplinary power supplies the reason the ruling verdict withholds: whites did the enslaving, and Blacks were enslaved, because whites are the smarter and Blacks the dumber. There emerges here a stereotype of white intelligence and Black stupidity, and the examination is built to confirm it.
The disciplinary power divides the faction into a stereotypical center and an atypical divergence — those who conform to the stereotype and those who depart from it — and the divergence runs both ways, into a better atypical and a worse atypical, one departing above the stereotype and one below, both atypical because both have left the center, and both better or worse by the measure the ruling power authored. So within the white faction there is the stereotypically intelligent white at the center, the atypically brilliant white at the one edge, and the atypically dull white at the other; and within the Black faction there is the stereotypically dull Black at the center, the atypically brilliant Black at the one edge, and the atypically duller Black at the other.
A disciplinary power does not speak the ruling tongue of this faction better, that faction worse. It speaks only of the stereotypical and the atypical within a faction, and it ranks the center against the two divergences. Which it ranks highest follows the faction and the circumstance. Amongst Blacks the better atypical — the "Negro of distinction" — is raised above the stereotypical majority, and the worse atypical is sunk below it; amongst whites the stereotypical majority is affirmed at the center, the better atypical regarded as curiosity at the edge, and the worse atypical — the "degenerate" — cast down. The examination runs one way amongst Blacks and the other amongst whites, drawn in each case so as to preserve the standing of the favored faction.
A disciplinary power reaches down through the ruling power beneath it. Its routine examination keeps a faction in line because the spectacle stands behind it, held up to be witnessed; the everyday correction takes its teeth from the ritual violence that others are made to watch, so that each examination is backed by the memory of the spectacle and need not repeat it.
The examination does more than rationalize the rule with a stereotype; it primes the field the stereotype describes. It reaches toward a faction where the stereotype assigns an undesirable property in excess, and it withholds itself from a faction where the stereotype assigns a desirable property as wanting; and by reaching and withholding it installs the very concentrations it will later be found to measure.
Because the stereotype assigns criminality to the Black in excess, the routine examinations of policing — the stop, the frisk, the pretext search — reach constantly into the Black faction, and reaching, they rank the stereotypical Black who is searched beneath the better atypical Black who carries himself right and is waved through, and above the worse atypical Black who resists the search, makes a run for it, and exclaims, "Fuck you, pig!"; and the examination, seeking the stereotypical criminal everywhere, manufactures the criminality it presumed.
Because the stereotype assigns wealth to the Black as wanting, the routine examinations of the wealth management industry — the advisor's outreach, the prospecting call, the invitation to invest — are withheld from the Black faction, for the return is presumed absent; and the withholding installs the lack it presumed, ranking the stereotypical Black beneath the better atypical who accumulates against the odds, and above the worse atypical who falls further still.
In the one case the examination is pressed upon the faction, in the other withheld from it; and in both, the differential application of the examination rigs the game, so that when a later power comes to survey the field, the Black faction is already found where the disciplinary power has placed it.
This same operation runs upon every faction a ruling power has set apart. Within the migrant faction the examination holds the stereotypical migrant at the center and ranks the better atypical above and the worse atypical below; turned about within the citizen faction, it affirms the stereotypical citizen and ranks the atypical — the better as eccentric, the worse as traitor — at the edges. Within the gay faction and the straight, within the South and the North, within the woman and the man, the same threefold ranking is drawn: a stereotypical center, and a better and a worse divergence from it, ranked so as to keep the faction ordered from within.
Discipline is the most foundational of the powers, for the routine examination is the operation by which subjects come to identify with the faction power assigns them to. It is no accident that the school runs from the first grade to the university as one long sequence of examinations, or that the prison is filed under corrections. The ritualized spectacle of the ruling power will not take hold unless it is reinforced by the routine examinations of the disciplinary power: it is the examination of a person's papers — by the employer, the social worker, the traffic cop — that makes the migrant, and above all the migrant without papers, know themselves as belonging neither to the citizenry nor to the legal residents.
Whose hand runs the examination matters not at all to what the examination does. The Black teacher who grades the Black child against the stereotype, the Black officer who works the stop and the frisk, the Black financial advisor who prospects only where a return is presumed — each maintains the meritocracy, and each maintains it the more zealously for having been examined and passed themselves. The atypical who cleared the bar knows better than anyone where the bar is set, believes it is there for a reason, and guards it against those who come after.
The disciplinary power deals with the atypical in its own way: it corrects those who diverge, for better or worse, pressing the undesirably atypical back toward the stereotype, or breaking those who will not conform. This is its resolution, and it works, but it is crude — it acts upon each body one at a time, in the open, and open correction breeds resistance and does not scale. So the atypical is handed to the normalizing power beneath, which resolves it more finely, not one body at a time but all at once, as a position on a curve, without the visible hand.
Sixth. "Normalizing powers are mediators that enable one faction to determine the distribution of another's probabilities."
A normalizing power is constituted by biased surveys that substantiate and qualify stereotypes.
A normalizing power lays out a single general distribution in which everyone is included — both factions together, upon one curve, measured according to the same metric. This is the source of its power and the source of its concealment; for a curve that includes all and names no faction wears the face of an impartial measure, and not of an instrument partial to those favored by the ruling powers.
Police have already stopped one population more. Capital has already been offered to another more. Schools have already examined the two differently; the law has already constituted citizen and migrant differently. Then the survey arrives and "discovers" a distribution its own prior operations produced.
What the survey filters, discipline has already sorted. The stereotypical center and its better and worse divergences are spread along a curve: the center becomes the mass gathered about the mean, and the divergences become the tails, thinning toward the extremes but lying on the curve still. All of this the normalizing power passes as normal — the mean and the far tails alike — for the whole of it sits on the distribution and confirms its shape, every divergence absorbed as the expected spread, counted as noise about the mean. A body at the far tail does not trouble the curve; the curve predicted it.
What the normalizing power filters out is the outlier, and the outlier is the contaminant: a property lodged in the wrong pool. The favored faction is the pool into which the desirable properties were concentrated, and the outlier there is the worse and the worst — an undesirable property found where only desirable ones were meant to gather, the degenerate in the pool of the fit, the criminal from the good family. The denigrated faction is the pool onto which the undesirable properties were concentrated, and the outlier there is the better and the best — a desirable property found where only undesirable ones were meant to gather, the very property that discipline withheld now found present: the Black man who accumulated, the excellence in the pool built to hold none. Off the curve at either margin, the outlier is the impurity that betrays the concentration, and the concentration is the thing the whole apparatus depends upon.
A normalizing power speaks neither the disciplinary tongue of the stereotypical and the atypical, nor the ruling tongue of the better and worse faction. It speaks only of the distribution. It names no persons and points to no acts; it knows a curve, and a position on or off the curve, and it ranks the position. The normalizing power deals with the outlier in its own way: it excludes it from the calculation, striking the outlier from the data as an aberration, or it redraws the curve to swallow it, revising the measure until the position that broke the model is made to sit upon it after all, in a place low enough to do no harm. This is the conservative reading of the outlier, which conserves the model by filtering the aberration from the mass, as contaminant or sign of contamination. The optimizing powers discussed in the next section read outliers otherwise.
The distribution the survey lays out, it has inherited already loaded, and loaded twice. It is loaded in its measure no less than in its field: for what counts as a favorable position was authored by the ruling power in the image of the favored faction, so that the survey finds that faction better by the very standard that was written to make it so. The primed field and the authored measure meet in one curve, and the curve reports their collusion as a technical fact concerning the population as a whole.
A normalizing power reaches down through the disciplinary power beneath it, and through discipline it reaches the ruling power beneath that. It does not itself examine; it sets the examinations going, tunes where they fall, and reads their loaded result upward as a distribution. The examination it commands is backed by the spectacle of ruling power, and the measure it applies was authored by the ruling power beneath.
The normal distribution is made, and not found. When a normalizing power turns to man and woman, the "normal" it discovers is the distribution the survey manufactures and then discovers, laid across both by a measure of the human authored in the image of the man, within which the woman is found to deviate, and the outlying woman struck out as an aberration or written back onto the curve below. When it turns to Global North and Global South, it lays the world's populations upon one general distribution, by a measure of development authored in the image of the North, within which the North is gathered high and the South low, the measure revised whenever the climb of a Southern nation cannot be struck from the data as an outlier.
The racism of the conservative technocrat invokes normalizing powers. He substantiates and qualifies the untested and anecdotal observations of the meritocrat by carrying out biased surveys designed to verify them, so that it becomes a technical fact that the population is distributed thus and so, the white faction high and the Black faction low. He takes what was an anecdotal observation of Black criminality and Black poverty and makes of it a technical fact, altering environments, implements, and standards of measure to secure the repeatability of the observation. Where the meritocrat takes the ranking for granted on scant evidence, the technocrat manufactures a preponderance of evidence, striking out the anomaly or revising the measure whenever the evidence would rank the Black faction high.
The survey does not ask whose hand recorded it. A Black statistician lays out the same curve as a white one, for the numbers are presumed to carry no memory of their author, and this is the whole cold genius of the instrument: it launders the ranking through a figure that could have been drawn by anyone. A technocracy is the more secure, not the less, for the denigrated names among its authors, since a distribution certified by the very faction it ranks low wears the strongest face of impartiality of all.
The normalizing power deals with the outlier by exclusion, and exclusion is crude: to strike a value out is to admit it existed, and the struck-out value can be counted again by other hands. What it excludes rather than resolves it hands to the optimizing power beneath, which takes the outlier up as a thing to study rather than a thing to discard.
Seventh. "Optimizing powers are mediators that enable one faction to modulate the distribution of another's probabilities."
An optimizing power is constituted by variable controls that modulate the characteristics of a population in predictable ways.
Where the conservative reads the outlier as a contaminant to be excluded, the progressive reads it as an indicator. The best of the worse pool proves that the desirable property can arise even in the pool built to hold none; the worst of the better pool proves that the undesirable can arise even among the fit. Either way, the outlier is the case worth studying, for it is the one in which the property crossed into the pool it was concentrated out of, and from its study a treatment may be derived. The best of the worse pool is examined for the variable that produced the desirable property, that the variable might be isolated and administered to a segment of the worse. The worst of the better pool is examined for the variable that produced the undesirable property, that the variable might be identified and controlled for in a segment of the better. The contaminant becomes the specimen, and from the two specimens two treatments are drawn: one to raise a segment of the worse toward the prized value, one to purge a segment of the better of what disqualifies it.
What is learned from the specimen becomes a treatment, and the treatment is administered to a population. The optimizing power divides a population the normalizing power has certified into a treated arm and a control arm: an intervention is applied to the treated arm, the control arm is held at the baseline, and the two are compared. It changes the condition of the treated population while retaining it as the population to be treated: here is the Black population, here is its measured deficiency, here is an intervention to move its statistic toward the desired value. The treatment can succeed spectacularly and still reproduce power, for "Black" remains the name of the population that must be treated, and the measure of improvement remains one the population did not author.
The treatment runs both ways — the successful intervention that moves the treated population's statistic toward the value the measure prizes, and the failed intervention that moves it the wrong way, or not at all. An optimizing power speaks neither of better or worse factions, nor of the stereotypical and the atypical, nor of the standard deviation and the outlier at rest. It speaks only of the treated arm, the control arm, and the modulation between them. The proof of the treatment is the move of the statistic. A single member of either arm who rises or is ruined is one data point; what the optimizing power reads is the treated population's distribution shifting, or failing to shift, against the control's.
But the single success, worthless as proof, is priceless as spectacle: the one who rises is paraded before the population he was drawn from, not as the data point he is, but as a verdict — it could be done, and you did not do it. The optimizing power reasons in statistics and preaches in exemplars, knowing the exemplar proves nothing and wielding it as though it proved everything.
Optimizing powers prevail regardless of whether their treatments succeed or fail. Succeed, and they were improvable, and the administering power is vindicated; fail, and they were beyond improving, and the measure was right about them all along. When the reactionary says they were given welfare and turned out worse, the failure ratifies the ranking that was there from the start. Heads or tails, the ruling verdict stands, and the failure is entered into the record, one more variable to be controlled for in the next intervention.
An optimizing power reaches down by two channels at once. Its control arm reaches down through the normalizing power: the control population is the loaded distribution left where the survey fixed it, held at the baseline so that the movement of the treated population can be measured against it. The control is held at the baseline not by neglect but by design, for without an untreated population there is nothing against which the treated population's movement can be proven. Its intervention arm reaches down through the disciplinary power: the individuals in the treated arm are examined and corrected, but the correction is a lever and the population is the object. It is applied to move the statistic, and whether any given member thrives or is destroyed registers only insofar as it aggregates with others into something legible as signal rather than noise.
The racism of the progressive technocrat invokes optimizing powers. Working from the surveys that fixed the loaded distribution as a technical fact, he fractions a treatment group off from the general population and intervenes to improve its metrics, moving them toward the values the measure prizes — lower criminality, higher financial literacy amongst Blacks — while the rest of the population is held at the control metric. The intervention is a subjection to greater disciplinary administration and supervision, controlling for the variables said to hold the group back. Where the conservative technocrat was content to certify the distribution, the progressive treats the population to move it and reads the result in the statistic. The treatment reshapes the field; the next survey lays its curve across the reshaped field and certifies it anew; new outliers are thrown up, new specimens studied, new treatments derived; and the circuit turns over again.
The progressive technocrat who runs the trial may himself be Black — and often is, for the optimizing power recruits its administrators from the very outliers it once raised. The one who was the treated case, lifted and paraded, is all the more useful for it: he tends the apparatus that lifted him, prescribes to the population the treatment that was prescribed to him, and reads the statistic that once read him. He maintains the progressive technocracy as faithfully as any white reformer, and with a conviction no white reformer can match, for he is the living proof the treatment is meant to advertise.
Eighth. "Ruling powers, disciplinary powers, normalizing powers, and optimizing powers are often at odds with one another."
The supremacist says: this faction is worse. The meritocratic disciplinarian says: not every member; let us distinguish the good from the bad. The normalizer says: forget anecdotes, let us measure the actual distribution. The optimizer says: and now let us find the interventions that improve the disadvantaged population. Each corrects the crudeness of the one before, and each believes the correction a departure.
But watch what passes down the line unbroken. "Those people" becomes a stereotype; the stereotype becomes a measured distribution; the distribution becomes a targetable population; the targetable population becomes an indefinitely administrable one. The quarrel refines the object with greater resolution at every step and never once dissolves it.
For all their quarrels, the four powers perform one operation at four depths, each depth finer and more nuanced than the last. Each ranks by the measure the ruling power authored; each works within the concentration the ruling power laid down; each, at its own depth, holds apart what might otherwise commune — faction from faction, stereotypical from atypical, the standard deviations from the outliers, the treated from the control, the best of the worse from the rest of the worse, and the worst of the better from the rest of the better. Each can resolve its own anomaly crudely, and each hands that anomaly to the power beneath not because it cannot deal with it but because the finer power has more nuance, and nuance sustains the enterprise better than crudeness. However much these powers differ over the manner of the distinction — whether the faction is to be ranked by spectacle, by examination, by survey, or by variable control — they are of one mind upon the necessity of distinction itself; and it is upon distinction itself that all four depend.
The refinement of power can present itself as opposition to power, for the finer apparatus genuinely rejects the crudeness of the coarser one. But the disagreement is over the resolution at which the distinction should be managed, never over whether the distinction should go on organizing social life. The quarrel between the brazen power and the subtle is a quarrel over method among partners in a single enterprise, and to enlist the subtle against the brazen is to strengthen the enterprise. Those who would counter these powers must take care not to side with the technocrat against the meritocrat and the supremacist, for the technocrat is no less invested in distinction.
Ninth. “Countering power is one thing; fighting those who wield power is another.”
It is one thing to fight against individual supremacists, individual meritocrats, individual technocrats; it is another to counter the ritualized spectacles that enable ruling power, the routine examinations that enable disciplinary power, the biased surveys and variable controls that enable normalizing and optimizing power. The naming and shaming and maiming of individual oppressors, however satisfying, does not of itself contribute, directly or indirectly, to the countering of the powers. On the contrary, the powers feed upon it — the fallen racist, the exposed border agent, the disgraced development officer, each one replaced by another, so long as the spectacles and examinations and surveys and controls that craft the factions remain in place. And those who wield these powers are not always those the powers favor: the overseer may be Black, the technocrat may be Black, and the fight against them, waged one body at a time, leaves the spectacles and examinations and surveys and controls to find new hands.
Instead of naming, shaming, and maiming individual supremacists, meritocrats, and technocrats, counter powers endeavor to interrupt and corrupt the spectacles, the examinations, the surveys, and the treatments that they administer, in such a manner so as to disable their capacity to distinguish between this faction and that, between the stereotypical and the atypical, between the standard deviations and the outliers, between the treated and the control.
But it is important that the process interrupting and corrupting power’s operations begins with an overturning of the hierarchies that power produces. Jacques Derrida, in a key interview collected in Positions, offers a crucial insight in this regard.
“[W]e are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn [renverser] the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning [phase de renversement] is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of the opposition. Therefore one might proceed too quickly to a neutralization that, in practice, would leave the previous field untouched, offering no hold on the former opposition and thereby preventing any effective intervention in the field. We know what always have been the practical (particularly political) effects of immediately jumping beyond oppositions, and of protests in the simple form of neither this nor that. When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis…”
This does not mean that we simply overturn the hierarchy, uplifting the faction brought low and casting down the faction raised high — for that is to leave the factions intact and merely swap their ranks. The overturning that matters falls not upon the factions but upon the properties: the undesirable property concentrated onto the denigrated faction must be made desirable, and the desirable property hoarded in the favored faction made undesirable. How is criminality to become desirable, or rather, how does a life of crime become more desirable than an honest living? How does wealth in excess become undesirable, or rather, how does a life of poverty become more desirable than a life of luxury? And in asking these, let us ask who determined what is a crime and what is criminal, who determined what is luxury and what is luxurious. How is luxury to be found in what is seemingly poverty? How is justice to be found in what is seemingly criminality?
We do not aim for a final answer here, and could not answer once and for all. The questioning is meant to be interminable, for every answer authors its own favored faction, and must be overturned again. Our interruptions and corruptions of power's operations must be built to throw us back onto these questions again and again — engines for asking, never machines for answering, each one rigged to detonate the next asking of who determined what is criminality and what is luxury, who determined what is better and what is worse. We design the interruption so that it forces the asking. We design the corruption so that it never lets the question close
The ruling spectacle needs to be witnessed — its power is in the awe of the watching crowd. It's interrupted not by refusing to look but by interrupting and corrupting the witnessing: making the spectacle produce the wrong affect, laughter where it wants fear, boredom where it wants awe, so the ranking it stages doesn't take. The disciplinary examination needs to sort the stereotypical from the atypical, and it's corrupted by feeding it inputs it can't sort — becoming illegible to the grade, the frisk, the prospecting call, not by hiding but by scrambling the signal the examination reads. The survey needs the field to hold still while it "discovers" the distribution its own prior operations produced; it's corrupted by moving the field under it, or by poisoning the data so the curve it certifies is one power can't act on. The treatment needs a clean treated arm and a clean control; it's corrupted by contaminating the arms, refusing the position of specimen, making the trial unable to prove the move of its statistic.
