Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics

Across the years that I have been working on this project, I have had to deal with that slightly uncomfortable experience of explaining what I am working on. In response to the apparently simple question “what’s the book about?” I have found myself giving two different answers. At first, this was just a matter of where I was in the project; but in retrospect, the strikingly different responses illuminate the problematic about neoliberal transformations of social difference and ethics under investigation in this book.

While writing chapters 4 and 5, I would tell people I was writing about contemporary changes in categories and concepts of social difference in the United States; after a bit of explanation, people usually became fairly animated, often regaling me with stories of their own confusion, code-switching, and (albeit unwittingly) latent racism. While writing chapter 6, however, I explained that I was writing about neoliberalism and ethics. To this, I received one clear and common response: “That’s an oxymoron!” Unlike with the other response, when I often found myself trying to wriggle gently out of uncomfortable situations after failing to introduce a broader reflection, this response short-circuited the conversation entirely. There was, quite obviously, nothing more to be said. (And I had clearly lost my mind.)

While mainstream US culture seems fairly aware of the schizophrenic state of conversations about diversity, multiculturalism, color-blindness, and good ole fashioned race and racism, we seem to be quite certain that there is nothing at all to be done about advanced capitalism and its total erosion of ethics. “TINA” (There Is No Alternative), the catchphrase from the 1980s, still seems to hold, describing this general consensus that there is no alternative and no viable critique of advanced capitalism; consequently, mainstream US culture seems resigned to the impossibility of any meaningful ethics in these neoliberal times.¹ Only crazy leftists and idealistic academics still ask such questions.

Of course, it was always only crazy leftists and idealist academics who asked these questions. And, according to this mainstream narrative of US culture, it was only ever asked through one rubric: Marxism. Functioning synecdochically as the only attempted critique of capitalism, Marxist critique is readily discounted in the United States by such shibboleths of political history as Perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Consequently, with this clear evidence of its failure as a viable realpolitik, any critique of capitalism is cast into the naïve hues of nostalgia and romanticism. The dominant cultural narratives thus become those of liberalism’s progress, naïve Marxist critique, and capitalism’s final victory, rendering the challenge of an ethical critique of neoliberalism affectively as well as conceptually quite difficult. (And yet, something funny is going on with our vocabularies of social difference: hmmm….)

This failure of the spirit or language of Marxist critique to cathect mainstream US culture is part of my motivation to try to think beyond Marxist frameworks here. Clearly, there is a rich (and ongoing) history of Marxist critique through which scholars of political economy have realized the limits of classical Marxist analyses and thereby reconceptualized them for the intricacies of globalization, socialism, postsocialism, and neoliberalism. Following Stuart Hall’s incisive analysis of the various strands of Marxist critique across the twentieth century in his essay “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees,” published in 1983, I do not call out the entire Marxist apparatus as irrelevant to our analyses of neoliberalism.² Not only would this kind of complex analysis of liberalism, Marxism, and neoliberalism be far beyond the scope of my abilities, but I also reiterate again that analyses of neoliberalism in the registers of political economy are both urgent and necessary.

When considering the thorny questions of subject formation, social difference, and ethics in the neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme, however, I want to follow Foucault’s insistence that neoliberalism does not function as an ideology. While Foucault’s distancing from Marxist apparati is not a new theme in his oeuvre, the impact of it in his analyses of neoliberalism is particularly jarring for contemporary scholarship, as I outlined in chapter 1. Therefore, following Hall, I turn specifically to those accounts of ideology and interpellation by Louis Althusser, especially in his famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).”

As Hall shows so deftly, we must turn to Althusser for these kinds of questions about “the processes by which new forms of consciousness, new conceptions of the world, arise” or “how social ideas arise.”³ We must turn to Althusser, that is, for cohesive accounts of ideology because “Marx developed no general explanation of how social ideas worked, comparable to his historico-theoretical work on the economic forms and relations of the capitalist mode of production.”⁴ It is Althusser, as Hall argues so persuasively, who “put on the agenda the whole neglected issue of how ideology becomes internalized, how we come to speak ‘spontaneously,’ within the limits of the categories of thought which exist outside us and which can more accurately be said to think us.”⁵ But there is yet another reason to turn to Althusser here: the profound, long-standing, and ongoing impact of his theories of interpellation across the theorizing of gender, sexuality, and race.

With a slightly ironic tone, Stuart Hall concludes his analysis of Althusser with a rather barbed rhetorical question: “If the function of ideology is to ‘reproduce’ capitalist social relations according to the ‘requirements’ of the system, how does one account for the subversive ideas or for ideological struggle?”⁶ Or, in terms that may be a bit more familiar, if we are all interpellated, how can we resist? I am guessing this is not a new question for most, if not all, readers of this book. I am also guessing we have a similar range of answers, especially if we are at all versed in queer theory: performative repetition, disidentification, or perhaps (still) just “drag.” Althusser’s theorizing of interpellation, with its underpinnings in ideology and identification, is foundational to queer theory. Moreover and more specifically, it is foundational to two rather different foundational figures of queer theory: Judith Butler (Gender Trouble) and José Esteban Muñoz (Disidentifications).⁷ In each of these theorists, Althusserian interpellation provides the foundational conceptual schema, albeit through diametrically opposed modes of citation, through which they reorient us to queer understandings and practices of gender, sexuality, and race.

This is unnerving not only because it may render the conceptual resources of queer theory woefully limited for the analysis of neoliberal social rationalities, but also because Butler and Muñoz initiate fairly different fields of scholarship, pedagogy, performance, and even activism. Canonized as a founding figure of queer theory per se, Butler and her theories of gender performativity as a mode of interrupting and resisting the heterosexual matrix have impacted so many fields I would not dare to enumerate them. Muñoz, however, is canonized as founding a particular field within queer theory—namely, queer of color critique—through his remarkably innovative work in performance studies with the politico-aesthetic concept of disidentification.⁸ This bifurcation, wherein Butler founds the racially unmarked “queer theory” and Muñoz’s work is marked by his race, captures part of my concern and is a long-standing fault line within queer theory. But rather than hashing over these problematics internal to queer theory, I raise a loud caution for the field as a whole and turn explicitly to each of these theorists as powerful examples of how we have come to theorize gender and race.

Race and gender operate very differently in the neoliberal episteme. By rooting my analysis of both of them in figures central to queer theory, I take the entanglement of both race and gender with sexuality to be self-evident. More strongly, I take both gender and race to be constituted in and through sexuality. But, as I will elaborate across the remainder of the book, I argue that gender largely carries forward the aestheticizing of social difference inherent in neoliberal social rationalities, while race lingers in deep historical reservoirs that jam the neoliberal machine.

Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is “expected” once it has been conceived. I hardly need add that this familial ideological configuration is, in its uniqueness, highly structured, and that it is in this … structure that the former subject-to-be will have to “find” its place, i.e., “become” the sexual subject (boy or girl) which it already is in advance.¹⁰

I read this omission as largely caused by Butler’s focus on sorting out the Lacanian symbolic in this early work of hers. Given the Lacanian scaffolding of Althusser’s arguments, this makes sense. I do not, therefore, pretend here to call out some aspect of Butler’s thinking that has never been noticed or that somehow renders the work flawed or lacking value. Gender Trouble is one of the most influential books of the late twentieth century. I am not attempting to dethrone it. While I do think the profound influence and absence of Althusser in Gender Trouble may point to a problematic dominant reading of Foucault that comes out of Butler, I do not pretend to rehearse those arguments here. Rather, I am interested in this project because of the massive circulation and impact of Gender Trouble in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in overdeveloped countries. I will return to this at length in chapter 4.

Turning to Muñoz, we find the role of Althusser much more explicit in his Disidentifications, published in 1999. Indeed, in the fabulous opening scene with Marga Gomez, Muñoz tells us that she “performs her disidentificatory desire” and thereby calls attention “to the mysterious erotic that interpellated her as a lesbian.”¹¹ He then proceeds to explain his indebtedness to Althusser explicitly through the work of Michel Pêcheux, who developed the concepts of identification, counteridentification, and disidentification directly out of his readings of Althusser. Muñoz thereby defines disidentification as “the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that opts neither to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology.”¹² Tellingly, in the very next paragraph, Muñoz claims a parallel use of disidentification in the work of Judith Butler.

The roots of this term for Muñoz also emerge out of Norma Alarcón’s use of it in her important essay “The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” published in 1991.¹³ Again, in the opening lines of the essay, Alarcón cites Althusser explicitly to describe her analysis of the writers of Bridge as “being aware of her displacement across a multiplicity of discourses: feminist/lesbian, national, racial, and socioeconomic.”¹⁴ For Alarcón, this holding of multiple positions within one’s subjectivity is precisely what Anglo-American feminists cannot conceptualize, wedded as they are to “a modal person” who “proceeds according to the logic of identification.”¹⁵ Disidentification, for which she also acknowledges Pêcheux’s work, thereby emerges in Alarcón’s work out of the multiple voices of Bridge and their embodiment of multiple, antagonistic subject positions. Muñoz calls this kind of multiplicity “identities-in-difference [that] emerge from a failed interpellation within the dominant sphere.”¹⁶

The political ethos that animates all three theorists (Butler, Muñoz, and Alarcón) is the project of destabilizing the subject. Across all three, this occurs through both complex theoretical maneuvering and the archiving and reporting of various cultural performances, with a careful eye toward what Muñoz describes as “laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.”¹⁷ These theorists are brilliant, incisive, creative writers to whom I, along with so many, am deeply indebted for opening various possibilities for thinking both normativity and resistance. But the projects of destabilizing a subject with deep interiority and the various characteristics that often find purchase there, such as agential rationality, stem largely from classical liberalism and the general schema of the Enlightenment that critical theory gives us (and clearly influences Butler and Muñoz). That is, while both Butler and Muñoz have had a remarkable impact on our theorizing of gender, race, sexuality, and resistance, the terms of their thinking in these early, groundbreaking texts are distinctly Althusserian. And as such, they may have less traction than we imagined when it comes to understanding and interrupting neoliberal subjects of interest.

To move through the kinds of transformations in subject formation that Foucault excavates and that I argue are well underway in this neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme, I begin to bring the Lacanian scaffolding of Althusser’s thinking to the foreground. In an essay written in 1964 simply titled “Freud and Lacan,” Althusser elaborates his defense of both Freud and Lacan as critical resources for theorizing the complex processes of social change, especially at the level of the subject.¹⁸ Defending “the scientificity of psycho-analysis” (LP, 129), Althusser focuses on two axes: “the familial ideology” (LP, 129) and Lacan’s recasting of Freudian schematics into language. Fused together, he gives us a succinct elaboration of the symbolic, which he notably refers to interchangeably as “the Law of Order” and “the Law of Culture” (LP, 142). With a brief noting of “the imaginary fascination of the ego” (LP, 143) in Freud’s accounts of the pre-Oedipal fort/da scene in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Althusser focuses on the symbolic to give an explicitly Lacanian account of interpellation. Calling it “the dialectic of the symbolic Order itself, i.e., … the dialectic of human Order, the human norm” (LP, 143), he develops it precisely in the order of what we post-Butlerians call “gender,” again offering a reading of infancy that strongly echoes that of Gender Trouble.¹⁹

While this essay is fairly elementary in relation to contemporary Lacanian theorizing, I bring it forward to emphasize the explicitly Lacanian understanding of social authority that structures Althusser’s account of interpellation. The Marxist frame of Althusser’s work and our uptake of it is explicit. But Althusser’s crucial addendum of interpellation to the Marxist account of ideology is explicitly Lacanian, as the final sentence of the essay shows: “This has opened up one of the ways which may perhaps lead us some day to a better understanding of this structure of misrecognition, which is of particular concern for all investigations into ideology” (LP, 149). Even more importantly for my argument, however, only two of the three registers of Lacan’s heuristic schematic constitute Althusser’s reading of Lacan: he emphasizes the symbolic and notes the imaginary, but the real never surfaces in any of Althusser’s thinking about interpellation. This crucial omission has deeply skewed our understandings of race, especially in these neoliberal times.

To elaborate this argument, which absorbs the rest of this book, I begin by arguing that the concept of social authority as a continuous, cohesive, singular function that serves as Althusser’s bedrock assumption no longer functions solely in these manners.²⁰ One of the most jarring of transformations underway in this neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme is the gradual and sporadic eclipse of the symbolic and our social cathexis to it.

In her provocative Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Jodi Dean argues that neoliberalism, particularly as exacerbated by the techno-frenzy culture that she names “communicative capitalism,” evacuates previous social scripts and the identities they spawn. Drawing on Žižek and his reading of Lacan, she shows how neoliberalism effects “the decline of symbolic efficiency,”²¹ which in turn renders the traditional mode of subjectivation via interpellation ineffective. Linking it to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s account of the crisis of institutions such as the nuclear family, the school, the neighborhood, the church, and so on, Dean emphasizes how this lack of symbolic investiture has multiple, mostly damaging effects. We no longer have any clear models of authority: whether a progress report from the school or a medical diagnosis from the doctor or a piece of advice from the cleric, we immediately seek second, third, even fourth opinions (most often via our favorite screen) and thereby extend our ambivalence about the very possibility of certainty. Stripping modern epistemologies of their barometers of certitude, this eclipse of symbolic force and cultural authority fragments and multiplies both rationalities and subjectivities: identities no longer function with clear and distinct boundaries, roles, meanings, or purposes.

For Dean, this renders individuals even more vulnerable to mechanisms of control and manipulation. As she writes, “Communicative capitalism’s circuits of entertainment and consumption supply the ever new experiences and accessories we use to perform this self-fashioning” (DNF, 66–67) that neoliberalism enjoins its subjects to engage. She thus follows out Žižek’s reading that, in this failure of the symbolic order to interpellate, we are regulated through another register of the Lacanian schematic, the imaginary. Subjects regulated purely by the imaginary are governed by the endlessly proliferating comparative devices of an ideal ego. This renders us endlessly aspirational as this purely social (not moral or epistemological) apparatus dishes up endless ideals to simulate.

While Dean assumes Žižek’s Lacanian registers, her descriptions also elaborate Foucault’s analysis of the neoliberal subject as a subject of interests. Driven by external economic incentives, these imaginary identities of neoliberalism are increasingly aestheticized and, consequently, so are the modes of determining worth and meaning: we are what and how we can buy, what and how we can compete, what and how we can look, what and how we can appear. This is the full-blown California cult of self with which, despite his adamant disavowals, Foucault’s late writings on the care of the self are so often confused.²² It is also, as Dean clearly sees, how neoliberalism is the birth-site of biopolitics: despite the illusion of freedom that this enticement to endless self-fashioning offers, these neoliberal imaginary subjects of interests become subject to greater and more diffuse societal controls.

Evacuated of internal controls and boundaries that the prescripted identities of symbolic interpellation secure (for better or worse), this externalized subject of neoliberalism is left utterly vulnerable to the whims of media, styles, fads, and trends: “I must be fit; I must be stylish; I must realize my dreams. I must because I can—everyone wins. If I don’t, not only am I a loser but I am not a person at all; I am not part of everyone” (DNF, 67). As Dean writes, neoliberal “imaginary identities are incapable of establishing a firm place to stand” (DNF, 67). Consequently, when violence becomes cool or disasters become fascinating, neoliberal subjects have no internal script with which to respond: we lack a vocabulary of evaluation other than that of the enterprising maxim “maximize interests.”

In Foucaultian terms, as Eva Cherniavsky and Falguni Sheth argue, the role and force of sovereign power have been eclipsed and transformed, but have not disappeared from the contemporary episteme. Cast in the terms of the classic liberalism that grounds the Marxist-Althusserian framework, the neoliberal rejection of the state can never be fully complete. Rather, I argue that the role of the state is shifting in this neoliberal episteme to a narrower and more explicitly racializing function that we should aptly call the carceral state. But as a neoliberal social rationality has encroached more and more upon all of our modes of reflection and everyday practices, the role of the state in mediating subjective formation has weakened considerably. This is an example of how neoliberal practices eclipse the role and force of the symbolic and how, consequently, interpellation’s lacunae become more and more pronounced. By turning directly to Althusser’s classic formulation of the constitutive parts of interpellation, I aim to map precisely how and where interpellation is still fully in force and how and where it is losing traction in sociopsychic formations underway in neoliberal social rationalities. This will, in turn, help to excavate the precise contours of neoliberal racializing schemas.

The explicit location of ideology in material practices of individuals and, even more so, Althusser’s insistence on the multiplicity and plurality of ISAs begin to look like the fragmenting of the social fabric that Jodi Dean diagnoses in neoliberalism. His ongoing insistence on the fundamental unity of these disparate practices, however, focuses his analysis on the dominant (hegemonic) functions of the liberal contractarian aspects of the modern episteme, namely, a social authority that functions through a juridical rationality and an obedient subject who responds with a psychological interiority. Bracketing for the moment the function of the police and army as Repressive State Apparatuses that structure and enforce a neoliberal racializing schema, I argue that Althusserian interpellation misses a great deal of the kinds of “new” sociopsychic formations underway in the neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme.

Take Žižek’s favorite example: choosing a ridiculously complex drink at Starbucks, while being soothed by the knowledge that one is “doing one’s part” for the environment and the globalized economy.²⁴ While this practice, which Žižek reads as a quintessentially neoliberal practice, certainly occurs in patterned kinds of behavior that one might call a ritual, it is but a fleeting practice among hundreds of others that might supplant, enhance, confuse, conflict, or simply disregard it at any moment. Keeping up with the changes in Starbucks menu is itself a dizzying practice: this is not the kind of ritual that ideological interpellation enacts. Moreover, a mere five years from now may well bring the intensification and marketing of practices around breathing fresh air or standing up straight or laughing more boisterously, rather than drinking different coffees.

Whatever the new trend, the kinds of practices involved are not the kinds of rituals Althusser has in mind, which are culturally, historically sedimented repetitions such as attending Mass on Sunday, kneeling to pray, obeying the headmaster, getting married with no concept of a divorce (or a prenuptial contract), keeping one job for an entire lifetime, obeying and pleasing one’s husband, devoting oneself entirely to parenting, and professing undying loyalty to one’s nation, one’s race, one’s community, one’s sports team, and so on. These are the rituals that bind ISAs together: they are the heart and blood of ideology. And, most importantly, they are the rituals that interpellate us into clearly scripted subject positions.²⁵ But they are no longer the kinds of everyday practices that animate living in these neoliberal times.

Finally, we come to the celebrated moment of that infamous cop: the hailing of interpellation that is the most explicit moment of contact with the Law. In his development of this critical aspect of ideological interpellation, Althusser emphasizes that “the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing” (LP, 118). He is most concerned to disabuse us of the temporal succession that the classic story of the cop hailing a person on the street implies. As he says, “For the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession” (LP, 118). But this is misleading: “In reality these things happen without any succession” (LP, 118).

The recognition that one is always already hailed is immediate. Even more so, one becomes a subject capable of such recognition precisely through the ideological hailing itself: without hailing, there is no subject. And yet, we are always already subjects—and thus always already hailed, always already interpellated by ideology. As Althusser puts it, “The category of the subject is the constitutive category of all ideology, whatever its determination (regional or class) and whatever its historical date, … [but] the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects” (LP, 115–16). Butler’s classic work in Gender Trouble, as I have already suggested, accentuated and popularized this dynamic considerably.

True to Foucault’s account of neoliberalism as emergent out of theories, concepts, values, and practices of classical liberalism, the question of the state (its role, its size, the modes of its governance) in the neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme is extremely thorny.²⁶ Without pretending to do justice to those debates, I argue that the explosion of incarceration rates in the US since the 1970s shows the ongoing relevance—and limits—of Althusserian interpellation for our concepts of race. That is, I am more interested in what the emergence of the carceral state means for processes and concepts of race than in what it means for transformations in the functioning of the state. (Accordingly, I continue my discussion of the racializing project of the prison industrial complex in chapter 5.)

The carceral state, as I am calling it, provides an urgent example of how neoliberal social rationalities and formations emerge out of, intertwine and overlap with, and sometimes intensify classically liberal social rationalities and formations. Reading it as a racializing institution then beckons for new concepts of race to capture its complex (and new) processes. Given the horrific rates of incarceration for people of color in the United States and the compounding epidemic of state-sanctioned violence and killing of people of color that the #BlackLivesMatter movement is finally exposing, the carceral state as a racializing institution particularly sharpens the need for new concepts of race that can move beyond the classically liberal reliance on inclusion and a broadening of the social contract as sufficient to ameliorate long-standing historical racial inequality.²⁷

In Althusser’s account, the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) crucially enforce a unity upon the plural, material instantiations of ideology. While I have argued that this kind of unified sociality is no longer cathecting neoliberal subjects of interests, the role of state force nonetheless continues to regulate—indeed, to criminalize, imprison, and kill—a racially selected portion of the US population. Althusser’s account of the RSAs thereby brings us to some of the thorniest issues confronting analyses of neoliberalism.

First of all, it forces the issue of the neoliberal state, which sounds oxymoronic. The break from the state is the animating point of departure for neoliberalism as an economic policy: both German and US forms of neoliberalism argue explicitly against Bismarckian and Keynesian welfare policy, respectively. The state is, from the beginning, anathema to neoliberal theories and policies. But that rejection of the state, which can never be complete, focuses primarily on the state’s interactions with the economy, granting vast latitude to other functions of the state, especially the repressive functions of the police and the army.²⁸

In the US iteration of the neoliberal episteme, RSAs no longer unify interpellation for all citizen-subjects. Intensifying for particular parts of the population, they transform from a general to a selective operation of repression that enacts long-standing schemas of xenophobia, especially racism, while enabling circuits for neoliberal subjects to maximize their interests. To put it too bluntly, who gets to maximize their interests and who gets imprisoned or enlisted in or killed by the military and police becomes an enactment of these long-standing historical schemas of racialization and xenophobia. The persistent role of the RSAs in the neoliberal episteme thereby forces a second difficulty: the persistence of racism, despite the neoliberal celebrations of diversity and the insistent evidence of a postracist era in phenomena such as the black middle class.

The classically liberal answer to this alleged problem of racism is to frame it as an historical accident of exclusion. The corrective, accordingly, involves the gradual extension of the social contract and its benevolent bequest of rights upon more and more disenfranchised minoritarian populations, often conceived as “getting in line” in a stunning teleology.²⁹ The carceral state refuses such iterations of the benevolent social contract, halting this progress narrative in its tracks. As Michelle Alexander’s (among many others’) work shows, the state apparatuses of the police and the army have expanded to historically unforeseen proportions in this neoliberal episteme and are directly enforcing and enacting racist demarcations upon select populations: the prison and the army have become explicitly racializing institutions.³⁰ Just consider the long litany of now-named laws, such as “Stand Your Ground” or “Stop and Frisk,” that have direct, explicitly racist effects. Or consider the astoundingly global exposure of police brutality against people of color in the United States by the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the fall of 2014. It would appear to be a foregone conclusion that Althusser’s RSAs are fully in effect, functioning as repressive structures to enforce an ideology of racism.

I caution, however, that this is only viable as a partial explanation, albeit a very important one, especially given the flows of capital. The focus on these actions of the police and military often problematically feeds the kind of simplified and flattened ideological reading of neoliberalism that posits the carceral state as doing the dirty work of the elite class, albeit with varying allegations of intentionality and in various guises, including such things as the defunding of inner-city schools that then funnel those populations into the military and prison.³¹ Given the neoliberal mantras of “diversity” and the “historically accidental” character of racism, however, this kind of analysis finds very little, if any, traction with neoliberal subjects of interests who are adamantly postrace and, more broadly, postxenophobia. Neoliberal subjects of interests do not cathect with the materially brutal reality of the carceral state as anything other than the fodder of ideological warfare—and the cynicism it breeds. Given that the state apparatuses of the police and the army do not directly interpellate and repress the entire polis, we must read them beyond (if alongside) the Althusserian schematic of ideology, interpellation, and RSAs. In the neoliberal carceral state, the police, military, and other extrajudicial security forces function, rather, as limits to the maximizing efforts of proper neoliberal subjects of interests—limits that are, crucially, racializing.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement, which is emerging in the United States and globally literally as I send this book to the final stages of production, is dramatically exposing the violence of these racializing limits. The potential of this movement is astounding, so I cannot possibly anticipate how it might unfold beyond December 2014. For the analysis of neoliberal racism I am developing, however, the demands of the movement will be sadly limited if they are framed solely in juridical terms. I understand the carceral state to include the rule of law, which is how the failure to indict the “cops” (whether employed by the state or privatized security firms) who killed Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, John Crawford, Eric Garner, and countless others is unsurprising. As Lisa Marie Cacho argues, “legal recognition is not and cannot be a viable solution for racialized exploitation, violence, and poverty.”³² If this movement reaches beyond the arc of legal remediation, which is so often the scene of ideological embattlement, it could ignite new forms of antiracism sufficient to the neoliberal contortions of race and racism. If, that is, this movement reaches beyond the purview of the carceral state to incite awareness of—and caring about—the insidious forms of racism that live in the crooks and crannies of our everyday lives, then it may incite an antiracist ethics.

My concern is, therefore, to track how the carceral state’s racializing limits to neoliberal subjects of interests instantiate and depend upon a transformation of social cathexes and social difference. Before turning directly to that in the following chapter, I return briefly to Foucault’s provocation about a split subjectivity at the heart of liberalism.

When Foucault locates this kind of subject of interests at the heart of liberalism, he at least sets a different stage than the one we have inherited from the state-centric, law-abiding one of the social contract tradition. If homo economicus has always already been running alongside the subject of rights, mostly underneath and preferably invisibly, then perhaps it has not been utterly uninvolved in the historically sedimented patterns of xenophobia that the liberal social contract—especially in contemporary, neoliberal iterations—prefers to refer to as unfortunate exclusions. For example, as the work of Naomi Zack shows, chattel slavery enacted a monetization of race by delineating clearly between those bodies who extrapolate labor into commerce and those bodies who are the commerce—that is, between those who breed other bodies for profit and those whose bodies are bred.³³ Or, in the language of neoliberalism, those who are entrepreneurs and those who are not.

In this light, race has always served as a systematic, generalizable schematic to distinguish between those who can and those who cannot pursue the egoist interests of homo economicus. While the subsumption of homo economicus into the subject of rights deferred our attention onto the sacrificial logic of obligation and responsibility, this return to the disavowed part of liberalism’s split subjectivity helps us to see how the primary question of cathexis to the social contract has always already been racialized. Not only is the cruelty of the racial contract historically noxious and destructive to racialized bodies, but access to becoming a proper entrepreneur is also barred from racialized bodies.³⁴ Despite Milton Friedman’s protestations, the market has never been neutral.

As practices of neoliberalism then begin to intensify homo economicus as the primary mode of subjectivation, these racialized histories still haunt the socially stratified enterprising activities of various, even conflicting stripes. For a quick example, popular, mainstream, white culture in the United States fetishizes black “gangsta” culture precisely as the victory of this enterprising impulse. Various modes of media screens allegedly celebrate the ostentatious displays of wealth by black stars of the music industry. But they do so only as an aberration that is an exception to the invisible and unspoken rule of proper enterprise. The carceral state then clearly enforces these limits and confines this subculture, policing the black instantiation of enterprise specifically as aberrant. Framed as a protection of the social sphere (that is, the social contract), the racializing of the market—that sacredly neutral social rationality—never comes to the fore. Rather, the carceral state appears to function as a disconnected, wholly external limit to the unlimited practices of neoliberalism: white bourgeois kids are totally cool for listening to and even parodying gangsta hip-hop in the suburbs, but they are not incarcerated for smoking the same weed.

If we continue to read processes of racialization and racism as ideological formations, we constrain ourselves to this space of the imaginary, which is largely dyadic. Lacan’s originary accounts of the imaginary (for example, in the 1949 account of the mirror stage and the account of the inverted bouquet from seminar I in 1953–54)³⁵ locate it in the dyadic space of the mother and child, which is then extended through language into the ontology of other and self. In that (early) developmental account, misrecognition and alienation incite the incipient ego to develop as a “fortress” to guard against the aggressive imago, which is (mis)perceived as the source of pain and trauma. Animated by a fundamental narcissism, the imaginary ego is filled with aggression and competition, with illusions of wholeness ensuring an endless repetition of dyadic battles. (Ripe material for the neoliberal market, needless to say.)

This foundational dyadic formation morphs and constrains the ideological concepts of both race and racism in various ways: for example, (1) race becomes the category that mediates the dyadic self and other conflict—that is, it becomes the conceptual placeholder for Other-ness, which is always framed in an aggressive, narcissistically cathected struggle; (2) racism functions strictly in a dyadic (black and white) manner; (3) race gets framed as a social construction of the same sort we have located in the concept of gender (a deeply problematic move that I elaborate in chapter 4); and (4) as a social construction, race should come undone through ideological or political manipulation (landing us in the contemporary, ridiculous, and pernicious claims of a postracial era).

This ideological understanding of processes of racialization and racism has informed US concepts of race and racism since at least the Civil Rights Movement. Filled with identitarian politics, racialized (which means nonwhite in the United States) subjects have been taught, encouraged, prodded, and otherwise cajoled into becoming distinct, legible, celebratory identities that are readily recognized by mainstream US culture: the happy, well-adapted, healthy, upwardly mobile racialized subject who is “lifting up the race” becomes the damning metric for racialized subjects in the post–Civil Rights United States. As Antonio Viego explains, ethnic-racialized subjects must undertake this kind of healthy identity formation “in order to be considered a socially and culturally intelligible citizen-subject and … failing to do so would condemn him to radical subjective illegibility.”³⁶

To become a distinct, legible identity as a racialized subject requires a kind of pretense of wholeness, completion, and cohesion that necessarily disavows the messy, irrational, chaotic processes of subject formation. Moreover, this pursuit occurs simultaneously at the level of both the individual and the community, since the legible racialized subject is always already the tokenized representative of the race. In the ideological reading of processes of racialization, the command to become that ideal-racialized subject is always already to become the spokesperson for the entire race. As an ideal ego, the aspiration always fails, leaving the racialized subject the site of pathology, the subject in need of compensatory strengthening of the ego to adapt better to his or her culture—his or her racist culture. Who can bear that weight? And what kind of politics can we find here but the most conciliatory assimilation?

The turn away from trauma as a profound site of racialization in the United States warps our understandings of race and racism. It warps our theories, our politics, our abilities to reflect upon these complex, long-standing, sociopsychic dynamics. It warps our lives. As Viego incites us, we must theorize this loss and trauma “at the psychic, political, juridical, and economic levels.”³⁷ We must do so to avoid providing, as Viego warns, “precisely the image of ethnic-racialized subjectivity as whole, complete, and transparent, an image upon which racist discourse thrives.”³⁸ But we must also do so to find our ways through the madness that neoliberal forms of racism are becoming.

We must find a way to speak about race and racism that cuts against these ideological frameworks. While there is, of course, much sociologically explanatory power in each of the claims I enumerated above, they are also easily manipulated into ideological disagreements and their inevitable cynicism. In attempting to jar us from that register, I conclude with a powerful thread we find in the authors of This Bridge Called My Back. For example, listen to the visceral, embodied language of Andrea Canaan: “Racial memory coursed through my veins. Memories of being snatched away by friend and stranger, stuffed into vessels that traversed vast spaces of water, chained, whipped, branded, hunted and sold by overlapping generational systems of degradation.”³⁹ Memories coursing through veins are not subject to ideological manipulation. “Sharing a common disaster,” as Stuart Hall defined racism, is not subject to ideological manipulation.⁴⁰

The call to embodied memory is thereby the line I want to cultivate. To do so, I continue to develop the Lacanian lexicon, moving toward a reading of race in the register Althusser omitted from his analysis: the real. Cast far beyond subjectivity as reduced to identity markers, the real allows us to think race and racism as powerful forces that refuse the reduction to sociological categories of identity—or remedies cast purely in their terms. If we are to think about ethics in these neoliberal times, we must create a meaningful way of talking about race and racism that cathects us to the long violent history of racism. To foreshadow arguments to come and riff on Hortense Spillers, we must find a language to talk about the censored chapter of our American grammar.