Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics

3. Of course, Marxists (especially Marcuse) have argued for some time that this kind of commodification is inherent in capitalism. Rooting myself in Foucault’s analyses of neoliberalism, I argue we must develop non-Marxist readings of these various transformations.

4. See hooks, We Real Cool, and Fraiman, Cool Men and the Second Sex.

5. Prime examples of the advocacy work include Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man; and Sachs, The End of Poverty. Prime examples of the critical work include Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework; Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies; Dean, “Drive as the Structure of Biopolitics”; Habermas, “Toward a Cosmopolitan Europe”; Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; and Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. For an excellent recent overview of various “forms” of neoliberalism, see Wacquant, “Three Steps.” See also Mirowski and Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin, for a thorough account of the widespread impact of the Mont Pelerin Society on academic disciplines.

6. It is little wonder, then, that the very issue of naming “neoliberalism” has rightfully become a subject of some debate. Heeding the arguments of both Elizabeth Povinelli and Lauren Berlant that we gain much from calling this contemporary period “late liberalism,” so as to capture the kinds of sociopolitical transformations such as multiculturalism and cultural recognition, I nonetheless persist in calling this social rationality under investigation “neoliberalism.” This by no means distances it from liberalism; to the contrary, my analysis is grounded in Foucault’s argument in the 1979 lectures that the “new” aspects of neoliberalism derive from an intensification of categories and practices of liberalism, not any kind of clear break from it.

7. Locating this problem, Bernard Harcourt argues in The Illusion of Free Markets that a nominalist approach offers an effective method to intervene in this politico-semiotic problematic. For Harcourt, the dominant categories of analyses of neoliberalism—namely, “free market” and “regulated” alongside “natural order” and “discipline”—have come to stand in for the practices they are allegedly describing. Through a brilliant comparison of late-eighteenth-century French regulations of the bread market with late-twentieth-century regulations of the wheat market at the Chicago Board of Trade, Harcourt exposes how these categories have become freighted with ideological proclivities, consequently skewing our view of what is happening (in the past and present) in the wide array of activities shaped by market rationalities.

8. I refer to Althusser’s foundational essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” in Lenin and Philosophy. Of course, Althusser argued this is always the case, demonstrating how there is no outside to ideology. I return to these arguments in great detail in chapter 2.

9. I offer only a brief sampling of this vast scholarship, from older classics to more recent work: Alexander and Mohanty, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures; Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale; Parrenas, Servants of Globalization; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman; Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy; Hawkesworth, Globalization and Feminist Activism; Cabezas, Reese, and Waller, The Wages of Empire.

10. See, for example, his classic Capitalism and Freedom.

11. For prime examples of this Marxist critique of neoliberalism, see Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Duggan, The Twilight of Equality; Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism; and Goldberg, The Threat of Race. The work of Chandan Reddy, especially his Freedom with Violence, and Jodi Melamed, especially her Represent and Destroy, both draws implicitly on Marxist analyses, especially the workings of ideology and interpellation. Finally, the explicitly non-Marxist analysis that I am deriving from Foucault here also addresses current trends in queer theory that analyze neoliberalism through Marxist lenses, including turns to the utopic as a queer temporal horizon. See especially Rosenberg and Villarejo’s special issue of glq, “Queer Studies and the Crisis of Capitalism,” as well as Hennessey, Profit and Pleasure, and Floyd, The Reification of Desire.

12. In the 1982 preface to Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman writes: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable” (xiv). The economic and demographic transformation of New Orleans after the crisis of Hurricane Katrina demonstrates this kind of neoliberal strategy perfectly; I conclude the book with a discussion of these phenomena.

13. Most scholarship, such as that of Harvey, Giroux, Stiglitz, and Duggan, locates the emergence of neoliberalism primarily in the Chicago School of the 1960s. See Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, esp. 10–12, and Dean, “Enjoying Neoliberalism,” esp. 48–50, for excellent overviews of these genealogies of neoliberalism.

14. I have in mind the broad sweep of scholarship inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life (in Homo Sacer) and Judith Butler’s concept of precarity (in Precarious Lives), including the work of Berlant, Esposito, Negri, Povinelli, and Virno. I am implicitly returning to a concept of biopolitics derived more directly from Foucault’s work and its emphasis on various modes of normalizing populations; my analysis of the transformation in the social aesthetics of cool in mainstream US culture is one of these modes through which particular kinds of living are “made to live” in particular ways and other kinds of living are “left to die.”

15. Dean, “The Biopolitics of Pleasure,” 477. As he elaborates, Dean wonders how and why “the question of pleasure, so central to Michel Foucault’s work on power relations, has been skirted by those who have developed his inchoate remarks on biopower for an understanding of our contemporary political situation” (477). While Dean focuses on Italian scholars such as Agamben, Esposito, Negri, and Virno, I argue that the same occlusion informs scholars in the United States such as Povinelli, Butler, and Berlant, as well as work out of queer theory and critical ethnic studies that focuses primarily on violence, such as that of Jodi Melamed and Chandan Reddy. See also my essay from 2012, “The Queer Thing About Neoliberal Pleasure,” for musings on the thematic of pleasure through exploring why Foucault locates both sexuality and neoliberalism at “the heart of biopolitics.”

16. The use of Foucault in the very act of occluding pleasure is particularly surprising in Povinelli’s turn to The Use of Pleasure in Economies of Abandonment precisely to develop the bifurcation “between those who reflect on and evaluate ethical substance and those who are this ethical substance” (11). While this works for her own project, it is far from the primary focus of Foucault’s volume, namely, the problematic of practicing pleasure. Her reading of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” performs a similarly gross occlusion of the major theme, namely, the unmitigated joy and happiness of the Omelas. As I hope is already clear, I find Povinelli’s work compelling and provocative, but regarding this specific occlusion of pleasure it is so via negation.

17. See Winnubst, “The Queer Thing About Neoliberal Pleasure,” for my argument that queer theory’s allegiance to antinormativity may render it one of neoliberalism’s best songs. See also Wiegman and Wilson, “Queer Theory Without Antinormativity,” for broader considerations of how queer theory might move away from and without this long-standing commitment.

18. Since the #BlackLivesMatter movement has emerged in the fall of 2014, Obama has given several more statements and interviews regarding the protests against the failure to indict the police officers who killed Michael Brown, John Crawford, and Eric Garner. While I have inserted some analysis of the #BlackLivesMatter movement (as of December 2014) across the book, I do not track Obama’s responses.

1. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 271. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as BB.

2. Thomas Lemke’s early reading of these lectures in 2001—seven years before they were translated into English—laid the groundwork for Wendy Brown’s reading of them, both of which functioned as authoritative summaries of the lectures for some time; see Lemke, “The Birth of Bio-Politics”; and Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework. Scholarship has continued to proliferate since the translation of the lectures into English in 2007. See especially Dilts, “ ‘From Entrepreneur of the Self’ to ‘Care of the Self,’ ” on the role of these lectures in the transition to the later volumes of History of Sexuality. See Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, for the argument that Foucault’s work ought not be divided into periods and themes.

3. Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, 114.

4. See Foucault, “Truth and Power.”

5. See Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 19, for a helpful delineation of Foucault’s primary problems with ideology as a conceptual framework for critique. See also Han, Foucault’s Critical Project.

6. For an excellent example of this kind of analysis, see Delaney, Times Square Red: Times Square Blue, which is also marked by a distinct tone of nostalgia that often accompanies Marxian critiques.

7. Foucault calls the German form “ordoliberals” because the primary theorists published in the journal Ordo. It also helps to distinguish them from the neoliberals in the United States. See also Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” for a discussion of this language.

8. I have developed some of the implications of this narrowed conceptualization of Protestantism through the work of Georges Bataille, who argues (following Max Weber and R. H. Tawney) in The Accursed Share, volume 1, that it is Calvinist theology, not Lutheran, that introduces commerce into the heart of Protestantism and its infamous work ethic. For a reading of this in relation to Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism, see Winnubst, “Sacrifice as Ethics.”

9. For a sustained examination of this point, see Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race.

10. Foucault discusses the transformation as occurring both in practices, such as shifts in agriculture and so on (BB, 33), and in “the heads of the economists” (BB, 30), including Adam Smith explicitly later in the lectures.

11. In one of his earliest discussions of “truth” as a matter of discursive practices, rather than correspondence, Foucault argues that Mendel’s insights about genetics had to begin to shape contemporary discourses before they could be fully “true”; see Foucault, “Discourse on Language.”

12. Labor is, of course, also fundamental to John Locke’s account of classical liberalism and social contract theory; see Winnubst, Queering Freedom, chap. 1, for an analysis of this. Suffice it here to say that the liberal strains in Marxist analyses are worth reconsidering in light of Foucault’s lectures.

13. Granted, Milton Friedman does analyze structures of distribution, but only to discount the need to do so, in Capitalism and Freedom.

14. Foucault draws extensively on Chicago School theorists for these developments, especially Gary Becker and T. W. Schultz.

15. It is worth noting that Foucault links the transformation—namely, “a policy of growth focused precisely on … the form of investment in human capital” (BB, 232)—directly to the considerable economic growth of Western and Japanese societies since 1930 (BB, 232).

16. See Huffer, Mad for Foucault, 67–74, for an incisive argument that this dominant reading turns on both a problematic translation of Foucault’s French into English and a distinctively Anglo-American concept of identity.

17. See especially Zupančič, An Ethics of the Real, for a provocative explication of this Kantian dilemma as the ethical dimension of the Lacanian Real. I return to this at length in the final chapter.

18. Foucault cites the physiocrats of France, the English economists, and even theorists like Mandeville; see BB, 275.

19. For compelling work on Foucault’s analysis of race and racism and extensions of it into Foucaultian analyses of race and racism, see McWhorter, Racism and Sexism in Anglo-America and “Foucault and Race;” and Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race.

20. I have in mind particularly the work of Giroux, Goldberg, Duggan, Delaney, and Melamed.

1. Goyette, “Joe Cool,” 1971.

3. As Rheta Grimsley Johnson writes: “Schulz describes himself as ‘a secular humanist’ from late 1980s onward, despite being reared in the Lutheran faith and being active in the United Methodist Church in early adulthood.” Grimsley, Good Grief, 137.

4. Mendelson and Melendez, There’s No Time for Love, Charlie Brown.

1. A slogan used by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, “TINA” has become a standard shorthand way of dismissing any attempt to think beyond capitalism. Of course, there have been and still are plenty of backlashes against this view by scholars and activists; I am only characterizing the view of mainstream US culture.

2. Hall’s insights in this essay are remarkable, particularly concerning the fraught theoretical times of the 1980s, when poststructuralism emerged right alongside Thatcherism in the United Kingdom and the Reagan Right in the United States. His overview of Marxist theory in the twentieth century locates precisely when and where Marxist critique has altered in an effort to remain relevant to the rapidly transforming circuits of capital. I must note that his analysis of how Marxist critique will always revert to the primacy of production over the market gives me pause about its tracking of the neoliberal transformations Foucault charts in the 1979 lectures. See Hall, “The Problem of Ideology,” 38.

7. Given the argument that I will elaborate that Althusserian interpellation fails to capture the shifting modes of social authority and subject formation underway in neoliberal social rationalities, these conceptual roots of queer theory may render many of its analyses insufficient or even irrelevant to neoliberal social rationalities. Indeed, queer theory’s fetishizing of nonnormative genders and sexualities as sites of resistance may, given the protracted arguments about subject formation and social difference underway across this book, become one of neoliberalism’s best songs. For a very condensed version of this argument, see Winnubst, “The Queer Thing About Neoliberal Pleasure.” For a recent turn to this question of moving beyond antinormativity for the field of queer theory, see Wiegman and Wilson, “Queer Theory Without Antinormativity.”

8. Given his tragic early death, the metaphor of canonization is particularly poignant for Muñoz.

9. Butler, Gender Trouble, 33.

10. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 119, my emphasis. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as LP.

11. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 3.

13. The essay was originally published in Calderon and Salvidar, Criticism in the Borderlands.

14. Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s),” 289.

16. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 7.

18. As he tells us in the opening sentence of the essay, he agreed to write this essay because of the criticisms “for discussing Lacan in three lines” (LP, 133) in a previous essay from 1963. In a letter to a translator in 1969, we hear more of this fraught historical context within the French Communist Party: “There is a danger that this text will be misunderstood, unless it is taken for what it then objectively was: a philosophical intervention urging members of the PCF to recognize the scientificity of psycho-analysis, of Freud’s work, and the importance of Lacan’s interpretation of it” (LP, 129). I note these historical conflicts because the allergy, if not hostility, to Lacanian analyses persists in so many of the intellectual and political worlds in which I travel.

19. See Butler, Gender Trouble, 42–46.

20. For an account of this in Althusser’s thinking, see Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries, esp. chaps. 7 and 8. Montag does not argue against this concept of social authority and thereby, albeit inadvertently, gives the kind of Althusserian reading of Foucault that I suggest Judith Butler’s early work helped to instigate.

21. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 61. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as DNF.

22. See Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 10–13, for a discussion of this confused reading of Foucault, particularly in the specific self-fashioning aesthetics of contemporary neoliberalism.

23. Althusser’s list of these ISAs is instructive: “the religious (the system of different churches), the educational (the system of the different public and private ‘schools’), the family, the legal, the political (the political system, including the different parties), the trade-union, the communications (press, radio and television, etc.), the cultural (literature, the arts, sports, etc.).” LP, 143.

24. See Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 53–54.

25. In addition to Butler and Muñoz, these kinds of cultural repetitions also structure the early work in queer theory of Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick. For a clear example, see her classic list of “family activities” in “Queer and Now,” in Tendencies.

26. See Passavant, “The Strong Neo-Liberal State,” for an excellent overview of the scholarship in political theory, especially Foucaultian accounts, of whether the neoliberal state is “big,” “small,” “weak,” or “strong.” In a manner that seems sympathetic if not symbiotic with my account of the carceral state as a racializing mechanism, Passavant argues that the neoliberal state has not declined in force, but has transformed in the ways that it governs. Arguing that the figure of the criminal is twinned with the figure of the consumer in neoliberal governance, Passavant shows how a logic of risk and security has come to structure the prison: “While the prison during the Fordist era was justified on grounds of correctionalism, today, incarceration is justified based on the incapacitation of those whose presence in society is seen simply as too risky” (15). I thank an anonymous reviewer of the press for bringing Passavant’s scholarship to my attention.

27. Put more pedagogically, while Charles Mills’s remarkable work in The Racial Contract remains required and crucial reading, it is insufficient to conceptualizing neoliberal processes of racialization and racism.

28. In The Illusion of Free Markets, Bernard Harcourt shows how one of the opaque twists in neoliberal logic is the demarcation of the penal system as the space where state law reigns boundlessly, having been removed from the space of the market.

29. This continues to structure the debates about same-sex marriage, whereby liberal advocates argue that it is gays and lesbians’ “turn” to receive rights, having waited “behind” African Americans and decidedly “ahead of” immigrants. For an excellent analysis of this problematic logic, see Reddy, “Time for Rights?”

30. I return to Alexander’s work, as well as that of Loic Wacqant and Angela Davis in chapter 5.

31. See Jodi Melamed’s much acclaimed essay “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” for an example of this kind of fundamentally ideological reading of neoliberalism that, first, serializes the historical development from liberalism to the Civil Rights Movement to neoliberalism and, secondly, argues that the carceral state is part of an ideological bifurcation of the population into neoliberals and prisoners. While this is an excellent and insightful analysis, the reliance on ideology and interpellation constrains the understanding of neoliberal racialization and, consequently, also the possibilities of interrogating and resisting it.

32. Cacho, Social Death, 8. Cacho develops a compelling analysis of how the categories of “social death” constrain our most well-intentioned attempts to contest them.

33. See Zack, “The American Sexualization of Race.” This also introduces heterosexuality as the mode of monetizing race.

34. Clearly, nonwhite bodies have nonetheless become excellent entrepreneurs in various kinds of markets in this neoliberal episteme, enacting the kind of confusion around race that animates my inquiries across this book. For a clear example, see Freeman, “The ‘Reputation’ of Neoliberalism.” Thanks to an anonymous reviewer of the press for bringing Freeman’s work to my attention.

35. For my own account of whiteness precisely through these texts, see chapter 2 of Queering Freedom. The analyses of that book are framed by the classically liberal episteme and also constrained to the symbolic and imaginary functions. Some of them, therefore, remain relevant to the neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme under analysis here. I track the most important connections in chapter 3, where I analyze the core, constitutive fantasies of classical liberalism.

36. Viego, Dead Subjects, 3. I am greatly indebted to and inspired by Viego’s work in Dead Subjects in thinking through what it means to conceive of race exclusively at the level of the Imaginary. I recommend his remarkable book for a much more sustained meditation on this, especially as it has been encouraged and incited by the dominant school of ego psychology in therapeutic practices in the United States. I note, particularly, his cautionary tales for academic theories, which run rampant these days, that explicitly and implicitly rely on this kind of conceptual framework, especially in the tendency to psychologize the racialized subject.

39. Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back, 261.

40. See Hall, Race.

1. John Lennon wrote and recorded “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)” on January 27, 1970. The song was released to the public ten days later. It is one of the fastest released songs in music history. The song has been covered many times, most notably by U2 on the album Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur in 2007. The song also inspired the title of a novel that became a movie and a television miniseries: This Date in History: Instant Karma. See http://929dave.radio.com/2012/01/27/this-date-in-history-instant-karma/#ixzz1toFylFyI.

2. That it was and continues to be encapsulated by Lennon’s relationship with Yoko Ono furthers my query in chapters 4 and 5: how have our categories of gender, sexuality, and race transformed in and through this neoliberal social rationality?

1. See Dean, “Drive as the Structure of Biopolitics,” for the provocation to read Foucault’s subjects of interests as inhabiting the Lacanian drive. While this framing of neoliberal subjects as existing in the circuit of the drive does not clash with her earlier argument that neoliberal subjects are controlled through the imaginary, rather than the symbolic, I find the opening ushered by the notion of the drive far more provocative for this project and the direct concern with ethics. To root all subjectivity in the imaginary effectively renders all modes of evaluation political, but the drive also initiates the real, which is a register of ethics.

2. By developing a Lacanian analysis of these dynamics, I aim to excavate some of the affective dynamics that may be animating the interrelations between these various categories that are, in turn, evacuating our concepts of social difference and obfuscating the erasure of ethics that is occurring in the practices, values, and categories of neoliberalism. I thus want to avoid two possible diversions: (1) the tedious debates around the viability of using Lacanian concepts as tools of social analysis; (2) the need to engage all of Lacan’s dizzying corpus before using any of it for social analysis. Taking my cues from the work of Tim Dean, Alenka Zupančič, Jodi Dean, and Slavoj Žižek, I approach Lacan in the same manner that I approach all theorists, namely, as helpful interlocutors who offer fresh analytic and speculative lenses for various problematics.

3. See Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, where he distinguishes the circuit of the drive from the linearity of desire as a fundamental indifference to the object. He writes: “Even when you stuff the mouth—the mouth that opens in the register of the drive—it is not the food that satisfies it, it is, as one says, the pleasure of the mouth” (167). The drive thus functions quite differently from desire, which Lacan diagnoses as the structural lack that relentlessly pursues the impossibility of wholeness that the phallic symbolic appears to promise. See especially “The Mirror Stage,” “The Signification of the Phallus,” and “The Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” all in Écrits. See also Tim Dean’s crucial account of how this emphasis on desire and phallic wholeness skewed early receptions of Lacan in the Anglophone academy: Dean, Beyond Sexuality, intro., chap. 1.

4. See especially “The Deconstruction of the Drive” and “The Partial Drive and Its Circuit” in Four Fundamental Concepts. As I elaborate in the racializing of sexuality in chapter 5, the somatic indexicality of the drive has been central to queer theorists’ development of it, especially Leo Bersani and Tim Dean.

5. See esp. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

6. As Tim Dean’s work shows again and again, sexual experiences cannot be folded neatly into any of the structures of the whole with which so many cultures freight them. They are disaggregating experiences, radically so, which is how Dean reads them through the Lacanian real. I return to Dean’s work at length in chapters 4 and 5.

7. By calling it a background, I hope to evoke the phenomenological schema and its understanding of “prereflective” cognition through which individuals approach and interpret everyday occurrences. But unlike the phenomenological investment in objective and subjective truth claims, psychoanalytic approaches attune us to the crucial roles of the irrational—“beheaded,” as Bataille would put it, from any rational purchase. My reading of fantasies in relation to the drive and the real hopes to sever them from the rational sublation that so many have read into the project of psychoanalysis.

8. See Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, esp. part 3, for his reading of power as correlated inversely with its visible, explicit expression; this also becomes germane to one aspect of Foucault’s concept of norms, when he argues that reproductive monogamy becomes most forceful as it falls silent and invisible in the nineteenth century in part 1 of The History of Sexuality, volume 1. Interestingly, I will develop a different aspect of Foucault’s concept of norms—that is, statistics—in the chapter. Finally, given Anglo-American emphases on a phallic reading of Lacan, this kind of invisibility also resonates with the function of the phallus; I resist the collapse of the schema of fantasy into the structural role of the phallus because fantasies do not regulate the social through authority or even cathexis with authority. Fantasies are epistemological devices that offer interpretations of the social primarily through cathexis. I am interested in how there can be multiple, even clashing and discordant fantasies circulating in a society.

9. Bruce Fink offers the example of a man’s gaze—“that look”—as inciting desire, rather than any particular man; of course, this generalized incitement of desire could never be admitted to the fantasy of romance and its individualization of desire.

10. While liberalism more publicly exalts equality, I focus on neutrality as the necessary condition of possibility for equality. Functioning as an epistemological structure, it is positioned as immune to ideological manipulation and thus implicitly undergirds other fantasies, as it were.

11. See Mills, The Racial Contract, which draws on Pateman’s Sexual Contract, and has now been extended to an entire field of scholarship. With deep roots in Marx and Marxism, Mills’s analyses exemplify an ideological critique of liberalism, one that is clearly still necessary, but also insufficient.

12. This helps to explain the cultural practice of easily dismissing pedestrian charges of xenophobia, especially of racism, as only so much “whining.” I return to this phenomenon in the discussion of the law as the arbiter of neutrality.

13. See Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism” and Represent and Destroy.

14. As scholars, especially Nikhil Singh (but also Reddy and Melamed), are now showing, in addition to their work on the United States in the nineteenth-century eras of slavery and Reconstruction, the post–World War II and Cold War era embraces the Civil Rights Movement as proof of liberalism’s ongoing claim to moral and cultural superiority, while continuing various neocolonial forms of violence. The aim of such scholarship is to expose the contradiction between this exalting of tolerance and the persistent violence against racialized (and implicitly sexualized) populations. Insofar as this scholarship enacts an ideological critique of liberalism, it will be insufficient, if still necessary, to dislodging the deep social cathexis to xenophobia. I hope this project will help to fill in some of the lacunae of its insufficiency.

15. See especially the pioneering work of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Ian Haney Lopez, both of whom understand their work as rooted explicitly in legal rationality and practices.

16. The emergent #BlackLivesMatter movement is exposing the gross violence of this internal self-correction of the law, especially the failure to indict police officers who kill people of color. Ongoing litigation and questions about New York City’s “Stop and Frisk” policy also serve as a recent example here.

17. I continue to be deeply informed by Georges Bataille’s development of the epistemological and ontological moves to “a general economy.” See Winnubst, Queering Freedom, for a prolonged elaboration, both hermeneutic and speculative.

18. This discussion draws on the much more extensive exploration of the role of utility in Locke’s text and in contemporary stratifications of social difference in the United States that I developed in Queering Freedom, chaps. 1 and 5.

19. Mader, Sleights of the Reason, 56. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as SR.

20. Of course, this does not mean that statistics cannot still be effective in a binary, ideological manner from a range of ideological camps. The political Right mobilizes this kind of binary logic constantly, but it also pops up in leftist ideologies, such as we saw, for example, in the infamous “99% vs. 1%” of the Occupy Movement in 2011 and 2012.

21. My focus on statistics thus sympathizes with Miranda Joseph’s recent argument that statistics are the technique of neoliberalism and thus not optional. Joseph reads statistics as hailing us and, explicitly developing an Althusserian and Marxian reading of their use, aims to find the “cracks” in this abstracted epistemology by pushing the abstraction/particularization contradiction to its extreme breaking point. Despite my critique of the limits of Althusserian-Marxian analysis, I am very interested in the possibility that the number (especially but not exclusively the statistical number) may be the sole remaining symbolic order interpellating us neoliberals. Joseph’s work is critical to this angle of speculation. See Joseph, Debt to Society.

22. McWhorter, “Queer Economies,” 68.

23. See especially hooks, “Eating the Other,” in Black Looks.

1. Simpson first wrote about the term in 1994 in the Independent, but it did not enter full popular culture circulation until the Salon.com essay in 2002.

2. Simpson, “Meet the Metrosexual.” Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as MM.

3. See Todd, “Is the Metrosexual Finally Dead?”

4. Bowers, “At Last: American Hipster Kills Hipsterism Dead.”

1. Susan Fraiman’s work shows how this is always a masculinist “cool” that is defined by “a posture of flambouyant unconventionality [that] coexists with highly conventional views of gender—i.e., is articulated through them.” Fraiman, Cool Men and the Second Sex, xii. I agree that the posture of cool is always already masculinist (as is evident in my interludes of cool), but I am interested in the elasticity of gender as an expression of cool in these neoliberal times. The formalization and erasure of history involved in this cultural engagement of cool are more deeply transformative and troubling than any masculinizing effects. Moreover, I am attempting to move our analyses beyond these identity categories.

2. Hooks, We Real Cool, 150.

3. Ibid., 156. hooks traces this sellout of black cool to “the patriarchal black power movement [that] ushered in a politics of cool that was all about dominator culture, asserting power in the very ways righteous black men had criticized from the moment they touched earth in the so-called new world” (155).

4. Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 27. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CC.

5. In this regard, Frank taps into a long trajectory of Marxist analysis of cool as the quintessential attitude of late capitalism. See Jameson, Postmodernism, 375; thanks to Jana Sawicki for bringing this text to my attention.

6. See Wendy Brown’s classic essay “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies,” in Edgework, for the charges of ressentiment and the ensuing mechanisms of victim and guilt to police the fundamentally political character of feminist epistemologies. For a compelling argument that identity-based fields of knowledge, including the wide circulation of the concept of intersectionality, have been mired by ideological frameworks, see Wiegman, Object Lessons, esp. chap. 5, 239–300.

7. The literature on intersectionality is vast and still growing. For an excellent overview and critical assessment, especially on the grounds of differing epistemologies of identity and subject formation, with a particular concern for the normalizing effects of intersectionality, see Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?, 13–20. Some of the central flashpoints of the debate include Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the phrase in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” and “Mapping the Margins”; as well as the extensions and critiques in McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality”; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, esp. “Conclusion: Queer Times, Terrorist Assemblages”; and Guidroz and Berger, “A Conversation with Founding Scholars on Intersectionality.”

8. See Ferguson, “Reading Intersectionality.”

9. The fields of Disability Studies and Trans* Studies seem particularly critical to the kinds of analysis I am advancing, especially the argument that somatic xenophobia persists through the neoliberal transformation of social difference and thereby offers an obstinate site from which to think resistance to it. The scholarly and activist fields are much too vast to cite here. For exemplars, see Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, esp. chap. 3 and the discussion of the billboards of the Foundation for a Better Life; and Spade, Normal Life. See also notes 10 and 17 of this chapter.

10. I do not, thereby, address the emergence of trans* visibility and politics, including the burgeoning field of trans* studies, in this discussion of gender. Given the complex interactions with both the soma and the law, trans* embodiment, affect, and cultural representations also articulate the limits of this social difference-as-fungibility machine. Thankfully, there is much excellent scholarship already moving in this direction; see especially Spade, Normal Life; Clare, Exile and Pride; and the remarkable editorial work of Stryker.

11. On the exporting of Chicago School economics across the world, see Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 8–9.

12. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CF.

13. Friedman consistently attempts to aestheticize and depoliticize all values as matters of individual choice, especially conflicting political and ethical values, such as racism; see Capitalism and Freedom, chapter 7. His rhetoric falls short of practice, however, even in this exemplary act of choosing a tie: Friedman regularly sported a spiffy “Adam Smith” tie—a preppy-colored, often striped tie with silhouettes of Adam Smith sprinkled across it that was, interestingly enough, worn throughout the Reagan White House.

14. As I noted in chapter 2, Althusser discusses the example of birth and the way that individuals are always already sexed subjects and thus always already interpellated. See Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 176.

15. By focusing on gender in the Lacanian register of the imaginary, I do not mean to imply that the symbolic and its enforcement of sexism are no longer functioning in neoliberal cultures. As the assault on reproductive rights continues to intensify, we must remain attentive to the persistence of this “old-fashioned” form of oppression in the sociohistorical fugue of liberalism-neoliberalism. The language of sexism and oppression, however, finds little to no traction in neoliberal social rationalities; to return to them may be part of a strategy of interrupting the neoliberal fungibility machine.

16. Dean, Beyond Sexuality, 70. Hereafter cited parenthetically as BS in this chapter.

17. Once more, I must emphasize my omission of trans* scholarship on gender from this discussion. First, while Dean’s reading of transgender embodiment and identification is somewhat dated by now, his fundamental attempt to think it through the register of the real still seems quite worthwhile (and missing in contemporary trans* studies scholarship). Second, as is clear in the following section, I am focusing on contemporary mainstream US culture, where gender-as-accessory seems to reign; this is clearly a different concept of gender than the one under examination in trans* scholarship, activism, and communities. For a particularly incisive articulation of the resistance that the soma in trans* politics and embodiments presents to this neoliberal “playing” with gender, see Draz, Transitional Subjects.

18. Todd, “Is the Metrosexual Finally Dead?”

19. McRobbie, “Feminism and the Third Way,” 103. The line of argument I am parodying here is most directly articulated by Janet Halley’s calls for queer theorists, especially, to “take a break from feminism.” For a thorough and incisive argument against Halley, see Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?, chap. 1.

20. Simpson, “Meet the Metrosexual.”

21. In his interview with himself in January 2004, “MetroDaddy Speaks!,” Simpson writes: “Do metrosexuals have to be wealthy or middle class? This is a common fallacy, partly based on the idea that working-class equals authentic and middle-class equals inauthentic. It’s actually a matter of spending priorities. Most metrosexuals in Britain, for example, are probably working class. David Beckham, like most of his male fans, is from a working-class family; he may have rather more money than most and get his togs for free, but this just means that he’s been able to continue his metrosexuality longer and on a larger, more frightening scale than most working-class men.” www.salon.com/2004/01/05/metrosexual_ii/.

22. For brief discussions of this widespread and persistent phenomenon, see Davis, The Meaning of Freedom, 47, and Thomas, “Soul,” where he explains how the defiance of spending the equivalence of an entire month’s rent on a pair of Nike Air Jordans is “the essence of Black cool” in poor communities (99–101).

1. Carr, Miles Davis, 209.

2. This is how he describes his own impact in a nasty story he tells in his autobiography, Miles, of a horrible evening with ignorant white elites at a (Reagan) White House dinner for Ray Charles in 1984. Many critics concur with the impact; see, for example, both Blumenthal and Giddens in Kirchner, A Miles Davis Reader; and Palmer, “Miles Davis.”

3. Kirchner, A Miles Davis Reader, 16.

4. Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 59. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as M.

5. He does, however, see it as a damaging effect of internalized racism. As he puts it, “I wanted to see what was going on in all of music. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and I just couldn’t believe someone could be that close to freedom and not take advantage of it. I have never understood why black people didn’t take advantage of all the shit that they can. It’s like a ghetto mentality telling people that they aren’t supposed to do certain things, that those things are only reserved for white people. When I would tell other musicians about all this, they would just kind of shine me on. You know what I mean? So I just went my own way and stopped telling them about it” (M, 61).

6. Here’s one example of how Miles understood musical creativity as first and foremost a collaborative undertaking, no matter the shared vocabularies involved: “It was Dizzy who made me really learn how to play piano. I’d be over there watching Monk doing his weird shit with space and progressive chords. And when Dizzy would practice, man, I would be soaking up all that good shit. But then again, I showed Diz something that I’d learned at Juilliard, the Egyptian minor scales. With the Egyptian scale you just change the flats and sharps where you want the note flatted and where you want it sharp, so you have two flats and one sharp, right? That means you will play E flat and A flat and then the F will be sharp. You put in the note that you want, like in the C scale’s minor Egyptian scale. The shit looks funny because you have two flats and a sharp. But it gives you the freedom to work with melodic ideas without changing the basic tonality. So I turned Dizzy on to that: it worked both ways. But I learned way more from him than he did from me” (M, 64).

7. Kirchner, A Miles Davis Reader, 66. Baraka was not alone in this kind of assessment. See, for example, Lhamon in Kirchner, A Miles Davis Reader, for an analysis of Davis as capturing the zeitgeist of the 1950s that he also locates in literature, poetry, painting, and photography—as well as in the nascent events and political consciousness of the Civil Rights Movement.

8. While mainstream white culture predictably tried to call this a form of racism, Miles never took that bigoted bait. Moreover, his long-standing friendship and collaboration with Gil Evans always served as an easy defense against such ignorant charges. For examples of his consistent critique of racism and commitment to the black community, see especially the Rolling Stone interview in 1969, the Saturday Review interview in 1971, and the Jazz Magazine interview in 1976, all collected in A Miles Davis Reader.

9. After beating his heroin addiction in 1954 and going relatively clean for fifteen years (he claimed to be a vegetarian, nonsmoker, and drinker in his interview with Rolling Stone in 1969), Miles fell in love with cocaine and struggled with various forms of substance abuse throughout the last two decades of his life. Michael Ullman calls his love for fashion and cars “one of most flamboyant lifestyles in the business…. A family of four could survive for a year on what he spent on sunglasses.” Kirchner, A Miles Davis Reader, 13.

10. Every time I mentioned writing on Miles Davis to a black woman, she responded, “Have you read Mad at Miles?” Pearl Cleage persuasively argues that we must stop idolizing cool black men who are domestically violent. Using Miles’s off-handed stories about “slapping the shit” out of Cicely Tyson, Cleage frames Miles as the exemplar of black masculinity not taking sexist violence seriously as a systematic problem of black culture and communities. Accordingly, she entices us to join her in a repeated mantra of denouncing Miles as “guilty of self-confessed violent crimes against women such that we should break his albums, burn his tapes and scratch up his CDs until he acknowledges and apologizes and agrees to rethink his position on The Woman Question.” Cleage, Mad at Miles, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19. It is a passionate call never to ignore violence of any kind, including the domestic sort that stains so many relationships and households across all racial boundaries.

1. See Dean, Beyond Sexuality, 99–102, for a discussion of this mantra in Lacan’s seminar and all of chapter 3 for Dean’s provocative reading, through this insight, of the social function of AIDS in the United States.

3. Dean largely reads race, like gender, as existing in the imaginary realm of identification. My crucial point of departure from his work is to insist here and in chapter 6 that we must read, especially in the United States, race as the real.

4. See the classic work, for example, of Davis, Women, Race, and Class; hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?; hooks, Feminist Theory; and hooks, Yearning; and Spillers, Black, White and in Color.

5. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 206. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as MBPM.

6. Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” 215, 218.

7. See, for example, his graphic representation in seminar 11 that emphasizes the erogenous zone as an orifice: Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 178. See also his famous explanation that distinguishes the circuit of the drive from the linearity of desire by a fundamental indifference to the object: “Even when you stuff the mouth—the mouth that opens in the register of the drive—it is not the food that satisfies it, it is, as one says, the pleasure of the mouth.” Ibid., 167.

8. See especially Lacan, “The Deconstruction of the Drive” and “The Partial Drive and Its Circuit” in Four Fundamental Concepts.

9. This is also how, in a distinctly Foucaultian framework, Lynne Huffer challenges and extends Bersani’s work into a feminist, queer ethics of eros that pivots on processes of desubjectivation. See Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?, 27–49.

10. I am following Dean’s critique of the Slovenian school for insufficient attention to sexuality here. See Dean, Beyond Sexuality, 19.

11. The parallel reductions and discountings are instructive: the Slovenians valorize proletarianization and discount race (for example, Jodi Dean in The Communist Horizon), whereas Tim Dean valorizes sexuality and discounts gender. I agree with Tim Dean, but lament the omission of race and argue that his account is still operating out of an exclusively liberal, not neoliberal, episteme; I disagree with Jodi Dean and insist that we must read race as the real. It is also important to note here that Lynne Huffer argues, in a Foucaultian lexicon, against the distinctly US reading of identity into Foucault’s accounts of subjectivity, especially as they are taken up by “gay/lesbian” politics, thereby agreeing with the constraints of identity politics. Huffer, Mad for Foucault, 67–80.

12. Given the powerful forces of transnational capital as well as the wide legacy of colonialism, this arguably extends beyond any literal borders of the United States.

13. I have in mind most of the “foundational” texts of this field of scholarship: Muñoz, Disidentifications; Ferguson, Aberrations in Black; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; and, more recently, Shah, Stranger Intimacy; Hong and Ferguson, Strange Affinities; and Reddy, Freedom with Violence.

14. Hall, “Race.”

15. See Cacho, Social Death, esp. 20–23, for a discussion of the ways “impoverished African American citizens’ consumption patterns are under constant scrutiny” (21) and how this feeds the criminalizing of people of color and the decriminalizing of unlawful corporate behavior.

16. For example, in addition to long-standing markets for home and community security devices, including the kinds of self-policing organizations that George Zimmerman volunteered for, I am also thinking of advertisements for credit cards via “security” (for example, American Express commercials airing in August 2013).

17. I cite data that the #BlackLivesMatter movement has put into global circulation since I first drafted this manuscript. In “Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial Killings of 313 Black People by Police, Security Guards and Vigilantes,” Arlene Eisen, of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), found that 313 unarmed African Americans were killed by police, security guards, and self-appointed vigilantes in 2012. Overall, one black person was killed in an extrajudicial shooting every twenty-eight hours; in December 2014, activists are debating whether that ratio might now be once every twenty-four hours. See report at http://mxgm.org/operation-ghetto-storm-2012-annual-report-on-the-extrajudicial-killing-of-313-black-people. Trayvon Martin is in the list of “Memorial Pages” in report.

18. See Fry and Taylor, “A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93%,” on the increase in wealth of the wealthy since the economic crisis in 2008. In the Great Recession of 2009–2011, the upper 7 percent of wealth distribution rose by 28 percent, while the lower 93 percent fell 4 percent. In dynamics that I explore regarding the racialized character of this accelerating wealth gap, the report analyzes how these disparities are caused by robust rebounds in financial markets, where the wealthiest locate their wealth, in contrast to the failing housing market, where the other 93 percent of the population ground the majority of their wealth assets. The report also explains that its data is restricted by its source, the US Census Bureau, and its demarcation of wealth categories; this helps to explain why it uses 7 percent and 93 percent rather than the more popularized (and catchy) 1 percent and 99 percent. See also Saez, “Striking it Richer,” which I discuss in note 30.

19. Dimock, Kiley, and Suls, “King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal.

21. Shapiro, Meschede, and Osoro, “The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap,” 1.

23. See, for example, the film Inequality for All, in which Robert Reich, Clinton’s labor secretary, shows how the levels of income inequality in 2007 matched those of 1928.

24. Fergus, “The Ghetto Tax,” 279.

25. See ibid., 278. Fergus analyzes the auto insurance industry in California from 1986 to 2000 as an exemplar of a market’s development and enforcement of a ghetto tax. Despite the passage of legislation (Proposition 103 in 1988) to render zip code redlining illegal, the auto insurance industry managed—through threatened boycotts and lobbyist manipulation directly tied to the blockage of campaign finance reform—not only to continue but also to intensify the practice. As Fergus concludes his essay, “In America, one’s ZIP code may be used by local governments to apportion tax dollars (for example, for public education, rather than according to a parent’s income); and despite the outlawing of racial redlining, banks and other members of the financial services industry still deny or charge extra for loans, credit, and insurance premiums to households in low-income or working-class neighborhoods as delineated by their ZIP codes.” Ibid., “The Ghetto Tax,” 306.

26. As Carolina Reid explains, “redlining” refers to the “residential security maps” that the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed to advise real estate appraisers of “adverse influences” related to a property, including the presence of “inharmonious racial groups” in the neighborhood. As Reid explains, “The maps, which outlined minority neighborhoods in red, identified areas that were deemed ‘too risky’ to receive FHA financing.” Reid, “Wealth Inequality,” 78. The federal laws passed to address these inequalities include the Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) of 1975, and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977.

28. Fergus calls these the “Step Acts to Deregulation,” echoing the Step Acts to Brown v. Board of Education: Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980; Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982; Tax Reform Act of 1986. Unpublished paper, presented at Ohio State University, November 18, 2011.

29. Fergus calculates that the racialized character of the subprime mortgage market of the late 1990s and early 2000s resulted in blacks receiving 3.5 times as many subprime mortgages as whites and Latinos receiving twice as many as whites. Unpublished paper, presented at Ohio State University, November 18, 2011. See also Reid, “Wealth Inequality,” 80, for her details on this data.

30. Emmanuel Saez, an economist at UC Berkeley, has been tracking this since 2008 and is amassing information back to what he calls the “Clinton Expansion” in 1993. See “Striking it Richer,” http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf. Of all the unnerving data, perhaps the most astonishing is the gap between the real growth in income since 2009: 99 percent of the United States has seen a growth of 0.4 percent, while the wealthiest 1 percent of the United States has seen a growth of 95 percent.

31. Unpublished paper, presented at Ohio State University, November 18, 2011.

32. Since titled “A More Perfect Union” and granted its own website, this speech continues to garner much discussion. I do not pretend to do that discussion justice here. I am merely using this speech as exemplary of the kind of internalizing of neoliberal social rationalities and the barometer of class mobility. Hailed as the global public figure of a new postracial era, Obama embodies the neoliberal forms of racialization in unique manners. See http://constitutioncenter.org/amoreperfectunion. It is particularly telling that Obama is sometimes called “the cool President,” a moniker that captures precisely the lingering anxiety about race in this celebratory “postracial” era. See Reed, “The President of the Cool.”

33. The impetus for this “second speech on race” was the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who murdered Trayvon Martin. While Obama spoke more personally in this speech, suggesting that he could have been Trayvon Martin and locating his murder in the long history of violence and racial profiling against black men, he still concludes with three classically liberal responses: (1) the need to educate law enforcement on racial profiling, including better data collection; (2) a need to revisit “Stand Your Ground” laws; and (3) yet again, the ongoing work of “perfecting the nation,” claiming that his daughters’ generation is better on race and racism than his generation. As I noted in the introduction, Obama has since given several more statements and interviews responding to the protests to the failure to indict the police officers who killed Michael Brown, John Crawford, and Eric Garner. Each of these includes his identification with young black men, rendering his otherwise classically liberal response ambivalent.

34. In “Race-ing Homonormativity: Citizenship, Sociology and Gay Identity,” Roderick Ferguson argues that homosexuality becomes normalized through the privatizing schemas of citizenship, just as Marx shows that religious difference is also normalized through privatization. Ferguson examines the sociological construction of ethnicity as a socially constructed category—as opposed to race as a biological category—as serving these privatizing schemas.

35. Or what Žižek, tellingly, calls “that kernel of jouissance” in “Love Thy Neighbor? No, Thanks!”

36. See Sullivan, Good White People, esp. chap. 1, for a compelling analysis of how “good white middle-class liberals” disavow all explicit forms of racism and bigotry by projecting it onto “white trash,” who are always characterized as ignorant and thus caught in eras long past.

37. For one of the most incisive and direct performances of “the hoodie” as absurd racial profiling, see the video produced by Howard University, “Am I Suspicious?,” March 25, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH5bB8HUWFs.

38. There is much more to say about how and when and where the neoliberal intensification of liberalism tears open, exposing the precious objet a of xenophobia without a symbolic apparatus sufficient to sublate it. I emphasize three registers here: (1) the recathecting to racism through the classic position of disavowal, which lays at the heart of the fantasy of tolerance; (2) the condemnation of racism as an archaic historical hangover, enacting the “new” syntax of progress as diversity; (3) the remarkably clever and enjoyable aestheticizing of difference, which we can all simply purchase and don.

39. Foundational texts on the carceral state include Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy; Gilmore, The Golden Gulag; Roberts, Killing the Black Body; and Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.” Foundational texts on the queer critique of homonormativity and homonationalism include Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet; Duggan, The Twilight of Equality; and Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.

40. Winnubst, Queering Freedom, 202.

41. The first answer to this question is direct and simple: white supremacy. To be clear: I am arguing that the neoliberal episteme keeps the historical schematic of white supremacy that it overlays in liberalism structurally intact. But since it strips us of a vocabulary for such speech, I am interested in finding new ways to speak of this. The answer “white supremacy” falls on deaf ears, cast back into that long-ago time when the bigots were also still live. Neoliberalism conquered white supremacy with diversity: good color-blind neoliberals cannot speak or hear or understand the meaning of calling this out as the ongoing victory of white supremacy. I return to this in chapter 6 as a call to move beyond identity categories in our thinking about race.

42. Again, this concept of gender changes immensely when taken up through the axis of trans* scholarship, activism, and communities.

43. I thank Kimberly Springer for immediately seeing this unnerving connection. Data for total number of persons incarcerated in the United States after 2011 is not yet available; therefore, my flatlined depiction at seven million is likely an undercounting. The following are the sources for various data included in this chart. For total numbers of persons incarcerated in United States: Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online, table 6.1.2011, www.albany.edu/sourcebook. For legalization of same-sex marriage: www.gaymarriage.procon.org (I listed Hawaii, Vermont, and California at the times of their respective initial legalization, rather than the final legalization as of 2013). For estimates of state populations: www.quickfacts.census.gov and www.worldpopulationstatistics.com.

44. Harcourt, The Illusion of the Markets, 52. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as IM.

45. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 9.

46. See Rodolphe Gasché’s remarkable book on Bataille (Gasché, Georges Bataille) for a discussion of Schelling’s katabole as a kind of destructive opening that grounds all epistemologies of representation. Related to the twentieth-century meanings of the metabolic function (catabolism) whereby molecules are destroyed and release energy to the organism, the katabole signifies the endless movement of an energy that must expend itself and, in so doing, render all formations unstable.

1. In honor of the 2010 World Cup, Puma commissioned Wiley to paint four portraits of prominent African football players—a partnership that Wiley called, “a perfect marriage,” especially because it focuses on the joy of Africa. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwNbQR_yIn8. Patterns from his paintings were incorporated into Puma athletic gear. The complete series, Legends of Unity: World Cup 2010, was exhibited in early 2010 at Deitch Projects in New York City.

2. Robert Mapplethorpe’s hugely controversial The Black Book (published in 1988), for example, is part of an emergent vocabulary that turns to this asignifying phenomenon, blackness. The work of Kobena Mercer and Stuart Hall and a return to Frantz Fanon also follow out this trajectory. Wiley himself often positions his work in the lineage set forth by Thelma Golden’s curating of the exhibit The Black Male in 1994. (It was Golden who selected Wiley to work at the Harlem Museum in 2001 after his MFA at Yale.) There are, unsurprisingly, many contemporary artists pursuing this vexed and vexing subject in a wide array of manners and inflections: Glenn Ligon, Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.

3. See especially Wiley’s interview with C. C. H. Pounder during his exhibit The World Stage: Israel at the Jewish Museum in New York City: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XluSaO8P_qA. See also his interview with Bad at Sports: “Interview with Kehinde Wiley,” www.artpractical.com/column/interview_with_kehinde_wiley/.

1. Additionally, by trying to reconceptualize race away from identity categories in a manner that insists on the persistence of racism, I offer a kind of end run around some of the “category fatigue” that plagues intersectional analyses, while still committed to the spirit of intersectionality.

2. Ligon, Yourself in the World, 43.

3. In the 1962–63 seminar that I turn to at length, Lacan situates embarrassment—or what I am also calling shame—in the same neighborhood as anxiety. In this vein, to fear the shame of being called out as a racist signals something decidedly different from being caught as guilty for actually being a racist. While the classically liberal lexicon might read this as a split between private and public, whereby we allow ourselves to harbor all kinds of racist convictions privately so long as they do not become public, I want to follow out a Lacanian reading that exposes different dynamics about the blocking of history at work in the neoliberal anxiety around race.

4. I invoke the house of mirrors to place this in the vicious space of ideology, shorn of a symbolic, that I elaborated in chapter 2. For example, thinking of the kinds of debates spurred by the killing of Jordan Davis or of Trayvon Martin (prior to the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter in the fall of 2014), I easily read the inability to recognize racism along identity fault lines, with whites on one side and people of color on the other. This is the ideological house of mirrors, where whites cannot see racism at all in anything, people of color can only see racism in everything, and a clearly racist act becomes a site of contention that goes unpunished in the legal system. This ideological problem calls for political intervention that is itself restricted to the ideological house of mirrors. The kind of analysis I am advancing cuts to the ethical question of how this profound inability to recognize (which is different from the meconnaissance of signification, as I will develop) that lies at the heart of the ideological confusion came into being at all.

5. Lacan, Anxiety, 173. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as A.

6. Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 164.

7. This does not mean that we are not developing new ways to speak of this history; it means that the old language of explicit racism is fading with the eclipsed symbolic. For example, scholarship in both Afro-pessimism and decolonial feminism is developing very interesting new manners of language; I am sadly too new to this scholarship to elaborate these connections here.

8. This distance from the structure of desire leads Lacan to dismiss existentialist accounts of anxiety from the outset, especially those of Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger. He insists, however, that anxiety is an affect and thereby offers a snapshot of a desubjectified account of affect: “It’s unfastened, it drifts about. It can be found displaced, maddened, inverted, or metabolized” (A, 14).

9. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 12.

10. This kind of approach to anxiety and trauma spins the swirling debates of 2014 about “trigger warnings” in university classrooms, especially feminist classrooms, into considerably different registers.

11. See Dean, Beyond Sexuality, 7, for Tim Dean’s elaboration of Lacan’s writing on the unconscious as “the censored chapter.”

12. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 41.

13. Many social theorists have turned to an ethics of the real in recent years, particularly under the influence of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, two suspiciously cool male theorists. To rehearse those scholarly debates and dialogues would involve a book-length study that outstrips the scope of my final meditation on ethics. Taking this emergent trend as a common point of departure, however, substantiates my belief that a Lacanian lexicon of the real speaks effectively to many of the sociopsychic transformations underway in the neoliberal episteme. In my final turn to articulate an ethics of the real as an ethics of racialized justice in the United States, I draw particularly on the work of Alenka Zupančič and Tim Dean.

14. Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as ER.

15. See ER, 236, and Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, on how making the real an object turns it into a strange desire for catastrophe and terror.

16. By suggesting that we can attune ourselves to these effects, I hope to resignify the Heideggerian roots of this term to capture a process of consciously retraining unconscious habits of response. I am, however, still frustrated with this formulation and hope to research atonality as a better formulation in future projects.

17. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 65. For a longer discussion of Hollywood and Zupančič, as well as of Lacan in relation to Bataille, see Winnubst, “Sacrifice as Ethics.” Recuperative narratives continue to dominate cultural representations of chattel slavery, such as the recent film Twelve Years a Slave, and settler colonialism. This resistance to recuperative narratives also structures Ann Cvetkovich’s project of reclaiming cultural expressions of trauma and depression as sites of meaning, rather than as in need of salvation; see Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, and Cvetkovich, Depression.

18. See Dean, “The Biopolitics of Pleasure,” for a provocative reading of Foucault’s understanding of pleasure, especially in History of Sexuality, volume 2, as an enactment of jouissance. In this vein, jouissance is clearly that which has to be suppressed in lesbian and gay communities for same-sex marriage to be legalized and thus animates most queer critiques of homonormativity.

19. For a reading of jouissance as at the heart of racism as configured through the Other, see Žižek, “Love Thy Neighbor? No, Thanks!”

20. I argued this explicitly in the register of nightmares and anxiety, albeit not in their Lacanian iterations, in Winnubst, “Vampires, Anxieties and Dreams.”

21. I call them denizens, rather than citizens, to emphasize the racialized limits to citizenship afforded residents of New Orleans. Before abolition, “denizen” connoted “a free Negro” who had rights somewhere between those of a full citizen and those of a resident alien.

22. See Žižek, First as Tragedy, Second as Farce, 53–54.

23. CBSNEWS.com, “Katrina Victims Are Buried, 3 Years After,” August 28, 2008, www.cbsnews.com/news/katrina-victims-are-buried-3-years-after.

24. “Displaced by Katrina, Most Stay Near: Poor Evacuees Found Settling Farther Away,” Boston Globe, December 18, 2005, www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/12/18/displaced_by_katrina_most_stay_near/?page=full.

25. See PolicyLink: www.policylink.org/site/c.lkIXLbMNJrE/b.5160103/k.6C6A/New_Orleans_and_Gulf_Coast__Overview.htm.

26. The argument that Hurricane Katrina was largely human-made, due to the effects of global climate change and the local negligence of levees, is widely known and accepted by now. See Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith, and Johnson, The Neoliberal Deluge, for a wide range of excellent analyses and overviews of this extensive scholarship.

27. In After the Deluge, Walker curated images from the vast Metropolitan Museum archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings to show how the white European and American imaginary has consistently scripted the ocean, which is either fearsomely beyond control or conquered for smooth commerce, in a metonymic relation with the powerful black body. From these historical images, Walker then pairs her infamous cut-outs with iconic images from media representations of Katrina to show how two iconic options emerge for the white imaginary’s confrontation with Katrina: the happy-go-lucky, if also pitiful and pathetic, “Aunt Jemima” figure, who is portrayed as both so dumb and so passive that she cannot help but resign herself to her natural condition of being at the whim of the raging waters; and the conniving, threatening “Coon,” violent and hypersexualized, that was the Katrina looter (and quickly a spoofed “beer looter” across various media). For an incisive reading of the racist media representations of the looter images, as well as the labels of refugee/evacuee, the neoliberal rewriting of Katrina as offering “a clean sheet” for enterprise, and the need for comparative racialization analytics, see Cacho, Social Death, esp. the introduction.

28. Reports of widespread looting, street gangs, and rape filled the airwaves as the nightmare of a Superdome ill-equipped to house so many bodies for so long unfolded. The reports became self-fulfilling racist fantasies, as evacuation and medical relief workers began to shut down services due to fears of the violence. For Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of these lies and their material effects, see Žižek, “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/2361/the_subject_supposed_to_loot_and_rape.

29. As Freud explains in his essay “Fetishism,” the role of the fetish is to protect the little boy from the fear of castration upon encountering his mother’s infamous “horror of nothing to see.” To heal this splitting of his subjectivity between a horrified threat and an adamant disavowal, the boy creates a fetish to function as a compromise between the two conflicting poles. The function of the fetish is to memorialize the horrifying threat of castration, while ensuring the boy’s victory over it: as Freud tells us, “[The fetish] remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it.” Freud, “Fetishism,” 154. Reenacting the conquering of the threat in every act of fetishism, the fetish enlivens the memory trace of a vanquished threat.