(no subject)
Genealogical Analysis of Race and Bureaucratic Society
There lies inherent in society numerous ideologies that we as rational beings are blind to. Our lives are controlled by them, we interact with them, and we reinforce them. Two of such ideologies are race: the classification of human beings based upon body type, and bureaucracy: the division of bodies into smaller uniform section all based on hierarchy of being. Many of us are blind to what lies in front us and never manage to ask how or why these ideologies were managed to shape our lives so definitively; two people, however, were able to see past their noses and into the void of society to give us answers to the how and why.
The Emergence of Race
Racial ideology is taken on by Barbara Jeanne Fields in her appropriately titled essay, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America. In her essay, Fields argues race isn’t an idea implicit in societies; rather, it is an ideology that was created due to a number of social contingencies, particularly in the United States. Slavery was introduced in the United States, Fields claims, simply out of purely economical reasons: “Virginia was a profit-seeking venture, and no one stood a profit growing tobacco by democratic methods (Fields, 102).” Thus slavery was needed to extract a viable profit from tobacco farming in the colonies. The firs slaves, however, weren’t from Africa, they were from England. These white indentured servants became the oppressed workers of the Virginia plantations. The situation for the indentured servants however, would take an economical turn. The fallen number of European indentured servants, along with their increased life span, made it increasing more expensive to use them as workers on plantations. This economic factor, along with an armed uprising of lower-class English servants in 1676 finally ceased the use of white Europeans as labor. The alternative was the importation of labor from Africa . These now freed indentured servants became what Fields dubs ‘the white yeomanry’. Years of subjugation to upper-class white men left a sour taste in the yeomanry and this led to a strong belief of social independence. “It also bred in them an egalitarian instinct that never gracefully accepted any white man’s aristocratic right to rule other white men (109).” What coalesced in the southern colonies was a use of slave labor from Africa for economic reasons, along with a strong distaste for white-on-white subjugation. The ideology of race didn’t emerge with just the coalescing of these two factors - it arrived with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.
The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence runs as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The ideals the US was founded on are the pillars of The Enlightenment, and are listed in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence: rights, life, and liberty. It is these ideals that are to give birth to race. Field claims, “Those holding liberty to be inalienable and holding Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident truth (101).” Thus race emerged as a way to reconcile the idea of holding slaves to living in a country that purports the freedom of ‘all men’. Race is further cemented when it takes on an aspect of an inferior/superior relation. Something Fields claims wasn’t a motivating factor in taking Africans as slaves to begin with; rather Afro-American slaves weren’t seen as inferior until after slavery had been instituted - the idea of inferiority came in response to the oppression of slavery (106).
Bureaucracy and Panopticism
The following was taken from an encyclopedia on the definition of bureaucracy: “bureaucracy is an organization structure characterized by regularized procedure, division of responsibility, hierarchy, and impersonal relationships. The term can characterize either governmental or nongovernmental organizations (Wikipedia).” Everyone one turns, one if faced with bureaucracy: school systems, business and offices, prison, the military, even hospitals. But why and how has society managed to become so accustomed to living in an ideological bureaucratic society? Michel Foucault attempts to answer this question in his essay Panopticism.
Foucault recounts an edict of measures to be taken to a town infested with the plague, “enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are in a fixed place… movements recorded… all events recorded… power exercised without division, according to a hierarchical figure (Foucault, 197).” This segmentation, observation, recording, and organization of the masses Foucault dubs the ‘technology of panopticism’ and is essentially an ideology of discipline (205). The term is taken from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, an architectural structure that relies on surveillance as a means of controlling the population within it. Ideally created for a prison, its basic structure relies on a central tower to house a guard or observer and cells along the periphery that house inmates. While the inmates are completely observable to the person in the center tower, the inmates are unable to see anyone in the central tower, never knowing if they are being watched. “Visibility is a trap,” Foucault puts it (200). While Bentham’s Panopticon foundered, panopticism as a mechanism of discipline invaded vast aspects of societal life. Panopticism allows us to “reform prisoners, treat patients, instruct school children, confine the insane, supervise workers, and put beggars and idlers to work (205).” Foucault’s panopticism is another term for bureaucracy - we have become a society of discipline:
'On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in the movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social ‘quarantine’, to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’. Not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending the power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of the power relations.'
And like Fields claims the ideology of race was created due to a coalescing of social contingencies, humanities reduction to a society of discipline and bureaucracy came about because of broad historical processes.
Before examining these social contingencies for the bureaucratization of society, it is important to note discipline is a technology used for the economics of power. It works to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically and socially), maximizes the effect of power, and finally it maximizes the effects of power will simultaneously lowering the costs (that’s increasing ‘capital gains’, for our capitalist, friends); essentially a combination of the first two (218). With these in mind, Foucault notes three major contingencies for the arrival of Disciplined Society. The first is a huge demographic thrust in population in the 18th century. This thrust led to a large numbers of people in the militias, schools, and hospitals. Discipline was used as a way to handle this thrust, and allowed governments and firms to keep track of the populations, workers and increased modes of production that boomed in the Industrial Revolution (218). The second comes from the social and political reformations of the Enlightenment. The universals of ‘freedom’ and ‘right’ put the populations on par with each other and divided everyone into ‘individuals’, rather than groups. Also on the governmental level, parliamentary and representative democracies both split governments and their power based on an individualized and hierarchical system, a bureaucratization of governments (222). Finally, it was noticed by society, most specifically scientists, that institutions who used discipline methods (schools, militaries, hospitals) gave rise to new branches of technology. Thus from the schools came child psychiatry; from the hospital came branches of medicine; and from workshops, a rationalization of labor (224). The amassing of these social contingencies, population thrust, universal rights and democracy, and the rise of new technologies, all gave rise to institutionalized discipline mechanisms functioning at a societal and cultural level. For Foucault, our culture has become inseparable from discipline.
Genealogical Analysis
It is important to make mention that Fields and Foucault are giving two different names to what could be viewed as the same concept. I am not going to argue Fields is actually speaking of discipline or Foucault is saying panopticism is an ideology, but both do claim in their respected texts they are dealing with topics that are inherent in our society and that is reinforced by our day to day actions. In her section on what an ideology is, Fields says, “an ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if it does not, it dies… (Fields, 112). Foucault, while not claiming panopticism is an ideology outright, he does make mention that panopticism, “must be understood as a generalizable mode of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men (Foucault, 205).” Therefore both race and discipline must act on an everyday level in our lives, and these actions must perpetuate the effects of discipline and race; it is a never ending loop that we’ve become accustomed and virtually blind to.
Both Barbara Jeanne Fields and Michel Foucault (with Foucault knowingly) performed genealogies in their works; Fields’ genealogy was on race, Foucault’s was on bureaucratic/disciplined society. In his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault describes the methodology of genealogy, “Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched and recopied many times (Foucault, NGH, 76).” Genealogy requires philosopher, social scientist, anthropologist to ignore a linear succession of history. Rather, it examines the shifting in meanings behind words, and concepts. It recognizes that from old ideas and knowledge comes the new, but it also recognizes that even though the new comes from the old, there is no linear connection. Teleology is worthless.
In both of their works, Fields and Foucault show a nonlinear progression towards their respective subjects. For Fields, race is not the accumulation of a desire to subjugate; rather it has its birth in American society as a way to reconcile holding slaves yet championing the virtues of equality and freedom. For Foucault, the institutionalization of bureaucracy was not the end goal of society, rather it was contingent upon shifts in society during the 18th century and a way to exercise discipline and power over the masses . Both authors recognize a shift in historical context that separates societies in time. This shift separates social context and make it difficult to understand the metamorphosis of concepts and ideologies through time. Genealogical analysis makes up for this constant shift by recognizing people in different times had different concepts, all though they may carry the same name.
Conclusion
I don’t know how to end it yet.
There lies inherent in society numerous ideologies that we as rational beings are blind to. Our lives are controlled by them, we interact with them, and we reinforce them. Two of such ideologies are race: the classification of human beings based upon body type, and bureaucracy: the division of bodies into smaller uniform section all based on hierarchy of being. Many of us are blind to what lies in front us and never manage to ask how or why these ideologies were managed to shape our lives so definitively; two people, however, were able to see past their noses and into the void of society to give us answers to the how and why.
The Emergence of Race
Racial ideology is taken on by Barbara Jeanne Fields in her appropriately titled essay, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America. In her essay, Fields argues race isn’t an idea implicit in societies; rather, it is an ideology that was created due to a number of social contingencies, particularly in the United States. Slavery was introduced in the United States, Fields claims, simply out of purely economical reasons: “Virginia was a profit-seeking venture, and no one stood a profit growing tobacco by democratic methods (Fields, 102).” Thus slavery was needed to extract a viable profit from tobacco farming in the colonies. The firs slaves, however, weren’t from Africa, they were from England. These white indentured servants became the oppressed workers of the Virginia plantations. The situation for the indentured servants however, would take an economical turn. The fallen number of European indentured servants, along with their increased life span, made it increasing more expensive to use them as workers on plantations. This economic factor, along with an armed uprising of lower-class English servants in 1676 finally ceased the use of white Europeans as labor. The alternative was the importation of labor from Africa . These now freed indentured servants became what Fields dubs ‘the white yeomanry’. Years of subjugation to upper-class white men left a sour taste in the yeomanry and this led to a strong belief of social independence. “It also bred in them an egalitarian instinct that never gracefully accepted any white man’s aristocratic right to rule other white men (109).” What coalesced in the southern colonies was a use of slave labor from Africa for economic reasons, along with a strong distaste for white-on-white subjugation. The ideology of race didn’t emerge with just the coalescing of these two factors - it arrived with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.
The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence runs as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The ideals the US was founded on are the pillars of The Enlightenment, and are listed in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence: rights, life, and liberty. It is these ideals that are to give birth to race. Field claims, “Those holding liberty to be inalienable and holding Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident truth (101).” Thus race emerged as a way to reconcile the idea of holding slaves to living in a country that purports the freedom of ‘all men’. Race is further cemented when it takes on an aspect of an inferior/superior relation. Something Fields claims wasn’t a motivating factor in taking Africans as slaves to begin with; rather Afro-American slaves weren’t seen as inferior until after slavery had been instituted - the idea of inferiority came in response to the oppression of slavery (106).
Bureaucracy and Panopticism
The following was taken from an encyclopedia on the definition of bureaucracy: “bureaucracy is an organization structure characterized by regularized procedure, division of responsibility, hierarchy, and impersonal relationships. The term can characterize either governmental or nongovernmental organizations (Wikipedia).” Everyone one turns, one if faced with bureaucracy: school systems, business and offices, prison, the military, even hospitals. But why and how has society managed to become so accustomed to living in an ideological bureaucratic society? Michel Foucault attempts to answer this question in his essay Panopticism.
Foucault recounts an edict of measures to be taken to a town infested with the plague, “enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are in a fixed place… movements recorded… all events recorded… power exercised without division, according to a hierarchical figure (Foucault, 197).” This segmentation, observation, recording, and organization of the masses Foucault dubs the ‘technology of panopticism’ and is essentially an ideology of discipline (205). The term is taken from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, an architectural structure that relies on surveillance as a means of controlling the population within it. Ideally created for a prison, its basic structure relies on a central tower to house a guard or observer and cells along the periphery that house inmates. While the inmates are completely observable to the person in the center tower, the inmates are unable to see anyone in the central tower, never knowing if they are being watched. “Visibility is a trap,” Foucault puts it (200). While Bentham’s Panopticon foundered, panopticism as a mechanism of discipline invaded vast aspects of societal life. Panopticism allows us to “reform prisoners, treat patients, instruct school children, confine the insane, supervise workers, and put beggars and idlers to work (205).” Foucault’s panopticism is another term for bureaucracy - we have become a society of discipline:
'On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in the movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social ‘quarantine’, to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’. Not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending the power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of the power relations.'
And like Fields claims the ideology of race was created due to a coalescing of social contingencies, humanities reduction to a society of discipline and bureaucracy came about because of broad historical processes.
Before examining these social contingencies for the bureaucratization of society, it is important to note discipline is a technology used for the economics of power. It works to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically and socially), maximizes the effect of power, and finally it maximizes the effects of power will simultaneously lowering the costs (that’s increasing ‘capital gains’, for our capitalist, friends); essentially a combination of the first two (218). With these in mind, Foucault notes three major contingencies for the arrival of Disciplined Society. The first is a huge demographic thrust in population in the 18th century. This thrust led to a large numbers of people in the militias, schools, and hospitals. Discipline was used as a way to handle this thrust, and allowed governments and firms to keep track of the populations, workers and increased modes of production that boomed in the Industrial Revolution (218). The second comes from the social and political reformations of the Enlightenment. The universals of ‘freedom’ and ‘right’ put the populations on par with each other and divided everyone into ‘individuals’, rather than groups. Also on the governmental level, parliamentary and representative democracies both split governments and their power based on an individualized and hierarchical system, a bureaucratization of governments (222). Finally, it was noticed by society, most specifically scientists, that institutions who used discipline methods (schools, militaries, hospitals) gave rise to new branches of technology. Thus from the schools came child psychiatry; from the hospital came branches of medicine; and from workshops, a rationalization of labor (224). The amassing of these social contingencies, population thrust, universal rights and democracy, and the rise of new technologies, all gave rise to institutionalized discipline mechanisms functioning at a societal and cultural level. For Foucault, our culture has become inseparable from discipline.
Genealogical Analysis
It is important to make mention that Fields and Foucault are giving two different names to what could be viewed as the same concept. I am not going to argue Fields is actually speaking of discipline or Foucault is saying panopticism is an ideology, but both do claim in their respected texts they are dealing with topics that are inherent in our society and that is reinforced by our day to day actions. In her section on what an ideology is, Fields says, “an ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if it does not, it dies… (Fields, 112). Foucault, while not claiming panopticism is an ideology outright, he does make mention that panopticism, “must be understood as a generalizable mode of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men (Foucault, 205).” Therefore both race and discipline must act on an everyday level in our lives, and these actions must perpetuate the effects of discipline and race; it is a never ending loop that we’ve become accustomed and virtually blind to.
Both Barbara Jeanne Fields and Michel Foucault (with Foucault knowingly) performed genealogies in their works; Fields’ genealogy was on race, Foucault’s was on bureaucratic/disciplined society. In his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault describes the methodology of genealogy, “Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched and recopied many times (Foucault, NGH, 76).” Genealogy requires philosopher, social scientist, anthropologist to ignore a linear succession of history. Rather, it examines the shifting in meanings behind words, and concepts. It recognizes that from old ideas and knowledge comes the new, but it also recognizes that even though the new comes from the old, there is no linear connection. Teleology is worthless.
In both of their works, Fields and Foucault show a nonlinear progression towards their respective subjects. For Fields, race is not the accumulation of a desire to subjugate; rather it has its birth in American society as a way to reconcile holding slaves yet championing the virtues of equality and freedom. For Foucault, the institutionalization of bureaucracy was not the end goal of society, rather it was contingent upon shifts in society during the 18th century and a way to exercise discipline and power over the masses . Both authors recognize a shift in historical context that separates societies in time. This shift separates social context and make it difficult to understand the metamorphosis of concepts and ideologies through time. Genealogical analysis makes up for this constant shift by recognizing people in different times had different concepts, all though they may carry the same name.
Conclusion
I don’t know how to end it yet.