Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection

6. Imagining Racial Agency

∏ D Imagining Racial Agency Rhinelander seems to refuse the possibility that either Leonard or Alice might reimagine themselves, let alone the schematizations of race in early twentiethcentury America. Both are ostensibly recuperated in line with normalizing demands of race and the accompanying dictates of racial discipline. Both are discursively identified as having failed in the articulation of their respective racial ‘truths.’ Leonard failed to reproduce white norms, and Alice failed to adequately self-discipline—to clearly and unambiguously act in accordance with what the law deemed to be her racial designation. The consequence, as it plays out in the course of the trial, is that each of these subjects is instructed as to their failure: the juridical reprimand for Leonard is that he is found to be personally responsible for his failure to performatively enact the imperatives of whiteness; for Alice, the finding is a juridical reprimand stating that she cannot exist as a liminal subject or a white subject but, instead, can only and must be black. Both are cast as aberrant and replaced within the normative injunctions that constitute the respective racial sites of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness.’ Alice and Leonard had each attempted a racial rearticulation, it would appear . Alice can be read as endeavoring either to enunciate a white identity or to formulate an identity that is unencumbered by rigid demarcation into the oppositional realms of blackness and whiteness. Leonard, while not forsaking a white racial identity, defies the normative demands of white masculinity in his embodiment of that subjectivity. The identification of these acts, most specifically within the disciplinary realm of law, results in both subjects being rein- Imagining Racial Agency 107 serted within dominant conceptualizations and imperatives of race. Actions that seek to recite race in new directions appear to be ultimately thwarted. Racial agency seems foreclosed and normalization incontestable with the apparent inevitability of detection, reprimand, and discipline at work in Rhinelander . This chapter explores these limitations. I begin with considering various ways that agency has been understood, specifically focusing on how it has been formulated by Foucault and Butler. I ask: what understanding or form of racial agency is enabled within the theory of performativity? If subjectivity is constrained and discursively constituted, is there any possibility to alter or resignify the compelled recitation of (racial) identity? How can Alice be thought of as a subject who exercises racial agency? Indeed, can she be interpreted in this light at all? And if so, is there resistant potential in her actions? Is this resistance subversive , or is subversion not necessary in order for acts to be resistant? THE CAPACITY TO ACT Understood as ‘the capacity to act,’ agency has commonly been thought about in two incommensurable ways, stemming from two radically di√erent views of ‘the subject.’ On the one hand, agency has been imagined as something possessed and wielded by the knowing, autonomous subject of liberal humanism.∞ As Susan Hekman notes: It has become a commonplace of contemporary philosophy that the epistemology of modernity is rooted in the epistemology of the knowing subject. Modernity’s search for absolute, indubitable knowledge has been defined, at least since Descartes, in terms of the knowing, constituting subject. (1995, 194) The constituting subject is seen to be the masterful owner of property in his own person. Consequently, this individual (inevitably cast as ‘man’) has been thought of as self-determining and capable of exercising agency through the rational operation of free will. On the other hand, however, a radical revision of the essentializing claims of liberal humanism has generated an attack on the subject as origin of meaning, knowledge, action, and free thought. This approach has instead argued that the subject is ‘constructed’ by discursive power, and insisted that rather than the individual wielding the power to constitute the self, the self is resolutely constituted , that is, determined by discourse. In this understanding agency is disavowed . Here the operations of discourse function in terms of sovereign or juridical power, rendering the subject a mere object. 108 racial imperatives Butler rejects both of these understandings of the subject and their accompanying configurations of agency (or lack thereof) in her account of performativity . However, both she and Foucault, to whom her conceptualization of the subject is at least partially indebted, have often been associated with the latter interpretation of agency. In these readings of Butler and Foucault, the general criticism runs...