R A E AND T W ttUMANITl€S

TttE: “€NDS” OF MODERNITY?

In the inaoduction to her authoritative history of The Idea @Race in

Science Nancy Stepan finds herself in agreement with George W. Stocking,
“that trying to correlate specific scientific arguments about race with events
in the history of racism, nationalism, or imperialism too often results in
histories that are vague and do an injustice to the complexities of the scien-
tific issues involved, as they were perceived by the scientists.... Race
science had a history and a coherence of its own to its practitioners” (my
emphasis), While both the historian of science and the anthropologist are
quite right to saess the specific historicity of the race concept in the critical
discourses of their own disciplines, the familiar slippage from the scientific
problem of race to the problematic of racism is, I believe, representative of a
more general problem in the writing of a history of the humanities. Fou-
cault’s distinction between sex and sexuality, which results in rethinking the
historical as genealogy and disposilg, is a relevant precursor. However, the
distinctive discursive formation of modern racism with its histories of
colonisation, slavery, diaspora, territorial dispossession, and migration,
would demand theoretical frames and political and philosophical priorities
that would necessarily be different from the “post-Enlightenment”Western
history of Foucault’s major inquiries.
If the identification of the “science” of race with the “vague” historicity
of racism is seen not as a categorical confusion or a disciplinary distraction

Public Culture 81 Vol. 4. No.2: Spring 1992

82 pUeuC WTURC

but as a dialectic, then we are, I believe, in a position to see how the

articulation of racehacism raises critical issues for the inscription of the
human sciences. The question of race as a dialectic, movement of doubling,
from science to ideology, from historical discipline to a disciplinary politics,
between history and myth, makes us more critically aware than social
scientists are wont to be, that the “referentiality” of the human sciences is
involved in a complex argument about the status of “representation” in
designating the social. The interdisciplinarity of race - precisely the
involvement of science in the historical events of imperialism or nationalism
- becomes a crucial space of intertextuality where the powers of
disciplinary discourses contest the political knowledges premised on cultural
and racial differences. We must open up an intertextual space in between the
signposts of traditional inquiries: the scientific investigation into human
differences; the historical or anthropological,locationsof theories of cultural
and ethical relativism, or political marginalisation -i.e., psychic and social
strategies of otherness.
The dialectic of race/racism needs to be conceptualised as a “doubling”
without sublation or transcendence. It would then both display and disturb
what Foucault describes as the “unthought,” which in the modem episteme
structures the human sciences as a form of knowledge that revolves around
Man as a figure of discourse, language, and reference. If the project of the
human sciences (post-Enlightenment) is to think the unthought that falls
between the “empirical” and “transcendental” -to’produceknowledge as a
representation of what is not given to consciousness - then what is the
structuring principle of that in-between intertextual and interdisciplinary
space of the knowledges of racehacism? What is the specific nature of the
“unthought” or “unconscious” of race? What figures of ambivalence struc-
ture the authority of race/racism as a form of knowledge and as a practice of
discursive and political power? How do the social hierarchies and cultural
representations of Western civility coexist with the consciousness of their
own history of colonial and postcolonial, metropolitan racism?
In Foucault’s introduction to the Hisrory of Sexuality racism emerges in
the nineteenth century in the fonn of a historical retroversion. In the
“modern” shift of power from the juridical politics of death to the biopolitics
of life, race produces a historical temporality of interference, overlapping,
and the displacement of sexuality. It is, for Foucault, the great historical
irony that the Hitlerite annihilation of the Jews was carried out in the name
of the archaic, premodern signs of race and sanguinity -oneiric exaltation
of blood, death, and skin - rather than through the politics of sexuality.
What is profoundly revealing is Foucault’s complicity with the logic of the
contemporaneous within Western modernity. Characterizing the “symbolics
of blood” as being retroverse, Foucault disavows the time-lag of race as the
sign of cultural difference and its mode of repetition.
The temporal disjunction that it would introduce into the discourse of
modem power is disallowed, because of Foucault’s spatial critique: “We
must conceptualise the deployment of sexuality on the basis of the tech-
niques of power that are contemporary with it.”l However subversive
“blood” and race may be they are in the last analysis merely a “historical
retroversion.” Elsewhere he directly links the “flamboyant rationality’? of
social Darwinism to Nazi ideology, entirely ignoring colonial societies
which were the proving grounds for social Darwinist administrative dis-
courses alI through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
If Foucault normalises the time-lagged sign of race as historical retrover-
sion, Benedict Anderson places the dreams of racism “outside history” alto-
gether. For FoucauIt race and blood interfere with sexuality. For Anderson
racism has its origins in antique ideologies of class that belong to the aristo-
cratic “pre-history” of the modem nation. The question of race is an archaic
ahistorical moment outside the “modernity” of the imagined community:
“nationalism thinks in historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal
contaminations ... outside hi~tory.”~ Foucault’s spatial notion of the con-
ceptual contemporaneity of power-as-sexuality limits him from seeing the
double and overdetermined snucture of race/sexuality &at has a long history
in the peuplemenr [politics of settlement] of colonial societies; for Anderson
the “modern” anomaly of racism finds its historical modularity, and its
phantasmatic scenario, in the colonial space which is a belated and hybrid
attempt to “weld together dynastic legitimacy and national community ...to
shore up domestic aristocratic bastions.”4

1 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. I. (New York Vintage

Books, 1978), 150.
M. Foucault, Foucault Live, tr. J. Johnstone and S. Lotringer (New York
Semitext(e), 1989), 269.
B. Anderson, Imagined Communities(London: Verso, 1983).
B. Anderson. 137.
84 pueuc

The racism of colonial empires is then part of an archaic acting out, a

dream-text of a form of historical retroversion that “appeared to c o n f m on
a global, modem stage, antique conceptions of power and privilege.”5 What
could have been a way of understanding the limits of Western imperialist
ideas of progress within the genealogy of a “colonial metropolis” -a lan-
guage of the opera boufle as a grimly amusing tableau vivant “of the
(colonial) bourgeois gentilhomme speaking poetry against a backcloth of
spacious mansions and gardens filled with mimosa and bougainvillea....”6
It is in that “weld” of the colonial side as, contradictorily, both “dynastic
and national,” that Western modernity is confronted by its colonial double.
But this moment of temporal disjunction, which would be crucial for under-
standing the “colonial” genealogy of contemporary metropolitan racism in
the West, is placed “outside history.” It is obscured by Anderson’s espousal
of “a simultaneity across homogenous empty time” as the modal narrative of
the imagined community. It is this kind of evasion, I think, that makes
Partha Chatterjee, the subaltern scholar, suggest from a different perspective
that Anderson “seals up his theme with a sociological determinism ... with-
out noticing the twists and turns, the suppressed possibilities, the contradic-
tions still unre~olved.”~
These accounts of the modernity of nation and power become strangely
symptomaticat the point at which they create a rhetoric of “retroversion” for
the emergence of racism. In placing the representations of race “outside”
modernity, in the space of historical retroversion, Foucault reinforces his
‘‘correlativespacing”; by relegating the social fantasy of racism to an archaic
daydream, Anderson further restores his homogeneous empty time of the
“modern” social imaginary. Lurking in the symbol of racism as part of a
perverse political “unconscious” is a disavowal of the sign of cultural differ-
ence, its colonial and postcolonial genealogy. In order to extract the one
fromthe other we have to see how they form a double, catachrestic bound-
ary: rather like the more general intervention in and seizure of the history of
modemity that black and postcolonial critics attempt.

Ibid.
bid.
P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed Books,
1986), 21-22.
 Retroversion and archaic doubling, attributed to the “content” of racism
does not remain limited to the ideational or pedagogical level of the dis-
course. Its inscription of a structure of retroaction (or time-lag) returns to
disrupt the enunciative function of this discourse and produce a different
“value” of the sign and time of race/modernity as culrural difference. If, at
the level of content, the archaicism and fantasy of racism is represented as
“ahistorical,” outside the progressive myth of modernity, then that is be-
cause there is an attempt, I would argue, to “universalise” the spatial fantasy
of modem cultural communities inhabiting “correlative spaces” within a
contemporary moment that is contained in a “homogeneous empty time” of
mohernity. (Black nation or Queer nation would be impossible to think.)
However, each time such a homogeneity of cultural space is established
there is a marked disturbance of temporality in the writing of moderniry.
For Foucault it is the awareness that retroversion of race or sanguinity
haunts and doubles the contemporary analytic of sexuality and may be sub-
versive of it: we may need to think race-as-sexuality. Anderson is aware of
the awkward “weld” or suture of modernity: the antiquity of racism reacti-
vates the problematic historical transition between dynastic lineage and hori-
zontal, homogeneous community, and the aporetic coexistence of both in
most modem forms of the imagined community: we may have to think of
racism as integral to modem ideologies of the nation, as the Eastern Euro-
pean and the Western metropolitan experiences of “immigrationyy are forcing
us to do. It is these unresolved, transitional moments within the enunciative
present of modernity and postmodernity that are then projected into a time of
retroversion or an unassimilable place “outside history.”

Homi Bhabha is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Council of the Humanities, and the
Old Dominion Fellow in English at Princeton University.