Stoler’s approach provides a provocative test case for the purposes of this book. In many respects, her study follows Foucault’s own interrogative agenda, sharing with him the conviction that discursive dogma is akin to death. In its earliest stages, Stoler situates her investigation within a broader intellectual context where Foucault strains to be heard amidst a host of competing voices and claims. She states that ‘[our] ethnographic sensibilities have pushed us to challenge the limits of Foucault’s discursive emphasis and his diffuse conceptions of power, to flesh out the localized, quotidian practices of people who authorized and resisted European authority, to expose the tensions of that project and its inherent vulnerabilities’ (Stoler 1995: 2). It is revealing that Stoler relies on such embodied rhetoric to capture this critical motivation. Her sense that there is something approaching a visceral need to respond to Foucault’s work, drawing on the same fleshy terms in which it is authored, informs The Disorder of Things as a whole.
Stoler attends to Foucault’s pivotal series in a chapter entitled ‘Towards a Genealogy of Racisms: The 1976 Lectures at the Collège de France’. As she maintains in her later study, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002), it offers an alluring supplement, allowing her to launch her contrapuntal reading in earnest. ‘I am more interested in the productive tensions between The History of Sexuality and this subsequent project [the lectures] and in the ways they converge and precipitously diverge in linking biopower and race ... I am interested in what we might glean from his insights and where we might take them’ (Stoler 1995: 59). It seems safe to assume that the conviction with which Stoler approaches Foucault’s work against the grain would have earned his approval. The close of the third chapter provides an effective summary of many of the qualities and quandaries inherent in Foucault’s writing and thought. As my emphases suggest, Stoler deliberately employs a series of terms that in themselves have become associated with the original discourse:
In contemporary perspective, Foucault’s analysis has an almost eerie quality. It speaks to, and even seems to anticipate, the conditions for ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Eastern Europe’s fractured states. If these lectures did not work as effective history, it is because Foucault did not try. As a history of the present, the lectures are disturbingly relevant today, and given the questions raised by those in the Collège de France audience, they were disturbing at the time. His attack on socialism certainly caught the attention of those who attended, but no one took up his more pessimistic indictment; namely that racism was intrinsic to the nature of all modern, normalizing states and their biopolitical technologies. Nor was he called upon to account for those varying intensities of racist practice ranging from social exclusion to mass murder. The state looms so large in his account, but the critical differences between state formations that discursively threaten expulsion and extermination as opposed to those that carry it out went unaddressed. On this unsettling note, he ended an extraordinary seminar. (Stoler 1995: 88)
The more ghostly and/or quasi-prophetic overtones of Foucault’s speculations that enchant Duncker’s reader, galvanise Miller’s critique and underpin this analysis are captured by ‘eerie’. If frustration over his shortcomings is inevitable, it precipitates the kind of discursive wrangling practiced by Stoler.
Similarly, Stoler’s disdain for the audience’s unwillingness to prod and probe chimes with Foucault’s own comments on the limitations of the lecture format. Cited in the foreword to ‘Society Must Be Defended’, Gérard Petitjean recounts how:
Foucault stops. The students rush to his desk. Not to talk to him, but to switch off their tape recorders. No questions. Foucault is alone in the crush. Foucault comments: ‘We ought to be able to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when the lecture has not been good, it would not take a lot, a question, to put everything right. But the question never comes. In France, the group effect makes all real discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback channel, the lecture becomes a sort of theatrical performance. I relate to the people who are there as though I were an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, there’s this feeling of total solitude.’ (Foucault 2003: xi)
The despair that Foucault-as-tutor and Stoler-as-student identify is somewhat eased, as the latter grapples with the former’s porous investigations. As Homi Bhabha’s explanation of the supplement in The Location of Culture maintains, the very fact that it comes later allows it to pose those uncompromising questions elided first time round:
Coming ‘after’ the original, or in ‘addition to’ it, gives the supplementary question the advantage of introducing a sense of ‘secondariness’ or belatedness into the structure of the original demand. The supplementary strategy suggests that adding ‘to’ need not ‘add up’ but may disturb the calculation. As Gasche has distinctly suggested ‘supplements ... are pluses that compensate for a minus in the origin.’ (Bhabha 1994: 155)
Foucault’s ‘tunnel vision of the West’ does not foreclose the possibility that his meditations might be put to productive use elsewhere. Stoler identifies his work’s prophetic power as viewed from the then contemporary perspective of the mid-nineties, when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans remained fresh in the political consciousness. As Mark Kelly maintains, the tentative prising open of a vast Pandora’s toolbox of reflections on state racism, biopower and blood that Foucault begins here becomes all the more unsettling, eerie and urgent in the historical present of the twenty-first century: ‘the “war on terror” is a bio-political war ... it operates according to the logic of a bio-political drive to defend the national population, justified by a stripped-down state racism in which one is either with America (good) or against America (evil)’ (Kelly 2004: 58). Whilst, building on this, I gesture towards the potential application of Foucault’s work to the Somali situation in particular, it is necessary to sharpen the focus on power in postcolonial Africa. This is an overarching concern throughout Farah’s work.
If Stoler’s objective is to expand Foucault’s territorial and discursive horizons, her own fleeting reference to the prophetic force of his analyses also serves as an interventionist invitation. Whilst she is preoccupied with colonial anthropology, her Eastern European aside has an altogether more pressing appeal for postcolonial scholars. In The Black Man’s Burden, Basil Davidson draws timely parallels between the Balkanisation of the African continent and the experience of its peoples:
The circumstances of Africa, it may be objected, differ in many ways from those of Eastern Europe. I am far from sure of this, but in any case the circumstances here relate to speeds of change, notably of ideological change. Europe has needed two centuries to go through its experience of nation-statism from its formative beginnings ... to the unfolding thought that nation-statism has come near the end of its useful life. But it seems that Africa has covered this ground in just half a century. (Davidson 1992: 288)
Published during the Balkans conflict, The Black Man’s Burden shares the same contrapuntal convictions as Stoler’s study. Davidson, too, rails against the prevalence of what he terms ‘the culturally compartmentalizing power of imperialism’, designed to limit possibilities for more interesting dialogue (Davidson 1992: 160). Typically, Edward Said works against this reductive grain. As such, he provides a useful bridge to Farah’s work.
Edward Said: Speaking the Truth to Foucault
Whilst Stoler makes Foucault groan