Governmentality, Racism, Affective Technologies of Subjectivity/Self

Abstract

Foucault, as we have by now seen, provides a series of methodological injunctions for the effective analysis of power. He directs our attention to its ‘micro-physics’, its capillary functioning, and urges us to develop a bottom-up grid of analysis with which we might grasp this functionality in the attenuation of individualized forms. He directs our attention also to power’s relational form, to the processes, activities and dynamics that underwrite its procedures. Crucial here are the mechanisms, strategies and techniques it utilizes, its ‘instru-mentality’, the fact of the transposition of certain of its rationalities onto political technologies of subjectivity and self.

[T]here is nothing simple about the structure and the dynamics of racism. My conviction now is that we are only at the beginning of a proper understanding of its structures and mechanisms [of its] … complexes of feelings and attitudes, beliefs and conceptions.

(Stuart Hall, 1992)

Our relation with our racial selves is an evasive thing, often easier to feel than to express.

(Paul Gilroy, 2004, p. 41)