Affixing Race in a Control Society (also, Race as Information)

“Race as a discourse is not an unchanging historical framework that limits identities to fixed taxonomies; it is rather a dynamic system of social and cultural techniques carefully calibrated to constrain, define, and develop a nexus of human activity where the ontology of the human, the representation of the body, and the social position of the subject intersect. At this intersection, the invention and perpetuation of various forms of race discourse can be understood effectively to employ the human organism as an experimental object of signification.” (González 42).

“[Societies of control are] ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system…Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other,” (Deleuze 4).

Previously in this class, we’ve mostly paired “information” with race in terms of genetics (the idea that since humans are now viewed as data-banks of information, the problem of race becomes ever more pressing in its genetic invisibility and scientific denunciation as a “social construction.”) González, however, imagines racial performance in terms of informational floods of sensory data, thus seemingly to present both the act of passing and the fixing of racial typologies in terms of a Deleuzian concept of “free-floating control systems.” By viewing race in terms of a Deluzian concept of control society, González brings to bear a new temporal schema of racial formation, as well as new terms of the persistence of racial typologies.

This new temporal schema of racial formation moves away from an economy of the visual. Instead of the closed circuit and the time-image, racial performance fixes racial formations through a series of moments, movements, and images which are psychic and more fully embodied than a registering (or rendering) of a visual epidermal tag. Race is “a dynamic system of social and cultural techniques” which, though they serve to “constrain, define, and develop a nexus of human activity,” (or, in disciplinary control terms, “enclose,”) are essentially in flux. While racial typologies may be fixed (“molds”) the manner of affixing them to individual bodies works according to a control society mechanism of a “modulation, a self-deforming cast,” (Deleuze 4).

If we view (as I am suggesting we do) González’s argument in terms of Deleuze, the persistence of racial typologies is fascinating. If racial typologies are symptomatic of environments of enclosure (disciplinary society) while the actual enactments of fixing individuals within these typologies are in terms of control-society flux and modulation, then what can we expect for the “transcending” of race or the emergence of a “new human(ity/ism)” in light of the fact that Deleuze views us as being in the process (and this was over 20 years ago) of transition from discipline to control society? It makes sense to me to suggest that we have become a society of new levels and complexities and invisibilities of fixing individuals in the overlapping “nexus” of race, while these racial “enclosures,” themselves are outdated not only for believers in equality but also for the contemporary methods of hegemonic power (González 42, Deleuze 4).