Racial Feralization: Targeting Race in the Age of ‘Planetary Urbanization’

Abstract

In this article, I propose the concept of racial feralization to explain the links between planetary urbanization, risk societies and race. The threat of racial feralization – as an apocalyptic eschatology of regression and the unraveling of the species – has always animated and conditioned the emergence of the discourse of ‘Man’ as well as the concept of race. The history of racism, that is, is also a history of responses to possible catastrophic consequences of progress and modernization. A major shift has occurred in the last 25 years or so. Racial feralization is not simply treated as a consequence or product of human activity, but has now entered the realm of power as a way to problematize heterogeneous populations defined by their relation to global risks and urban agglomerations. Ferality thus emerges as a principle of legitimation for the deployment of racial power in new and more vicious forms.

Keywords

race risk society urbanization violence

For Warre, consisteth not in Battell only, or in the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan)

I viewed it as part of a very dirty fight, which was, by its nature, apocalyptic: we could not afford to lose. (June Jordan, Civil Wars)

Like any intellectual field, the critical study of race is underpinned by contradictions, episodic crises, regional conflicts and epistemological disagreements over its object of critique. On one aspect, however, the majority of race scholars agree: the critique of race must take place through a critique of philosophical humanism. The basis for this rejection of ‘Western’ humanism is often – if not always – Michel Foucault’s (1994 [1970]) notion of a ‘Western episteme’ or ‘episteme of Western culture’. One of the key polemical arguments in Foucault’s The Order of Things is that ‘Man’ emerged as a consequence of the reorganization of knowledge under the secularizing drives of European culture and society. Given its historically conjectural emergence, associated with epistemic transformations, the category ‘Man’ was bound to disappear as new forms of knowing, doing and thinking emerged at a later time.

Building on this aspect, various critics of race have argued that this unitary category ‘Man’ does in fact what it says on the tin. ‘Man’ is a white, male norm whose ‘overrepresentation’ (Wynter, 2003) in knowledge is guaranteed by the racial subjugation of his/its others. Hence, the human in philosophical humanism is nothing but ‘Man’ created through the reorganization of the ‘Western episteme’ whose conditions of possibility were colonization, conquest, enslavement and genocide. Walter Mignolo (2007) speaks of this creation of ‘Man’ as the ‘celebratory rhetoric of modernity’ that at once interpreted Enlightenment as the freedom of ‘Man’ while simultaneously denigrating and dominating those deemed ‘lesser humans’. One critic recently argued that the notion of ‘Man’ conceives of the human as an ‘ontological fait accompli’ whose ‘fait accompli’, given-ness or taken-for-grantedness, is given in the ‘liberal episteme’ by the intersections of various systems of domination (Weheliye, 2014).

In the rush away from philosophical humanism, these critics, I argue, have in fact accepted the same grounds on which the critique is launched. That is, despite the arguments that the concept ‘Man’ is overrepresented or constituted through ‘coloniality’ and racial subjugation, they have accepted that ‘Man’ is a product of the discourse of progress and the almost inexorable march of a ‘Western episteme’ that dominates all in its tracks. An ‘overrepresentation’ of ‘Man’ is in fact an ‘overrepresentation’ of one perspective of racial governmentality, namely that of infinite progress. This confusion perhaps arises from Foucault’s lack of distinction between a ‘Western episteme’ and ‘the episteme of Western culture’. The use of the two interchangeably results in many of Foucault’s critical interlocutors, such as mentioned above, assuming the ‘Western episteme’ as an empirical reality, when the intention was perhaps to use the term ‘episteme’ as an analytic to understand the organization of knowledge within a mutating ‘Western culture’.

Furthermore, taken for granted, Foucault’s prophesy of the disappearance of ‘Man’ has curiously allowed critical race scholars to assume that ‘Man’ is constituted through a monolithic ideal of progress and perfectibility. Hence the slippage that qualifies the episteme as ‘liberal’, or the characterization of the human as an ‘ontological fait accompli’. The human, however, is anything but a ‘fait accompli’ in ‘Western philosophy’, if the various ‘traditions’ can indeed be grouped under such a wide label. In fact, the whole point of Foucault’s argument is that ‘Man’ has to be fabricated across a number of disciplines and fields of knowledge, and what links them together is the analytic that he proposes: the ‘episteme’. Yet, the latter occludes a parallel discourse that traverses the history of ‘Man’, a counter question that – existing as an ever present side-by-side with the former – draws its energy from the idea that the human form is precarious and that it could unravel with catastrophic consequences for the human as a species.

Put simply, philosophical humanism was never as self-assured and all conquering as is often assumed by the reflexive and necessarily reductive critiques of ‘humanism’ seemingly ubiquitous, if not foundational, to critical race studies. While the extension of humanism might have set up absolute binaries and unbridgeable differences between the human and its others, through what Edouard Glissant (1997: 95) calls ‘techniques of the absolute’, it was also troubled by its own misgivings and uncertainties, and images of decomposition and regression. There are two parallel discourses that characterize modernity. The first one is identified by critical race scholars as the modernity/coloniality dyad, the horizon of which is progress and perfectibility, and that sets up absolute differences and European ‘Man’ as the governing norm. The second discourse, what I call racial feralization,¹ derives from the perspective of the catastrophic failure of modernity’s project of becoming human. It refers to the ever present potential that humanity will slip back into and blend with nature.

The historical discourse of ferality, I argue, emerges with race as an ‘organizing principle’ of modernity (Robinson, 1983; Goldberg, 1993, 2005) as the risk of regression and degeneration inherent in the processes of anthropogenesis. Anxieties over the precariousness of the human form are conditioned by the discourse of race and vice versa. To the extent that race allows secular conceptions of community formations to emerge by defining a counter- or anti-race against which social and political struggles are forged, the fear of regression is experienced in apocalyptic terms – as engulfment by the anti-race. I argue that racial feralization, as a conception of race, has reappeared as a problematic of government in the context of a risk-society, where the possibility of catastrophic ‘man-made’ disasters becomes a clear reality. My argument is that the discursive explosion around racial feralization finds its most acute expression in the (real and imagined) continuum of risks (of disaster, violence, diseases, etc.) that have emerged as a result of processes of planetary urbanization. Race then acts as the principle of legitimation for governance to target feral threats to the human form.

Counterinsurgency and the ‘Feral City’

In 2003, Richard J. Norton (2003), Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, argued that future security challenges to the US would increasingly emerge from global urban landscapes. Rebuking the orthodoxy that focuses on ‘failed states’ as the paradigm of conflicts and emergencies, he posited that failed cities would become incubators of multiple and multi-dimensional threats for which the US military is ill-prepared. According to Norton, those failed metropolises are to be appropriately termed ‘feral cities’. A city may be termed feral by (1) its descent into near anarchy controlled in varying degrees by criminal gangs, states, armed groups and other actors, (2) its status as an ‘immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases’, (3) its massive environmental pollution and dangerous levels of toxicities, (4) its global connectivity through its port, airport and communication systems, and (5) its opportunities for terrorist organizations to find cover among the population and through alliances with criminal syndicates.

At the time, Norton argued that feral cities were becoming a global possibility – with Mogadishu as the actually existing feral city. In this sense, feral cities appear as a thought experiment in a thorough attempt to redesign US foreign policy and the projection of power. While Norton draws a typology of cities ‘going feral’, ranging from ‘green’ (New York City) to ‘yellow’ (Mexico City) to ‘red’ (Johannesburg), he cannot explain why yellow and red types do not always turn into the feral nightmare that he has imagined. In fact, the criteria on which the typological classification is based rests on such minimalist conceptions of democracy, security, and society that almost any city anywhere could be declared feral accordingly. To wit, ferality appears as simply the horizon of military intervention according to the US Navy’s own post-Cold War and post-Gulf War revised doctrine of power projection ‘from the sea’ to counter state and non-state actors. Two doctrinal papers (‘… From the Sea’ and ‘Forward … from the Sea’) outlined that the Navy will have to shift its focus from mastering the high seas to crisis management exercised as military and humanitarian interventions in port areas and littoral regions, as well as toward providing support for what would later become known as ‘full spectrum dominance’ (US military domination of air, sea, land and cyberspace). Feral cities in that case presented the ultimate challenge of multidimensional and hybrid threats.

Fast-forward a decade later, and the conditional (‘if they become feral’) has given way to the active rethinking of military doctrine in the actual presence of feral cities across the global arena of conflict. As Stephen Graham (2007: 121) argues, Western military strategists undertook a radical shift in policy in the aftermath of the war in Iraq. While, historically, urban combat tended to be avoided, today ‘cityscapes of the global South have emerged as paradigmatic conflict zones’. Cities are not merely conceived as targets to be bombed from the air but are now thought of as ‘battlefields’. Increasingly, the environment of the city of the Global South (including its visual, aural and olfactory landscapes) is being reconstructed for simulation of future conflicts and military training across the US, Kuwait, Israel, England and Germany. Simulations are designed to recreate urban decay, the supposed intimacy of the streets and a whole ‘architecture of collapse’ (2007: 125). The feral city is now a fixture in the military imaginary.

As David Kilcullen (2013: 17), formerly a Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the US State Department and a former counterinsurgency advisor to General Petraeus, argues, the future of conflict will be ‘crowded, urban, networked and coastal’. Taking Norton’s model of feral cities as a departure point, he argues that counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine will have to engage with risks that emerge not only from the spatial and temporal logics of the city, but also from its ‘metabolic logic’ (2013: 78). Based on a socio-biological metaphor that takes the city as a living organism, he argues that the city must be conceived as ‘flow and process rather than just place, with violence shaping and creating the landscape, and not just happening in it’ (2013: 240–1). He calls for a rejection of the binaries of traditional COIN orthodoxies (state vs non-state, government vs insurgents, etc.) and for the military to imagine a ‘conflict ecosystem’ that will contain multiple security challenges – ‘threats without enemies’ (2013: 114). In fact, Kilcullen (2006) defines COIN as ‘armed social work’, the goal of which is to constantly mobilize the population, classified as friendly, neutral or hostile.

According to this logic of permanent warfare (or armed social work if you prefer) nestled in the socio-biological flows and processes of the city, urban life is stripped bare to its security dimension. Inhabitants are supposed to have no ideology, beliefs, desires, politics or aspirations, but are simply engaged in a security calculus (cf. Khalili, 2010; Simone, 2008). The city has become the stuff of nightmares with ‘feral subdistricts’ (Kilcullen, 2013: 77) evoking apocalyptic visions of (Mad Max-style) disorder. As Kilcullen further argues, it is possible to imagine a continuum of feralization in urban spaces across the planet whereby their networked characteristic would place the world in permanent turmoil. Such a vision cannot prevent itself from drawing its own binaries (albeit denied), as Ridley Scott shows in Black Hawk Down. Thoroughly post-ideological, the film pits the city, Mogadishu, as an actor (‘The Mog’) against the survivalist experience of a ‘band of brothers’ (Army Rangers).

While the idea of a feral city can be dismissed as simply the product of a fertile macho and military imagination, the prevalent use of the term feral to index various urban spaces, situations and processes needs a critical engagement in the contemporary moment. Like the doctrine of ‘failed states’, feralization should not be considered simply as empty rhetoric; such notions embed conceptualizations of humanity and define the limits of possible socialities that ultimately dictate how opportunities and vulnerabilities are to be organized and distributed. Robert Kaplan’s (1994) ‘The Coming Anarchy’ and John Rapley’s (2006) ‘The New Middle Ages’ trade in similar images and concepts as Norton’s article. Both describe a coming ‘formlessness’ (or a return to it) that threatens to engulf the form-giving institutions of modernity. Both speak of the surplus of violence, pollution and disease that no defense mechanism will be able to contain.

Meanwhile, the notion of ‘fragile cities’ (Savage and Muggah, 2012) is deployed to imagine new forms of humanitarian interventions into the resilience of cities, whereby resilience becomes a naturalized category to think of the subjects of governance (cf. Evans and Reid, 2013). Ferality, I argue, can be understood as a ‘problematic of government’ in matters of contemporary racial management from the point of view of the catastrophic and the apocalyptic. Next, I trace the anxieties around race that ferality indexes today in relation to urbanization. The feral city is not simply a location in the Global South but functions as an imaginary to rethink race and urbanization on a contemporary global scale. It is a form of problematization by various actors involved in governance in the context of the decomposition of the nation-state.

Feralizing the Urban

Outside of counterinsurgency discourse, journalists and various commentators have discovered the generative conceptual capacity of ferality to name various anxieties over race and class and urbanization. Steven Malanga (2009), writing in the conservative City Journal, argues that ‘feral houses are perhaps the most visible sign of Detroit’s long decline’, in an article titled ‘Feral Detroit’. These houses and neighborhoods, he continues, serve as ‘focal points for criminal activity’. In fact, Americorps’ Urban Safety Project (www.amusdetroit.org) has started to target abandoned houses, boarding them up to reduce ‘victim attractiveness and susceptibility’ in a ‘crime-fighting effort’. Crime thus figures prominently in imagining Detroit as ‘feral’. But so do race and class: Malanga argues that Detroit’s problems are ‘self-inflicted’ – ‘the city’ and its residents presumably have driven out white residents and replaced them with black and poor ones.

The protean ability of ferality – a flexible concept for flexibilized times – to name race, class, crime and urban decay found its most stringent application during the 2011 urban riots in England. Then, shackles of English politeness were once and for all released, in the condemnation of ‘looters’. In the Daily Mail, Richard Littlejohn (2011) described the looters as

a wolfpack of feral inner-city waifs and strays who spend their time smoking dope, drinking lager and playing Grand Theft Auto on their stolen Playstations. The soundtrack of their lives comprises wealthy, bling-laden rappers, surrounded by near-naked booty, singing about smacking bitches and killing cops.

It was left to the historian David Starkey (2011) to spell out the racial meaning in terms of catastrophic engulfment: ‘A substantial section of the chavs have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.’ If the working poor are becoming black, where does feralization end, given that the petite-bourgeoisie is increasingly exposed to exploitative conditions once reserved for the working classes? As Paul Gilroy (2013: 555–6) noted, unlike the riots in 1981, the aftermath of those of 2011 lacked any ‘attempt at demotic contextualization’. The lack of any ‘legible pattern’ in the destruction was simply ascribed to neoliberal explanatory logics of personal responsibility (or lack thereof), thus describing ‘nonpostcolonial settler-migrants determined to protect their shops, businesses, and uplift strategies from the feral mob by any means necessary’.

But it is urbanity that conditions both the riots and the punitive reactions to them (Lamble, 2013). According to Gilroy (2012), England’s metropolitan ‘unruly multiculture’, its continuing labor market discriminations or hyperexploitation as the only choices for ‘work’, and the city as the siting of the emergence of a ‘market society’, are the disjunctive driving forces that mould the debates around safety, security and national identity. The characterization of rioters as feral is not restricted to England only.² In fact, strong resonances can be found in the 1989 case of the Central Park Five in New York City and the aggressive reaction of the press and public figures to that case. When a young white investment banker was raped and brutally beaten while jogging in the park, the police quickly coerced five black and Latino teenagers into confessing to the crime. The press reacted with headlines such as ‘Wolf Pack’s Prey’ and carried hysterical coverage of a phenomenon that was named ‘wilding’ (cf. Burns, 2012; Derber, 2007; Mexal, 2013). The New York Post’s Pete Hamill, in an article titled ‘A Savage Disease’, illustrates the moment:

They were coming downtown from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance […] And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teeming with violent images of the street and movies, they had only one goal: to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white. (quoted in Hancock, 2003: 38)

As LynNell Hancock (2003: 38) points out in the Columbia Journalism Review, ‘city editors pitched in and drafted a powerful storyline on the order of “Heroic Woman vs. Feral Beasts”’.

The discursive explosion around ‘wilding’ in New York City represents a convergence around urbanization, race and crime. Although many trace this convergence to the ‘war on crime’³ style of penalization from 1965 onwards – as a turn to ‘governing through crime’ whereby the ‘experience of victimization’ or the ‘imagined possibility of victimization’ becomes the constituting force in defining the contours of the political community (Simon, 2007: 109) – I want to suggest a different tack here. If one brings to bear some of the counterinsurgency discourse above, in which the city itself becomes an actor, what we get is a bridging of the dichotomy of ‘the human’ and ‘its environment’ (cf. Sloterdijk, 2011), while at the same time situating the event or phenomenon at hand in a (govern)mentality that views the city as a battlefield. That is, we need to consider, following Thomas Hobbes’s epigraph above, that the ‘nature of war’ consists of – as much as ‘the act of fighting itself’ – ‘an inclination’ or a ‘disposition’ to fight, to defend one’s space and property – here, understood through the idiom of race.

The disposition to fight the feral threat emerging from various forms of decomposition – individual, social, environmental – is intrinsically linked to the problem of urban violence. Or more precisely, the organization of violence is shaped by the discourse and social imaginary of racial feralization as a problematic of government amidst the dislocations created by ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2011). As Neil Brenner (2013: 102–3) argues, rather than ‘the city’ as a self-contained type of settlement or ‘the urban’ as a ‘pre-given site, space, or object’ that is then contrasted to the non-urban, contemporary analysis of urbanization must be located in two processes of capitalist creative destruction of sociospatial arrangements: ‘concentrated’ and ‘extended’ urbanization. Concentrated urbanization – the ‘agglomeration’ of ‘population, infrastructure, and investment’ in localized sites or regions – is linked and shaped in relation to other ‘places, territories, and scales’ that include

small- and medium-size towns and villages in peripheralized regions and agroindustrial zones, intercontinental transportation corridors, transoceanic shipping lanes, large-scale energy circuits and communications infrastructures, underground landscapes of resource extraction, satellite orbits, and even the bio- sphere itself. (Brenner, 2013: 104)

Brenner further argues that the ‘unit-like’ character of the urban, much like the ‘nation-form’, is an ideological effect of capitalist practices that create ‘the structural appearance of territorial distinctiveness, coherence, and boundedness within a broader, worldwide maelstrom of rapid sociospatial transformation.’

Such ‘unit-like’ effects were created and understood through the idea of contained homogeneities: nation-states contain society where each nation is the expression of a distinctive racial type (Balibar, 1991; Banton, 1998; Goldberg, 2002; Sassen, 2007). This Russian dolls model was roughly the norm from the middle of the 19th century up to the late 1970s when neoliberal policies were cranked up a gear. It was entrenched in the ideology of modernization and social progress, whereby it was believed that a nation could modernize itself through the urban, thus securing the genealogical lineage of the race (Dorlin, 2009; Weinbaum, 2004). The ‘urban question’ (Donzelot, 2008) would be relationally shaped by the ‘social question’ (Castel, 1995) and the ‘race problem’ (cf. Fassin and Fassin, 2009). W.E.B. Du Bois (1996 [1899]: 392) had already noted this normative commitment in The Philadelphia Negro as ‘the spirit of the twentieth century’: ‘the recognition that in the slums of modern society lie the answers to most of our puzzling problems of organization and life, and that only as we solve those problems is our culture assured and our progress certain’.

Today, we must reckon with the fragmentation of contained homogeneities as the normative model of racial and social management. Governance on the basis of (fixed) racial types and biological hierarchies has given way to forms of power that try to organize violence along more flexible lines. Racial feralization, as a problematic of government, is the new conceptualization of race that need not rely on hierarchical notions or on fixed categories to perpetuate racism. Racial ferality at once presents the grid of analysis for the discourse of security and the range of possible and legitimate forms of power that can be applied to populations and settlements that are deemed existential threats simply by existing. In fact, despite’s Starkey’s assertion that ‘the whites have become black’, the focus is elsewhere than on categories, namely on nihilistic violence. The discourse of feralization zooms in on destructive behavior, decomposition, formlessness and engulfment by chimerical beings who have blended with their polluted and decomposed milieu. In fact, the milieu and the environment are as much a source of threat as those feral beings that inhabit them.

Racial Feralization

That the human being would turn into a caricature of itself – a chimerical being that holds a broken mirror to Man’s lofty ambition to better itself as a species – is a recurrent theme throughout modernity. This counter-discourse of feralization animates and conditions theoretical reflections on and practical designs of perfectibility, civilization and culture. Even as the species’ destiny and vocation towards greater perfection is celebrated, the possibility of feralization, of the human falling to a position lower than beasts, reflects the theoretical uncertainties about the precariousness of the human form.⁴ The destiny of ‘Man’ – a species destined towards greater perfection through self-domestication – is always threatened and menaced by its own unraveling. It is only in considering the human being as a species, and not simply as a collection of individuals, that such discourses can be grounded. Species-unity, the very foundation that can guarantee progress and civilization, always has to face the potential of its own undoing into and engulfment by a condition of ferality that would herald the reign of evil and nihilism.

The discourse of feralization has to be understood in its close relationship to race as an organizing principle of modernity. Eric Voegelin’s politico-theological account of the two-fold emergence of the racial as a category reveals the deep imbrications of feralization with race. The ‘race idea’ emerges with a shift from a transcendent to an ‘immanent interpretation of life’ (Voegelin, 1998 [1933a]: 99) in a secularizing world, raising epistemological and ontological questions over how to incorporate ‘Man’ into a ‘natural system of living forms’ (1998 [1933a]: 18) and how to differentiate the human from the animal sphere. Secondly, through a metaphysical reflection on human nature and its relation to the state, race secularizes the Christian concept of the ‘corpus mysticum’ and becomes the new ‘mystical body’ that secures the spiritual and political unity of the political community (Voegelin, 1997 [1933b]: 128–9). The realization of this unity takes place by demarcating the community to be constructed from its antithesis, the counter- or anti-race. The anti-race is the concept that at once secures the foundation for racial distinctions – whether they are to be based conventionally on geographical divisions or physical varieties or on natural (biological) causal relationships between physical and mental traits – and at once threatens to unravel them and turn humanity into a chimeric and directionless caricature of itself.

The race concept can be seen as the long historical discourse of what it means to become human, but also, conversely, in the possible ramifications of regression. For every possibility of improvement, betterment and perfection, the specter of ferality provides a reminder that the human form is precarious. The discourse of ‘Man’ is haunted by two categories that have been occluded by the concept of ‘episteme’: Homo ferus and Homo sylvestris. Feral Man and Wild Man have helped to establish the human’s real nature, namely its capacity for self-domestication and anthropogenesis. The Wild Man (Homo sylvestris), often used to establish a discourse on primatology, has long played a role in providing the basis for racial hierarchy and distancing. It shows the rise of the human from its humble beginnings in nature to the creation of higher forms of culture through self-education. Yet, the category of Homo ferus remains a reminder of the precariousness of this perfectibility – the human can fall back rapidly (as in the case of feral children) to a level even lower than that of the beasts (Tinland, 2003 [1968]: 206).

My argument is that feralization is the subterranean discourse that traverses the history of race, as a conjunctural possibility of the erasure of the symbolics of race: whiteness/blackness, primitive/modern, savage/civilized. Such symbolizations were the result of both the need to place ‘Man’ within the natural system and to create political communities on the basis of a process of self-domestication based on the capacity to become human. The prospect of racial feralization, I argue, is the apocalyptic eschatology that runs parallel to and conditions the ideology of progress, as a counter-anthropogenesis that shadows the process of becoming human. Racial feralization has operated under various names and different regimes of rule: as marronage in the garrison and paramilitary communities that constituted plantocratic regimes (Hadden, 2003), as a discourse of ‘racial degeneration’ (Pick, 1993) linked to class and poverty to secure the foundations of solidaristic welfare states (cf. Castel, 1995; Ewald, 1986), and as the ‘anti-race’ in the genocidal history of anti-Semitism (cf. Sikka, 2003: 85; Esposito, 2008).

Whenever anthropogenesis is invoked – when the becoming human of humanity enters political discourse and practice – racial feralization appears as the dystopian or nihilistic tendencies inherent in the idea of race, calling forth the apocalyptic scenario of the total naturalization of the human. Today, it is the real stake that haunts concepts such as the Anthropocene or the posthuman. It finds its most acute expression in the idea of a ‘risk society’ in the context of planetary urbanization as the potential for catastrophic destruction through humanity’s own actions. Feralization enters discourse and practice as a problematic of government and allows various agencies to identify, name and govern a population in racial terms. In turn, it legitimizes the application of a number of techniques of sorting and technologies of control and care to those identified as feral. The demise of ‘overtly racist regimes’ (Frederickson, 2002), since the fall of South African apartheid and the dismantling of Jim Crow, and the increasing normative commitment to diversity in many institutions, produced the need for new forms of racial governance.

Targeting Racial Ferality

Racial feralization is racial governance in the age of planetary urbanization. That is, concentrated and extended urbanization have disturbed previous models of race management based on the nation-state model. Meanwhile, the security apparatuses – namely the military and the police – have been reconfigured to define their problematic of government in terms of responses to catastrophic and existential threats posed by racial ferality. In turn, the discourse of feralization has legitimated new forms of power that can apply the principle of race as ‘social war’ and ‘social purification’ towards those identified with decay and decomposition (Mbembe, 2013: 76–87; Goldberg, 2009b). While ‘the social and political economy of cities’ was once conceived ‘as central to the fortunes of the national economy’, as Neil Smith (2001: 71–2) argues, today’s cities connect ‘more directly to the global economy as sites of production than as sites of reproduction’, leading to many social groups being ‘surplused’. Increasingly, all those ‘surplused’ are finding themselves entering the matrix of racial governance – in terms of the vulnerabilities, forms of sufferings, and modes of killing that can be applied to them.

As a discourse of governance, the great appeal of racial feralization to ‘experts’ and institutional actors is in its dissociation from notions of biological hierarchies or cultural essentialism. The horizon of catastrophization is enough to mobilize and constitute multiple agencies (NGOs, police and the military, but also all kinds of informal networks) in acts of self-defense. Racism consequently no longer solely or principally operates through the pre-supposition of hierarchies (cf. Barker, 1981), but rather is able to find its principle of legitimation precisely in the need to forestall catastrophe. In an age defined by the possibilities of ‘becoming something else’, where each individual is asked to change her/himself, cultural essentialism and fixity have already been loosened (cf. Bauman, 2005). To govern on principles of the ‘mass consumer’ or fixed socio-cultural groups would be self-defeating. Instead, fixed definitions of groups can be jettisoned in favor of tactical interventions into the processes of group formation by targeting the individual and monitoring levels of risks. The symbolics of race – the categories that define fixity – are allowed to decompose through individualization and hybridization up to the point where this degeneration signals the threat of racial feralization (i.e. the possibility of racial engulfment).

Grégoire Chamayou has recently described the contemporary modality of power as one that neither follows normalization and disciplinarization nor is adequately expressed in Deleuze’s notion of ‘societies of control’. Rather, Chamayou (2014a) understands power as that which seeks to detect anomalies in the behavior of concrete individuals through chronospatial mapping:

The production of this form of individuality belongs neither to discipline nor to control, but to something else: to targeting in its most contemporary procedures, whose formal features are shared today among fields as diverse as policing, military reconnaissance and marketing. It might well be, for that matter, that we are entering targeted societies.

He tracks these modes of ‘acquiring targets’ through the rise of drone technologies (or the effects of a certain ‘dronification’), and as part of a more general history of ‘predatory power’, ‘manhunts’ or ‘human predation’ (Chamayou, 2010, 2013, 2014b).

My reading is that a ‘society of targeting’ emerges together with the governing of racial feralization – the two are co-conditioning. As the symbolics of race have come under pressure from (1) individualization and class fragmentation, (2) normative commitment to diversity and multiculturalism, (3) migration and other forms of planetary mobilities, and (4) the epistemic uncertainties of the very techniques that make race self-evident, racial feralization appears as a problematic in the discourse and practice of government. Power, through the discourse of ferality, could be rationalized by redefining the conceptualization of race while simultaneously borrowing from historical models of racial subjection (segregation, expulsion, pogroms, etc.) to expand the field of the racial to all those that have been surplused by neoliberalism and who also now carry a surplus of risks (if not a surplus of ‘race’). Racial governance at the threshold of catastrophization, by positing total engulfment as humanity’s horizon, requires a re-worked sorting mechanism. Racial feralization’s categorial ‘elasticity’ rooted in mechanisms of ‘behavioral sorting’ (Chamayou, 2013: 204, 2014a) establishes a hyper-responsive modality of power that can be applied to large numbers of undesirables.

The range of actions deployed by security apparatuses across the urban landscape speaks to the possibilities open for power by racial feralization and targeting. The criterion for suspicion during ‘stop and frisk’ by the New York City Police Department was revealed in court (when the policy was declared unconstitutional) as ‘furtive movement’, which included everything from ‘walking in a certain way’ to ‘moving in and out of a car too quickly’, ‘[g]rabbing at a certain pocket or something at their waist’, ‘getting a little nervous, maybe shaking’, or ‘all of a sudden becom[ing] very nervous, very aware’ (quoted in Cohen, 2013). This kind of ‘behavioral sorting’ blends two concerns over racial feralization: the urban landscape is volatile and unsafe with beings whose violence is random. Little separates civilian, bystander and ‘suspected’ in the categorial elasticity employed by the police in an environment perceived as hostile. The same process creeps into urban designs, as demonstrated by structures such as narrow benches and spikes (backed by laws against panhandling) erected in campaigns against the homeless.

It has been repeatedly pointed out that exploitation was never enough to secure capitalist relations (Robinson, 1983; Roediger, 2005; Du Bois, 1998 [1935]), and that race is ‘the modality in which class is “lived”’ (Hall, 2002: 62). The power of racism, as Stuart Hall (2002: 63) argued, is that it ‘discovers what other ideologies have to construct: an apparently “natural” and universal basis in nature itself’. As capitalism is increasingly defined by flows and the infrastructure that secures the circulation of goods, what cannot be absorbed into its revenue streams are the wastes – human and otherwise – that it produces (Bauman, 2006: 27–54). Those that are targeted by the discourse of racial feralization comprise this human waste, and it is to these that a series of techniques and technologies of social cleansing derived explicitly from historical experiments in racial management can be applied. Race provides the model of ‘social war’, and it also defines the parameters of belonging and abandonment, the thresholds of sufferings and vulnerabilities (Goldberg, 2009b; Mbembe, 2013).

So, the ‘whites’ are indeed becoming ‘black’, but in a completely different register, where the whiteness/blackness distinction – sociological or ontological, whichever way one wants to define it – does not provide even the modicum of comfort that ‘we’ are not ‘them’. Instead, racial feralization is the future posited by the discourse of government where a catastrophic engulfment threatens the human form, and where decomposition and decay will reduce the planet to a volatile landscape of random violence. Racial ferality inaugurates a form of governance at the threshold of the future survival of the human race. We are facing a governmentality of survival whose garrison political subjectivity fashions a survivalist ethos – both for those mobilized as its forces of self-defense and for its targets, now scattered like game wherever the processes of planetary urbanization create surplus. June Jordan’s epigraph above captures this apocalyptic disposition perfectly: losing is not an option.

Racial Feralization and Risk

Contemporary concerns over the potential for catastrophic destruction, that is, for ‘man-made’ disasters to assume the force of ‘natural’ catastrophes, animates discussions around concepts such as the Anthropocene and the posthuman. Ulrich Beck’s (1992 [1986], 2009) notion of the ‘risk society’ already laid out, decades ago, the stakes of the blurring of human/natural causes in mass calamities: the potential for the destruction and annihilation of human life by forces unleashed by human agency (e.g. nuclear disaster, climate change, and global pandemics). Hence, Chakrabarty (2009) rightly argues that the Anthropocene creates a ‘shared sense of catastrophe’ for humanity as a species, i.e. humans can only experience themselves as a species-unity through their potential disappearance. That the human must demarcate itself from other species is not questioned by the anthropocenic discourse. This raises some pointed questions for the governance of risks, the assignation of ‘blame’ and the distribution of responsibility (Douglas, 1994). And it is, I argue, at this very point that the history of ‘man’s misgivings’ (Lovejoy and Boas, 1935: vii) reappears in the form of racial feralization as a problematic of government: racial feralization demarcates populations amidst a ‘shared catastrophe’, creates the saved and the damned and is invoked to distribute resources, to delimit security, and ultimately to draw out the limits of the human.

What is distinctive about governance today is that problems are approached from the perspective of ‘catastrophization’ (Ophir, n.d.). As Adi Ophir (n.d.) argues, the politics of disaster (man-made or natural) ‘was often conceived as part of the circumstances in which power operates or one of the consequences of its operation, but in both cases it was conceived as external to power’. However, in the contemporary world, catastrophization must be considered as a ‘constitutive element of power’ whereby disaster is ‘interiorized’ within the realm of power. In this mode of operation, ‘catastrophization becomes a set of governmental policies, a measured and restrained means of governance’ of different populations that lie along a continuum of being at-risk and becoming the risk. Borrowing from Ophir, I argue that the risk society signals a new mode of political thinking in relation to race: racial feralization is ‘interiorized’ within racial governance. Racial feralization, as catastrophic potentiality, becomes the primary mode of racial conceptualization to demarcate the lines of political communities, separating those who will be granted safety and safe passage from those who will be expelled, and distinguishing those who are deserving of care and rescue from those who must be abandoned. Racial feralization maps a spectrum of sufferings and humiliations for the populations that are threatening or are deemed to be carriers of the apocalyptic germ.

As a problematic of government, racial feralization operates across a number of discursive formations in relation to the proliferation of risks and the management of insecurity. Two co-constitutive modes of problematizing ferality can be distinguished – a topocentric and an anthropocentric mode. Proliferation of risks is not to be understood simply in quantitative terms – that modern life opens humans to more risks is as old as modernity (Ewald, 1986; Foucault, 2009). Rather, it speaks to the exponential ratcheting up of risks to the point of catastrophe as each contaminated place is transformed into an agent of contamination. For example, the SARS epidemic was quickly blamed on the close proximity of humans and animals in the city, a blending of human and environment that creates a host which then propagates the disease, and which turns everyday surfaces (a door knob, the seat of a plane or train, a cup) into agents of transmission (cf. Davis, 2005). In imagining global pandemics, a thin and fragile border is drawn between at-risk populations, risky behaviors and the risk of catastrophe on a planetary scale. The potential naturalization of humanity is evoked as each and every person becomes a potential carrier and is thus transformed into a force of nature with destructive powers. Feralization is seen as emerging from the topographical coordinates of a globalized society whose previously localized commonplace spaces are now interconnected.

So, racial feralization is problematized in terms of the decomposition of the milieu – the localized place where symbolization confers memory, anchorage and discipline. This is conditioned by the neoliberal project. Once the collective socializing project was declared over, i.e. ‘there is no such thing as society’, a breach was opened for race to lose its anchor in a local context (a ‘national society’) or in a disciplined and normalized body (processes of self-domestication), and for the subterranean discourse of racial ferality to be revived as a problematic of government. Racial feralization enters the discourse and practice of governance as a reflection on the decomposition of the tight-knit relation between the milieu (social and natural) and the individual. In the topocentric dimension, there emerges a geography of pollution where humanity has blended with the environment, i.e. sites of abandonment that cannot generate symbolization, and whose human/nature content is about to leak out, whether in terms of diseases, uncontrollable violence or moral degradation. Marc Augé (2008 [1992]: 83) has called these sites that resist symbolization – airports, supermarkets, train stations – ‘empirical non-places’ which only host transitional activities and only ‘exist to be passed through’. The decomposed non-place of racial feralization is its opposite image in a broken mirror – full of threats, on the verge of morally and physically contaminating the whole planet. If feralized non-places are to be ‘passed through’ let it be with a bulldozer.

On the anthropocentric scale, feralization is the grid through which to understand behavior and for government to take shape within an imaginary of decomposition and decay. The notion of precarity must be extended from its economic connotations to cover political actions that shape the racial orientation of various agencies towards the precariousness of the human form. That is, an orientation conditioned by governmental response to racial feralization shapes how the individual is understood to the extent that s/he can be made amenable to the apparatuses of governance. Left without socialization – and this is the moral of the many stories about feral children – a human is but a human form that has blended with its environment. This decomposed being (for individual is not even the proper term here) is thus a shell into which all kinds of danger might accumulate. Like a host carrying a dangerous virus, it is an agent of contamination that can lead to an unraveling of the social, reducing life to a random, meaningless, violent and aimless drift. Discursively, racial feralization operates across two concepts at once: fullness and emptiness. On the one hand, there is the emptying of the scene of a social relation that can subsequently be filled with all kinds of threats: disease, criminality, addiction, random acts of hyper-violence, pollution, etc. On the other hand are beings full of violence and destruction – full of life-sucking energies, but devoid of character and personality (as nature or a virus is devoid of character and personality).

The destructive threat of randomness to an action’s or event’s context of interpretation (e.g. as in so-called motiveless crimes) is regularly invoked by criminologists and other apostles of security. James Q. Wilson (1995: 492), considered one of the fathers of so-called ‘zero tolerance’ policing, clearly expressed the philosophy and fear behind feralization:

We were unhappy about having our property put at risk, but we adapted with the aid of locks, alarms, and security guards. But we are terrified by the prospect of innocent people being gunned down at random, without warning and almost without motive, by youngsters who afterwards show us the blank, unremorseful face of a seemingly feral presocial being.⁵

Equally, John Dilulio (1995), writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, described a category of criminal as ‘superpredators’ – ‘remorseless juveniles’ with ‘vacant stares and smiles, and remorseless eyes’ who give off a ‘buzz of impulsive violence’.

Feralization, according to this governmental discourse, shatters the ‘routine familiarity’ and ‘expectation’ of the ‘everyday’ (cf. Essed, 1991): feral beings are lurking in every corner, in every city, ready to strike. Wilson ended his jeremiad with: ‘Get ready.’ The ‘vacant stares’ and emptiness of character are aligned with this destructive power, and the social scene is filled with threats (innocent people gunned down at random) that cannot be contained through security measures and are thus the potential of a nihilistic and catastrophic power, namely racial ferality. In ‘targeting societies’, the implication is that everyone should ‘get ready’. If risk and security emerged as technologies of power to deal with the (negative) consequences of modernity, the interiorization of racial ferality as an apocalyptic eschatology within the realm of power brings about a transformation in the political constitution of society and culture. Gradually, securitization through monopolistic organization of violence (i.e. the state) is giving way to garrison communities linked and defined by their relation to risks and threats. Racial feralization is the mobile and flexible concept that legitimates the constitution and government of low-cost, garrisoned, integrated and networked planetary urban life.

Conclusion

I started this paper with a reflection on some of the constitutive dimensions of critical race studies. I argued that the critique of modernity, which borrows from Foucault’s notion of a ‘Western episteme’, tends to assume a monolithic discourse of ‘Man’, when in fact what we find are various hesitations and uncertainties over the human form. The precariousness of humanity’s modalities of self-domestication – what I have called feralization – is always expressed in the idiom of race, because the racial is the ‘body idea’ through which political communities organize themselves in a secularizing world. Racial feralization represents the threat that the human will be engulfed by nature, and that human life will be reduced to formlessness and random violence, devoid of any ability to create meaning in the world. That is, the symbolics of race, so central to modernity’s self-understanding, would be undone by the impossibility of symbolization. This catastrophic and dystopian horizon has now entered into the way that power is constituted and instituted, and racial feralization has been revived as a problematic of government to extend the matrix of race to populations surplused by neoliberal capitalism. Racial ferality acts as a principle of legitimation to govern the perceived exponential increase of catastrophic dangers in a risk society whose context is planetary urbanization. I am arguing that this analysis places the traditional ways of theorizing race and racism under severe pressure.

Critical race studies rely on a number of tropes for the analysis of racism: essentialism, hierarchy, and the categorial distinctions created by the symbolics of race. Each of these is now under revision by the deployment of racial feralization as a problematic of government. Put simply, two important developments in how racisms operate can be identified: (a) racial hierarchies are not necessary, though they might be sufficient, for racist expressions, and (b) racial categories are necessary but not sufficient conditions for racial power relations to exist. When categories cannot be fixed and hierarchies are flattened, racial power must be operationalized by other means. This is where ‘feralization’ has found its raison d’être for policy makers. As an epistemological object, it allows various agencies (police, military, carceral and corporate, to name a few) to identify, name, problematize and govern a population in racial terms. This in turn legitimizes the application of a number of techniques of sorting and technologies of control and care to those identified as feral. As such, racial feralization emerges as a concern for and simultaneously a challenge to critical race studies, traditionally thought.

Let me be clear. Racial feralization, as deployed here, is an analytic and not an empirical fact. It is a racial conceptualization that operates as a principle of legitimation for the vulgar display of power that functions at the heart of the production of vulnerabilities, sufferings and humiliations that daily cross our visual landscapes. Power always works through fantasies of its own inexorability and inevitability. Racial feralization operates by projecting a fantasy of total decomposition and racial engulfment, while simultaneously presenting ‘targeting societies’ of seek and destroy as the only plausible alternative. As a form of race thinking, it creates a special challenge for the politics of antiracism. Traditionally conceived, as an arena of conflicts and antagonisms, ‘the political’ appears in the gap between power and the subject, i.e. in the space of resistance and refusal. The governance of racial feralization does not try to close that space, or to perform an ‘ideological closure’ to create a hegemonic formation. Structuralist accounts would predict that political antagonisms generated by antiracist praxis would blow away the ideological cover, create a crisis of hegemony, and in the process open up a contestation through resistance. However, in the targeting of racial feralization this gap between power and subject is not simply closed (everything reduced to pure ideology or spectacle). Rather, governance comes to occupy the space of resistance and exacerbates the conflicts and antagonisms to generate new targets. Racial governance is not government through consent or apathy, but an infernal cycle of polemical hyper-politicization. When everything is political, as the saying goes, nothing is political. The daily polemics of race that is played out on social media is not to be confused with the technology but is to be grasped as the renewal of forms of power that present race as the only legitimate basis for organizing power and violence.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ben Cox, Muriam Haleh Davis, and Megan McCabe for comments on the paper. I am grateful to David Theo Goldberg for many discussions about race and feralization. A special thank-you to Megan, who pushed me to refine the ideas and arguments and helped me immeasurably with the editing. Many thanks to AbdouMaliq Simone for inviting me on board for this special edition. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their very helpful and insightful comments.

Notes

Diren Valayden is an independent researcher. He has a PhD from the Culture and Theory Program from the University of California, Irvine. He is currently writing a book on the theoretical history of racial feralization. This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section, ‘City of Potentialities: Race, Violence and Invention’, edited by AbdouMaliq Simone.

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