Rethinking Race,Calculation,Quantification,and Measure

Ferguson’s Reordering of Foucault: From State Racism to Population Racism

What makes Ferguson’s account of the interdisciplines of the late 1960s and 1970s a matter of calculation, quantification, and measure is its focus on the institutional arrangements and the material practices of bureaucracy that characterized the academic context in which the interdisciplines developed, or the way in which the academy met what Ferguson calls the interdisciplines’ “will to institutionality.” In their ambitions to be recognized by the academy, the interdisciplines, Ferguson suggests, both informed and were informed by the ongoing deconstruction of the sovereign subject of Western modern thought, thereby contributing to critical theory as it was finding a home in the humanities and the arts. In their insistence on the recognition of subjects other than the sovereign subject of Western modern thought, they would participate, if not altogether consciously or willingly, in the administrative work of the social sciences by reproducing or managing social difference in what was becoming more explicitly a neoliberal and biopolitical governance both inside and outside the academy.

For Ferguson (2012), then, the interdisciplines became a force of biopower, turning minorities into subjects of biopolitics as biopolitics

would take as its representative the subject constituted through difference, the one who had to learn what it meant to have a particularized history, the one who would have to access how the probabilities for life have everything to do with these particularities . . . (p. 34)

More specifically, subjects would have to learn to think of themselves in terms of historic social differences, accounting for the present conditions of their lives in these terms. The academy played a central role in this “learning,” as it ingratiated minorities by making ability or capacity—both physical and mental—a standard of incorporation and also a mode of surveillance and measurement. This “new interdisciplinary biopower placed social differences in the realm of calculation and recalibrated power/knowledge as an agent of social life” (p. 34). Or to put it otherwise, the academy was central in aligning economy and governance with knowledge/power by turning knowledge/power into biopower and fostering the calculative manipulation of affective or life capacities as a reformulation of difference. Difference was to be incorporated into hegemony, not disruptive of it, and a “calculative ambience of sociality” (Crandall, 2010) was both supportive and supported.

The academy’s management of difference was part of, if not in part constitutive of, a change in the relationship between economy and governance. In this sense, it is hard not to think of Foucault, not the Foucault of The Order of Things, but the Foucault of the lectures of the late seventies on liberalism, neoliberalism, and the change in the relationship of economy and governance (Foucault, 2004/2007; Foucault, 2004/2008). In these lectures, Foucault argued that the liberal market functions as a limit to sovereignty in that the so-called “natural” circulation necessary to the market cannot withstand governance’s direct interference. What distinguishes neoliberalism from liberalism, especially American neoliberalism, is that the government no longer functions as a principle of market limitation. Rather, the market has become a principle turned against governance. The market has become something like an economic tribunal that governance continuously faces where governance is no longer determined to be legitimate or illegitimate but efficient or inefficient. This is an economy that is after economy, as Randy Martin describes it, in that the political, usually excluded from economy, instead has been fully included as the political effectiveness of governance is subjected to market measures, or what Martin (2013) calls “the social logic of the derivative.”

As such, the market functions as a principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and behaviors, not in terms of a measure of exchangeability, but in terms of a formal structure of competition, the underside of the liberal promise of equality. Foucault (2004/2008) himself argues that this is a society where discipline is no longer central; “nor is it a society in which a mechanism of general normalization and the exclusion of those who cannot be normalized is needed” (p. 259). Instead we see

the image, idea or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of the individual. (pp. 259-260)

As Ferguson (2012) puts it, “Without question, there was a new policing of minority difference by federal, state and local governments but alongside that repression was a veritable explosion in the affirmation of minority difference in both grassroots and official venues” (p. 75). Ferguson continues, “Sometimes minority difference would be hegemonic, at other times it would be oppositional; many times it would be both. Each profile would be available for articulation and neither one would be ‘false’” (p. 73). This of course follows on the efforts especially of those in the academy to correct the misrepresentations of women, African Americans, queers, and others. But in a neoliberal environment where the matter of false consciousness matters less, difference not only becomes a matter of tolerance; difference fast becomes a resource for “political branding” (Clough & Willse, 2011). That is, difference is put to use to politically brand issues, regardless of where these issues actually fall on the political spectrum, as modern, progressive, and civil. Difference now functions as a technology deeply embedded in the discourses of humanitarianism and human rights, activating democratic action aimed at “ensuring choice.” If then the subject of discipline is no longer central to biopolitics, the subject nevertheless becomes an individualizing figure of populations, a humanizing figure of political branding. Think for example of the figures of the starving African child, the Israeli queer, the trafficked prepubescent girl, and so on that can be used as rhetorical figures in what I referred to above as political branding and population racism. These figures serve to individualize a collective phenomenon or integrate individual phenomena within a collective field, but in the form of quantification.

While the figure of the human subject may function to humanize populations, nonetheless, in biopolitical terms, the population is a technical object, a political object of management and government—not necessarily a collection of individual subjects. Population is rather a set of elements in which we can note constants and regularities. Populations have their own specific aggregate effects, irreducible to a smaller frame. Population is an effect of statistical analysis, a matter of probabilities, a measure of risk that constitutes an actuarialism, a racist actuarialism, that is productive rather than merely representational. It is the calculability of risk that underwrites the comparison of populations and their life capacities or lack thereof, thereby value-coding an expectation about populations, as populations are thrown into a market competition for life-itself.

After all, the matter of population is life-itself and it is this competition for life among populations that Foucault treated as a racism particular to biopolitics, a state racism. I prefer to make use of the term population racism to point to a racist actuarialism that is before and goes beyond state racism or what Foucault described as the maintenance of health of national populations in marking some populations for debility and death. ² With population racism, the calculations and measures of population in a variety of contexts—territory, class, ethnicity, gender, race—are put in terms of an analysis of biological activity. Of course, this is a biology (and now neuroscience) that is infused with technicity or technicality—the technicity of measuring for starters. In turning all contexts of populations into a biotechnicity of calculation, quantification, and measure, population racism makes way for the health or lack thereof of populations to be part of a global market, beyond national bounded-ness, beyond the boundaries of the body as organism.

Ferguson, drawing on Stephanie Smallwood, adds to this discussion reminding us that these biopolitical practices of quantification have roots in slavery where “Africans were placed at the center of calculation in order to see how far a life could be stretched and tried for the necessities of capitalist economic formations” (Smallwood as quoted in Ferguson, 2012, p. 91). As a result, Ferguson proposes that “life would become a factor in capital’s equations,” releasing a “profound epistemic revolution in which slavery’s computations would be the prototype to Marx’s free laborer” (p. 91). While slavery subjected life to calculation as a measure of exchangeability in capitalist production, the institutionalization of the interdisciplines in the late 1960s and 1970s engaged calculation otherwise. That is to say, calculation served to make difference a matter of competition in social life, part of, but not reducible to production or economic exchange. It is this competition among populations for affective or life capacities that was operated successfully in the academy by factoring in minority difference in a regime of calculation that betrayed the kinship this regime had “to prior and emerging regimes of calculation and alienation” (p. 93). In this, the specific historicities of the subject of difference are also made to function biopolitically, becoming a matter of calculative or quantitative reformulation.

The New Interdisciplines

Today in the wake of the institutionalization of the interdisciplines and their ongoing decline, both the humanities and the social sciences are facing a new regime of calculation, quantification, and measure. My co-authors and I have called this the “datalogical turn” to refer to the data mining of social media, tracking devices, and biometric and environmental passive microsensors—the full analytic capacities of twenty-first-century media—now deployed not only in but also outside the academy in business, culture, government, economy, and individuals’ lives. Social sciences, sociology in particular, are facing what nearly ten years ago, Mike Savage and Roger Burrows (2007) called the “coming crisis of empirical sociology.” Data, as they put it then, “is so routinely gathered and disseminated, and in such myriad ways that the role of sociologists in generating data is now unclear” (p. 889). Thus, “the claims to jurisdiction” that “sociologists can make around their methodology repertoires,” is challenged (p. 889).

Not only have sociologists become brokers of data rather than producers of it, the massive production of data outside the academy makes way for the aestheticization of data to make data more affective and to command greater market attention. To my mind, it is this aestheticization of data that has informed the critical studies of calculation, quantification, and measure, which today are forming the new interdisciplines, drawing the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences into a close relationship with mathematical sciences, computer sciences, digital studies, and an array of natural sciences. In the humanities and the arts, the critical studies of calculation, quantification, and measure are part of what has developed as “the non-human turn” to recognize other than human agencies (Grusin, 2015). In the social sciences, they are part of studying the impact of data-fication and its effects on the epistemological and ontological assumptions underlying methods for studying the social (Latour, Jensen, Venturini, Grauwin, & Boullier, 2012).

But the data-fication of twenty-first-century media not only raises a question about methods for studying the social, it also raises a question about the interrelationship of concepts and technologies for navigating inside datasets. As Bruno Latour and his collaborators (2012) have put it, “‘specific’ and ‘general,’ ‘individual’ and ‘collective,’ ‘actor’ and ‘system’ are not essential realities but provisional terms . . . a consequence of the type of technology used for navigating inside datasets” (p. 2). For Latour and his colleagues, digitized networks specifically undo the assumption of the whole constituted by interacting elements—or a system-metaphysic. They argue instead that there is more complexity in the elements than in the aggregates; or to state it a bit more provocatively, they claim that “the whole is always smaller than its parts.” This characteristic of a network is termed “the one level standpoint” (1-LS) in contrast to the “two level standpoint” (2-LS) of micro and macro levels of social structure.

This provocative proposal about the displacement of the 2-LS by the 1-LS or the network, I would propose, points to the effects of the current regime of calculation or the data-fication of twenty-first-century media that is calling into question assumptions about human experience, consciousness and bodily perception, as well as agency, historicity, system, and structure. As Hansen (2015a) sees it, twenty-first-century media no longer store human experience as such; rather, they store the bits of data that “register molecular increments of behavior” that are never an expression of lived human experience (p. 40). As such, twenty-first-century media have shifted from “addressing humans first and foremost” to registering “the environmentality of the world itself,” providing a “worldly sensibility” that is prior to human consciousness and bodily based perception and re-embeds “consciousness in a far richer context of the causally efficacious lineages that have produced it” (pp. 8-9; see also p. 52). The data-fication of twenty-first-century media shows that consciousness and bodily based perception are accomplishments that involve “the coexistence of multiple experiential presents—multiple, partially overlapping presents from different time frames and scales” (p. 45; see also p. 192). In other words, bodily based perception and consciousness are displaced as central to experience. The technical not only supplements consciousness and bodily based perception, but are also actually the condition of their arising.

For Alexander Galloway (2014), what Hansen refers to as twenty-first-century media brings about the decline of forms of mediation such as hermeneutics, historicization, and immanent or aesthetic appreciation. As Galloway puts it, “We can expect a tendential fall in the efficiency of both images and texts, in both poems and problems, and a marked increase in the efficiency of an entirely different mode of mediation, the system, the machine, the network” (p. 62). For Galloway, the network, or a “microphysics of links and vectors,” has become systemic. However, it should be noted that if network be system, it is one in which the structure of the micro and macro, or the 2-LS, has been displaced. In this, the system-metaphysic, the taken-for-granted relationship of parts constituting the whole, no longer holds. Randy Martin has even argued that the undoing of the system-metaphysic is one of the effects of network that is better understood in terms of the social logic of the derivative. As he puts it,

As opposed to the fixed relation between part and whole that informs the system metaphysic, the derivative acts as the movement between these polarities that are rendered unstable through its very contestation of accurate price and fundamental value . . . (Martin, 2013, p. 91)

For Martin, the derivative assembles the disassembled aspects of almost anything that can be given a risk file and almost anything, it would seem, can be. As these risks can be hedged, and these hedges themselves traded, derivatives bring neither market equilibrium nor stable prices; it is as if no transaction is ever finished and there will always be potential for a better performance with every trade. Measure is a matter of volatility, the self-generating volatility of pricing the derivative through trade. As such, measure is “a point of reference after the fact that is treated as an intent, a target to be hit based upon something that has already occurred, hence a momentary conversion of an unknown into a measure that cannot hold” (Martin, 2013, p. 91).

Eli Ayache (2007) describes this process of measuring or pricing through trading as “beyond probability.” As he puts it, “this process supposed to record a value, as of today and day after day, for the derivative that was once written and sentenced to have no value until a future date” “. . . extends beyond probability” (p. 42). The derivative “trades after probability is done with and (the context) saturated” (p. 41). When the context is saturated with all its possibilities, it opens up to what Ayache calls “capacity” that allows for the context to be changed. Pricing through trading “is a revision of the whole range of possibilities, not just of the probability distribution overlying them.” This puts “into play the parameter (or parameters) whose fixity was (supposed to be) the guarantee of fixity of the context and of the corresponding dynamic replication within a context” (p. 44).

Hansen too rethinks probability in terms of the data-fication of twenty-first-century media. Providing “a wide swathe of environmental data,” data-fication, Hansen (2015b) argues, can only offer the opportunity to produce patterns or information that are not inherently there in the data, what he calls “probabilities in the wild” (p. 118). As datasets cannot be totalized, probability ceases to function as either an “a priori calculus of probability” or as “empirical probabilistic systems,” that is to say, when probability is in relationship to the number of possible outcomes that can be considered equiprobable. Jordan Crandall (2010) argues that the latter is no longer the case. With data-fication, he proposes, a “probable construct exists that stands in relation to reality as its tendency . . . a silhouette that models future positions, a ghostly forebear into which reality flows” (p. 75). Drawing on Crandall, Hansen (2015b) concludes that data-fication “seems to yield an ontological transformation of probability itself: probability ceases to function on the basis of mere possibilities and instead comes to operate as the index of “real propensities” (p. 119).

In his take on propensities or tendencies, Hansen turns to Alfred North Whitehead who proposes that “probabilities are expressions of real forces, of actual propensities rather than empty statistical likelihoods” (Whitehead as quoted in Hansen, 2015b, p. 121). For Hansen, Whitehead’s take on probability shows a shift from conceiving potentiality as residing in an affective excess or in the virtuality of conscrescence that is ontologically prior to actualization. Instead, Hansen (2015a) argues that the potentiality of conscrescence “bleeds or seeps into the contribution the actual entity makes to the settled world . . . ” (p. 85). Potential, then, is in “the contrast among already existing actualities . . . the real potentiality of the settled world at each moment of its becoming”—becoming different with each new actuality or data (Hansen, 2015a, p. 120). ³ This is data’s power to give rise to more data. For Hansen, following Whitehead, this power is the “causal force of the present”; that is to say,

every actuality includes in its present feeling, its potential to impact future actualities but also . . . that it feels the potentiality for the future in its present and indeed as part of what constitutes the causal force of the present. (p. 210)

As Hansen sees it, data-fication refashions the relationship of the present and the future, causality and probability. Data-fication makes causality a matter of tendencies rather than “acts of discrete agents,” drawing on the continual becoming of the worldly sensibility that data-fication provides. As such, there is always a “surplus of sensibility,” no matter the precision of the “predictive analytics” of twenty-first-century media, or the measures of data-fication (Hansen, 2015b, p. 121).

Critical Practice: Race and Twenty-First-Century Media

In turning to questions of criticism and the new interdisciplines, it is this surplus of sensibility that makes or can make a difference. Martin too points to a surplus in relationship to the derivative as a matter of the social relationships that can occur around transactions that are never done with, or, as Ayache would put it, when probability is done with and the parameters have the capacity to change. ⁴ As derivatives “articulate what is made in motion, how production is inside circulation,” Martin (2013) goes on to argue that derivatives turn criticism to mobilization, “to see how we move together but not as one,” to see what we are in the midst of, or what is in our midst, “to take up what is remaindered, the excess of noise that comes back from the amplifying of risk” (p. 100). He continues,

To suggest therefore that a derivative logic is present across cultural and financial practices is not to assign particular places in an architectural order (which was what the idea of structure was based upon), but to identify principles of movement that associate an array of activities, and flows of people, without forcing them to conform to a singular idea. (Martin, 2013, p. 100)

Echoing Martin’s concern to shift criticism to mobilization, and following on Galloway’s (2014) treatment of network’s deflation of hermeneutics, historicizing, and aesthetic or immanent appreciation, McKenzie Wark (2014) argues that criticism must yield to being a critical practice “of constructing situations for communicating otherwise,” or alongside “the control of the portals which appear to govern the relation between what is possible and that which lays claim to command them” (pp. 158, 160). In this moment of the undoing of the system-metaphysic and the becoming ubiquitous of the post-probabilistic measure of the current regime of calculation, it might be best for the new interdisciplines forming around calculation, quantification, and measure to be wary of their own will to institutionality and the ways it does or does not support a critical practice. It also may be a good time to rethink race, measure, calculation, and quantification, however, without seeking their systemic relationship, as Tara McPherson suggests is needed in the epigraph to this essay. The systemic is not our problem.

Recently, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2012) has proposed that rather than considering race and technology, we consider “race as technology.” For Chun, this means that race be understood not for what it is but for what it does, and, like technology, what race does is function “to facilitate comparisons between entities classed as similar or dissimilar.” For example, race has been “crucial in negotiating and establishing historically variable definitions of biology and culture.” Like technology, race “is always already a mix of science, art and culture.” It is central, as is technology, to the “changing relationships between human and machine, human and animal, media and environment, mediation and embodiment nature and culture, visibility and invisibility, privacy and publicity” (p. 39). Race as technology may be another indication of how race, in the post 1960s and 1970s, became a matter of minority difference and useful as such to the academy and to neoliberalism and biopolitics generally. But it seems to me that thinking race as technology fails to provide ways to think of race or technology in terms of twenty-first-century media, if we do not ask if and how the simile, race as technology, still might or might not hold.

After all, when Chun links racism to race as technology, she turns to Martin Heidegger’s post–World War II treatment of technology in terms of standing reserve. As such, Chun follows Heidegger in thinking that the essence of technology is not technological and so there is no need to specify which technology is being referenced. Yet, there is a growing awareness that it matters which technology is being addressed or what different technologies do (Stiegler & Beardsworth, 1998). This is especially important in relationship to the data-fication of twenty-first-century media as they operate beyond the boundary between human and machine, human and animal, media and environment, mediation and embodiment, nature and culture, visibility and invisibility, privacy and publicity, the very boundary that race supposedly mediates, as Chun would have it. Indeed, it is beyond the boundary between human and machine, human and animal, media and environment, mediation and embodiment, nature and culture, visibility and invisibility, privacy and publicity, where calculation, quantification, and measure operate. As such, the new interdisciplines are pointing to the inefficiency of hermeneutics, historicizing, and immanent appreciation and calling for new methods of critique of media, race, and racism that take the specificity of data-fication into account.

Chun suggests that there still is possibility for criticism in taking race as poeisis or a mode of reveaing the racism of technology as standing reserve. But twenty-first-century media take us beyond this opposition of techne and poiesis, and, as Hansen reminds us, the compensation which twenty-first-century media offer for doing so, or for demoting consciousness and bodily based perception, is not to give back to them their centrality in constituting or reflecting on experience. Rather it is to offer human beings the experience of a worldly sensibility, and thereby to make available to consciousness “aspects of its own causal background that it literally has no capacity to grasp directly . . . ” (Hansen, 2015a, p. 52). I am not saying that twenty-first-century media give us a post-racism; surely there is already a body of criticism of data-fication in the production of racist practices of risk, surveillance, and control, a matter of biopolitics and neoliberalism. I am instead asking the question Chun might have asked: What is race doing as twenty-first-century media beyond biopolitics and neoliberalism or in relationship to the social logic of the derivative and data-fication? Perhaps Chun does indicate what might be an apt answer when in her reading of Greg Pak’s film, Robot Stories, she sees race as a matter of ethics, as an ethical question: What relationships does race set up? In light of twenty-first-century media, I would reformulate this question to ask, What mobilizations can race make possible? In this sense, what race does or can do is led away from hermeneutic, interpretive criticism to critical practices of mobilization, from a humanism to a non-humanism that is not inherently racist.

Wondering about the future condition of the interdisciplines that he has addressed, Ferguson ends The Reorder of Things not with a revolutionary plan but a moderate one. Addressing those who have been and still may be connected to these interdisciplines, Ferguson (2012) calls for small acts: “A syllabus, a job ad, a recruitment strategy, a memo, a book, an artwork, a report, an organizational plan, a protest . . . ” These small acts, as Ferguson sees it, can be deployed “in order to imagine critical forms of community” (p. 232). Martin (2013) argues similarly; he proposes that the derivative social logic allows us “to recognize ways in which “the concrete particularities, the specific engagements, commitments, interventions we tender and expend might be interconnected, without first or ultimately needing to appear as a single whole or unity of practice or perspective” (p. 87). This shift to small acts might make a difference, Ferguson claims, but only if they serve a will to institutionality that “recognizes the world is not enough.” However, such acts have already been all but caught up in the network of twenty-first-century media, or what Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey (2012) have called “gray media,” like “databases, group-work software, project-planning methods, media forms, protocol, algorithms.” These are “tangible, biddable things” that only pose “problems of meaning as a preliminary to a more efficacious problem of use or ‘getting things done’” (Fuller & Goffey, 2012, p. 9). To make a difference with the little acts that Ferguson and Martin point to, it will be necessary to seriously and critically engage with twenty-first-century media—its affordances and its debilitations. I view this critical engagement as one example of the sort of mobilization that race may make possible as a non-humanism.

We might also consider what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) have said of the university and those who refuse to be accounted for:

What might appear as the professionalization of the American university, our starting point, now might better be understood as a certain intensification of method in the Universitas, a tightening of the circle. Professionalization cannot take over the American university—it is the critical approach of the university, its Universitas. (p. 41)

Perhaps then it needs to be said that the crack dealer, terrorist, and political prisoner share a commitment to war, and society responds in kind with wars on crime, terror, drugs, communism. But “this war on the commitment to war” crusades as a war against the asocial, that is, those who live “without a concern for sociality.” Yet it cannot be such a thing. After all, it is professionalization itself that is devoted to the asocial, the university itself that reproduces the knowledge of how to neglect sociality in its very concern for what it calls asociality. (p. 40)