Wendy Brown | February 28, 2002
DRAFT: DO NOT CITE
In the larger genealogy of tolerance of which this paper is a part, I argue that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have featured a transmogrification of the object of tolerance discourse with respect to the emergence of that discourse in the Reformation. This is a transmogrification from subjective belief (religion and other matters of “conscience”) to identities rooted in ideologically naturalized differences (race, ethnicity, sexuality) and imagined to be fairly objective. I also argue that in the twentieth century, the agents and vehicles of tolerance are expanded from state and church to civil society–groups and individuals. Against the backdrop of these changes in the subject and object of tolerance, this chapter poses two questions: What is the relation of contemporary tolerance discourse to formulations of citizenship and the state? And what is the relationship of this discourse to state legitimacy and state violence?
In what follows, I will argue that as a complex collection of cultural, social and state practices, tolerance functions in part as a form of political rationality, a strand of what Foucault termed “governmentality.” As an order of policy discourse that is largely non-legal without being extra-legal, as a state speech act that is only occasionally an enforceable rule, and as a popular discourse that emerges in schools, churches, civic associations, museums, and café conversation, tolerance will be seen to exemplify Foucault’s unorthodox account of government: “not a matter of imposing laws on men, but rather of disposing things, that is to say, to employ tactics rather than laws, and if need be to use the laws themselves as tactics.”122 As a discourse that circulates between state and populace, that produces and organizes subjects, and with which subjects govern themselves, tolerance will also be seen to embody what Foucault formulated as several of the distinctive features of modern governmentality: the state is not the wellspring or agent of all governing power and the rationalities governing individual subjects and the populace work through a range of formally nonpolitical knowledges and institutions. Moreover, the body of legal and non-legal, pedagogical, religious and social discourses of tolerance together produce what Foucault understands as the signature of modern governmentality, its omnes et singulatim effect (“all and each,” a title of one of Foucault’s lectures and a constant referent for him in conceptualizing the nature of modern political power). Simultaneously totalizing and individualizing, and achieving each through the other, tolerance emerges as a strategy in the arsenal for managing large and potentially unruly populations, thus as an element of biopower.
Foucault’s formulation of governmentality is notably thin, conceived mainly in terms of the genealogy of its emergence in the eighteenth century in Europe, when population becomes the critical object of political power and political economy becomes a principal form of political knowledge. As we shall see, Foucault’s formulation of governmentality is also problematically inflected by some of his relatively local theoretical skirmishes; in Foucault’s rendering, governmentality perhaps stands to state theory as genealogy stands to dialectical critique and as discourse stands to (structuralist deployments of) ideology. Each is intended to correct for the perceived flaws of the other, and thus is perhaps overdrawn in its opposition to the claims and premises of the other. But before reworking his account to free it slightly from the parochialisms constraining the aims of my study, it may first be useful to ask what Foucault is trying to achieve through his recuperation of the old fashioned term, government, and through his coinage of the strange cognate terms, “governmentality” and “governmentalization of the state.” It is my sense that in this work, Foucault is aiming to integrate a set of concerns that preoccupied him during the 1970s–the critique of sovereignty (state and individual), the decentering of state-centered political theory and of capital as the organizing power of history, the formulation of norms, regulation, and discipline as some of the most important sites for analyzing power, the development of analyses that illuminate the production of the modern subject rather than chart its repression. But Foucault’s governmentality thesis not only integrates these concerns, it gathers them into a project which moves from critique toward the development of a framework for apprehending the operations of modern political power and organization.
The questions of modern government, according to Foucault: “how to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept to be governed, and how to become the best possible governor.” Government in this broad sense, then, includes but is not reducible to questions of rule, legitimacy, or state institutions–it is about the corralling, ordering, directing, managing, and harnessing of human energy, need, capacity, and desire, and it is conducted across a number of institutional and discursive registers. Government in this sense stands in sharp contrast to the state: while Foucault acknowledges that the state may be “no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction,” as a signifier, it is a containing and negating power, one that does not begin to capture the ways in which subjects and citizens are produced, positioned, classified, organized, and above all, mobilized by an array of governing sites and capacities.123 Government as Foucault uses it also stands in contrast to rule, or more precisely, with the end of monarchy and the dissolution of the homology between family and polity, rule ceases to be the dominant or even most important modality of governance. But Foucault is not arguing that governmentality–calculations and tactics that have the population as a target, that involve both specific governmental apparatuses and complexes of knowledges outside these apparatuses, and that convert the state itself into a set of administrative functions rather than ruling or justice-oriented ones–chronologically supersedes sovereignty and rule. In his own words, “we need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security.”124
As I have already hinted, within the problematic of government, Foucault’s interest in the state is limited to the way in which it is “governmentalized,” that is, both internally reconfigured by the project of administration and externally linked to knowledges, discourses, and institutions that govern outside the rubric and purview of the state. The “governmentalization” of the state connects “the constitutional, fiscal, organizational, and judicial powers of the state ... with endeavours to manage the economic life, the health and habits of the population, the civility of the masses, and so forth.”125 Governmentality in general includes the organization and deployment of space, time, intelligibility, thought, bodies and technologies to produce governable subjects; the governmentalization of the state both incorporates all these tactical concerns into state operations and articulates with them in other, non-state domains.
Governmentality, then, seems a promising frame of analysis to track the governing functions of tolerance as a discourse that circulates between a variety of pedagogical, religious, legal, political, and cultural sites, producing and positioning citizens and subjects. Foucault, however, will not take us the whole distance here, precisely because of his strategic diminution of the state in theorizing modern political power. For tolerance discourse does not only govern subjects, it does not only still potential civic conflict or social unrest, it also shores up the legitimacy of the state and in so doing shores up and expands state power that would otherwise be eroding. As we shall see, both state and non-state deployments of tolerance serve important strengthening and legitimating functions for states suffering from weakened sovereignty and exposed partiality ( investments in the cultural hegemony of certain groups). Tolerance discourse will also turn out to be perversely important in legitimating certain kinds of state violence.
If, in Foucault’s analysis, the state is but a minor apparatus of governmentality, is itself governmentalized and only survives to the degree that it is governmentalized, the state remains the fulcrum of political legitimacy in late modern nations.126 Yet political legitimacy, especially the political legitimacy of institutions conferred by those subject to them, is not a matter in which Foucault was much interested.127 Put another way, governmentality, as Foucault renders the term, expresses both the leakiness of the state and the insufficiency of the state as a signifier of how modern societies are governed, but it does not capture the extent to which the state remains a unique and hence vulnerable object of political accountability. The state’s legitimacy needs determine a fair share of political life, a fact with which a theory of the imperatives conditioning and organizing governance must reckon but which Foucault’s formulation of governmentality does not.128 Moreover, modern political power does not only manage populations and produce certain sorts of subject, it also reproduces and enlarges itself. Indeed, this reproduction and enlargement is perhaps one of political power’s primary objects and thus can never be treated independently of the project of governing populations and individuals–if it is analytically separable from this activity, it is not so separable in governing practices themselves. Thus, governmentality rightly understood will have to include not only attention to the production, organization and mobilization of subjects, but to the problem of legitimizing these operations and especially their performance by the singularly accountable object in the field of political power, the state.
In this vein, I shall argue that the deployment of tolerance by the state is in part a response to the historically diminished capacity of the state to ally itself with universalism and especially to embody universal representation. Tolerance discourse also masks the role of the state in reproducing the cultural dominance of certain cultural groups and norms and does so at a historical moment when popular sensitivity to this role and this dominance is high, when those historically excluded by those norms on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity or belief are vocal about such exclusion. State tolerance talk both softens and deflects these tensions. So, for example, in the context of its current national security crisis, the American state not only guarantees equality across ethnicity and subnationality, it expressly calls for civic tolerance of what is conjured as threatening us at the moment: “middle eastern types” in “our” midst. The state’s guarantee of equality is an expression of its powers to fulfill our social contract with it while the state’s call for tolerance seeks to incite a certain modality of consciousness and behavior among us, ones in which we are meant to extend recognition and liberality toward the Other, to respect if not embrace a diverse citizenry, to avoid stereotyping, prejudice, vigilantism. Yet at the same time that the state represents itself as securing social equality and rhetorically enjoins the citizenry from prejudice and persecution, the state engages in extra-legal and persecutorial actions toward the very group that it calls upon the citizenry to be tolerant toward From Immigration and Naturalization Service roundups of illegal aliens, to detention and deportation of one ethnic subcategory of illegal residents, to racial profiling in airport security searches, to police and FBI interrogations that abrogate civil rights, the state is busily vilifying, persecuting, and prosecuting Middle Eastern residents and Muslim-Americans, constituting them as threats to national security and as a suspect, hence vulnerable and tenuous, population. As we shall see, these apparently Janus-faced actions are not mere hypocrisy or subterfuge but are, rather, themselves the coinage of tolerance as a subject-regulating and state-legitimating discourse.
But I am getting ahead of my story here. To understand how tolerance may have acquired the contemporary governing function I am imputing to it (where governmentality now includes the amassing and legitimating of state power), we need to understand something of how tolerance came to have a late modern renaissance in the first place, how it came to be a justice discourse in our time and what kind of justice discourse it is. For to the extent that tolerance is framed as an (early) historical phase of the modern movement toward civil and political enfranchisement of historically excluded populations–a frame in which candidates for tolerance eventually become candidates for political equality–tolerance has surged back into popular and state discourse at the very historical moment that one might have expected Western democracies to have moved “beyond tolerance.” Why? Why has tolerance emerged as a justice discourse at this particular historical juncture? And what is the significance of the fact that what was in an earlier time a state practice of managing dissent from settled truths and deviance from settled norms, and took the form of express edicts and other laws stipulating the conditions under which tolerance would be offered, is now promulgated as a group and individual practice for negotiating entrenched differences and fulfilling egalitarian social aims? What are the implications for tolerance as a regulatory discourse of these shifts in the locale, agents, and aims of tolerance?
There are richer and poorer answers to the question of why tolerance has lately had such a renaissance, and I want to begin with the poorer ones only so that we may loosen their grip on our intellectual imaginations. Most common is probably the idea that the world has lately erupted in a hundred scenes of local and internecine conflict, roughly rooted in identity clashes, and that tolerance is the appropriate balm for soothing these conflicts. The explanations offered for the eruptions themselves are many: 1)In the Soviet Bloc, the end of the Cold War lifted the lid repressing ancient blood feuds and the forced co-habitation of unlike peoples resulting from artificially drawn nation-state boundaries, a situation compounded by new power vacuums in which identity conflicts festered and bids for hegemony could be waged. 2)The late modern world features the rise of fundamentalisms–ethnic, religious, national–which are by nature intolerant and must be countered with tolerance. 3)A historically unprecedented mixing of the worlds peoples–migrations and settlements incited but not controlled by late modern capitalism–leaves ethnically and religiously diverse people living cheek by jowl, often in economically precarious and socially deracinated circumstances. Absence of the comforting affirmation of long standing homogenous communities gives rise to anxiety about identity and to conflict with others who are different, both of which in turn produce an intensification of identity claims, identity conflicts, and hence the need for tolerance. In short, goes the story derivable from each of these accounts or any combination of them, tolerance discourse is ubiquitous today, indeed, is urgently needed today, because the steady process of secularization and universalization promised by an Enlightenment historical metanarrative has instead backwashed into tribalism, localism, and an assortment of fundamentalisms. Since tolerance was coined for managing eruptions of the particular against the (imagined) universal, the deviant against the normal, the outsider against the insiders (the Protestant amidst the Anglicans, the Jew amidst the Christians), it is little wonder that this discourse has made a revenu as the Enlightenment narrative of history has faltered. The universal lies in tatters, the normal is under constant challenge, the outsiders are now all inside but without cosmopolitan sophistication, and the result is hardly harmonious.
Commonsensical and ubiquitous as they may be, these answers to the question of how tolerance has come to be such an important justice discourse in our time are inadequate because they presume the creature they are trying to explain: they presume that tolerance ameliorates conflicts rooted in intrinsic differences, they presume that the shape of these conflicts is prior to the discourse called upon to broker them, and they presume that tolerance is the natural and singular remedy for such conflicts. They do not explain how these conflicts come to be framed as problems of intolerance, indeed, how conflict and conflict resolution in general today is commonly framed in this way. They do not explain why the proposed remedy for these conflicts is tolerance rather than emancipation, tolerance rather than equality, tolerance rather than autonomy or sovereignty, tolerance rather than armed struggle, tolerance rather than repression, pathologization, or criminalization. Or, as Foucault taught us in his studies of power and sexual repression, by asking “why” rather than “what” and “how,” we presume to know in advance the nature of what we are analyzing, we ontologize the discursive organization of the present, we naturalize the very terms we need to subject to genealogical disruption if we are to understand what kind of social order and subject tolerance brings into being or stabilizes.129 If we do not historicize or otherwise submit to critical scrutiny the terms of the problem we are exploring, we will also treat as inevitable rather than contingent the solution proposed for it.130 In pursuing other explanatory routes, perhaps we ought to ask not why we need tolerance so badly today but why we have this conviction that we need it badly and that it is what we need, what precipitates the discourse of tolerance, what kind of tolerance is being called for, who or what is doing the calling and who is called upon to enact it, what tolerance is being invoked to achieve, what kind of subjects and objects it produces, and what ramifications it has beyond its surface aim of conflict resolution.131
Genealogy of Contemporary Tolerance Discourse
To relocate the ground of inquiry then, we will need historically attuned accounts of the late twentieth century emergence of tolerance as a discourse of domestic justice and civil peace. Here are some speculative possibilities, beginning with the least attended wellspring:
1. The popular agitation for tolerance, as it emerges from civil rights groups, in schools, religious organizations and neighborhood associations, appears to be part of a more generalized retreat from far-reaching and transformative visions of political change, a retreat that is itself the result of dashed hopes for the possibility and efficacy of such change, and hence lost faith in the worth of justice projects bound to the elimination or radical reduction of social, political and/or economic inequality. Framed thus, the contemporary promulgation of tolerance appears to issue from not merely a compromised but a despairing political ethos. Nor is the retreat embodied by tolerance quests limited to equality projects. Tolerance also turns away from community-oriented or participatory models of civic and political life. Rodney King offers the plaintive epigram–“can’t we just get along?”–for the terribly thin vision of membership and participation harbored by tolerance. Tolerance as a primary civic virtue and dominant political value entails a view of citizenship as passive and of social life reduced to relatively isolated individuals or groups barely containing their hatreds and aversions toward one another. (Insofar as cultivating tolerance is frequently figured as the solution to what we have come to call “hate crimes,” tolerance is not countenanced to dissolve the hatred but only to prevent the crime.) This depiction of citizenship stands in sharp contrast to a politically interested and mobilized citizenry, one capable of acting on its own behalf. Rather, tolerance as a social ideal figures a citizenry necessarily leashed against its own instincts; it embodies a fear of citizen sentiments and energies which it implicitly casts as inherently xenophobic, racist, or otherwise socially hostile and in need of restraint. In its bid to keep us apart from one another and to establish relations of indifference among us, tolerance as it is invoked today figures human society as a tinderbox–a crowded late modern Hobbesian universe in which difference rather than sameness is the source and site of our enmity, in which natural bonds of sociality are nil, and in which both the heavy hand of the state and constraining forces of necessity are frighteningly absent.
We can go further here. Through its routine privatization of sites of difference (discussed at length in chapter one), the call for tolerance aims to reduce encounters with difference in the public sphere, that is to reduce public engagement with difference and by this means to reduce the very problem of difference as a political problem, referring it instead to “culture” or “nature.”132 As Anne Phillips suggests, what these reductions sacrifice is, on the one hand, the possibility of politically transforming “differences” lived as both effects and vehicles of inequality or domination, and on the other, the possibility of developing deep knowledge of others in their “difference” and hence the possibility of substituting such engaged understanding for moralistic distance from or denunciation of difference.133 In short, tolerance as a dominant political ethos and ideal gives up on connection across differences, let alone solidarity or community in a world of differences. It aims to separate and disperse us, and then naturalizes this social isolation as both a necessity (produced by difference) and a good (achieved by tolerance).
At this point, the retreat from larger visions of justice contained in the ubiquitous advocacy of tolerance today begins to appear as a retreat from the political itself: the cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection of political life as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, as a domain in which we can be transformed by our participation in it, as a domain in which differences are seen as created and negotiated politically, as a domain in which “difference” comprises much of the subject matter. To the contrary, imagining the political as a place where individuals with pre-constituted identities, interests, or ideas chafe and bargain, tolerance discourse attempts to remove from the political table as much of our putatively “natural” enmity as it can. The costs? The cultivation of shared citizen power and of a substantive public sphere devoted to the fashioning of democratic political culture and community. Moreover, this retreat from a political encounter with difference exacerbates the problem that it imagines to occasion it. The thinner that public life and citizen experience with power and difference grows, the more we withdraw into private identities and an experience of fellow citizens as radically other. Then the more we appear in need of tolerance as a solution to our differences, a solution that deepens our alienation from one another and from public life as a field of engagement with difference.
Nor does the anti-political thrust of contemporary tolerance discourse end here. In its privatization and naturalization of difference, tolerance discursively buries all the social powers constitutive of difference. When heterosexuals are urged to tolerate homosexuals, when school children are instructed to tolerate one another’s race or ethnicity, the powers producing these “differences,” marking them as significant and organizing them as sites of inequality, exclusion, deviance, or marginalization, are ideologically disappeared. Indeed, in its move to individualize, to de-corporatize, and to solve conflict through individuation and privatization, tolerance would appear to express something of an arch fear of the political.134 Perhaps the contemporary embrace of tolerance expresses an anxiety rooted in a conflation of politics with violence, an anxiety that identity conflict must either be suppressed or fought to the death, an anxiety itself fomented by the contemporary retrenchment of a discursive public space–a domain of nonviolent political contestation– that would teach otherwise. We might grant provisionally that the bitter and bloody seventeenth century wars over religion were appropriately superseded through edicts of tolerance that cast religion as a profoundly individual and private matter; does this mean that our social conflicts today are equivalent, and that depoliticizing them is the best way to work through them?
If tolerance discourse represents a retreat from radical justice projects, and a more generalized retreat from rich formulations of political life on the part of would-be progressives, it also represents, and indeed is incited by, a retreat from a universalist formulation of human being. By this, I do not mean that tolerance inevitably entails moral or cultural relativism, far from it.135 Rather, the point I am pressing here is ontological rather than moral: tolerance discourse today, especially insofar as it is advocated for sites of civil and social conflict that are rarely religious in nature, involves a retreat from the Enlightenment notion that Man is a universal creature and is only contingently and epiphenomenally divided by language, culture, nation, or ethnicity. Those halcyon days are over: today, we hear from every corner, differences matter. If not intrinsic and permanent–which is what much popular and scientific discourse holds–they are at least considered highly intractable. And tolerance is required because they are intractable. Indeed, as the homosexuality-is-curable advocates make clear, differences eligible for transformation do not require tolerance. Tolerance arises at the dusk of Enlightenment Man not to relieve us of the problem of difference, but to inscribe its power and permanence.
2. This first line of approach to a historically-minded understanding of the resurgence of tolerance talk emphasizes a general retreat, on the part of liberals and leftists over the past three decades, from far-reaching justice projects and from an appreciation and cultivation of a robust democratic political life. But this account dwells primarily upon popular or civic deployments of tolerance while eliding state deployments of tolerance discourse state as well as state exploitation of the civic discourse. Moreover, it dwells upon the intellectual climate and the mentalite that undergirds eruptions of tolerance discourse today while eliding relevant material historical formations inciting this discourse. These two elisions compel a host of questions. With regard to the first one, concerning the multiple locations and addressees of tolerance discourse, what are the circulation routes of tolerance discourse, between citizenry and state, between civil society and state? What is the difference–in object, in aim, in moral and political valences–between state and civic discourses of tolerance? What kind of governmental rationality might be forged from the amalgam of civic and state tolerance discourse? And with regard to the second elision, concerning the material conditions of the current circulation of tolerance discourse, what is the place of globalization in producing and organizing this circulation? In particular, what of the unprecedented migrations of the world’s populations that have brought about the end of even the faintest conceit of the homogenous nation state?136 And what of the receding presence of the state and the correlated eruption of nationalisms and especially fundamentalisms in the postcolonial and especially post Cold War epoch, for which tolerance is one if not the necessary or inherent response? It is through consideration of these questions about the nation state and globalization that we will be positioned to address the first set of questions regarding the circulation of tolerance discourse between state and civil society, a circulation that indexes the presence of governmentality.
To grasp how and why tolerance discourse is employed in conflicts engendered by the decline of the state and the rise of nationalist or other fundamentalist identities, we need to return to the breaking up of subnational communities attendant upon the consolidation of the modern nation state, discussed at length in chapter three. In that discussion, it became clear that events such as the 1782 Edict of Tolerance (for Jews) in Austria and the declaration of Jewish emancipation by the French National Assembly in 1791 offered Jews a straightforward choice: assimilation or near total exclusion from the promises of modernity.137 This marked a turning point for European Jewry from the self-regulating, if persecuted, Jewish communities of medieval Europe to the individuation of Jews as citizen-subjects in modern European states. The Jewish nation, and primary identification with it, had to be dismantled as Jews became citizens of European nation states. Moreover and most crucially for understanding the effect of tolerance on the development of the public sphere itself, if Jews continued to behave collectively, the public aspect of this behavior occurred within a liberal discourse in which Jewishness itself had no place. Thus, the development of the modern public sphere is revealed as premised not simply the upon the destruction of prior corporate structures, but upon a complicated formula of inclusion entailing the exclusion of rich, subject-constituting, ethical, moral and religious discourses.138 As religious and other minorities were incorporated into the state, minority communities were disaggregated and minority discourses were excluded from legitimate public and especially political discourse. This particular economy of disaggregation, individuation, incorporation, and discursive exclusion continues to structure productive and especially regulatory dimensions of tolerance in the present. However, as we shall see, the engine of this economy is no longer primarily law and policy emanating from state institutions but is, rather, civic discourse from a variety of sites, state pronouncements, and citizen interpellation, in short, governmentality in which the state figures but is not the only figure.
Premodern corporate communities created certain zones of collective self-determination and self-regulation vis ˆ vis formal feudal governance and the emerging nation state, zones that disappeared as these corporate structures were disaggregated. These zones of ... let us tendentiously call them “freedom” ... were undermined by the various forms of “enclosure” entailed in nation state consolidation and are further reduced by the governmentality of tolerance as 1)an outlying or anomalous culture or community is submitted to state and especially liberal norms, and 2)the individual disinterred from these communities is fabricated (at the subjective level) and positioned (in the social order) by homogenizing forces such as Christianity, liberal political discourse, and the market.139 Corporate bonds are thus broken from within as the individual is excised from the culture, and broken from without as the culture is brought into hegemonic political, economic and cultural orbits, and as the protective intervals of spatial isolation and discursive autonomy for the subcommunity are thereby erased. Concretely, the state becomes a formal administrator of the culture, but so also do other hegemonic forces, e.g., Christianity and the market have informal but powerful transformative effects on the newly tolerated and enfranchised community. Philosopher Joseph Raz offers uncritical, indeed approving support for this process in his account of how multicultural societies, even when they are not dominated by a privileged cultural majority, avoid high levels of social and political fragmentation precisely because of the felicitous homogenizing effects of a single (capitalist) economy and a single (liberal democratic) political order.140 These forced involvements with common culture, in Raz’s view, usefully restrict the meaning and reach of differences in a multicultural population.141
It is through these triple mechanisms—excision of the individual from the community, loss of insulation for communal norms and practices in a homogenizing cultural and political-economic context, and incorporation/inclusion of the community in a state discourse–that what begins as a project of freedom or inclusion is transformed into an apparatus of subjection and regulation. As communities are exhumed from their ghettoized or otherwise anomalous political spaces, and are brought under the jurisdiction of the state and into the orbit of mainstream economy and culture, individuals abstracted from ethnic, religious, or other subnational orders are converted into citizens on the condition that the belief world from which they hail is excluded from legitimate public discourse. After working moderately well from the middle of the nineteenth through the third quarter of the twentieth century, this tacit bargain has begun to reveal certain limitations and contradictions as a practice of governmentality. For the more that rich cultural norms are eradicated from public discourse, the more vulnerable this discourse becomes to fundamentalist and other counter-hegemonic social movements. A public sphere formally devoid of all non-secular sources of moral and ethical judgement is quite defenseless against substantive ethics claims: it has only proceduralism to fall back upon, and as such cannot deliver compelling judgements about, or even interpret the meanings of, the culture’s thorniest ethical or political dilemmas. Moreover, as we shall see in a moment, once nation-state sovereignty itself begins to fray, with consequences, among others, for the presumed cultural neutrality and universalism legitimating the liberal nation state, the more vulnerable public discourse becomes to trans-national identity claims–ethnic, racial, sexual, religious–that compete with state-based nationalism. As the nation state loses its embeddedness in cultural hegemony–indeed, as it must loosen itself from explicit involvement with reproducing white, Christian, male, heterosexual norms–a range of social movements fill the public sphere with noisy demands and complaints, including reactionary, anti-modernist ones. Put another way, the liberal commitment to a public sphere uncontaminated by non-liberal ethical, moral or political discourses paradoxically produces a very weak basis for public sphere resistance to, on the one hand, challenges to its endorsement of certain norm-based inequalities, and on the other, fundamentalist or quasi-essentialist identity-based social movements.
But let me back up here. While it is conventional to conceive objects of tolerance in terms of “sub-national” identities or groups, there is almost always a transnational element to these objects, however variable in degree. Indeed, the very decorporatization of community–Jewish, sexual, Islamic, or ethnic–that we have seen as the condition of tolerance is aimed at attenuating if not eliminating the transnational dimension of the identity at issue. As chapter three argued, the Jewish nation must recede for the Jew to be enfranchised, just as the good (tolerable) homosexual shuns a life revolving around the bars and baths in favor of family and corporate values, and the good American Catholic listens more closely to the President than the Pope and sides with British raison d’tat against the IRA. Consider, in this regard, Bush’s account of Muslim-Americans following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon: “ ... there are millions of good Americans who practice the Muslim faith who love their country as much as I love the country, who salute the flag as strongly [sic] as I salute the flag.”142 Muslims who love the American flag, who salute it “strongly,” are the polar opposite of “religious extremists” bound to Allah or Osama bin Ladin, and interpellated by calls to jihad. America can tolerate Islam in its midst to the extent that Muslims have fealty to the (American) nation state over transnational Islam. This transfer of loyalty is paradoxically literalized through love of a symbol–the flag, a literalization Arab business owners understood all too well as they frantically plastered their windows with American flags in the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
Tolerance responds to transnationalist forces and formations, which themselves threaten or at least haunt the integrity of the nation and the sovereignty of the state, by countering them with nationalism, by making national citizens out of transnational subjects. We saw this in the nineteenth century production of French Jews as French cultural subjects and as French republicans, rather than as mere individuals with rights. In the nineteenth and twentieth century state discourse of tolerance oriented to multicultural populations, tolerance does not simply sheer an individual of her/his culture of origin, but produces a new national citizen over and against the original culture. Tolerance is offered on the condition that the individual shifts public attachments and fealty from one object to the other, a condition that is not always easy to see because the old (cultural) attachment may be retained but privatized while the new (national) attachment is performed in public. Thus, in the weeks after September 11th, Muslims in New York could be found fearfully praying to Allah in the basement of shops whose windows were adorned with American flags.
But here is the paradox of tolerance as governmentality in demanding this shift in fealty objects (a paradox visible only if we correct for Foucault’s inattention to the specific needs and powers of the state in theorizing governmentality): the state places itself in a hostile relationship with constituent elements of the community being tolerated even as the state also represents itself as that which confers emancipation and tolerance, that which offers legal protection to minorities. This is the political face of the requirement of decorporatization for tolerance: the state will protect and tolerate individual members of the nation, not groups whose fealty is to some higher or lower god, to some other national formation, to some elsewhere. Tolerance discourse thus appears, on the one hand, as a disciplinary strategy for a motley, potentially ungovernable, and growing number of transnational affiliations in a time of weakening nation states and dramatic international population migration, and, on the other, as a restorative strategy of legitimation for weakening nation-state sovereignty and thinning notions of citizenship as nation-state membership. That is, tolerance is not only a tactical political response aimed at quelling the disturbances of the peace waged by erupting fundamentalisms and other identity-based demands, but a technique for relegitimating liberalism and restoring the notion of the nation at a moment in which both are faltering. If globalization has, among other things, eroded both nation-state sovereignty and nation-state fealty, tolerance emerges as a civic disciplinary technique–not quite a state or juridical practice in this case–for rejuvenating both. Moreover, if, consequent to both late modern material and ideological developments, the liberal state itself can no longer promise universal representation, if it can no longer pretend to norm-free cultural standing, and if liberal values of assimilation, secularism, formal equality are being called into question as the basis for nation-state belonging and as the best means of solving problems rooted in “difference,” state promulgation of tolerance serves simultaneously to distract from these losses, to resurrect the neutral status of the state on new footing, and to expand state power to pursue “intolerant” and even violent domestic and foreign policy. Finally, to the extent that “freedom” remains the primordial term through which liberal regimes and in particular, liberal states obtain their legitimacy, the place of tolerance in securing this legitimacy against a horizon of shrinking freedoms, of limitations on freedom, and of more routine exposures of the limits to freedom, is no minor one.
One can see these multiple dimensions of the governmentality of tolerance discourse as well as the range of its venues, agents, and functions in two recent policy episodes in American politics, one which concerns the same-sex marriage debate and one which concerns the Bush administration’s response to the September 11th terrorist attacks. In both cases, what I aim to highlight is the circuitry of tolerance discourse from state to civil society to individual and back to the state. This is the circuitry that contains the simultaneously state legitimating and civic disciplinary effects of tolerance and that etches the presence of governmentality.
Same Sex Marriage
The campaign for same-sex marriage as well as the campaign against it can be located in the genealogy of the liberal inclusion practices and the development of the public sphere briefly accounted above. The very possibility of arguing for state recognition of same sex unions on a par with heterosexual unions is premised upon the prior existence of a politically intelligible challenge to the cultural hegemony of male dominance and heteronormativity certified and reinforced by the state. Put another way, it can only happen when a wedge has been driven between state proclamations of universal representation and the hegemonic cultures of exclusion heretofore endorsed and supported by the state. To the degree that rich cultural norms, including those of religion, are formally excluded from legitimate public discourse, and to the degree that laws rooted in those norms thus become vulnerable to challenge, counter-hegemonic social movements gain a wide gate of entry into public debate. Thus, the campaign to legalize gay marriage is a campaign for inclusion that depends upon there being a hearing for a critique of the heterosexual norms of state/public/legal discourse. The campaign against same sex marriage is part of this same story: it represents a fundamentalist reaction to the emptying out of cultural norms from state and public discourse. Indeed, it insists upon the importance of the state embodying and upholding certain cultural norms, in this case traditional marriage.
Now let us consider within this context, George W. Bush’s position on the question of gay marriage as he formulated it in a pre-election debate with Al Gore:
“I’m not for gay marriage. I think marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman ... I’m going to be respectful for [sic] people who may disagree with me ... I’m a person who respects other people. I respect their– I respect ... I will be a tolerant person. I’ve been a tolerant person all my life. I just happen to believe strongly that marriage is between a man and a woman ... ”143
Bush’s formulation, which couples a rejection of the petition for same-sex marriage with the advocacy of tolerance for homosexuals, attempts to position the state as conquerable by neither the gay marriage campaigns nor by its opposition. Rather, this position constitutes the state as the potential peacemaker between them: it advocates tolerance of homosexuals as individuals while protecting the institution of marriage from the debasement feared in letting its gender economy slide. But this positioning is not achieved by the state actually taking a middle position: rather, the state actively shores up the family values and marriage form that its own secularization has weakened, while advocating that the general public be tolerant of “alternative lifestyles.”144 As the protector of heterosexual marriage and prerogative, the state itself does not and cannot stand for tolerance in the sexual field; rather, the tolerance it urges is carried out by individuals toward individuals in the realm of civil society, outside the domain of law. Importantly, though, it is only by urging tolerance that the state re-secures legitimacy (challenged by revelation of its investment in hegemonic cultural norms) while taking a position at odds with equality, and while taking a position that sides with one counter-hegemonic movement against another.
The state, as protector of heterosexual marriage and heterosexual privilege more generally, looks at gender difference and confers marital rights and sexual legitimacy on the basis of what it sees. But in urging tolerance, the state urges citizens not to look, not to see what it sees. The tolerance the state urges the citizenry to bear is thus secured through our averted glance, that is by a kind of visual privatization that is a ghostly repetition of the actual privatization of sexuality required for homosexuals to be tolerated at all. This complex economy of seeing and not seeing, in which state and citizenry have opposite assignments–the state sees and enjoins heterosexuals from marrying, the (heterosexual) citizenry averts its glance and tolerates homosexuality in its midst–means that tolerance in this domain can only be a civil and individual rather than a state practice. Yet the state’s advocacy of tolerance is crucial to state legitimacy at the moment that the state is taking a fundamentalist stand on marriage. From another angle, the state’s advocacy of tolerance conjoined with fundamentalist policy implicates the citizenry in a complex ruse that disciplines increasingly unruly kinship practices at the same time that it relegitimates a state whose cultural norms are showing.
Tolerating Islam
In the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist events, George W. Bush surprised many Americans with his repeated statements about the importance of treating Arab Americans with respect, of distinguishing Islamic belief and practices from the violence of the perpetrators, and of refraining from scapegoating and stereotyping as well as abuse and vigilantism. His efforts in this direction were sometimes fumbling–he spoke of “women of cover” when expressing his dismay about intimidation of Islamic Americans wearing religiously sanctioned clothing and he stuttered over the formulation of an American “we” and on the question of national fealty: “Our nation must be mindful that there are thousands of Arab-Americans ... who love their flag just as much as ... [we] do, and we must be mindful that as we seek to win the war that we treat Arab-Americans and Muslims with the respect they deserve.”145 Following a meeting with American Islamic leaders in Washington D.C. on September 17th, he declared, “ ... it is my honor to be meeting with leaders who feel just the same way I do. They’re outraged, they’re sad. They love America just as much as I do.”146 Multiculturalist talk does not come easily or naturally to Bush: he reinstalls a “we” and a “they” at the very moment he is trying to dispel the distinction, he tacitly represents America as belonging fundamentally to non-Muslims, and he can only establish belonging by asserting subjective identicality–‘they feel exactly the way I do.’ Still, the very earnestness and the repetition of these efforts to staunch bigotry and racial violence took many by surprise.
But if Bush has continuously urged citizen regard for the rich diversity of the American population, if he has preached respect and tolerance for the citizenry, this is hardly the state’s bearing either in prosecuting the war in Afghanistan or in fighting terrorism on the domestic front. While the populace is suborned to tolerance, state practice is flagrantly extra-legal, violent, race-conscious, and religion-conscious. The prosecution of the war itself involves substantial “collateral damage”, i.e., civilian Afghan death, which would be flatly unacceptable if it were European or American death. (The most conservative estimates of Afghan civilian casualties placed them at more than 1000 and others have placed the figure above 4000–what is most striking is that the numbers are neither accounted by the State Department nor are a concern of the mainstream press.)147 The state detained thousands of persons of Middle Eastern descent after the September 11th attacks, approximately 500 of whom remain in custody without having been charged; during these detentions, near relatives of the detainees were not informed of the names or whereabouts of the detainees, nor were the detainees permitted legal counsel.148 Interrogation at their residences of another 5000 young men on student, tourist or business visas who “have come to the U.S. from countries with suspected terrorist links” began in December; Miranda rights are not read to these men and those questioned who have expired visas are among the growing numbers of individuals from the Middle East targeted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for immediate deportation.149 And, through various counter-terrorism bills, the state is creating an increasingly wide domain of unaccountable power for itself. The “USA Patriot Act,” signed into law shortly after September 11th, involves “court stripping”–removing authority from the judiciary in times of crisis and in particular, circumventing judicial powers that protect civil liberties. In early October, Attorney General Ashcroft instructed all federal agencies to resist Freedom of Information Act requests made by American citizens whenever “institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests could be implicated by disclosure of the information,” that is, to resist all FIOA requests.150 Federal investigators continue to chafe against civil and criminal rights provisions protecting detainees who refuse to speak. In November, the FBI and Justice department raised the possibility of using truth serums or torture to extract information, or of sending detainees for interrogation in countries where such means are legal or routine.151 Bush’s mandate that terrorists be tried in military tribunals rather than federal courts has left U.S. civil rights advocates reeling just as the his refusal to abide by Geneva Convention standards coupled with images of Afghan prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay–shackled, blindfolded, shaved, gagged, caged in the open air–and in Afghanistan prisons–crowded and starved, sometimes to death–has left much of the world reeling.
Thus the state’s own vigilantism, violence, and racial profiling, at home and abroad, does not simply stand in contrast with its enjoining of citizen vigilantism and calls for tolerance. Rather, it is legitimated by this enjoining; as long as the state implores its subjects to be peaceful, law abiding, and without prejudice, it can use its prerogative power for precisely the opposite practices. The state calls for tolerance not because it is or can be, but so that we will be, so that it does not have to be–so that it can act like a state. L’tat, ce n’est pas nous. This is not to say that the state is forthrightly intolerant, but that neither equality nor tolerance nor protection of civil rights are within the ambit of raison d’tat. On one level this is obvious enough and old news; throughout modernity, raison d’tat, especially in the international sphere, has always had some independence from liberal institutions and values, an independence justified within liberalism by the state’s security function rather than its equality function. However, particularly as state sovereignty erodes and the efficacy of state action in the international sphere is weakened, both of which weaken the state’s capacity to fulfill its security function, state legitimacy depends upon a sustained identification of the state with equality, liberty, and fairness, and it depends as well upon the capacity of the state to maintain an unrestive citizenry, one which does not turn against itself or turn against the state. Tolerance talk is, among other things, a vehicle for producing this quietude, passivity, even submission. Tolerance calls out a docile, individuated, deactivated citizenry in the context of a volatile multicultural order striated with potent transnational alliances–Jewish, Afghan, Islamic, Arabic. Tolerance, combined with the injunction to “shop, spend, buy” to boost the war economy, figures a somnambulant population–unified by the culture of commerce–that stands in sharp contrast to the vigilant, violent, and divisive posture of the state and in sharp contrast as well to the potential mobilization of sub- and trans-national identity among the citizenry that such a crisis could engender.
But in addition to mutual respect and tolerance, and the new found patriotism of shopping, the state has hailed its subjects in yet another way amidst this crisis, one that seems initially at odds with analysis above. Americans have been asked to become the “eyes and ears of the government” in the domestic war against terrorism, and to heighten our vigilance about strange people and strange behaviors: we are to be wary of mail we don’t recognize, people we don’t know, actions that seem out of place.152 This means, of course, that there is justification for our own racial profiling, e.g., suspiciousness toward an Arab man sitting in an office reception area with a package on his lap. Indeed, such “intolerant perspectives” are not only justified but patriotic. Patriotic, too, as the very name of the Congressional act licensing it indicates, is our embrace of curtailed civil liberties and thus our tolerance of racial profiling in airport security stations, reduced or lost access to public buildings, search and seizure without warrants, detainments in violation of Miranda rights, wiretaps on phone conversations and intercepted mail between prison inmates and their lawyers. In this interpellation, we are no longer distant and passive subjects of the state but rather, its agents and mirror image, appendages of a nonliberal raison d’tat.
Both interpellations–as passive and docile subjects organized by tolerance and by shopping, and as agents of the state organized by xenophobic fear–are essential to a complex project of legitimating the state in late modernity. On the one hand, we, like the state, must embrace a multicultural rather than homogenous figure of the nation. On the other hand, we, like the state, must incarnate some strong notion of a national “we” to sustain the identity of nation and state respectively as well as the relationship between them. On the one hand, we, like the state, must express through our behavior the “Americanness” of equal treatment, mutual respect, tolerance, and freedom of belief and association.153 “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America. They represent the worst of humankind.” President George Bush, quoted in “Bush Visits Mosque, Warns Against Anti-Islam Violence,” by Shelvia Dancy, Religion News Service. On the other hand, we, like the state, must be hyper-alert to the dangers in our midst; indeed, we must be the state’s foot soldiers against terrorism.154 But here is how the legitimating logic goes: defined against the unfree, intolerant peoples who menace us, a tolerant citizenry is a virtuous and free citizenry and it is precisely this virtue and freedom which licenses the violation of principles of tolerance and freedom in the name of our security. This virtue and liberty also contrasts, of course, with the direct racialized violence of the state; however, in conferring the virtue of tolerance upon the people, in calling for tolerance, the state allies itself with virtue, regardless of what it actually does or incites. The state must be the source of the call for tolerance; it must dress itself in citizen virtue (as well as patriotism) in order to pursue actions in violation of domestic law, independently of international organizations and alliances, and often with indifference to the principles of justice it feigns to embody.
The model here is not the simple one of state hypocrisy or manipulation: rather the formulation of governmentality I have been advancing to frame contemporary tolerance discourse casts the citizenry less as a puppet of raison d’tat than a crucial vehicle of it, and hence a vehicle of its own subjugation as a citizenry. Here is another episode from the current crisis that will make clear how this aspect of the governmentality of tolerance works: On September 30th, the Anti-Defamation League, an American Zionist organization whose self-description is a “not-for-profit civil rights/human relations organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and bigotry of all kinds, defending democratic ideals and safeguarding civil rights,” bought a full page in the New York Times. Headlined “Empowering Children in the Aftermath of Hate: A Guide for Educators and Parents,” and packed with didactic small print, the page detailed activities for school children of various ages designed to teach the damage done by “stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination.”155 “Intolerance of difference,” the ad opined, “is at the root of most violence,” therefore it is our task as parents or teachers to “give our children the tools they need to confront hate effectively in the aftermath of the frightening and violent events of September 11, 2001.” There are several strategic agendas one could ascribe to this ad, but I am here less interested in those intentional agendas than in how such a message (perhaps unconsciously) represents the citizen task with regard to tolerance, and the relationship between this citizen task and state violence. The Anti-Defamation League is unequivocal in its support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine and in its defense of all the state violence this occupation entails.156 It is unqualified in its support for Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan. Here is how American and Israeli state violence are linked to tolerance in ADL rhetoric: In the wake of the September 11th attacks, those Americans who qualify their support for Israel, and for America’s support of Israel, are regarded by the ADL as inherently anti-Semitic, ergo, intolerant.157 Similarly, Americans who blame Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are inherently anti-Semitic, ergo, intolerant. Initially counter-intuitive, the logic works perfectly once you enter it: If lack of support for Israel equals anti-Semitism equals intolerance, then tolerance does not just permit but requires both state violence and our support for it. Equally important here is discerning how the language of tolerance sanctions the state violence that itself reproduces and mobilizes the “difference” which becomes the occasion for tolerance in the first place. That is, tolerance is not merely a cover for ethnicized or racialized state violence, it is not only a cloak for the state’s dagger. Rather, on the one hand, tolerance mobilizes a discourse of essentialized differences through which state violence is legitimated, and on the other hand, tolerance is activated by state violence, indeed, it is produced by the violence, even as it appears as its idealistic antidote or alternative. (The call for tolerance in the context of state violence bound to essentialized difference is inherently idealistic insofar as the conflict at issue is not occasioned by intolerance and cannot be solved by tolerance.)
Old fashioned tolerance discourse concerned with the domain of speech and belief also reveals its cards in a crisis such as the current war on terrorism. Free speech, the most familiar instance of tolerance as a legal good and as openly protected and regulated by the state, is subverted through a reversal of the state-citizen circuitry described above; this time, the state does the tolerating/protecting, while turning the citizenry into intolerant vigilantes. Here is how this works: The state promises to protect free speech and dissent, while declaring at the same time that “if you’re not for us you’re against us,” that is, allying dissent with support for the enemy. Dissent becomes equated with unAmericanness and cannot be tolerated; indeed, as we have seen, the limit condition of tolerance is fealty to the nation, loyalty, patriotism. Within the logic of “if you’re not with us, you’re against us,” dissenters are not eligible for tolerance; they are allied with the enemy, they are treasonous, there is no reason to tolerate them. So, while they are formally protected in their right to dissent by the state, when the equation of dissent with unAmericanness is taken up by corporations, the media, and other powers in civil society, dissenters are pulled from the airwaves, from the pages of magazines, from educational forums, occasionally even from academic positions and other jobs. The combination of popular and commercial power in silencing dissent leaves the state looking like a protector of free speech, even as it has articulated the conditions for radically curtailing it. The state remains a tolerant state even as the people have been rallied around a certain intolerance in the name of patriotism. Again, tolerance becomes both a tool of state power, this time as a set of exclusions required for building a national consensus behind state violence, and a vehicle of citizen subjugation–both effects are achieved by our own hand. This is tolerance as governmentality, “not a matter of imposing laws on men, but rather of disposing things, that is to say, to employ tactics rather than laws, and if need be to use the laws themselves as tactics.”158
Between the depoliticizing discourse of tolerance and the anti-political implications of state violence, the domain of political life and the role of citizenship have been dramatically squeezed in the current crisis. The task of those who care about democracy is to pry open this pincer on the political and counter it with the cultivation of citizen power, a cultivation so different from that of tolerance, shopping, reproaching dissent, and passive endorsement of state violence.