Governing the Nation’s Reproduction: Culture, Poverty, and Eugenics

Abstract

Within liberal governing apparatuses the “pauper” represents the historical Other in opposition to which bourgeois selfhood overtly defines itself (as opposed maybe to sexually, gender, and race-coded Others that are mobilized surreptitiously when the bourgeois selfhood is crafted). I shall not insist on the construction of the poor as Other of the normal liberal citizen in the United States, since this theme is recurrently taken up in the specialized literature. What I would like to discuss instead are the modalities in which U.S. governing practices mobilize the signifier “culture” for othering on both racial and poverty axes. Passing through the nodal point of culture is a most useful strategy for a plethora of liberal apparatuses, especially since “culture” is contemporarily widely accepted as a discrete, concrete, and objective element of identification and self-identification. Therefore, “culture” becomes, surreptitiously, the tool through which in U.S. liberalism—and in liberalism in general—one’s identity is being made “special” or “particular” on racial and “pauperist” lines. Culture, in other words, is the term that in liberalism comes to represent the measure of the (natural) difference in race, civilization, civility, and pathology between the “dominant” and the “minority.” That contemporary state racisms change their emphasis from the genotype/phenotype of the subjects to their “culture” does not signal a foundational change in those biopolitical technologies, since their notion of culture is so profoundly “worked entirely from within” that it becomes as determining and ineluctable of what a person is as the biology it replaces.