For the past two weeks, my transnational feminism class has been working our way through Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. We've only begun to scratch the surface of this text, and I think many of felt things got more complicated, not more clear, the more we worked. So, to help bring what I hope is at least a modicum of clarity to our discussions, I decided to post a section from my manuscript-in-progress which directly deals with Puar's concept of "profile" and its relation to superpanopticism/biopolitical administration.
I want to again emphasize that this a work in progress. :)
Superpanopticism is not interested in individual
subjects as such, but in populations, in aggregates. Without much of an
investment in individualized and individuated subjects, superpanopticism has little
use for identities—it does not need
to make inferences about the qualities and capacities of subjects, which is how social identities work. Rather,
superpanopticism needs to survey, monitor, and adjust averages across a population or a group. Its profiling
strategies use race, gender, and sexuality as technologies. Specifically, these technologies distribute state and
“institutional support,” doling out resources so that averages can be
maintained and aleatory, statistically deviant “events” can be minimized. Those
fitting some profiles are incited to live, and others, who fit different
profiles, are left to die. Puar thus develops a concept of “the profile” as a
superpanoptic alternative to juridical and disciplinary/panoptic notions of
“identity.” In this section, I will explain Puar’s concept of “profile” by
comparing it to Falguni Sheth’s concept of race-as-technology. I will then
connect the prfile to Puar’s notion of “assemblage” in order to show how Puar
develops her case for the need to theorize beyond the visual.
Reflective
of their shared debt to (and criticism of) Foucault, Puar’s conception of race
is similar in many ways to philosopher Falguni Sheth’s. Sheth argues that race
is not (just) a “what”—an identity—but (more importantly) a “how”—a technology.
As Sheth explains, in shifting the question from what race is to what it does,
race is no longer
descriptive, but causal: it facilitates and produces certain relationships
between individuals, between groups, and between political subjects and
sovereign power. The function of
race, then, is similar to the function of technology: Technology, commonly
considered as equipment, facilitates the production of certain ‘goods’…race
becomes an instrument that produces certain political and social outcomes that
are needed to cohere society” (Sheth, 22).
As
a technology, race (or gender, or sexuality) is more than a property of bodies;
it is a system for organizing society. For example, the popularization of the
automobile significantly shaped post-WWII urban development in the United
States. The car made certain kinds of relationships among individuals and
groups easier to establish and maintain. It also encouraged the use of the
driver’s license as a near mandatory form of individual identification, and
encourages specific relationships between individuals and the state. As a
technology like the car, race encourages and discourages certain kinds of
relationships among individuals and groups, and among individuals, groups, and
the state. Race is used to dole out exposure to environmental hazards,
likelihood (and severity) of encounters with law enforcement, reproductive
autonomy, even perceived queerness. To perform this distributive function, race
can’t be tethered to human bodies—it needs to be perceived in non-human things,
like locations, clothing, musical styles, or, as I have argued elsewhere, even
dog breeds. Thus, as Puar argues, “the terms of whiteness,” for example,
“cannot remain solely in the realm of racial identification or phenotype”
(200). Like Sheth, Puar thinks that race is not just a visible, substantive
property of bodies. “Race and sex,” Puar argues, “are to be increasingly
thought outside the parameters of identity, as assemblages, as events” (211). Something
happens in and/or through an event
(even in the most general, least technical sense of the term).[1]
As an assemblage or event, race has a function, it does something.[2]
According to Puar, race and sex can, accomplish, among other ends, “render
bodies transparent or opaque, secure or insecure, risky or at risk,
risk-enabled or risk-disabled, the living or the dead” (160). In other words,
Puar thinks race and sex are, to use Sheth’s words “instruments that produce
certain political and social outcomes that are needed to cohere society.” I
will return to the idea of assemblage later in this section. For now, it’s
sufficient to note that Puar and Sheth eschew the visible-social-identity model
in favor of the technology model.
Puar argues that superpanopticism favors one
technological medium—the profile. It is helpful, if perhaps a bit blunt, to
contrast profiles with images. Social identities follow the representational
logic of images: a sign refers to some signified content. One’s race or gender
can symbolize one’s cognitive capacities, sexual appetitiveness, or even taste
in music. Profiles, on the other
hand, summarize or systematize relations among data; in this respect, a profile
is more like a mathematical equation than a picture. As Puar explains, “the
profile, as a type of composite, also works…as a mechanism of information
collection and analysis that tabulates marketing information, demographics,
consumer habits, computer usage, etc.” (192). Profiles bring together many
strongly and loosely-related “facts” or bits of information. Unlike images,
which re-present content, profiles show relationships among more-or-less disparate data points.
So, while identities use surface/depth
logics to ground inferences about the “inner content” of a person in his or her
visible appearance, profiles use network logics to describe a person’s
position in relation to others. “The
profile establishes the individual as imbricated in manifold populations” (Puar
162). Profiles
are accounts of the form or structure of relationships, which can be measured
“in terms of speed, pace, repetition, and informational flows” (Puar 201).
Thus, “what is at stake” in profiling “is the repetition and relay of
ubiquitous images,” which are formal, structural factors, “not their
symbolic or representational meaning” (Puar 201). Profiles use relationships
among bits of information (e.g., how frequently one visits a website, how much
and how often one buys a particular product) to gauge individuals’ situation in
relation to others, and relations among various groups.
Instruments for measuring, analyzing, and
calculating information, profiles do not use visible body features like
phenotype or gendered bodily comportment. Thus, Puar argues that we “profile”
people not through surveillance, but through the monitoring of our “sense of”
or “feel for” a person (or, more informally, their “vibe”). “A patrolling of affect
changes the terms of ‘what kind of person’ would be a terrorist or smuggler,
recognizing that the terrorist…could look like anyone and do just like
everyone else, but might seem something else” (197). This “seeming” is
an assessment not of identity or actions, but of one’s “fit” with a particular
profile. Puar describes this assessment as a “see[ing] through” the body (199).
Profiling is not a visual assessment of what the body’s outward appearance
means or represents. With profiling, “the visual is expanded through a certain
kind of transparency, not only by looking at the body, but by looking through
it” (199). So, Puar argues that profiling and panopticism operate literally
beyond the visual—they “expand” the visual beyond its traditional, representational
mode. To “see” the body is to use its visible appearance as an outward sign or
symbol of its inner content. To “see through” the body is to remix or
re-order the body and its constituent parts. As a “surveillance event,”
profiling “is a rematerialization of the body, a slaying of the body across
multiple registers that adumbrates the terms of intimacy, intensity, and
interiority” (199). The profile need only adumbrate or hint at interiority,
because it is more interested in the relations among parts than in what these
parts are or what they mean. This emphasis on relations among parts is why
profiles remix rather than represent. As in music production,
profiling remixes by cutting and reordering parts: “the subject is divided up
into subhuman particles of knowledge that nevertheless exceed the boundaries of
the body, yet it is also multiply splayed through, across, and between
intersecting and overlapping populations” (Puar 12). Profiles describe the
relations among individuals as members of defined groups—be they members of a
specific race, or consumers of a specific brand of commodity. In fact,
profiling tracks membership in either group—race or brand-affiliation—in terms
of the other. “The profile disperses control through circuits catching multiple
interpenetrating sites of anxiety” (198). So, as a technology, profiles are
used to monitor and maintain population-wide averages, and to predict and
preempt deviant events. They work on and through relationships, whereas
identities work on and through visible body appearance.
Profiling
may be a technology of surveillance, but it is not one that uses sight, at
least in any standard sense of the term. Traditionally, vision perceives
images, appearances, and representations—a subject perceives an object. Puar
argues that superpanopticism follows a different “economy of sight,” one
without either “subjects” or “objects.” Instead, we have “assemblage[s] of
subindividual capacities” that are “visualized” in the way that data is
visualized in a new media environment.
The point is not to see objects, but relationships among types of info.
Here's a word cloud of this blog made using the web app "Wordle":
[1] Puar’s discussion of torture is clear evidence of her “technological”
conception of race, gender, and sexuality. Speaking not about femininity, but about “the force of
feminizing,” Puar attributes the following effects to this force: “stripping
away,” “faggotizing,” “robbing,” “fortification,” “rescripting,” “regendering,”
and “interplay” with technologies of “racial, imperial, and economic matrices
of power” (100).
[2] “This shift forces us to ask not only what terrorist corporealities
mean or signify, but more insistently, what
do they do?” (Puar, 204; emphasis mine).
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