The late Michel Foucault proposed that power was not just violence or coercion, but the institutionalized creation of concepts, categories, and lines of division. This essay is written in honor of the rigor and beauty of his thought, and the subtlety of its depths. The ideas here are not new, but are of deep importance. I enjoyed expressing them in my own language. I am indebted to Foucault, Georges Bataille, James Baldwin, Pierre Bourdieu, the Buddha, and others.
Isabel Wilkerson’s masterpiece, The Warmth of Other Suns, is a portrait of American racism, and the vibrant quest for freedom of the African-American people. She includes vivid accounts of cruelty and violence—lynchings, torture, bombings. She details physical and economic exploitation as both an economist and a writer, describing the backbreaking work of picking hundreds of pounds of cotton just to break even. She shows the radical difference in conditions and opportunity for whites and blacks, from one-room schools in the South to crowded slums in the North. Throughout and behind all these more blatant aspects of American racism, she describes the neurotic emphasis on separation, the routine enforcement and governance of a physical system that kept whites and blacks from mixing. Though not as dramatic as exploitation, cruelty, and smothered opportunity, in reading her history I kept coming back to this emphasis on separation, and digging into it for some lesson in the functioning of power.
The neuroticism of whites in enforcing this separation was(is) remarkable. Southern towns had separate seats, schools, jobs, living quarters, and public institutions for white and black residents. Whites who allowed these boundaries to be crossed could be ostracized from the community. Blacks could be killed at the drop of the hat for violating arcane forms of decorum—speaking out of turn, stepping off the sidewalk too slowly. As federal rulings forced schools to be integrated, thousands rioted at the prospect of white and black students sitting in the same classroom. Trains crossing the Mason-Dixon line going South had to make a lengthy stop at the border to shuttle black passengers into the Jim Crow car. Motels wouldn’t rent rooms to blacks for fear of losing business entirely. In northern cities, violent rioting and bombing kept blacks confined in certain quarters of towns. Why did the oppressor cling so violently to separation? Why such a paranoia over mixing?
Power is not merely a concrete, physical system in which some are paid less, treated worse, and punished more harshly—it is a conceptual system of difference, the creation of categories out of unity. The idea that two groups are fundamentally different, or that there even are two groups at all, constitutes power and makes it possible to exercise cruder forms of power. Whites and blacks in the U.S. grew up believing that they were two fundamentally different groups of humans, that there even are such things as whites and blacks. This conceptual world can only hold if the barrier of physical separation is assiduously and violently maintained.
Separation, a grammar of physical relations, was not just a means of enforcing the inhumane conceptual order of white supremacy: it was a vital condition for producing it. The external world was physically organized according to the logic of white supremacy, and those born into this arrangement had their internal conceptions take on its shape. There is an interlocking, reinforcing causality between the conceptual world and the physical one, with physical separation creating conceptual differentiation, and vice versa in a vicious cycle. [1]
Humans perceive the world not as it is, but through concepts, categories, and language: through stories. These stories are picked up verbally, but are also implicit in the way our culture arranges the world. We perceive the dimension of time in terms of “Monday Tuesday…2022…day/night” because these are the stories our world gives us. Because our categories and stories are the very lens through which humans perceive the world, the biases inherent in these stories are rarely consciously scrutinized. In the example of American racism, a story is created through a manner of arranging the physical world, naming, and juridicating the activities of living bodies. Instead of the story “people,” the world tells a story of “whites” and “blacks” being essential things. And inherent to this story is power. This is a subtle, latent power, implicit in the way stories of what the world is are created through a routinized form of living. To illustrate this point, I want to explore one more form of power, based in a story we are given by our rules and conventions around what sorts of organic substances can inhabit what areas.
Humans have created internal divisions among the species through naming, categorizing, and enforcing boundaries. We have also created a deeper categorical divide between the “human” and the natural world. This story—that certain things are nature, and that certain things are human—is so deeply embedded and reinforced by the way we live and the conventions we enforce that we can hardly see the power and alienation it creates.
Certain bodies and objects are expected to stay outside, while others are expected to stay inside. These expectations are rigorously and violently enforced. Bugs, dirt, germs, mold, leaves, wild animals, and even wind are expected to stay outside. Feces is quickly and cleanly swept away from the confines of the house. Meanwhile clothes, shoes, bags, and upholstery are all expected to stay ‘inside’—to not get muddy, wet, stained. Humans spend a great deal of both mental and physical energy worrying about and enforcing these boundaries.
Our architectural style and means of transportation make this line easy to enforce. Inside our cars humans are dry, warm, and clean, while on the outside it might be wet, dusty, muddy, sweaty.[2] Bugs are fumigated, swatted, stomped, germs burned away by Lysol. Even the food we eat comes from the inside, packaged in plastic. Those parts of human life that are sloppy, wet, stinky, wild—birth and death—are quarantined from sight within sanitized hospitals.
This physical arrangement produces a conceptual schema which sees the human, ‘in here’, as different from ‘nature’, out there. Separation creates the delusion of difference and the possibility of exploitation—for one cannot exploit and dominate something they think they are equal to or a part of. The violence and exploitation wrought by this physical and conceptual separation is obvious, from mass extinction to climate change to factory farming.
Human power over nature, then, is not just present at the Tyson slaughterhouse, or the coal plant, or the deforested zone. Power is our conventional form of living, and the stories these conventions routinely create and reinforce. This is a deeper understanding of complicity than just the carbon released in our morning commute, or the plastics we use and then toss. It is an understanding of complicity of thought, of the false narrative of humans vs. nature that we create and re-create on an everyday basis. To undo what we have done we can’t just stop eating meat or using plastic: we must undo our deepest ways of seeing the world. This would seem to be a daunting task—cutting the plastics is hard enough—, if the process of unraveling our stories wasn’t in fact a way of becoming whole again.[2.5]
What’s less obvious about power is the way it also alienates the oppressor. Just as the white oppressor fundamentally de-humanized themselves through de-humanizing the black body, so too we suffer deep psychic and spiritual harm in de-naturalizing ourselves. When the master dehumanized the slave or sharecropper, they cut themselves of from the love and compassion that is the only thing that can truly make a life meaningful. Cut off from that true inner well-spring of joy and satisfaction, they pursued impermanent satisfactions even more ardently: profits, sensual gratification, the sadistic pleasures of domination. Thus they moved even farther from the only thing that could redeem their life.[3]
The modern American is in a similar situation regarding nature. We can only find true release in accepting ourselves as part of nature, as part of a messy, mucky, whole that we have no control over. This ultimately means letting go of control and accepting death. Instead, we run farther and farther away from death, chaos, and impermanence, trying to surmount it, to prove our difference from it.[4] The chaos is out there—we are in here, cozy and in control. But this is a fiction, a band-aid, and because we neurotically attempt to apply it over and over again, we are unable to tap into the redeeming beauty of being a part of this unfolding cosmic process. In my own life I did not go searching for the wilderness; it found me, as the secure inner narrative of my life was forced to crumble through injury. This encounter with chaos was the gateway to a deeper level of security, connection, and peace.[5] Conceptual worlds have an insidious momentum and resiliency, though, and my work to continue unraveling the story I’ve lived most of my life is arduous, ongoing, and rewarding.
No book can teach what is taught by the exposure to a cold and desolate winter night, or by a whole day spent doing nothing but watching the clouds. Yet these are not things we go looking for, accustomed as we are to seek pleasure and comfort. In other words, we must actively seek some discomfort in order to let go of stories, let go of power, and achieve a deeper level of comfort. We need to open the windows, stick our hands in the mud, cultivate our own food, welcome the spider in the bathroom, walk places, sit with the sick and dying, spend more time naked and more time in the rain, rustle in the undergrowth, turn off the lights and just be in the dark.
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.” – Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
[1] Foucault: “It is certain that the mechanisms of subjection cannot be studied outside their relation to the mechanisms of exploitation and domination. But they do not merely constitute the "terminal" of more fundamental mechanisms. They entertain complex and circular relations with other forms.” (note: by “subjection” Foucault means categorization, naming, the creation of certain types of subjects)
[2] As the anthropologist Tim Ingold argues, are mode of transportation makes us feel like travelers above the world, rather than wayfarers through it. We do not need to test the winds, monitor the weather, or interact with plant and animal life as indigenous peoples do in order to travel.
[2.5] Accepting an understanding of power as subtle, dispersed, and pervasive--a Foucauldian vision of power--also means opening up to far deeper, nobler potentials of liberation.
[3] Just as the root of power is division, the root of peace is unity, connection, love. For this reason I am skeptical of any “liberatory” campaigns that operate on the premise getting power, or fuel their fight with division. As Lilla Watson writes: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” I have been struck by the intuition recently, an intuition that eludes words, that all healing is self-healing.
[4] And yet at the same time we have a strange, fetish-like attraction to these things—to rot, slime, feces, corpses--, as if a part of ourselves knows that they are truly us. Hairiness, bodily fluids, and violence are seen as repulsive, but at the same time are fetishized. The popularity of shows about murderers, hoarders, and sexual predators represents this underbelly. It is as if there is a part of us that tries to get back to our original unity through these things; Zizek called this part of us “drive.”
[5] James Baldwin writes that “the entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive,” but that it is only through turning towards the “great wilderness” that one discovers that life is “unutterably beautiful.” For Baldwin exploring this wilderness the provenance of the artist, waging a “lovers war” with their own society, illuminating dark and uncomfortable truths.
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