25/07/2018 Rhizomes: Issue 10: Roderick A.

Ferguson

Rhizomes » Issue 10 (Spring 2005) » Roderick A. Ferguson

The Stratifications of Normativity

Roderick A. Ferguson

[1] In Aberrations in Black, I argued that Foucault's theorization of sexuality was posed in opposition to the
theorization of capital. By this I meant that Foucault figured the repressive hypothesis in the critique of
capital. There I focused on the part of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 in which Foucault writes,

This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is
to uphold. A solemn historical and political guarantee protects it. By placing the advent of
the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces
and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it
becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. The minor chronicle of sex and its trials is
transposed into the ceremonious history of the modes of production; its trifling aspect fades
from view. A principle of explanation emerges after the fact: if sex is so rigorously
repressed, this is because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. [i]

To restate, Foucault implies here that the critique of sexuality necessarily must displace the critique of
capital. This displacement has helped to engender a tension between the study of sexuality and the critique
of capital, a tension that exists within queer studies as well as in Marxist analyses. For me, that tension had
to be addressed if I was going to theorize African American sexuality as the material genealogy of race and
sexuality, as evidence of the simultaneity of the discursive production of racialized sexuality and the
itineraries of capital. There I was especially concerned with African American sexuality as the prism through
which to observe polymorphous perversions as the effect of racialization, perversions produced as part of
the reflective protocols of a modern epistemological apparatus like sociology, perversions whose conditions
were ironically produced by capital and regulated by the American nation-state, perversions rearticulated by
African American culture, generally, and by that cultural form known as the African American novel,
particularly.

[2] I'm still concerned with trying to work out the procedures of capital and how those procedures expose
capital's investments in the discourses of racialized sexuality. As of late though, I've become much more
interested in the production of normativity. Now, to be sure Aberrations is indeed about normativity. It
considers the ways in which state, culture, epistemology, and capital have to negotiate with racialized
regimes of normativity. But in Aberrations, I primarily focused on the pathologization of African American
culture as the effect of normalization and on black working-class and poor communities and subjects as the
target of that pathologization. Now I would like to turn my attention to the normalization of African American
culture and on black middle-class and intellectual formations as the effect of that normalization. In a sense
this project is the precondition for what I tried to do in Aberrations. There I was much more concerned with
the question of pathologization and looking at the interactions between discourses of sexuality and capitalist
economic formations by looking at poor and working-class formations. Currently, I want to think about the
subtle ways in which the interactions between discourses of sexuality and capitalist economic formations
change when observed through the phenomenon of normalization.

[3] I'd like to think about normalization as a way to observe social formations. In the front of mind I am
interested in African American emancipation as the genealogy of a certain grammar of normalization within
the United States. In the front of my mind, however, I am nudged by more contemporary interests: the
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simultaneity of the right to gay marriage and the procedures of war, the production of racialized middle-
classes as part of the outcome of rights-based movements within the 60's and 70's and as an ideological
event within the contemporary circumstances of U.S. empire.

[4] This interaction between the national and the normative in which rights-based actions dole out
normalized emancipations as they secrete regulations at the level of gender and sexuality, emancipations
instantiated through middle-class formations, have their genealogy within nineteenth century African
American racial formations. Pursuant to this relationship between nationality and normativity, I want to also
think about the ways in which this production structured relations within and outside the formal borders of
the U.S.. The genealogy of this relationship between nationality and normativity lies in what I would like to
call the paradox of modernity, a paradox figured in the definitions of freedom and morality.

The Paradox of Modernity

[5] In The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Michel Foucault locates morality within the
itineraries of individual development. He writes,

Anyone who wishes to study the history of a "morality" has to take into account the different
realities that are covered by the term. A history of "moral behaviors" would study the extent
to which actions of certain individuals or groups are consistent with the rules and values
that are prescribed for them by various agencies. A history of "codes" would analyze the
different systems of rules and values that are operative in a given society or group, the
agencies or mechanisms of constraint that enforce them, the forms they take in their
multifariousness, their divergences and their contradictions. And finally, a history of the way
in which individuals are urged to constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct would
be concerned with the models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the
self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the decipherment of the self by
oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object. [ii]

Here Foucault acknowledges the capaciousness of the category "morality," that is, its ability to house many
meanings. This capaciousness allows various "agencies" to deposit their own interests onto moral terrains,
interests expressed here as "codes." This ability seems to also permit the moral subject a certain latitude in
fashioning the self, presenting the subject with opportunities for unpacking and repackaging the self.
Foucault's inquiry into and theorization of morality focus on the interaction between discursive forces —
rules, codes, values — and individual subjects. By ending the question of morality with self-creation, though,
Foucault implies that the inquiry into morality prioritizes the individual, subordinating the question of the
agencies of morality to how individuals absorb the discursive mandates of those agencies. In Foucault's
theory of morality, the individual is the primary unit of analysis.

[6] But what if we were to theorize morality in such a way to account for those agencies? Here I refer to state
and capital as the presumed agencies of freedom. And in what ways do they, as institutions, represent
moral formations that bear upon what we have come to know as race? We might obtain a different account
of morality if we attend to its genealogy within political theory. To begin with, enlightenment theorists
understood morality as a subjective and institutional formation. For theorists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
morality provided the underlining logic of man's transition from the state of nature to civil society. In The
Social Contract, for instance, Rousseau addresses this transition by arguing,

The passing from the state of nature to the civil society produces a remarkable change in
man; it puts justice as a rule of conduct in the place of instinct, and gives his actions the
moral quality what they previously lacked. It is only then, when the voice of duty has taken
the pace of physical impulse, and right that of desire, that man, who has hitherto thought
only of himself, finds himself compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason

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rather than study his inclinations. And although in civil society man surrenders some of the
advantages that belong to the state of nature, he gains in return far greater ones; his
faculties are so exercised and developed, his mind is so enlarged, his sentiments so
ennobled, and his whole spirit so elevated that, if the abuse of his new condition did not in
many cases lower him to something worse than what he had left, he should constantly
bless the happy hour that lifted him for ever from the state of nature and from a stupid,
limited animal made a creature of intelligence and a man. [iii]

Civil society is where man becomes the rational and moral subject of justice, no longer the immoral or
amoral subject of inclination, instincts, and desires. Man thus becomes part of what Immanuel Kant would
later refer to as "the world of understanding." As such civil society denoted not only man's entrance into a
new institutional setting but also into a new subject formation.

[7] Through Rousseau we have an understanding that the institutional change towards civil society is
simultaneously a subjective change toward rationality and morality. This is a rationality and morality figured
through the emergence of man as the subject of the law, no longer the subject of instinct. For instance,
Rousseau goes on to say that in this transition man loses his "natural liberty and the absolute right to
anything that tempts him and that he can take; what he gains by the social contract is civil liberty and the
legal right of property in what he possesses." Being the subject of the law and having the right to property
implies what Marx later understood to be the nature of the state - that is, the liberal democratic state's
purpose as the guarantor of property relations under capitalism. But Rousseau also implies something else
here, something that Marx seemed to neglect - the state and property relations as the expressions and
agents of morality. Rousseau gives us a sense of how civil society acts as an agent upon man. He writes,

We might also add that man acquires with civil society, moral freedom, which alone makes
man the master of himself; for to be governed by appetite alone is slavery, while obedience
to a law one prescribes to oneself is freedom (Rousseau, pp. 64-65). [iv]

According to Rousseau, the state of nature is the realm of the instinctual as well as the terrain outside of
sociality. As the horizon of rationality, civil society is, on the other hand, the standard of morality. Bereft of
the resources for just governance, the state of nature denotes the conditions of immorality and irrationality,
conditions characterized by the rule of instinct. Civil society, alternatively, denotes the sphere in which
reason is offered and enacted. In contradistinction to the state of nature or the realm of irrationality, in civil
society, justice governs man. Under such governance, man's actions take on a moral and rational quality.
For Rousseau, to be governed by instinct is the horizon of immorality as well as slavery. Civil society is the
domain of freedom because it is the condition for rational self-governance and subjection to moral law. This
subjection is contradictorily a mode of freedom, a subjection that grants access to law and property.

[8] Morality as governance - as a type of subjection - can be called freedom, according to Rousseau,
because it is a subjection that man installs himself. It does not seize him against his will as an instinct
would; it is a submission that purchases unprecedented liberties. This dialectic between moral subjection
and freedom is what I would like to call the founding paradox of modernity. It is paradoxical because liberty
is a mode of subjugation to the moral ideologies of law and property. Like Foucault's understanding of
sexuality, morality is not a matter simply of repression. It is also a matter of production: it is responsible for
the creation of new types of subjects who can claim rights, property, and morality. Unlike Foucault's
understanding of morality, this theorization of morality presumes much more than the individual as the
destination of moral discourses. Instead, morality here implies a whole set of agendas that emerge from the
creation of moral subjects and their analogues in the formation of state and civil society. If we were to relate
this to the question of sexuality, we might say that sexuality becomes part of a whole complex of managerial
aims arising from the state and from institutions in civil society. The mastery presumed by state, civil society,

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and moral subjectivization necessitates the management and regulation of sexual desires and practices.
This mastery is known as freedom and thus illuminates the ways in which freedom as a practice and as a
category is weighted by moral discourses.

Marx and the Anti-capitalist Critic as the Subject of Morality

[9] Marx assembled a powerful critical response to the state as the guarantor of property relations, this was
also a way of demonstrating how the procedures of freedom — state formation and property expansion
drive practices of unfreedom. As Marx states in Capital: Volume 1, "The sphere of circulation or commodity
exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden
of the innate rights of man." [v] This realm is the realm of freedom because "both buyer and seller of a
commodity, let us say labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free
persons, who are equal before the law." [vi] But a subjective change soon occurs between buyer and seller
and labor-power, according to Marx: "He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a
capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent
on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and
now has nothing else to expect but — a tanning." [vii] The degradation and exploitation of the worker, for
Marx, was the most powerful rebuttal to state and capital as the domains of rights and emancipation.

[10] For Marx the most powerful contradiction of capital could be seen in this aforementioned scene - that is,
the structural antagonism between buyer and seller, between the exercise of property rights and expansion
for one and the devaluation of rights and humanity for the other. Here, Marx points to the fact that property
as the domain of Freedom produces forms of stratification at the level of class. But underneath Marx's own
narrative of class stratification is another narrative, one in which we might observe stratifications along the
level of normativity. In "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," for instance, Marx illustrates capital as
a mode of accumulation by focusing on the circumstances of British labor. Marx quotes from certain public
health documents,

The results of the admirable work of Dr. Julian Hunter are to be found in the seventh (1865)
and eighth (1866) Reports on Public Health... On the condition of urban dwellings, I quote,
as a preliminary, a general remark made by Dr. Simon. 'Although my official point of view,'
he says, 'is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires that the other aspect of
this evil should not be ignored... In its higher degrees it' (i.e. overcrowding) 'almost
necessarily involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and
bodily functions, such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than
human...To children who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into
infamy. And beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced
should ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilization which has its essence
in physical and moral cleanliness.' [viii]

[11] In The Social Contract morality was known most poignantly in terms of what it rendered to those who
entered civil society - enlarged minds, ennobled sentiments, freedom, access to law and property. Here in
Marx, morality is underscored through its absence - contagious diseases, unclean confusion of bodies and
bodily functions, sexual nakedness. There is a sociological interest driving Marx's critique, a moralization of
social conditions, a rendering of sexuality as the ultimate sign of the defilement of property relations. This
sociological morality becomes not only the basis of radical critique but of middle-class outrage as well. He
writes,

The antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and thus of capitalist property

relations in general, is here so evident that even the official English reports on this subject
teem with heterodox onslaughts on 'property and its rights.' This evil makes such progress

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alongside the development of industry, the accumulation of capital and the growth and
'improvement' of the towns that the sheer fear of contagious diseases, which do not spare
even respectable people', brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no less than the Acts of
Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened middle-classes in certain towns, such as
Liverpool, Glasgow and so on, took strenuous measures to deal with the problem through
their municipalities. [ix]

Here official English Reports bear witness to a normative middle-class outraged by the presumed
pathologies of poor and working populations, populations ostensibly distinguished by disease and sexual
immorality. The reports produce knowledge about those populations and about the middle-class, knowledge
that stratifies a disease ridden working-class and a respectable and fretful middle-class in terms of
normativity. As the progress promised by capital imputes pathologies onto poor and working-class
populations, we can see how moral discourses about sexuality subtend the general law of capitalist
accumulation and how those discourses produce cross-class antagonisms.

African American Emancipation as the Genealogy of Normativity for Minoritized Subjects within U.S.
Racial Projects

[12] By way of overview, morality denotes the ideological underpinnings of state and civil society,
underpinnings that frame law and property as the domains of freedom, self-mastery, and subjection. This
definition of morality arises out of the genealogy of political theory. Morality also refers to a kind of
sociological hermeneutic that governs analyses of social conditions. The genealogies of the political and the
sociological definition of morality can be seen in African American racial formations in the nineteenth
century. Indeed, African American middle-class and intellectual formations express the overlapping moral
genealogies of political theory and sociology. As I hope to demonstrate, the archival materials on black
colleges and universities allow us to observe how the narrative of the transition from state of nature to civil
society acquires a specifically racial import. We might also see how the moralization of social conditions
helped to produce racial projects among African Americans. We might also see how that moralization
produced class differences stratified along the lines of normativity.

[13] At the end of the Civil War in 1865, the United States faced the issue of how to civilize newly freed black
subjects. Hence, the U.S. government established The Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees,
popularly known as the Freedmen's Bureau. With civilization in mind, the Freedmen's Bureau founded 1000
schools for former slaves and also assisted with the founding of the major black colleges and universities. In
The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois frames the founding of these schools within both the educational
needs and economic possibilities of this population. He writes, "In the midst, then, of the larger problem of
Negro education sprang up the more practical question of work, the inevitable economic quandary that
faces a people in the transition from slavery to freedom, and especially those who make that change amid
hate and prejudice, lawlessness and ruthless competition." [x] As the Freedman's Bureau attempted to
deliver freed blacks to the benefits of civil society, it offered historically black colleges and universities as
agencies of morality.

[14] On January 9, 1900 Atlanta University president Horace Bumstead sent a letter requesting scholarship
donations for the University. In the letter Bumstead ascribes specific moral itineraries to the university and
others like it. He writes,

The necessity for the solution of the Negro problem becomes more and more apparent, not
only for the sake of the Negro himself, but for the sake of our country, which should not
have borne the disgrace of his helpless ignorance so long as it has. There is no better
solution offered, there are no practical means for any other solution than education. But that

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he may be raised, is being raised from vice and ignorance and taught to make of himself a
worthy citizen of this our country.

Atlanta University is carrying on a unique and vastly important part in this work for the
Southern Negro. Its plan is to take such men and women as show themselves capable of
receiving a good education and to train them thoroughly for the work of carrying on the
industrial and elementary education of the masses. This higher training is absolutely
essential for certain ones, for if the race is ever to achieve a measure of independence it is
necessary that its leaders be Negroes themselves. Moreover, as the great majority of the
Southern colored people are beyond the reach of white people, and must be civilized,
educated and Christianized by members of their own race if it at all, it is very evident that
well-trained teachers are requisite. [xi]

Bumstead attributes a sociological function to Atlanta University. The university presumes and responds to a
sociological problem that has national importance. This sociological problem that goes by the name of "the
Negro problem" is evidenced through ignorance and vice. African American education is the antidote to that
problem and the deficiencies and immoralities that it implies. African American education, according to
Bumstead, can transport blacks from the state of nature connoted in the condition of slavery to an American
civil society promised by the black college. A specifically moral task, therefore, underwrites the black college
and university. Blacks educated in such institutions emerge as the agents of that task, revealing the ways in
which black intellectual formations - subjective and institutional - become technologies of normalization.

[15] In a companion letter to President Bumstead's request, Atlanta University alumna Mary L. Hubert
described how the college had benefited her as a moral agent. She begins the letter by praising the
university for standing for "thoroughness and Christianity." She then proceeds to describe the work that she
has tried to do with her 135 pupils in a rural town in southeast Georgia. "Being a graduate of Atlanta
University I could have secured an appointment in a city public school, but I accepted this because it was a
country school, for I felt that my services were needed much more in such a place than in the city where
they generally have superior advantages." [xii] Later on in her letter, Hubert refers to the sociological
conditions that give purpose to her life. She writes,

My experience here teaches me that much of the crime and social corruption, which surely
exists among our colored youths, may be traced to their home life. In some of the homes
the children never see the beautiful which they might see if only they knew how with their
own hands to make home attractive, and if the mothers and sisters had known how to make
home attractive, many a son and brother might have been saved from ruin. I have tried hard
to reach the homes of these boys and girls. Some I find come from homes where indecency
is ever before them, others from those miserable little hovels where immorality and impurity
may be witnessed in their worst form. [xiii]

Here Hubert moralizes the social conditions of her rural constituency. Here she implies the sociological
importance of the home in the moral edification of its members, specifically, but of African Americans,
generally. Those conditions presume a discourse of sexuality that drives Hubert's civilizing effort, conditions
that present the homes as "miserable little hovels of immorality and impurity." The letter is the evidence of a
stratification of normativity in which Hubert and other civilized, educated, moralized black subjects provide a
managerial strata that can regulate and discipline black subjects who deviate from regimes of normativity,
subjects whose class and regional differences mark them as the bearers of slavery's immoral and
ignominious stain. For Ms. Hubert and others like her, freedom means bringing the pupils and people like
them within morality's thrall.

African American Emancipation in the Shadow of the Imperial Paradox

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[16] Freedom as a mode of moral subjugation structured the logic of U.S. imperialism at the end of the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth. It is important to note that the period out of which the archival
documents from Atlanta University arose were framed within the period of U.S. imperialism formalized
through the Spanish American War in the late nineteenth century. During that period the long project of
emancipation was shaped by U.S. imperial expansion. For instance, in A New Negro For a New Century
published in 1900, Booker T. Washington locates the emergence of a new, modern, nationalized and
moralized African American subject as the effect of U.S. imperialism. Washington writes,

The Civil War had estranged the sections almost as much as the agitation of the slave
question had; for it left a bitterness in its results - such as the manumission and
enfranchisement of the late slaves and the reconstruction policy, forced upon the country by
that uncompromising radical, Representative Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania - which
seemed to be intensified rather than tempered by time...The bitterness rankled in [the white
people's] souls all the more as the war had destroyed well nigh all their wealth, along with it
their slave property, which had become co-equal in citizenship; a transformation in itself of
the most radical and provocative character, from the standpoint of those who for two
centuries and more, had been taught to and did regard the African as less than human as
simply property.

But the declaration of war with Spain was responded to with a fervor and enthusiasm in
every State of the Union, among all the race elements of the population, that put at rest
forever any lingering suspicion that the Republic would be divided in sentiment in the face
of a foreign foe. [xiv]

Here Washington constructs the Civil War as a struggle that brought about a costly emancipation, one that
cost the United States its unity and whites their privilege. But the war with Spain provided the opportunity of
reunification of the states and the unprecedented chance for African Americans and whites to exist as
equals, citizens, and allies. As citizenship under imperial agendas allegedly promoted an equality of
conditions, that citizenship was predicated upon the increasing subjugation of peoples within Cuba, Guam,
Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii. We might think of the possibilities of minority enfranchisement
within the conditions of imperialism as yet another instance of the stratification of normativity. In this way,
black middle class formations at the end of the nineteenth century gained national and moral coherence
within the context of an imperial venture that would assume the moral necessity of U.S. imperialism.

[17] We can see the ways in which African American middle-class and intellectual formations interlocked with
regimes of morality through Washington's arguments about the Black women's club movement. In a chapter
about African American women's clubs, Washington writes,

Among colored women the club is the effort of the few competent in behalf of the many
incompetent; that is to say that the club is only one among many means for the social uplift
of the race... The consciousness of being fully free has not yet come to the great masses of
the colored women in this country. The emancipation of the mind and spirit of the race could
not be accomplished by legislation. More time, more patience, more suffering and more
charity are still needed to complete the work of emancipation. [xv]

Like Ms. Hubert, the women of the club movement engaged in a moral project of freedom. Their agency
was based on stratifications constituted out of normativity and expressed through differences of class and
region. The very structure of the book illustrates the simultaneity of nationalism and normativity as
formations obtained within the moment of U.S. imperialism. The book begins with U.S. imperial war as the
process that provides the condition for nationalization and normalization. The book ends with the Black
woman's club movement, suggesting the ways in which processes of moralization bear the trace of imperial
maneuvers and events. The structure symbolizes, for me, how nationalization and normalization are twin
processes. As the book assumes imperialism as the context for the racial project known as the New Negro,

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it suggests that these processes express themselves within and beyond national borders and terrains. As
the book opened the twentieth century, it also possibly announced the debut of a logic that propelled that
century, a logic that insisted upon the simultaneity of emancipation and moralization. This is a logic that
demands that we do a certain genealogical work around morality, looking for its broad powers and
applications. It is an analysis compelled by a suspicion that the history of morality may very well be the
history of empire.

Notes

[i] Michel Foucualt, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage Books, 1990),5-6.

[ii] Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure

[iii] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by Maurice Cranson (London: Penguin Books,
1968),

[iv] Ibid 64-65.

[v] Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy: Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 280

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid 812-813.

[ix] Ibid 812.

[x] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Publications, 1961), 77.

[xi] Horace Bumstead Records, Clark-Atlanta University.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Booker T. Washington, A New Negro for a New Century: An Accurate and Up-to-Date Record of the
Upward Struggles of the Negro Race (Chicago: American Publishing House), 23-24.

[xv] Ibid 383.

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