CHAPTER REVIEW REVIEWED BY: DEVYANI TOTALA

BOOK : IMAGINING CITIES

CHAPTER: WHITE GOVERNMENTALITY* Urbanism, nationalism,
racism
---- By Barnor Hesse

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The city has always been a meeting point for cross-disciplinary discussion within the debates of
modernity and, more recently, postmodernity. Imagining Cities gives students access to the most
exciting recent work on the city from within sociology, cultural studies and cultural geography.
Contributions are grouped around four major themes: the theoretical imagination; ethnicity, racisms
and the politics of difference; memory and nostalgia; and the city as narrative.
While these representations consider the interplay of past and the present, imagined and substantive,
the final section of the book links present and future in an examination of the idea of the virtual city.
Here, the world of cyberspace not only recasts our imaginaries of spaces and communication, but has a
profound impact on the sociological imagination itself
CHAPTER REVIEW:
This chapter describes 'deconstruction' of racial harassment and racial terror in white
appropriations of the British city. 'White governmentality' relies on technologies of the body
which aim to control and discipline conduct through populist racist ascriptions and moral panics
which inform the limitations placed on the 'racial others' spatial mobility, economic status,
political participation and social visibility. In the British city the practice, incidence and impact of
racial harassment is lived under the virtual aegis of a 'white governmentality' which pervades the
national configuration of social and political life. To challenge the cultural-urban difference of
immigrant and indigenous black/Asian settlements was to snipe across a racialized border. The
chapter describes that how nationalism provides a split surface of inscription for the discourse of
racial harassment to re-write the Britishness of the city. D. Smith's analysis suggests that
segregationism overlaps and interacts with racism and nationalism.
Thhis chapter is what might be described as the disciplinary logic of ‘whiteness’ which emerges in
resolute form whenever the cultural formation of the British nation is called into question by the
racialisation of spatial dynamics in the city. In recent years the proliferation of racist abuse, violence
and murder in relation to Black and Asian populations has continued to highlight an acute national
identity dislocation in the post-war/post-colonial settlement. The author has tried to theorise the
conditions which make possible, and frustrate the dissemination of, ‘whiteness’ in the regulation of
that dislocation. But there remains a profound political dimension to this deconstruction which I can
only address schematically in this conclusion. He wants to consider the hegemony of ‘whiteness’ as a
structure of what Foucault has described as ‘governmentality’. The focus here is not government in a
reductive statist sense but rather the specific ways in which the conduct of individuals or of groups
might be directed. Governmentality as a relation of power has expansive and restrictive senses.
Expansively it describes the deregulation of power relations in a multiplicity of social networks which
interact and interface in numerous ways where there is no ‘primary and fundamental principal of
power which dominates society down to the smallest detail’. In the restrictive sense it describes the
increasing regulation of power relations through the securing of compliance to state control.
Understood in these two senses governmentality can be defined as the ‘conduct of conduct’, a strategic
activity that aims to shape, guide or affect the conduct of persons and communities, including the
government of the state, the self and others. It is in this politically intrusive and socially pervasive way
that European racism, as a relation of regulating the subordination or excommunication of the ‘other’,
has always sought its articulation not simply within the general structure of a ‘colonial
governmentality’ (cf. Bhabha 1994; Thomas 1994) but, more complexly, within a ‘white
governmentality’
What is remarkable about this is not so much its entrenched institution in the regime of modernity, but
that its extremely mundane routinisation in the social encounters of everyday life in Britain seems to
pass through the discourse of social science unnoticed even by the super-critical sensitivities of
postmodern thought. It seems useful therefore to say something strategic about how we might begin to
think about the operationalisation of ‘white governmentality’. This means asking questions about how
‘race’ becomes problematised within and beyond the state (e.g. in the streets and communities of the
city) and defined as a problem of government. In other words we need to know, ‘those dreams,
schemes, strategies and manoeuvres of authorities that seek to shape the beliefs and conduct of others
in desired directions by acting upon their will, their circumstances or their environment’. By drawing
on this analysis it is possible to identify at least two significant strategies of ‘white governmentality’.
The first can be described as ‘nationalist political rationalities’. This incorporates a moral elaboration
of appropriate directives, an epistemological characterisation of the objects and subjects of governance
and a distinctive idiom which makes this amenable to political deliberations. Generally ‘white
governmentality’ develops this through techniques of surveillance which affirm the ‘crushing
objecthood’ of the ‘racialised other’. This entails the deployment of representational strategies which
assume the right to oversee, interrogate, celebrate or include/exclude the ‘racial other’ in any social
field. The second strategy can be described as ‘racist programmes of government’. This is less
discursive and more pragmatic, it is focused on the rectification of problems and the practical
resolution of anxieties, for example, fears of ‘black mugging’ or ‘Muslim fundamentalism’. Here
‘white governmentality’ relies on technologies of the body which aim to control and discipline
conduct through populist racist ascriptions and moral panics which inform the limitations placed on the
‘racial others’ spatial mobility, economic status, political participation and social visibility. In the
British city the practice, incidence and impact of racial harassment is lived under the virtual aegis of a
‘white governmentality’13 which pervades the national configuration of social and political life.
In this chapter the generic sense of ‘whiteness’ refers to its various contradictory ruses, plays and
strategies of concealing and revealing the relational terms of its racialisation; and in forgetting or
deploying the logic of its implication in racist discourses. It has become fashionable to cite Anderson’s
anthropological concept of a nation imagined as limited, sovereign and as a community. But this needs
to be distinguished from what is meant by an ‘imaginary’. The concept is taken from Jacques Lacan .
The imaginary has been used in political theory and cultural theory as a conceptual tool in
understanding the logic and limits of social discourses.
There are four dimensions of an imaginary which are relevant to the discussion of ‘whiteness’ and
nationalism in this chapter. First, it is the ‘absolute limit which structures the field of intelligibility’, in
other words it is a social horizon. Second, it refers to the recognition of social incompleteness and the
desire for fulness in any social vision. Third, the desire for fulness requires negotiation with a
‘constitutive lack’, which is ‘simultaneously alienating’ and ‘potentially confrontational’ (Bhabha
1994). Fourth, the imaginary oscillates between two forms of identification, ‘narcissism and
aggressivity’. ‘Racialisation’ is important in the understanding of social processes and social identities
This establishes the pattern of defining people formations as gendered collectivities of visibly
distinctive bodies, otherwise classified in the European gaze as ‘races’. On this reading racialisation
occurs on three levels. First, the reduction of diverse cultural representation to the limited iconography
of ‘races’. Second, the hegemony of ‘white culture’ which eliminates dialogue with ‘other cultures’ in
the global representation of the universal. Third, social contestation around and through different
conceptions of ‘race’and between differently racialised identities .This dimension can also be
described as a racial antagonism. These three levels taken together enable me to concur with
Miles’summary that racialisation refers to the ‘historical emergence of the idea of “race” and to its
subsequent reproduction and application’.
This hegemonic regulation takes two socially uneven co-existent forms. The first, ‘social hierarchy’,
includes the ‘racialised other’ within the social’s ‘mainstream’ but only in the position of
subordination to a racially dominanted structure. The second ‘social incommensurability’, excludes the
‘racialised other’ to the social’s ‘margins’, in the position of excommunication from a racially
monopolised structure. Often what is analytically described as racism simply refers to strategies and
interventions which attempt to introduce, sustain or elaborate the structures of these social formations.
This sociological misconception misses the significance of Derrida’s philosophical insights.
Deconstruction as a phenomenon emerges from the semantic entanglement or conflictual logics within
a ‘text’ or ‘experience’ where areas of meaning cannot be fixed or settled and are resistant to being
settled once and for all.
Derrida (1987, 1981) suggests ‘undecidablity’ refers to the logic in a system of signification which
sustains both coherence and incoherence in which meaning is irreducibly incomplete, and where the
construction of what makes sense or can be defined is beyond semantic mastery. Thus it is the logic or
syntax within which the generation of meaning takes place that creates the possibility of
indeterminacy. Even in a classical opposition between two terms, the element of undecidability
emerges where the meaning of an item: cannot be allocated exclusively to either one of the two terms;
could be defined as any one of the two terms; is not itself a third term; and continually disturbs the
demarcation line drawn between the two terms. In the relation between identity and otherness what is
different from both identity and otherness, is undecidable. The desire for the original nation adds the
element of ‘whiteness’ to the idea of its foundation. This fails to recognise that not only is the
significance of ‘whiteness’ an imperial addition to the history of the nation, but its significance is
irreducible to the singularity and insularity of Britain. Hence ‘whiteness’ becomes a dangerous
supplement in so far as once added it threatens not only to transform the particularist idea of nation
into the universal idea of ‘race’, but to prescribe racism as more important than nationalism.
In assuming that there exists a Black community with leaders who somehow convene or represent that
community, this offers up the colonial imagery of a barely tolerated people who have to be governed,
whose leaders cannot control their youth and whose youth have to be restrained. Technologies trained
in relation to the Black body thus acquire the cultural commonplace of reasonableness. 13 ‘White
governmentality’ legitimates if not the deployment of racism then at least its cognitive rationale. It is
important to stress here that racism is ‘non-reversible’, since to argue otherwise is to assume it has a
normative direction and to ignore its constitutive implication in an asymmetrical relation of
governance.