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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

tolerance & governmentality « Previous | |Next »
September 8, 2006

In this chapter from Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire Wendy Brown takes a Foucauldian approach to tolerance. She says that:

The central question of this study is not "What is tolerance?" or even "What has become of the idea of tolerance?" but, What kind of political discourse, with what social and political effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and imperialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scrutiny of this talk provide?

Tolerance as a political discourse and practice of governmentality, that is historically and geographically variable in purpose, content, agents, and objects., would consider a consortium of para-legal and para-statist practices in modern constitutional liberalism---practices that are associated with the liberal state and liberal legalism but are not precisely codified by it.

She adds:

tolerance is exemplary of Foucault’s account of governmentality as that which organizes "the conduct of conduct" at a variety of sites and through rationalities not limited to those formally countenanced as political. Absent the precise dictates, articulations, and prohibitions associated with the force of law, tolerance nevertheless produces and positions subjects, orchestrates meanings and practices of identity, marks bodies, and conditions political subjectivities. This production, positioning, orchestration, and conditioning is achieved not through a rule or a concentration of power, but rather through the dissemination of tolerance discourse across state institutions; civic venues such as schools, churches, and neighborhood associations; ad hoc social groups and political events; and international institutions or forums.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:58 PM | | Comments (0)
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