The Things of Order Affect, Material Culture, Dispositif

1 Author version. Please cite final published version here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/article/926818 The Things of Order Affect, Material Culture, Dispositif Donovan O. Schaefer Introduction: Affect and Ceremony In early 2016, a high school student in Charlottesville, Virginia, petitioned her city council to remove a monument in a local park. The bronze equestrian, erected almost one hundred years earlier, depicted Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The student argued that the statue made the park forbidding and alienating to the city’s Black residents. A year and a half later, a coalition of neo-Confederates and far-right activists—reacting to the council’s vote to remove the statue in the wake of this petition—stormed the park and its surrounding neighborhood, ultimately murdering a counter-protestor in the ensuing violence. In July of 2021, after a series of legislative actions and court challenges at the city and state levels, the council removed the statue. Two years later, the Charlottesville Lee monument was melted down by the Swords Into Plowshares project, a Charlottesville community organization that, as of this writing, intends to reuse the bronze for a future monument that reflects antiracist values (Armus and Green). The location of the foundry and the names of its proprietor and workers were kept secret for their safety. 1 Commenting on Frantz Fanon’s account of the material culture of colonialism, Achille Mbembe describes the colony as a war zone, a contest of forces, in which “sensory life”—the continuum of bodies, objects, and landscape—is itself a battlefield. “Colonial domination,” he writes, “requires an enormous investment in affect and ceremony and a significant emotional expenditure that few have analyzed until now” (Mbembe 2017, 114; emphasis added). In the contemporary moment, monuments and memorials have become flashpoints in the culture wars smoldering across the face of the globe. From Johannesburg to Charlottesville to Oxford to Sydney to Kyiv, public material culture is now the scene of a collision of competing agendas as activists seek to reshape sweeping assemblages of power. As Mbembe predicts, this has everything to do with the ongoing force field of conquest, colonization, and racism. Disputes about public culture become contests about who has the capacity to project themselves as publics—and who is sidelined, denied access, and excluded. Monuments become nodes of race and power, affect and ceremony. The controversies around Confederate monuments in the twenty-first century are often framed as if statues are, in essence, three-dimensional speech. After the New Orleans 1 2 city council voted to remove statues of Lee and other Confederate figures in 2015, a group calling themselves the Louisiana Landmarks Society sued the city on the grounds that their First Amendment right to free speech—“which they exercise by maintaining and preserving the historic character and nature of the city of New Orleans, including their monuments”—was being infringed upon (Landrieu, 186). Construed as information in metallurgical form, statues earn special protection as “free speech,” with their destruction condemned as “censorship.” Others argue that Confederate monuments serve an educational purpose, and that they should be left standing to preserve vital historical knowledge about the past. As we’ll see below, even some critics of Confederate statues take this approach, calling for “recontextualization” of offending monuments by, for instance, placing informative signs or plaques nearby. These analytic frames, I suggest, reflect an essentially liberal understanding of how publics are created and maintained. For the purposes of this essay, I will define liberalism as an approach to power in which the sovereignty of individuals is held sacrosanct, especially as expressed through the vocabulary of “rights” held by individuals against external entities, such as “states.” 2 The liberal paradigm also retains a secondary conviction that power operates primarily through physical force, rather than through fields of power. In this idiom, rational individuals encounter the public sphere as an ongoing dialogue or debate in which ideas are presented for rational scrutiny, considered, and then coolly accepted or refused. This framing goes hand in hand with the tendency to construe public material objects “symbolically” and therefore shield them as, essentially, speechlike functions. Objects are compressed to a single dimension—information—and processed through rational reflection. The individual is fundamentally detached from the objects around them, engaging things through an intellectual prism and translating them into bits and bytes of data. Politics is the sum total of the contributions rational individuals return to this conversational public sphere. And a statue is interchangeable with a plaque, sign, posted document, flyer, or other text that happens to live on a landscape. But this approach is inadequate. The deadly urgency of the controversy around Confederate monuments—both on the part of those who seek to remove them and those who seek to maintain them—directly evidences how much more these statues are than crystallized information. The Charlottesville student’s petition states that “many people, including myself, feel very uncomfortable in the park and we don’t visit it,” before adding, “there are events that I don’t attend simply because they take place in that location” (B.). Mbembe proposes that such monuments are “sculptural extensions of a form of racial terror” (Mbembe 2017, 128). The ferocious response to monument removal campaigns has led to threats, intimidation, armed protest, and murder. Rather than strictly “informative”—let alone ornamental—monuments are fully integrated with and necessary to the projection of colonial power. The hegemony of liberal styles of thinking has left our political vocabulary woefully unequipped for this conversation. What is needed is a terminology that allows us to diagnose publics as formed not just by intellectual tissue but by material objects that have their own capacities to exert force independent of the register of information and ideas. To redress this gap, this essay argues for a reappraisal of the work of Michel 2 3 Foucault—one of the most trenchant critics of liberal political thinking—as offering a theory of material culture. Material culture tends not to be considered as a topic that falls within Foucault’s purview. But although he is sometimes misrepresented as “essentially a theorist of discourse” (Peltonen, 207), Foucault’s work actually sets the stage for a sophisticated analysis of the nexus between bodies, power, public material culture, discourse, and affect. This essay charts a way of attaching the expansive conversations that have unfolded from Foucault’s work on power to the analysis of material culture, offering support to Mbembe’s call for an attention to “affect and ceremony.” The essay proceeds in two phases: first, it reviews Foucault’s late theory of power and his corresponding idea of the dispositif. The dispositif is the instrumentation of power. Not just discursive, it is a heterogeneous assemblage of bodies, discourses, and material things—including specific objects like the scaffold and the panopticon. The article then puts Foucault’s approach to material culture in conversation with two strands of contemporary critical thought—New Materialism and affect theory—to show how a fully fledged analytics of power–matter–affect might emerge. What Foucault calls the “analytics of power” is, in fact, a way of studying affect and ceremony—the streams of force that constitute subjectivity above, beneath, or behind language. 3 Criticisms of colonial material culture in the work of scholars like Fanon and Mbembe dovetail with this analytic approach. A material Foucauldian frame, combined with an attention to affect, allows us to diagram the limitations of a liberal framework in which the political effects of material objects—such as monuments—are flattened to the dimension of information, speech, or semiotic meaning. Contra the prevalent view of Foucault as exclusively preoccupied with discourse, a reconsideration of the dispositif shows that Foucault’s analytics of power enhances our understanding of the role of material culture in guiding political affects. Part I: Power–Matter–Affect Foucault’s Analytics of Power In May 2017, four Confederate monuments were removed from the streets of New Orleans in the dead of night and under heavy police protection. A few days later, Gary Shapiro, a philosopher at the University of Richmond, published an op-ed arguing that monuments honoring the Confederacy should remain standing. Shapiro’s assessment was not based on the assertion that the statues were benign, as some defenders claim—that they were “heritage not hate.” Shapiro’s premise was the opposite: that the statues and the Confederacy they celebrated were unambiguously reprehensible. He expressed sympathy for the “refreshingly clear” logic of the “iconoclasts” who wanted to level the monuments. His argument, instead, was that “the statues are undeniable signs of [Southern] history— of what has been done and suffered here” and that “mere erasure would be a form of historical denial” (Shapiro). Considering the string of Confederate statues dotting Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, Shapiro argued for a “contextualist” position. He proposed leaving the statues in place but surrounding them with new text (and new monuments) that would reorient the “meaning” of the original objects. “Destroying or removing the structures,” he wrote, “eliminates opportunities for productively using our past.” He 3 4 proposed adding “plaques concerning the war itself, disputes over slavery, Richmond’s and Virginia’s roles in the Confederacy, Reconstruction . . . , African-American disenfranchisement, [and] the blatant racism surrounding the statues’ planning and dedication” (Shapiro). This contextualist position is the liberal position. It is isomorphic with the position of the British Conservative Party in dealing with statues of enslavers and colonial despots, which calls for a policy of “retain and explain” (Massing). Its philosophical premise, I would suggest, is shared by partisans of the statues, who similarly frame the Confederate monuments as an iteration of the free play of ideas. As we saw above, the Louisiana Landmarks Society challenged the New Orleans city council’s decision to remove several Confederate monuments in court, claiming an infringement of their First Amendment right to free speech (Landrieu, 186). Confederate apologists have written that Confederate monuments were fundamentally about white Southerners “making their voices permanently heard in the immediate wake of Reconstruction” (Johnson 2009, 66). Advocates of Confederate commemoration will even go so far as to characterize their fight as an extension of the civil rights movement—with white Southerners now cast in the role of victims having their rights clipped and in need of liberation (Maurantonio, 151). This paradigm aligns with the prevalent “Lost Cause” narrative deployed by partisans of the Confederacy, which narrates the secession of the enslaver states as an extension of the liberal demand for individual rights and limited government first advanced by the American Revolution (Pollard, 35). Another Confederate apologist makes this link crystal clear, stating that Confederate soldiers deserve monuments because they were “fighting for America, Americanism, the Constitution, and the aims of the Founding Fathers: small government, limited government, self-government, and above all, states’ rights” (Seabrook, 29). Regardless of the evaluation of the monuments themselves, these approaches share a common assumption about the nature of public material culture: that it is, in essence, information. In the case of monuments, this is information that happens to have been rendered in three dimensions and conspicuously posed in the public sphere. But these monuments are fundamentally forms of speech, no different from text on a billboard. This is what I’m calling the liberal position (a usage that does not necessarily map onto the loose sense of “liberal” and “conservative” in US popular discourse). The liberal response to information (or misinformation) lodged in the public sphere is either to protect it as free expression or to counter it with more and better information. The thinking subjects that are the elemental unit of the liberal polity will sift the expanded collection of facts available to them and choose the better argument. It is exactly this style of thinking that Foucault seeks to overturn in his new approach to power. 4 In History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Foucault lays the groundwork for this reframing. This requires sweeping away what he sees as a mistaken understanding of power associated with liberal subjects, whose self-sovereignty is infringed upon by incursions from a range of external forces—states, laws, other people. Foucault’s model of power takes us beyond the liberal axiom that power is fundamentally about the dynamic of thoughtful subjects affirming their sovereignty, in which resistance against external force is always privileged. Foucault labels this the juridico-discursive template of power: power 4 5 patterned after the form of a law as declared by a sovereign (Foucault 1990, 83). This is power as proclamation from on high: “It speaks, and that is the rule” (83). Power as law is both a discourse and a univocal current of force laying siege to the liberal subject. Foucault rejects this picture, proposing instead that power needs to be understood as a multidimensional field enfolding and forming bodies into subjects from the outset. Rather than an imposition on self-sovereign subjects from the exterior, power defines subjectivity from the inside. Rather than just denying a preexisting free subject his due, power is productive of the horizon of what we want—and even what we imagine as “freedom” (94). Not only that, the juridico-discursive model of power overstates the extent to which power is about implementation of a legal rulebook—a contraption of linguistic assertions. “Whether one attributes to it the form of the prince who formulates rights,” he writes, “of the censor who enforces silence, or of the master who states the law, in any case one schematizes power in a juridical form, and one defines its effects as obedience” (85). For Foucault, individual action is shaped by things (discourses, groups, objects, institutions) that make subjectivity. Relations of power, Foucault writes, “are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play” (94). Extreme forms of the exercise of power—such as forceful confinement or the constant threat of deadly violence—are, for Foucault, bad templates for a general theory of power (88). Yet it is these narrow templates that liberals reach for in conceptualizing forces outside the individual as essentially violent. Foucault suggests instead that we need to think of power as productive—as eliciting responses from bodies not only by dictating but by activating, enticing, and creating. 5 Rather than the diktat of a monarch—or even an abstract “state”—power is everywhere, enfolding bodies and defining the parameters of how they interact with the world. The Dispositif: Foucault’s Theory of Material Culture What Foucault calls the “analytics of power,” then, diagrams a massive ensemble of fields of force that are productive of subjectivity. Foucault characterizes his oeuvre as moving through three phases: the archaeology of knowledge, the genealogy of embodied power, and ethical self-formation (1982, 208). In the earliest phase, Foucault was primarily concerned with questions about the establishment of discursive regimes through the composition of categories (“madness,” “illness,” “man”). This approach—identifying the role of discourse in power—has been so effective that Foucault is often presented as a thinker exclusively concerned with power in linguistic form—sometimes even as a kind of discourse reductionist who sees language itself as the raw material of subjectivity. Matti Peltonen calls these renderings of Foucault as “essentially a theorist of discourse” the misbegotten “textbook image” of his thought (207). Moving on from this conception allows us to recognize the capacity of Foucault’s thought to assess material culture and power. In the genealogical phase of his work, Foucault turned his attention to bodies as sites where power converges to discipline and transform subjects (1977, 24). This included a new fascination with material culture itself. “Space,” Foucault writes, “is fundamental in 5 6 any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power” (1984, 252). As Jim Gerrie proposes, Foucault ended up aligning himself with philosophers of technology who reflect on the ways artifacts shape and influence their human creators. Not just crystallizations of our intentions, the objects we create also form us as subjects in ways that both extend and exceed our own ideas about them (66). Power is distributed not only by words and ideas, but through a network of objects and practices (68). This set of concerns led Foucault to articulate a new key term, dispositif, first used in a 1975 interview given shortly after the publication of Discipline and Punish (Rabinow 2003, 49). Variously translated in English as “apparatus,” “deployment,” “construct,” “alignment,” or “positivity,” John Pløger suggests the best rendering may be “assemblage” (Peltonen, 206; Pløger, 55). This is because a dispositif, in Foucault’s own words, is “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid.” (Foucault 1980b, 194; emphasis added) Foucault’s dispositif concept is specifically designed to index the heterogeneity of power—its capacity to operate through multiple crisscrossing channels, discursive but also bodily and material. Ronjon Paul Datta notes that dispositif becomes a central organizing term in Foucault’s genealogical phase, just as “discursive formation” and “episteme” were in his earlier archaeological phase (294). The new prominence of the dispositif is why objects emerge as a more pointed—if unannounced—concern in the main texts from this period, Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Vol. I. But secondary scholarship still tends to downplay the material dimensions of the dispositif. Gilles Deleuze’s influential misreading of Foucault’s work is a possible source for this error. In his commentary, Deleuze zeroes in on dispositifs as “forms of discourse” or as philosophical premises that make links between the “visible” and the “articulable” possible (1992, 165; 1988, 38) In this line of interpretation, no attention is paid to actual objects. Similarly, some framings of the dispositif informed by hermeneutics flatten objects back down to a sign or “text” to be “read in multiple ways,” on the grounds that “the social field is a field of multiple beings or ‘readers’” (Pløger 2008, 59). Paul Rabinow’s discussion of dispositifs focuses on “relationships” and “laws,” not on material things 6 (2003, 52). Foucault himself is explicit that his concern in this period is the “political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations” (1977, 24; emphasis added). Material formations, like architecture, have always been part of fields of power, he insists, even when it takes time for the “political literature” to catch up (1984, 239). And he stresses that the definition of a subject as made within language is inadequate: “It is not just in the play of symbols that the subject is constituted. It is constituted in real practices—historically analyzable practices. There is a technology of the constitution of the self which cuts across symbolic systems while using them” (Foucault 1984, 369). Foucault even goes so far as to announce that dispositif is a master term that includes epistemes—which he renames “discursive apparatuses”—but also incorporates all manner of nondiscursive elements (1980b, 197). As Peltonen points out, a dispositif—like a penal structure—is “not just a bundle of discourses or an illusion created by them, but something more heterogeneous and tangible” (215). The multiplicity 6 7 of power relations is also a zone of convergence between the material and the semiotic. In the 1977 interview where Foucault provides his most expansive definition of dispositif, the interviewers (including the Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller) are perplexed by Foucault’s intention to thematize what he calls the “non-discursive.” He ultimately dismisses their concerns by announcing “my problem isn’t a linguistic one” (1980b, 197). What many approaches to the dispositif miss is Foucault’s emerging fascination with how subjects are made by material objects in their materiality—not in their capacity to “symbolize.” To advance our understanding of Foucault’s relevance for contemporary studies of material culture—profoundly promising but also tantalizingly underdeveloped—the following sections revisit his analyses of two specific objects that become central axes of dispositifs in Discipline and Punish: the scaffold and the prisonhouse. 7 Though Foucault himself only offers the beginnings of a programmatic study of the nexus between materiality, affect, and power, we can see how the dispositif emerges in these studies as a promising device for exploring these relationships. The Scaffold as Proscenium of Terror In the graphic opening scene of Discipline and Punish, Damiens, the failed assassin of Louis XV, is tortured in extravagant fashion and then torn apart by horses. Foucault sees this event as characteristic of a distinctly premodern mode of punishment: public spectacle as an act of sovereign terror. As Foucault points out, the performance begins at the door of a church, but most of the pain is visited on Damiens on a specially contrived object: an elevated platform. In the subsequent chapter, “The Spectacle of the Scaffold,” Foucault contextualizes the violent destruction of Damiens’s body against the backdrop of the longer history of public execution in France. This tradition is best understood, Foucault suggests, “not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested” (1977, 47; emphasis added). The mutilation of a body—forcing a victim to broadcast pain to a public—is part of the reaffirmation and reiteration of the will of the sovereign. The materiality of punishment creates the affective current that electrifies a circuit of power. The scaffold—the physical affordance fashioned by a raised platform—is an indispensable element of this ceremony. It operates as a stage or proscenium, a mode of elevating and circumscribing an act of spectacular sovereign violence in order to make it a focal point, creating the “theatre of terror” (1977, 49). This is why it’s essential that the public attend these spectacles. “In the ceremonies of the public execution,” Foucault writes, “the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.” (1977, 57). Sovereign power must be displayed, and this display is contingent on a particular configuration of the materiality of the space. This rendered public execution “more than an act of justice; it was a manifestation of force; or rather, it was justice as the physical, material and awesome force of the sovereign deployed there” (1977, 50). The political efficacy of a public execution is only possible because the scaffold has been inserted into the network, allowing the evocation of “awesome force.” Physical elevation of the ceremony on the scaffold—above the crowd, at the vertex of every line of sight—makes it visible to a multitude. Just as a speaker climbs a stage, pulpit, upturned soapbox, or car roof to materially enable an address to an 7 8 assembly, the scaffold instantiates a public. The same could be said about infrastructural features that allow mass public addresses, like the balcony attached to Mussolini’s office over the Piazza Venezia in Rome, later emulated by Hitler on the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The stagecraft of the elevated ceremony of punishment is embellished over time through the establishment of an increasingly elaborate dispositif. The scaffold comes to be surrounded by a “whole military machine” including “cavalry of the watch, archers, guardsmen, soldiers” (1977, 50). This bristling display is designed not only to secure the site but to amplify the visceral impact of the scene by exhibiting the glory and power of the sovereign (50). Moreover, the aftermath of each execution is meticulously scripted and choreographed to maximize dramatic impact: “Corpses [are] burnt, ashes thrown to the winds, bodies dragged on hurdles and exhibited at the roadside” (34). The gibbet is invented to display the body of the criminal in public for an extended period after execution. Each improvisation increases the theatrical force of the scaffold. This is why, Foucault observes, the first public display of the guillotine backfired: the terror of the condemned—now obscured by the feet of the executioners on the scaffold and the guillotine apparatus itself—prompted a demand for more visibility from the audience: “Give us back our gallows” (58). These raw physical elements are crucial affordances for the creation of a line of sight—an indispensable channel for the operation of the dispositif as a public network of power. The Panopticon as Impression Machine In the second phase of Foucault’s history of punishment, affects and objects remain the central focus. But modern punishment draws up a more complicated dispositif to corral and direct these forces. The Quaker-run Walnut Street Prison in Philadelphia, for instance, was converted into a “penitentiary” in the 1790s. Unlike a prison, which sought only to inflict hardship, it applied techniques like solitary confinement and workshop labor to transform inmates on the moral register (124). As Caleb Smith writes, these practices connected to “centuries of Christian monastic practices and Romantic dreams” designed to “carry the prisoner from the darkness of living death to the light of rebirth” by compelling the captive to confront their moral culpability (84). In other words, the new dispositif invoked fields of power beyond the register of the juridico-discursive—the sword of the sovereign held up as command backed by violence. It typified power’s capacity to make subjects by transforming their horizon of action and desire, renovating subjectivity from the interior rather than menacing it from above. The new mode of punishment was based on techniques for transforming subjects developed in education, intentional communities, and martial regimentation. The penitentiary was an apparatus for training bodies, “an imaginary equipment or techne of normalization, that work[ed] through its spatial dispositif” (Pløger, 65). Through this structure, a three-dimensional skein of material traces was drummed into the body, reconfiguring its capacities. This was not a matter of manipulating “the signifying elements of behavior or the language of the body,” Foucault writes, “but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization.” In the end, he concludes, “constraint bears upon the forces rather than upon the signs; the only truly important 8 9 ceremony is that of exercise” (1977, 137; emphasis added). Instead of demanding obedience or contrition—the juridico-discursive command—disciplining the body was about inserting it into new regimes of action, new ceremonies, new economies of force, and thereby reconfiguring its future decisions. Foucault calls this focus on regimentation the “micro-physics of power” (139). Rather than power as a command or decree, this is power at the capillary level, pulsing through environments and bodies. And the efficacy of this spatial dispositif is, like the scaffold, a direct consequence of its concrete materiality. Disciplinary techniques (enclosure, partition, confinement) and buildings (barracks, factories, schools, prisons) all reiterated the elementary structural unit of monastic life: the cell, a spatial technology of discipline that could compel rest, exclude temptation or distraction, and force selfconfrontation. Spaces were configured in such a way as to conduct bodies through carefully designed regimens, assimilating them to systems of exercise and rewriting their capacities (143). The microphysics of power is resolutely physical. The “ceremony of exercise” that allows for the transformation of subjects requires an assemblage of specialized artifacts: curtains, walls, barriers, gates, corridors. Similarly, the disciplined body itself becomes a node for material interventions, such as scheduled movements and regimented gestures (151). This includes a meticulous training of the body’s relationship with particular objects. Foucault quotes at length from an eighteenth-century manual for soldiers detailing a series of highly precise instructions for interacting with a rifle. This involved “a breakdown of the total gesture into two parallel series: that of the parts of the body to be used (right hand, left hand, different fingers of the hand, knee, eye, elbow, etc.) and that of the parts of the object manipulated (barrel, notch, hammer, screw, etc.)” and the correlation of these parts “according to a number of simple gestures (rest, bend)” (153). This “body-object articulation” transforms the physical capacities of the soldier (153). New object relations, drilled into the body through training, yield a different subject—with different aptitudes, propensities, and horizons of action. The epitome of this dispositif of disciplinary power is Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. The panopticon is a radial prison design that placed a sentry tower in the center of a chamber. Each cell in the panopticon was visible to the sentry tower, but the sentry tower was configured in such a way that the prisoners could not see in. This led to a permanent sense of surveillance on the part of inmates, a cultivated paranoia: “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication” (200). As material culture scholar Ian Woodward writes, the panopticon is “an object which is the product of historical changes in discourses about punishment, and which—although ‘inanimate’—as a product of its design ‘acts’ to achieve political and organisational ends” (14). The prisoner internalizes the felt sense of supervision and so absorbs the “automatic functioning of power” 8 (201). The panopticon leaves impressions in the prisoner’s body. These remain intact, shaping the subject’s response to new places and situations, long after release. 9 The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia—a successor to the Walnut Street Prison that refined the “penitentiary” model of incarceration—retains many of these structural innovations to this day. Although not a panopticon per se, the original building 9 10 was constructed with a central guard chamber serving as an octagonal hub for eight corridors arranged like spokes radiating outward. The cardinal point at the dead center of the guard chamber still provides unbroken visibility into all seven original cell blocks (the eighth spoke is an exit) at once. As the structure was augmented over time, angled mirrors were added to allow continued direct visibility from the cardinal point. Each cell had a single light source, a single small door, and an individual toilet, enforcing a rule of maximum isolation. At the same time, the guards used the system of metal pipes running through the cells to eavesdrop on prisoners. These fused regimes of sonic and visual surveillance were only made possible through concrete material forms configured in highly specific ways. The panopticon as dispositif illustrates Foucault’s sense of how the power–matter interface relies on affects. It is not designed to influence prisoners at the level of thoughts and ideas. There’s no attention paid to persuasion. The prisoners are not given books, nor are they subject to moralizing lectures insisting on the urgent need for reform. They’re not even made to understand their incarceration as an awful consequence of earlier bad actions that they would do well to avoid in the future. Instead, a distinct material configuration enfolds them, enmeshes them, and rewires their affective circuitry. They are dyed in the wool by the machine. The prisoner comes to feel differently, to navigate the world using a different set of intuitive coordinates. Through a material implement, the panopticon surgically operates on the prisoner’s affects. In being “subjected to a field of visibility,” the inmate makes power “play spontaneously upon himself” (202), both “spectacle” and “enclosed” forms of punishment, then, rely on objects. They are different formations of power, but nonetheless similarly dependent on their proper assemblages of bodies, ideas, space, and things. When Foucault turns to the history of sexuality a few years later, he once again thematizes architecture—of schools and hospitals, for instance—as a conduit for power relations in excess of discourse: “one can have the impression that sex was hardly spoken of at all in these institutions,” he writes, “but one only has to glance over the architectural layout, the rules of discipline, and their whole internal organization: the question of sex was a constant preoccupation” (1990, 27). By configuring the distances and proximities between bodies, what was seen and said and by whom, the process of fashioning sexualized subjectivities was not just discursive but structural. The work, Foucault tells us, was done by “the builders” (28). Dispositifs reticulate words, walls, books, ideas, objects, and architecture to project power; material configurations are indispensable tools to rearrange the affects making subjects. Part II: Monument Theory From Foucault to New Materialism Foucault’s work sets the stage for innovations in contemporary theory that advance a nonliberal approach to the monument controversies—like affect theory and the New Materialisms—while also providing untapped resources that can help develop those conversations further. The remainder of this essay will build these links, reviewing sources that have drawn on Foucault’s work to address affect (understood as subjectforming impressions) and ceremony (understood as materiality)—and their implications 10 11 for analyzing the dispositif of Confederate monuments. New Materialist thinking emerges, in part, out of innovations in science and technology studies. Anthropologist Bruno Latour, for instance, connects a set of Foucauldian concerns to his studies of “laboratory life” 10 (1999, 192). Extending his conclusions to other kinds of organizations, he argues that they do not “succeed in constructing a social relation solidly established on discipline, on verbal coercion, on printed notices, on warnings or the gentleness of customs” (2000, 19). Discipline requires not just discourse, but a careful configuration of material elements. He notes that for Foucault “discipline is impracticable without steel, without the wood of the door, without the bolt of the locks” (19). The artifacts that comprise a dispositif each bring with them an irreducible horizon of action that makes their collective functioning possible. This leads to Latour’s new take on scientific knowledge-production as an effect of an ecology of artifacts. He reframes science as the mobilization of assemblages or networks of objects that bring undisclosed features of the world into view in novel ways. Because the material elements of these dispositifs—microscopes, petri dishes, centrifuges—are irreducibly necessary to the thresholds of knowledge reached, Latour argues that we need to think of them as having a form of agency. 11 (1999, 180). This is knowledge-production not as the operation of a detached mind staring at the world but as a concert of human and nonhuman forces. Reflecting Foucault’s field model of power, the liberal divide between subject and object devolves into a heterogeneous complex of “trajectories and dispatches, paths and trails” (2000, 12). This, in turn, becomes the template for Latour’s understanding of power, underwriting his commitment to examining the elements of each political dispositif not just in terms of human actors, but also material forms—“beautiful shapes, elegant silhouettes, heroic statues” (2005, 38). Later New Materialist authors like Jane Bennett extend this insight. Like Latour, she worries that our understanding of political action in the Western humanist tradition lapses too quickly into a liberal binary frame of subjects and objects (2010, x). She argues that the relegation of artifacts to the realm of the politically inert has skewed efforts to theorize politics by rendering invisible the vast material networks that define the openings and constraints determining human activity. Her alternative suggestion is to consider what she calls “thing-power”—to “attend to the it as actant” (3). Each of these actants has its own capacity to project force in the world, making and remaking frames of power. But what Bennett and Latour neglect is attention to how these objects become reticulated into systems of power that are not just enacted, but felt. Affect is a key concept for Bennett in elaborating thing-power, but she means it in an exclusively nonfelt sense (Bennett 2010, xii). She invokes Spinoza’s use of “affect” as “that which affects bodies,” where “body” means literally any material thing—living or not (31; see also Deleuze 1988). There are advantages to this approach, but it overlooks the specificity of living bodies as nodes of experience—as feeling, desiring, responding things. For Latour, as well, his artful personification of objects is a necessary correction (2000, 19), but also one that zeroes out the possibility of incorporating embodied emotions into networks (Schaefer 2023). This steers us away from approaching “affect” as the horizon of experience and feeling. 11 12 Although Foucault is wary of any vocabulary redolent of a psychic interior— reiterating his deep-seated hostility to psychology and phenomenology (Foucault 1980a)—he nonetheless clearly indexes affect, feeling, and experience when he talks about how material objects like scaffolds and prisons articulate bodies to formations of power. When objects meet bodies, they produce pleasure, fear, exhilaration, paranoia, or other changes in disposition that reconfigure the junction between bodies and power. The scaffold is a megaphone of terror. Discipline is about changing the field of feelings around (living) bodies and so reconfiguring their actions. Inanimate objects may be actants, but they can’t be disciplined. The ambition of the panopticon is not to transform the way cots, cell doors, bars, uniforms, sinks, toilets, plates, and cups act in the world. Similarly, Confederate monuments are of high interest to human observers, but their thing-power is null to sidewalks, streetlamps, and park benches. Highlighting the capacity of Foucault’s thought for understanding material culture and power means keeping the felt conjunction between a dispositif and a breathing, pulsing body at the forefront of our analysis—reckoning with both affect and ceremony. This means assessing “bodies” not in the abstract Spinozist sense of all physical things but as sentient, feeling creatures. The horizon of acting, thinking, and experiencing is a single continuum. The Affective Dispositif This leads us to another field of contemporary thought influenced by Foucault—affect theory. Affect theory is a profoundly multiform field, with different strains of scholarship pointing to different definitions of the term “affect” itself (including Bennett’s Spinozist sense of the word, as a property of any physical thing). I have elsewhere proposed considering these as different “dialects” and specifically argued against those dialects that are strongly influenced by Gilles Deleuze’s emphasis on affect as “becoming.” 12 It’s beyond the scope of this piece to relitigate these debates, but my approach here will follow a dialect of affect theory closely associated with queer theorist Eve Sedgwick—who explicitly aligns her work with Foucault’s approach to power while sidestepping Deleuze’s rigid definition of affect as becoming (2003, 114). Sedgwick, like the New Materialists, rejects the liberal binarism that sharply separates subjects and objects. Instead, she insists on seeing objects and subjects as a fully integrated continuum, mediated by feeling. She proposes that we “address aspects of experience and reality that do not present themselves in propositional or even in verbal form alongside others that do, rather than submit to the apparent common sense that requires a strict separation between the two,” while also refusing to “subsum[e] nonverbal aspects of reality firmly under the aegis of the linguistic” (6). In this interpretation of affect theory, we’re made subjects not just through the sedimentation of words and concepts but through the accretion of affects in our bodies, triggered by things in the world (including words and concepts) that mold our habits, dispositions, and actions (62). Sedgwick sometimes uses the term “object” in an expansive sense tinged by the psychoanalytic context—really as any kind of attachment. 13 But in her final work, she fleshes out an account of affects and real, touchable objects. The work of Marcel Proust, she notes, captures this exquisitely. What she calls a “Proustian atmosphere” is an 12 13 affectively saturated space in which objects, people, and places all serve as overflowing nodes of feeling (2011, 6). Scholars working on affect in this dialect have directly addressed how Confederate monuments operate as affective loci. Erika Doss argues that the production of monuments is concentrated in bursts—periods of “mania”—such as the “statue mania” of the early twentieth century. This was, Doss writes, “symptomatic of turn-of-thetwentieth-century anxieties about national unity, anxieties unleashed by the rapid advance of modernism, immigration, and mass culture” (27). The production of publics through material culture is a response to these volatile political transformations. Doss, like Foucault, challenges the liberal position by paying attention to public memorials and monuments not as information, but as “archives of public affect, ‘repositories of feelings and emotions’ that are embodied in their material form and narrative content” (13). They are not simply discursive effects. Material culture shapes the public sphere—and the bodies within it—by conducting affects. 14 However, Doss’s approach sometimes understates the complexity of the contesting forces that surround these objects. For instance, she writes that the spurt of statue mania in the US from the 1870s to the 1920s was a response to the “divisiveness of the Civil War,” creating a thirst for public sculpture that “not only embellished the postbellum public landscape but encouraged passionate and consensual understandings of nationhood” (20; see also Johnson 1995, 63). Although helpful in calling attention to the affective elements of material culture, this approach understates the way public culture unfolds as an agonism or struggle of competing priorities, particularly around race. Confederate monuments were part of a white supremacist dispositif, a technology by which one group asserted its dominance over another. As Vann Newkirk writes, Confederate monuments “were built in waves that corresponded to the creation of the ‘Solid South’ and backlashes against black political power” (Newkirk 2017). Many monument-building campaigns emerge in similar circumstances, both fractional and agenda-driven, designed to amplify one group’s claim on the public sphere at the expense of others. Examples used by Doss—like the monuments constructed by the Nazis in Germany or the Baath Party in Iraq, all demolished by American military occupiers—are efforts not just to collectively “build a nation” but to claim turf. Doss’s approach inadvertently downplays the fractionalism of public material culture—and in particular the weaponization of a monumental dispositif by white supremacists against Black citizens during the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and civil rights eras. A more textured response comes from a subfield that merges affect theory and New Materialism, what Jennifer Ladino calls “affective ecocriticism.” In her book Memorials Matter, Ladino sets out to better understand the relationship between feeling, subjectivity, and materiality by reflecting on the commemorative sites operated by the U.S. National Park Service. Like Doss, she marks her goal as “to consider how the physical environment makes people feel things, how it shapes the ‘flows’ of . . . affects at NPS sites” (xi). While affirming, with Bennett and Latour, the actancy of nonhuman entities, she focuses not just on the way they push other pieces of matter around, but the way they trigger feelings in bodies—and thereby reticulate those bodies into formations of power (16). 13 14 Crucially, Ladino is especially interested in the way monuments and memorials produce not just a feeling, but varieties of feeling. The contents of a commemorative park—vivid backdrop, memorial objects, text of official park publications and signage— produce a complex agonism of affects. And these sites feel differently for different visitors (197). Lakota Sioux visiting the disfigured Six Grandfathers mountain, also known as Mount Rushmore, experience that space in a way that is vastly out of sync with the feelings of settler-colonists (3). Concurring with the Charlottesville petition that was the catalyst for the Unite the Right riots, Ladino notes that the Lee statue was experienced very differently by Black Americans than by non-Blacks (266). Sara Ahmed, another affect theorist who connects Foucault with phenomenological philosophy, thinks about this in terms of the politics of orientation. The question for her is how objects are arranged in such a way as to feel aligned or misaligned for different bodies. The felt sense of belonging, of membership in a community, of being welcome in a space, is constituted by the material components of dispositifs (15). Rather than making a nation, singular, monuments broadcast different affects for different bodies, and these shape the political contours of the publics that crop up around them. Confederate Monuments as Dispositif How can this attention to power–matter–affect help us better understand the dispositif within which Confederate monuments operate? Mbembe’s work offers an especially elegant exploration of these concerns with respect to monuments. Fanon—Mbembe’s touchstone for thinking about materiality—was acutely concerned with how the affective dimensions of material culture reinforced colonial regimes. He describes the colonial world as a “world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues: the statue of the general who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A world cocksure of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip” (Fanon 2004, 15). Colonial power, Fanon insists, manifests not just as a regime of violence backed up by soldiers, police, prisons, and weapons, but a regime of degradation that breaks the spirit of the colonized through constant frustration and humiliation (149). Demeaning the history of the colonized and ostentatiously elevating the colonizers is the key ingredient—hence decolonization demands transformation of public material culture (155; see also Mbembe 2019, “Introduction”). Mbembe develops this line of thinking, writing that “this power structure depended on a phantasmagoric mechanism without which each repetition of the founding colonial gesture was bound to fail” (2017, 106). Power, for Mbembe as for Foucault, necessarily includes a material component—the inscription of the traces of colonial domination on the space of the colony. And like Foucault, this is not just power conveyed by force of arms: Fanon documents the material establishment of colonial publics through “stoniness”—statues and monuments (2004, 15). Flooding a colony with towering sculptures produces a field of power not just by transfiguring space but by infiltrating bodies and seeping into the imagination of the colonized. Mbembe diagnoses this as an ongoing regime of terror. A constant material replication of the bodies of colonial overseers—in bronze, marble, or granite—is 14 15 meant to ensure that both murder and cruelty, which the dead personify, continue to haunt the memories of the ex-colonized, to saturate their imaginary and the spaces of their lives. . . . The statues function as rituals that conjure dead men in whose eyes Black humanity counted for nothing, which was reason enough for their lack of scruples at spilling Black blood over a trifle. (2017, 128) Similarly, Mbembe notes that sacred sites from the precolonial period—such as the tombs of dead kings—were desecrated and leveled by colonizers (2017, 126). All of these actions, Mbembe proposes, draw on the insight that to endure, a form of domination must not only inscribe itself on the bodies of its subjects but also leave its imprint on the spaces that they inhabit as indelible traces on the imaginary. . . . The potentate must inhabit its subjects in such a manner that the latter can no longer see, hear, smell, touch, stir, speak, move, imagine, or even dream except in reference to the master signifier that weights over them, forcing them to stutter and falter. (127) The panopticon watches. But the colony forces the colonized to watch. The new dispositif occupying the sensory landscape reconfigures the play of affects that circulate in that space. And this is part of the process of commandeering the fields of power that operate there. A similar line of analysis has been explored by Black American commentators since the Civil War, who have been consistent critics of the use of material culture to glorify white supremacists and degrade Black bodies through the cult of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. A Black journalist relayed the reaction of an elderly Black man watching the Lee statue rise on Monument Avenue in 1890: “The Southern white folks is on top—the Southern white folks is on top” (151). In “Growing up in the Shadow of the Confederacy,” an autobiographical essay published a few months after the New Orleans removals and ten days after the Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville, Vann Newkirk writes that public material culture below Mason-Dixon—obelisks, statues, memorials, and flags commemorating the Confederacy—often creates a sort of shared hallucination, in which the hazy glory of the Old South sticks to everything. “Plantations might as well have been wonders of the world, and old battlefields holy places,” he writes. “Part of living in the South, just as much as eating and breathing were, was partaking in a perpetual reenactment” (Newkirk). Newkirk considers a statue on a victory column in his North Carolina hometown, dedicated a century earlier, according to a plaque at its base, to the glory of ordinary Confederate soldiers. The statue was a daily presence in his life, welded to the material landscape, reminding him he “lived in occupied territory” (Newkirk). It was, he notes, “built two years after the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan and during a period of intensifying race riots and lynchings nationwide. As Jim Crow sub-citizens, black folks could not vote to stop the onslaught of the granite memorials, and they faced crossburnings and lynchings for daring to speak out against the projects” (Newkirk; emphasis added). In Charlottesville, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on a nearby hilltop and paraded through the streets in May 1924 in the run-up to the unveiling of the Lee monument. 15 These monuments served as vectors of feeling, relay points in a dispositif of power–matter–affect. They were sophisticated instruments to consolidate the joy, dignity, and confidence of whites in their ownership of the public sphere—and implicitly or 15 16 explicitly to marginalize and demoralize Black bystanders. Just like the panopticon and the scaffold, they performed a disciplining function, terraforming the subjectivity of bodies moving through their atmosphere. From this perspective, the liberal contextualist position shows serious cracks. To “recontextualize” objects that incant their power to degrade and depress by virtue of their grandeur, mass, height, rigidity, and thickness is to mistake material culture for information. Newkirk writes that “for my white classmates who wore Confederate flag shirts to class, even as they assured me that ‘I’m not racist,’ the idea that one could celebrate the heritage without the hate held currency.” But his own conclusion is that “it is not possible to both worship at the altar of the Confederacy and fight for the liberation of people like me.” What Newkirk is identifying is precisely how a particular discourse— even a set of ardently affirmed discursive commitments to, say, anti-racism—is contradicted by the materiality of the “altar of the Confederacy.” The affective resonances of victory columns, equestrian bronzes, vividly colorful battle flags, and Confederate soldiers in ready position broadcast on a frequency both above and below the juridicodiscursive. An artifact of degradation can’t be so easily debated with point–counterpoint. A material Foucauldian approach that emphasizes how material dispositifs traffic affects is better able to map the acute political contests that converge on these artifacts. Conclusion: Rearranging the Monumental Dispositif Before its removal in the final weeks of the summer of 2021, the Robert E. Lee statue on Richmond’s Monument Avenue was transformed by protestors into a very different kind of object. Covered in paint and slogans, it became the scene of performances by Black dancers and artists, memorials to victims of police violence, light displays projecting antiracist writings, a community vegetable garden, and a neighborhood basketball court. The Lee sculpture itself—too high to be accessed by climbers—sported bursts of color from a paintball gun. The transfigured monument inverted what Eve Sedgwick might call the “visceral, operatic power” of the equestrian bronze, repurposing it as a new kind of affective beacon: an anti-racist dispositif to knock down white supremacy (2011, 66). In Ahmed’s language, it changed the parameters of who felt oriented in space. Efforts to render statues as three-dimensional “speech” sidestep the affective power of public material culture. The liberal stance endorses the continued maintenance of Confederate monuments on the grounds of their intrinsic value for the purposes of education or as a kind of information that must be protected from “censorship.” In the process, this perspective misses the capacity of material objects to conduct affects in ways that supersede liberal framings of politics as composed by reasoned debate in a fundamentally linguistic public sphere. But thinking outside liberalism is harder than it seems. One challenge is the lack of vocabulary for explaining the effects of material things—a vocabulary that can assess the rapid, rough impacts of monuments not only on thought but on bodies, affects, and sensory life. Foucault’s dispositif makes intelligible the shaping of fields of power by material culture. His approach washes out the binary frameworks that have structured so much thinking on power—not just the binary of the sovereign liberal subject set against external forces, but the binary of discourse and matter. Even speech is not just speech. It, too, has material-affective form. What Donna 16 17 Haraway called the “material-semiotic node”—an analytic lens that locates information and objects on a single interactive plane—can be productively reframed as the material– affective–semiotic node (200). This is the theater of the dispositif. Foucault’s call is for a 360-degree picture of power–matter–affect operating through multiple channels and across multiple layers. The aesthetic response to the statues, the cognitive response, the affective response, and the political response converge in a single field of fluid interactions. To flatten statues to the semiotic register is to misunderstand what they do, how they fix dispositifs, how they lure bodies into assemblages of power by evoking—compelling—affects. Statues are more than signs. Their effectiveness includes their symbolic dimension but is not reducible to it. As the protesters in Richmond well understood, the operatic power of the Lee statue on its sixtyfoot-high plinth would not be nullified by a plaque. The Swords Into Plowshares project in Charlottesville, with its mission of melting down the Lee statue and recasting it as a new piece of public art, shares the same insight. These interventions aim to transmute these objects, to redirect and rechannel their power, building new dispositifs out of new material forms. Donovan O. Schaefer is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke University Press, 2022). His current research project examines affect and race in public material culture, especially Confederate commemoration. Acknowledgments This essay began in the 2018–2019 Wolf Humanities Center Forum on “Stuff” at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m grateful to all the participants of that seminar for providing invaluable suggestions when I presented a very early version of this essay there, especially Sarah Wasserman, Julie Nelson Davis, and Karen Redrobe. Sarah Weicksel’s excellent response to the paper was especially generative. I’m also grateful for conversations at the 2022 “Learning with Charlottesville” Summer Institute (hosted by the Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia) and at the University of North Carolina Religion and Theory Reading Group, where I had the pleasure of discussing the article with a brilliant group of critics and interpreters. Finally, I’d like to extend thanks to the editors and two anonymous reviewers at Cultural Critique, whose thoughtful comments have markedly improved the piece. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Armus, Teo, and Hadley Green. 2023. “Charlottesville’s Lee Statue Meets Its End, in a 2,250-Degree Furnace.” Washington Post, October 26. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2023/civil-warmonument-melting-robert-e-lee-confederate/ B., Z. “Change the Name of Lee Park and Remove the Statue.” change.org petition. 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Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things.” In Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture, edited by P.M. Graves-Brown, 10–21. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public.” In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 14–43. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Massing, Katharina. 2021. “The UK’s Plan to ‘Retain and Explain’ Problem Monuments Is a Backwards Step.” The Conversation, March 19. https://theconversation.com/statues-the-uks-plan-to-retain-and-explain-problemmonuments-is-a-backwards-step-156430 Maurantonio, Nicole. 2019. Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press. Newkirk, Vann R., II. 2017. “Growing up in the Shadow of the Confederacy.” The Atlantic, August 22. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/growing-up-inthe-shadow-of-the-confederacy/537501/. Peltonen, M. 2004. “From Discourse to Dispositif: Michel Foucault’s Two Histories.” Historical Reflections 30, no. 2:205–219. Pløger, John. 2008. “Foucault’s Dispositif and the City.” Planning Theory 7, no. 1:51–70. Pollard, Edward A. 1890. The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. New and Enlarged Edition. New York: E. B. Treat. Rabinow, Paul. 1995. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 19 20 ———. 2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Savage, Kirk. 1997. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schaefer, Donovan O. 2019. The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2022a. “Rationalist Nostalgia: A Critical Response to Ruth Leys’ The Ascent of Affect.” Capacious 2, no. 4:115–135. ———. 2022b. Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2023. “Feeling Material Culture: Affect, Power, Sensation.” Material Religion 19, no. 1:82–84. Seabrook, Lochlainn. 2018. Confederate Monuments: Why Every American Should Honor Confederate Soldiers and Their Memorials. Nashville, TN: Sea Raven Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2011. The Weather in Proust. Edited by Jonathan Goldberg. Durham: Duke University Press. Shapiro, Gary. 2017. “The Meaning of Our Confederate ‘Monuments.’” New York Times, May 15. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/the-meaning-of-ourconfederate-monuments.html. Smith, Caleb. 2009. The Prison and the American Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Vargas, Therese. 2023. “Lee’s Statue Is Gone. What It Unleashed Remains.” Washington Post, October 28. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/10/28/leestatue-threats-remain-charlottesville/. Woodward, Ian. 2007. Understanding Material Culture. London: SAGE. Notes 1 News of the meltdown triggered a wave of threats directed at the Swords Into Plowshares leadership. (Vargas 2023) Although many Confederate monuments in urban centers have been removed, monuments in rural areas, especially in the Deep South, remain standing. Meanwhile, advocacy groups like Monuments Across Dixie are actively campaigning to raise new Confederate statues and flags, often on privately owned land but in view of the public. 2 Duncan Bell has convincingly argued that “liberalism,” as an analytic and philosophical category, has been applied in different ways to different groupings of ideas over the course of its history, and that in its contemporary usage it is more often advanced as a term of abuse than a precise intellectual taxon. I use “liberalism” here to delimit a narrow set of philosophical parameters, which neglects by design the massive overdetermination of the word in contemporary usage. 3 As I have noted elsewhere, Foucault’s early interest in power–knowledge (1977, 27) was later expanded in History of Sexuality, Vol. I to include attention to “power–knowledge–pleasure” (1990, 11) or what I suggest we can 20 21 productively rename “power–knowledge–affect” (2022b, 58). 4 There is a salient counterargument to this characterization of Foucault as antiliberal, in that Foucault, while pushing back on certain elements of classical liberal philosophy, is also invested in a project of liberation— sometimes phrased in individualistic terms. In “What Is Enlightenment?” for instance, he invokes a “new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.” (Foucault 1984, 46) This has led to criticism of Foucault as a thinker sympathetic to certain aspects of “neoliberalism.” Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora note that Foucault’s fascination with neoliberalism descends from his observation that the neoliberal homo oeconomicus is not a subject defined by innate qualities (a “criminal,” for instance) but an economic maximizer who makes decisions based on advantage in any given moment. (Dean and Zamora, 160) This interest in individual choice (as an aggressive antidote to essentialism) seems to align Foucault with other aspects of “liberalism” broadly conceived, including, as Dean and Zamora note, “opposition to any organized socialist or social democratic project” (235; and see n.2 above). I would respond to this in two ways. First, Foucault is not an immaculately consistent thinker. “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same,” he growls in Archaeology of Knowledge, before adding: “leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order’” (2002, 19). The question is how different elements of his thought can be elevated, elaborated, and applied to different problems. Equally important, however, is to note that Foucault is himself working out the paradoxes of his own thought. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes, Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. I, for instance, is ultimately a book “divided against itself in what it wanted from its broad, almost infinitely ramified and subtle critique of the repressive hypothesis” (2003, 10) affirming the importance of a multilateral model of power in Parts I through IV but retrenching in a basically top-down picture of power as state-driven “biopolitics” in Part V. Reading Foucault as antiliberal is, I would argue, ultimately a more productive interpretation of the broader currents of his thought, but there are undoubtedly strands of his oeuvre that could be drawn in the opposite direction. 5 Foucault repeatedly emphasized, in his late writings, that he worried about the tendency to interpret power as strictly top-down that had been superimposed on his early work (1999, 162; Foucault 1984, 245). 6 But see also Rabinow 1995, which thematizes the relationship between power and urban planning. 7 An inventory of other objects that prefigure the analysis of dispositifs in Foucault’s work would include the ships carrying the mad in Madness and Civilization (1961); the painting “Las Meninas” in The Order of Things (1973); the “silent world of the entrails” in Birth of the Clinic (2003, xi); public baths as “cathedrals of pleasure” in “Space, Knowledge, and Power” (1984); the hypomnemata notebooks in the final “On the Genealogy of Ethics” interview (1984); classroom desks arranged in rows in “The Mesh of Power” (2012); and the reflection on Clement’s “regimen”—“the manner of drinking . . . luxury in furnishings . . . talk about perfumes and crowns, then shoes . . . then diamonds”—in the opening chapter of Confessions of the Flesh. (2021, 9). 8 This is not the same as the “exhibitionary complex” proposed by Tony Bennett, in which the display of objects makes bodies into reflective, self-governing subjects (76). That framing presupposes that the cardinal thing we do when we look at objects is “think” about them. It is exactly this intellectualized model of subjects, I suggest, 21 22 that Foucault’s dispositif concept steers us away from. 9 In 2016, the final prisoners were transferred from one of the only panopticon units in the United States, Stateville Correctional Center’s “roundhouse,” originally constructed in 1922. According to prison reform advocate Jennifer Vollen-Katz, the design of the prison wing led to an open echo chamber in which every sound reverberated through the room, creating a “sensory nightmare” (Eldeib). The failure of the panopticon model, then, lay in its inability to manage the sonic relay system created by open plan incarceration. The lack of partitions, doors, and corridors converted the room into a torture chamber. 10 See Woodward, 13. 11 To differentiate these networked material agents from autonomous agents in the classical sense, Latour renames them actants. This reconstitution of the locus of agency in actancy fragments Enlightenment models of the self as a sovereign agent, so it would be misleading to stress a binary frame of agents/actants, though that’s sometimes how Latour seems to talk about it. 12 Schaefer 2019; Schaefer 2022a. 13 This is the sense deployed by Melanie Klein, for instance. 14 So, too, does language, by conducting affects, leave its own warping effect on the public sphere. This is just as invisible to the liberal perspective as the shaping force of material culture. 15 City of Charlottesville, “Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, Report to City Council (December 19, 2016),” 121, http://blairhawkins.net/RH/2016BRCReport.pdf 22