The history of the U.S. ethnic and women’s studies protests presents the transition from economic, epistemological, and political stability to the pos­sibility for revolutionary social ruptures and subjectivities. For instance, the San Francisco State student strikes of 1969 advocated a “Third World revolution” that would displace and provide an alternative to racial in­ equality on that campus. That same year, 269 similar protests erupted across the country. 3 At Rutgers, black students took over the main educa­tional building, renaming it “Liberation Hall.” At the University of Texas at Austin, a student organization called Afro Americans for Black Libera­tion “insisted on converting the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to a black studies building and renaming it for Malcolm X.” 4 Inspired by the black power movement, Chicano students would also form “the United Mexican American Students, the Mexican American Student Associa­tion, and MECha, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, while oth­ ers in San Antonio founded the Mexican American Youth Organization, MAYO.” 5 Those students would also begin to demand Chicano studies courses and departments. Similarly, in 1969 American Indian activists took over Alcatraz Island and claimed it as Indian territory, with hopes of building a cultural center and museum. 6 And in 1970, the first women’s studies programs would be established at San Diego State University and at SUNY-Buffalo. While the state governments in California and Wisconsin called out the National Guard on students advocating for ethnic studies, systems of power also responded to these protests by attempting to manage that transition, in an attempt to prevent economic, epistemological, and political crises from achieving revolutions that could redistribute social and material relations. Instead, those systems would work to ensure that these crises were recomposed back into state, capital, and academy. Whereas modes of power once disciplined difference in the universalizing names of canon­icity, nationality, or economy, other operations of power were emerging that would discipline through a seemingly alternative regard for difference and through a revision of the canon, national identity, and the market. This theorization of power converges with and diverges from Foucault’s own observations, converging with him through an emphasis on the strate­gic nature of power relations. For instance, recall his argument about power in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, where he argues for power’s “intentional and nonsubjective” nature. 7 According to Foucault, whatever intelligibility power relations may possess, it “is not because they are the effect of another instance that ‘explains’ them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation.” 8 Elaborating on the strategic but nonindividualized character of power, Foucault wrote that “there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objec­tives. But this does not mean it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject.” 9 The Reorder of Things builds on this element of Foucault’s theorization by looking at how state, capital, and academy saw minority insurgence as a site of calculation and strategy, how those institutions began to see minority difference and culture as positivities that could be part of their own “series of aims and objectives.” As formations increasingly character­ized by the presence of minority difference, state, capital, and academy— in different but intersecting ways— began to emerge as hegemonic processes that were “especially alert and responsive to the alternatives and opposi­tions which [questioned] or [threatened their] dominance.” 10 Hence, this book looks at the diverse but interlocking ways in which state, capital, and academy produced an adaptive hegemony where minority difference was concerned. In keeping with Foucault, the book eschews an individualized notion of power, preferring instead to regard power as a complex and multisited social formation. Rather than being embodied in an individual or a group, power— Foucault says— is a set of relations in which “the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them.” 11 In this book, the impersonal nature of power is derived from the ways in which hegemonic investments in minority difference and culture are distrib­uted across institutional and subjective terrains during and after the period of social unrest, terrains such as universities and colleges, corporations, social movements, media, and state practices. The book also uses the category “power” in the spirit of Foucault’s own implicit belief that complex situations deserve a name. Even though the name is ill-fitting, it is the “closest [we] can get to it.” 12 Addressing the cat­achresis called power, Foucault says, “power establishes,” “power invests,” “power takes hold.” 13 Furthermore, in his description of biopower, he writes, “Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied to the level of life itself.” 14 For Foucault, power becomes like a character in a story, a code name for the “multiplicity of force relations.” 15 Like Fou­cault, I use power as shorthand for a plurality of relations, arguing that if power is the “name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society,” 16 then power in the age of minority social movements becomes the new name for calculating and arranging minority difference. While The Reorder of Things attempts to rigorously attend to how dominant modes of power in the post– World War II moment utilized minority difference, the book does not reduce the “the political and cul­ ural initiatives” of the social movements— those grand champions of minority culture— to the terms of hegemony. Indeed, as part of its own archival investigation, the book attempts to unearth those elements of the social movements that were antagonistic to the terms of hegemony, giving attention to how university and presidential administrations in the sixties attempted to beguile minorities with promises of excellence and uplift. Thus, as part of its investigation of the changing networks of power, the book analyzes how dominant institutions attempted to reduce the initiatives of oppositional movements to the terms of hegemony. This book diverges from Foucault as it takes racial formations as the genealogy of power’s investment in various forms of minority difference and culture while extending Foucault’s emphasis on the productive— and not simply the repressive— capacities of power. From the social movements of the fifties and sixties until the present day, networks of power have at­ tempted to work through and with minority difference and culture, trying to redirect originally insurgent formations and deliver them to the norma­tive ideals and protocols of state, capital, and academy. In this new strategic situation, hegemonic power denotes the disembodied and abstract promo­tion of minority representation without fully satisfying the material and social redistribution of minoritized subjects, particularly where people of color are concerned. One of the central claims of this book, then, is that the struggles taking place on college campuses because of the student pro­tests were inspirations for power in that moment, inspiring it to substitute redistribution for representation, indeed encouraging us to forget how rad­ical movements promoted the inseparability of the two.
The history of the U.S. ethnic and women’s studies protests presents the transition from economic, epistemological, and political stability to the pos­sibility for revolutionary social ruptures and subjectivities. the San Francisco State student strikes of 1969 advocated a “Third World revolution” that would displace and provide an alternative to racial in­ equality on that campus. That same year, 269 similar protests erupted across the country. 3 At Rutgers, black students took over the main educa­tional building, renaming it “Liberation Hall.” a student organization called Afro Americans for Black Libera­tion “insisted on converting the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to a black studies building and renaming it for Malcolm X.” in 1970, the first women’s studies programs would be established at San Diego State University and at SUNY-Buffalo. While the state governments in California and Wisconsin called out the National Guard on students advocating for ethnic studies, systems of power also responded to these protests by attempting to manage that transition, in an attempt to prevent economic, epistemological, and political crises from achieving revolutions that could redistribute social and material relations. those systems would work to ensure that these crises were recomposed back into state, capital, and academy. modes of power once disciplined difference in the universalizing names of canon­icity, nationality, or economy, other operations of power were emerging that would discipline through a seemingly alternative regard for difference and through a revision of the canon, national identity, and the market. This theorization of power converges with and diverges from Foucault’s own observations, converging with him through an emphasis on the strate­gic nature of power relations. recall his argument about power in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, where he argues for power’s “intentional and nonsubjective” nature. whatever intelligibility power relations may possess, it “is not because they are the effect of another instance that ‘explains’ them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation.” there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objec­tives. But this does not mean it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject.” The Reorder of Things builds on this element of Foucault’s theorization by looking at how state, capital, and academy saw minority insurgence as a site of calculation and strategy, how those institutions began to see minority difference and culture as positivities that could be part of their own “series of aims and objectives.” As formations increasingly character­ized by the presence of minority difference, state, capital, and academy— in different but intersecting ways— began to emerge as hegemonic processes that were “especially alert and responsive to the alternatives and opposi­tions which [questioned] or [threatened their] dominance.” , this book looks at the diverse but interlocking ways in which state, capital, and academy produced an adaptive hegemony where minority difference was concerned. , the book eschews an individualized notion of power, preferring instead to regard power as a complex and multisited social formation. Rather than being embodied in an individual or a group, power— Foucault says— is a set of relations in which “the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them.” the impersonal nature of power is derived from the ways in which hegemonic investments in minority difference and culture are distrib­uted across institutional and subjective terrains during and after the period of social unrest, terrains such as universities and colleges, corporations, social movements, media, and state practices. power establishes,” “power invests,” “power takes hold.” Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied to the level of life itself.” power becomes like a character in a story, a code name for the “multiplicity of force relations.” if power is the “name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society,” 16 then power in the age of minority social movements becomes the new name for calculating and arranging minority difference. the book attempts to unearth those elements of the social movements that were antagonistic to the terms of hegemony, giving attention to how university and presidential administrations in the sixties attempted to beguile minorities with promises of excellence and uplift. dominant institutions attempted to reduce the initiatives of oppositional movements to the terms of hegemony. , networks of power have at­ tempted to work through and with minority difference and culture, trying to redirect originally insurgent formations and deliver them to the norma­tive ideals and protocols of state, capital, and academy. , hegemonic power denotes the disembodied and abstract promo­tion of minority representation without fully satisfying the material and social redistribution of minoritized subjects, particularly where people of color are concerned. the struggles taking place on college campuses because of the student pro­tests were inspirations for power in that moment, inspiring it to substitute redistribution for representation, indeed encouraging us to forget how rad­ical movements promoted the inseparability of the two.