Problemstellung
When the Politics and Analytics of Race Collide

The scientific mind forbids us to have an opinion on questions that we do not understand, on questions that we do not know how to formulate clearly. Above all, one must know how to pose problems. And, whatever one might say, in scientific life, problems do not pose themselves. It is precisely this sense of the problem that is the hallmark of the true scientific mind. For a scientific mind, all knowledge is a response to a question. If there was no question, there cannot be scientific knowledge. Nothing is taken for granted. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed.

Gaston Bachelard, La Formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1938

Race everywhere, race all the time, race über alles. Accelerating since the turn of the century, a seemingly epochal shift in academic and public debate has taken place devaluing class and valorizing race, gender, and sexuality as principles of social vision and division, analytic categories, and foundations for civic claims-making.1 Battles over the social organization of production and economic redistribution have been overshadowed, if not entirely displaced, by struggles for the recognition and promotion of embodied identities, ascribed by nature or fashioned by culture. The (re)discovery of the historical horrors and contemporary ramifications of Western colonialism, the excavation of the branching consequences of transatlantic slavery in the longue durée and the acceleration of non-Western immigration in countries of the global North have solidified this shift. The diligent denunciation of racism, deemed "institutional" or "structural," and of its insidious effects has become de rigueur and "diversity" is now celebrated and promoted, not only by universities, but also by the media, corporations, governments, transnational organizations, politicians, and citizens' associations, creating a vibrant market for a new cadre of diversity consultants.2 The proliferation of legislation, conventions, and administrative apparatuses entrusted with detecting and fighting ethnoracial discrimination in the European Union and, a contrario, the growing electoral appeal of racialized populism across the continent all attest to the burning urgency of the question.3 But how are we to make sense of the protean, slippery, yet seemingly self-evident reality of "race" that claims such priority in academic attention and civic energy?

Sociological reset: epistemology, methodology, theory

The present book takes heed of these trends and troubles and seeks to assemble the building blocks of a neo-Bourdieusian theory of racial domination as a relation of symbolic violence and material encasement. It draws on Pierre Bourdieu's genetic structuralism and its derivative, the agonistic theory of group-making, to develop an analytic of race-making, that is, a parsimonious set of interlinked categories designed to help us parse the "race question." In a nutshell, it pours cold analytical water onto a hot topic in the hope that we can thus reformulate it on paper so as to better advance toward its resolution in historical reality.4

This approach stems from the observation that, to a degree unmatched in other domains of social inquiry, the politics of race gravely skew the analytics of race. Consider the mandate to denounce the phenomenon under scrutiny in the terms of the current political debate (and the more vitriolic the denunciation, the better);5 the propensity to drown it in an endless flow of moral emotions; the near-exclusive focus on groups mobilized in the national political and academic fields (to the neglect of other categories that remain invisible); the exportation of US-based categories and problematics around the globe regardless of the configuration of racial division in the receiving country; the race to discover race where others failed to detect it, leading to endless historical regress (from the modern era to feudalism to antiquity) and relentless geographical annexation (of countries where ethnoracial divides are blurred or faint); the urge to celebrate subordinate categories (their agency, creativity, and resistance), or the common presumption that members of racialized populations are endowed with a special sociological perspicuity and even unique insights into the foundations of racial inequality (as opposed to its phenomenology).6 To be sure, some of these postulations, turns of thinking, and civic commitments can energize research and serve the requirements of creative social inquiry as well as public engagement.7 But, all too often, they adulterate "this sense of the problem" that Gaston Bachelard saw as "the hallmark of the true scientific mind," and by crimping social inquiry they risk curtailing the historical possibilities for transforming the realities of "race" on the ground.

This book rests on the conviction that, to parse ethnoracial domination, we need an infusion of epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, historical depth, and geographical breadth more than we need yet more excited expressions of moral fervor and chaste vows to pursue racial justice, a topic to which I return in the conclusion to this volume. We need a fundamental analytical reset - a new Problemstellung that derails accepted ways of studying "race and racism" or "race and ethnicity" (in the most common designation), dissolves long-standing issues, and generates fresh questions and novel empirical insights.

To articulate this agenda, I draw on three thinkers: the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard, the German legal scholar and political economist Max Weber, and the sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Bachelard's tow, I follow the precepts of historical rationalism, which holds that scientific knowledge proceeds through rupture with common sense and involves, not the discovery of ready-made "facts" waiting to be "collected" in reality, but their construction by the controlled deployment of theoretical and technical instruments.8 From Max Weber, I borrow the characterization of ethnic and status groups as collectivities rooted in "positive or negative estimations of honor," the concept of closure referring to strategies aimed at restricting the life chances of subordinate categories, and the methodological device of the ideal type as means for "univocal communication."9 Lastly, I draw on Bourdieu's theory of social space and symbolic power as the institutionalized capacity to impose cognitive categories of construction of the social world and his genetic sociology of classification struggles through which agents strive to impose those categories and shape the social world accordingly.10 Let me then provide the rudiments of the epistemology, methodology, and theory that undergird my analytical endeavor.

1. Bachelard's historical epistemology

This book is grounded in the "historical epistemology" of Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, and Georges Canguilhem, elaborated during the period 1928-68, based on studies in the history of the physical, astronomical, and life sciences respectively, and imported into the social sciences by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.11 This philosophy of science diverges sharply from the two epistemological traditions that have historically dominated Anglo-American social science and the continental Geisteswissenschaften, namely, positivism and hermeneutics. It asserts an unshakeable faith in the creative powers of reason and in scientific progress through rupture and discontinuity, what Bachelard calls surrationalisme.12

Bachelard's revolutionary approach to knowledge formation starts from the premise that epistemology must be grounded in the history of scientific practices and not in a priori principles. It must familiarize itself with work in the laboratory to grasp science as the concrete mating of thought and experiment, reason and reality, concept and percept, which varies with each discipline. This work is collective; it is the task of a community of inquirers and it requires what Bachelard calls "the union of the laborers of proof." Anticipating many of the ideas later popularized by Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms,13 historical epistemology conceives truth as "error rectified" in an endless effort to dissolve the prenotions born of ordinary and scholarly common sense. It proposes that science advances, not through the encyclopedic accumulation of facts, but through discontinuities by constantly questioning its own foundations to foster the emancipation of the mind from previous scientific conceptions. Equally distant from theoretical formalism and from empiricist operationalism, idealism and realism, it teaches that facts are necessarily suffused with theory, that laws are but "momentarily stabilized hypotheses" (in the words of Canguilhem), and that rational knowledge progresses through a polemical process of collective argumentation and reciprocal control. Moreover, epistemology takes sides: it is the judge which "passes judgment on the past of knowledge and the knowledge of the past."14

Canguilhem singles out three axioms at the center of Bachelard's thought: "the...