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Following Foucault’s analysis of a dispositif, this thesis proposes an analysis of race and racism at the level of dispositif, which may be characterised as the dispositif of race, or perhaps better, of raciality. By the term ‘raciality’, I emphasise that race throughout this thesis is treated as a process of becoming, and accordingly attempt to articulate the practices and processes of racialisation. My emphasis here is to clarify the point that the term ‘race’ seems rather limited to capture these practices and processes because it affirms a static object called ‘race’ while being so fragile in its definition. I have already suggested that classificatory fingerprinting should not be understood as a technology of classification of race but that of racialisation of social groups. That is to say, the biological knowledge of race in the tradition of nineteenth- century physical anthropology is only an element of raciality. Race understood at the level of raciality captures elements that produce the conditions of possibility for the category called race to emerge. These elements include the concept of barbarism, criminality, and backwardness, the physiological characteristics such as skin colour and fingerprints, and so on, that are not by themselves equivalent to race but constitute it as such.

More concretely, the thesis’s concern here follows the line of Foucault’s emphasis on sexuality rather than sex. During the process of drafting The Will to Knowledge, Foucault initially thought, “sex was taken as a pre-given datum, and sexuality figured as a sort of simultaneously discursive and institutional formation which came to graft itself on to sex, to overlay it and perhaps finally obscure it” (Foucault 1980: 210). Soon, however, he found this formulation problematic and accordingly inverted the relation: sex is something that is produced by the dispositif of sexuality (Foucault 1980: 210). Accordingly, in this thesis, I conceptualise race, and use the term ‘race’ thereby, in terms of raciality that is not something that overlays or obscures race but is the condition of the latter. The idea of ‘backwardness’ as an element of raciality, for example, does not obscure race but constitutes race in a given historical context. In other words, just like the category called sex was produced a particular government of sexuality (Foucault 1998b), race is a form of manifestation that emerged from a certain set of practices of racialisation. It is, this thesis suggests, produced by the dispositif of control-subjectification of race, or better raciality.

Accordingly, I do not reduce the history of race and racism to the model of repression and prohibition. On the contrary, I conceive of the ways in which racial repression and prohibition are conducted as constitutive elements of the strategy of race. The model of repression and prohibition is problematic because it separates race from power, assuming power is external to race. Instead, power must be understood as immanent to race (see Foucault 1998b: 98). Equally, the liberation of race – for example, the rise of Black Power – dismisses power immanent to subjectification; it dismisses power immanent to the subjectification of the social category of ‘Black’ as well as power immanent to racial subjectification that falls outside of the European taxonomy of race. Instead, by shifting an analytical scope to the level of dispositif, I

shall look at very codifications of raciality in each historical moment with its strategic function and with its ‘urgent need’. In short, the thesis investigates the nexus of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, and, instead of challenging a particular mode of racial subjectification, I will scrutinise each mode of racial subjectification in a given context.

Power-knowledge relations in fact take a crucial role in Foucault’s concept of dispositif. As Foucault clarifies:

The dispositif is … always inscribed in a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain coordinates of knowledge which issue from it but, to an equal degree, condition it. This is what the dispositif consists in: strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge (Foucault 1980: 196, translation modified. See Foucault 1994c: 300).

The last sentence is particularly important for this thesis. For my analysis of the discourses on race and practices of biometric identification, I do not seek to the causality between them. My approach is not to find if the discourse of race and racism, or more broadly ‘racist ideology’, produces a certain set of practices of biometrics. Nor is biometrics to ‘prove’ racial differences. My investigation lies in the middle of the discourses on race and practices of biometric identification that are in the mutual relationship of support and that make the modality of racial government intelligible.

So, for example, as I will examine in the subsequent chapters, the dispositif of race does not solely capture the emergent discursive construction of the idea of race in the context of modern Japan – namely, in the texts of Fukuzawa Yukichi who translated and introduced the concept in the country – or in the context of post-WWII Japan where former colonial subjects were consistently racialised in criminal terms by the

state officials. Nor does it solely rely on colonial practices of biometric identification in the manner of biological anthropology or post-WWII practices of biometric policing. By examining these discursive and non-discursive, and institutionalised, practices in relational terms, and contextualising them in each historical setting, the thesis is designed to present different modalities of racial government in Japan since its imperial period to the present day. To put it schematically, I attempt to capture the systems of rationality in biopolitical racism through analysing a political urgent need that emerges in each historical, as well as geographical, context, the discursive construction of race, and practices of biometric identification.

Conclusion

This chapter discussed Foucault’s historical method, which guides the thesis’s historical investigation of the government of race through biometrics. In particular, I discussed three methodological propositions of Foucault: an archaeological critique of the history of science; a genealogical scrutiny of power, knowledge, and subjectivity; and the concept of dispositif as the locus of analysis. Accordingly, the chapter highlighted the importance of these methodological propositions and explicated how they can be constructively incorporated into a study of the history of biometric identification vis-à-vis that of race and racism.

In the light of Foucault’s historical method, the conventional view of the history of biometrics, which conceptually separates the practices of race from the idea of race, is revealed to be problematic because of its static understanding of identity and identification. This issue is not exclusive to the progressive account of biometrics and racism but, as I showed in Chapter One, is equally prevalent in existing critical studies of racism and biometrics that are oriented towards the critique of white

supremacy. In order to overcome this issue, I proposed that the political deployment of biometric identification must be analysed as a process of making identity, and thereby empowering a form of control, in each historical context: that is to say, biometric identification at the level of racialisation. I also proposed that drawing on Foucault’s concept of dispositif, an historical study should look at both discursive and non-discursive practices of racialisation in order to capture a particular modality of racial government – governing in terms of control-subjectification – in a given historical context. Equipped with Foucault’s historical method, the thesis now turns to my historical investigation of the government of race in modern Japan.