Introduction:BiologizingCulture/CulturingBiology 29
objectifyingthrustinvolvedinconceptualthinking.Adorno'scautionary
remark "we have no type of cognition at our disposal that differs
absolutely from the disposing type" (N egative Dialectics 15) is
particularlyàproposin this context. Race and gender are undoubtedly
conceptsofthe"disposingtype":theyorganizelivinghumanbeingsinto
categories,regulateandcontrolrelationsamonghumanbeingsandoften
relegate the perceived biologically Other to the margins of the public
domain.
By now, the assumption that race and gender are conceptual
framings or, in more fashionable parlance, social and cultural
constructions (and nothing but that) has become so generally accepted
and is so widely reiterated in all sorts of race- and gender-related
discourses that it has become a veritable "academic cliché," as Nancy
Frazier has noted with regard to race (155). At the same time,
poststructuralist thinking on race theory and Gender Studies, has been
such that, in the effort to de-naturalize nature, to deconstruct the
essentializing, biologistic assumptions originally underwriting both
concepts, concerns for the embodied and hence biological existence of
human beings have been relegated pretty much to the sidelines of
concern. Thus, any interest in these factors wasaprioride-legitimated
or, worse, excommunicated as an instance of misguided essentialism
while the human body named by race or gender is often perceived as a
moreorlessarbitrarylinguisticsign.
Whatsuchaperspectivetendstoforecloseisthefactthatevenwhile
race and gender are almost always contingent cultural constructs, these
constructs do have material consequences for the people thus
designated, as incidents reported almost daily in the media show.^21 In
other words, the domain identified as the biological endowment of
human beings can qua meaning-endowment generate material effects,
which,inakindoffeedbackloop,thenimpactagainon,evenreinforce,
the meaning endowment.^22 In other words, perpetual semiosis can and
(^21) Anotoriousexampleofthisisthe2009arrestofHarvardscholarHenryLouis
Gates Jr. at his home as a suspected burglar. Neighbors had called the police
becausetheyhadobservedanAfricanAmericanprowler.
22
ThisisafigureofthoughtthatcanbetracedbacktothestructuralMarxismof
Louis Althusser, and in particular to his concept of "structural causality."
Althusser is here seeking to relate a sequence of historical events to an