Semiotic Engineering
I think it will be in the relation between declaratives and imperatives. Instead of purely logical discourse (if x, then y), you have imperatives triggered by fulfilled hypotheticals: if x, do y. That's more broadly, though, not necessarily in relation that passage.
---
Race in a sense may exist--it would depend on how we define it and the kind of discourse it constructs. But I don't think a coherent definition or usage of "racism" is possible. People who use the word have an event-image in mind: the Nuremberg Laws, the southern cop beating the civil rights protestor, the S. African bantustans, etc. Some kind of formal discrimination leading to violence, around which all kinds of attitudes can be imagined. Yes, it is a liberal sovereign being imagined here--"racism" marks an apparent anomaly in the liberal order, a scandal--you can maintain your belief in liberalism if you attribute the danger to the illiberal. But if you actually try and put your finger on a racist act or statement, what do you come up with? If someone believes some claim about blacks or Jews, well, either the claim is true or false, or partly true and partly false, or not well-enough formulated to be either true or false. So, can a derogatory claim about a group be racist if it's true? In that case, charges of racism are demands that we collaborate in collective lies. Are the false parts the parts that are racist? Why isn't it enough that they're false? Do they have to be deliberately false? Maliciously false? How do we identify and measure such intent? Each statement or act would have to be assessed differently--all of them together wouldn't add up to something we could meaningfully call "racism," unless we insist on them doing so--but that insistence would be based on a need to be against "racism." Or, perhaps one wants to insist that any general claim about groups is inherently false and therefore can only be made with malicious, libelous intent (even the complimentary claims--certain groups being smarter, harder-working, etc.--would merely be setting those groups up to be taken down on some other grounds). But the only basis for this insistence is that an absolute injunction or embargo on such claims is necessary for... what, exactly? I doubt we'd get a very clear answer here, but "racism" gives a name to the vaguely felt menace behind any claim about groups whatsoever--which brings us back to a kind of extreme, dogmatic liberal individualism, any deviation from which must set in motion catastrophic consequences.
And even the most obvious indicators of racism, discriminatory laws, can easily be understood as attempts to draw borders within a single nation where the differences between groups are seen as bigger than those that normally hold between "citizens." The group in a position to make the laws sees themselves as superior, and their ability to make the laws kind of supports that claim, and so they make the laws in their own favor. Is believing that one group is superior to another "racist"? That brings us back to the whole discussion above--is the claim true or false? Eligible for truth or falsity? If one group can be superior under certain conditions to another, you might on liberal grounds say that it is still wrong to establish different categories of citizen, but what is added to that moral claim by saying the intent behind the law is "racist"? Again, it's just a way of begging all those questions I went through above. The real question is whether that liberal assumption is more moral than some other that might apply.
---
But I do also to generate models for "infiltrating" liberal cultural sites. I think that asking people to define "racism," and then asking them to apply their definition to a few examples, while scrutinizing each one carefully, would be enormously instructive. (Can they really refuse that? If so, that would very revealing--perhaps to them as well, because they are never asked to do these things.) They will ultimately get to that same point as the Canadian Supreme Court: it's not about truth, it's not about morality or justice, it's about granting us a hunting license.