Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and culminating in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the United States had successfully formed a capitalist market system and an emergent consumer, imperial, colonizing, unequal, and inequitable modern society, where an oligarchy bathed in riches while the majority of Americans endured a series of national, economic, gender, and racial crises. The Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) and economic power for these decades offered economic and social freedom and privilege to middle- and upper- middle- class Anglo- Saxon, Protestant whites (mostly males), who never consciously acknowledged that they were beneficiaries of racial, gender, class, and imperial oppression and structural inequality.

Also, in these decades, the United States and its RSA and ISA— which are relations of power, practices, and actions— reduced “vulnerable” people of color, women, workingclass European immigrants, colonized indigenous nations, incorporated territories, and protectorate— that is, vulnerable to dispossession, poverty, insecurity, lack of agency, and harm— to second- class citizens. Through its RSA and its ISA, the United States exploited, devalued, marginalized, and denied justice, difference, and equality to women, the colonized, and people of color, who were repressed by circuits of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and gender bias. The relation of knowledge to power made it possible for the US grammars of normativity to support this way of structuring the world, which forecloses the possibility of thinking otherwise.

But throughout this period, series/ assemblages of vulnerable, oppressed, and excluded groups, different forms of subordination, gave rise to a variety of antagonisms, which were not held together by societal norms and values and which coexisted and developed on parallel planes and which, at times, communicate and commingle in their becomings. They existed as a corollary, as simultaneity of difference with their own internal becomings, reinventions. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann would characterize them as systems that are “operationally closed, […] relying entirely on internal operations.” These excluded groups, different forms of knowledge represent what Niklas Luhmann calls “functional differentiation” in modern society, where there is no hierarchal relation between each function system. These groups and forms of knowledge formulated conceptual formations, regimes of power/ knowledge, and challenged/ opposed this economically transformed, unequal and inequitable modern American society, showing the limits of this way of knowing.