Permission to speak!
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Not so long ago either it was clear who was sovereign — what power was and from where it emanated. The body of king was the seat of empire and state. ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’ blurts the infamous Bourbon, Le Roi Soleil, paragon of pomp. Now, we are told, ‘The individual himself or herself becomes the reproduction unit for the social in the lifeworld.’¹ ‘In the end, Rome disappears’, adds Michel Foucault, with wry understatement. It seems everyone is sovereign — especially on Oprah. Bonfire of vanities, or a recoding of order?

What I would like to do is to trace the outline of these phenomena through history: to make something of a brief attempt to understand how it has become possible — and by what transformations in history did it become thinkable — that so many voices overwhelm us with words / that the imperial model of power disappears. Could the two be related? Can we assume that they’re not? How might the promotion of speaking relate to the history of governing? How might the proliferation of authors relate to the history of authority? Everywhere we hear of the fragmentation of centralized authority, but would it be possible to write a history of private authority, sovereign individuality, discourse, avowal, authorship and speech, independently of the liberal regimes of truth within which they’re grounded and find their justification? What if it were possible to stand outside those regimes? Would it be possible to reconstruct a history of the emergence of private authority through a political history of the creation of subjectivity? Could the political history of the creation of subjectivity account for the disappearance of imperial authority? Could the shadow of power be found lurking behind the light of knowledge, adding order to the playground of private freedom?

First voice

The space of private authorship we witness in the contemporary world cultural political economy is an empty one. Some might say a trap. It is a space opened up for us on the back of the disappearance — or culmination — of disciplinary society.² It is a space we accept only insofar as we have not as yet come to terms with a singular and fundamental transformation that occurs in Western history, finding its faultline at the birth of the modern age, and informing the disciplinary order which emerges therefrom: this being the transformation in the overarching schema of political technology (tactics and strategies of political power) from techniques of domination grounded in suppression and limitation to techniques bent on production and facilitation. I argue here that the space within which private authors exist — and by extension private authority in general — cannot be understood until we come to terms with a series of rearticulations, transformations that take place between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, in what we might know as the ‘arts of governing’. Through these rearticulations the self-constituting subject — that work of magic who could author his own life — was “discovered.” Some might say created. Moreover, the entity that begged him to speak was the state.³ From the very first, the space of enunciation was to be an ordered one, pushing into oblivion the misshapen syntax of indolence and unreason.⁴ In my view, taking an historical and philosophical step sideways, the rise of private authority at a transnational level, or domains of private authorship at an individual level, in no way circumscribe the efficacy of the state. Indeed, correctly outlined, they might be seen to enhance it. Given a certain critical reading — one focussing less on law than on disciplines; less on saying “no” than on saying “yes” — the very existence of domains of private authority indicates how advanced is the project of totalizing disciplinary space.

Toward a knowledge of individuals

In a presentation to the Chicago meeting of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 29th March, 1989, Ivan Illich delivered a startling statement: “Human Life”, he announced, ‘is a recent social construct, something which we now take so much for granted that we dare not seriously question it.’ The notion has a history, he continued, ‘it is a Western notion, ultimately the result of a perversion of the Christian message.’⁵ Ten years earlier, under the auspices of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Michel Foucault had made an equally striking suggestion, and what turned out to be a similar argument. ‘Everyone knows,’ he began,

Beginning his analysis — and in order to explain this notion of “pastorship” — Foucault contrasted two worlds: the Greek and the Roman world on the one hand, and the Oriental world (Egypt, Assyria, Judaea) on the other. Pastorship begins with the idea of the shepherd. In the former world, we are told, this metaphor is absent. In the latter it is prolific. Several characteristics of the shepherd function were important to Foucault: 1) the power the shepherd wields is over a flock, rather than a land. By contrast, the Greek gods owned the land — it was not promised to the flock, nor were they to be led to it. 2) The shepherd gathers and guides the flock. In his absence no flock exists, as such. So unlike the gods of Greek thought, the shepherd does not merely resolve conflicts and withdraw, but is permanently present, and through this presence gives identity to previously dispersed elements. 3) The primary role of the shepherd is to ensure the salvation of the flock. Yet unlike the helmsman of the ship of state, the task of the shepherd is not one of saving all at once by avoiding shipwreck, but each all the time, in ‘constant, individualized and final kindness.’ 4) This kindness itself was not to be exercised for the glory of the leader, but as “devotedness” and duty to the well-being of the flock. This devotion takes the form of sacrifice: the shepherd who stays awake while the flock sleeps. His time is wholly taken up with the task of caring: finding the green pastures, the tranquil landscapes. And his attention to danger and comfort is permanent: individualized to the needs and character of each and all together.

It seems a very different economy of power was familiar to the Romans and Greeks, and the meeting of the two (as Christianity takes hold) precipitated a significant crisis in the structures of ancient society. Nowhere before had the metaphor of the shepherd appeared in political literature; and as we know, it wasn’t just pastors but Pharaohs and kings who played the role — and were afforded the title — in the Orient. Neither in Isocrates, nor in Demosthenes, nor in Aristotle does this theme of the shepherd appear. But it appears in Plato, and it is something of a crisis theme. In The Statesman, in particular, he thrashes it out. The accommodation he comes to is famous, indeed infamous: it is the myth of the earth spinning in opposite directions. In the first phase (the first direction of turning), each animal on earth belonged to a flock led by a “Genius-Shepherd.” The human flock was directed by the deity, and being led thus, ‘mankind needed no constitution.’ In a second phase, the world turned in the opposite direction. The gods no longer play the role of shepherd, and men, given fire, had to look after themselves. Neither can the politician play the role of the shepherd. His role becomes one of weaving the fabric of the social; binding together lives and temperaments. The role of the shepherd would be dispersed among the flock. Would the king provide mankind with food? Not at all. The baker or the farmer do that. Would the king or the politician tend to men when they are sick? The physician has the job of doing that. Many citizens, therefore, could claim this pastoral title of the shepherd of men, while the king or the politician play the role of the unifier.⁷

All this might seem remote, Foucault admitted. But his point in raising these texts, he told his audience, was to illustrate how deeply these themes run through the entirety of Western history. For the essence of the problem is the relations between two forms of power: a political power operating through a legal framework ensuring unity within the state, and a power which could be called ‘pastoral,’ aimed at sustaining and improving the lives of each and all (omnes et singulatim). As Foucault suggested,

With the Greeks and the Romans — with the exception of Plato’s The Statesman — this aspect of the pastoral played a limited role. As Christianity became better established, it in turn transformed these Hebrew themes to its own ends. Four aspects were important: 1) with Christianity the responsibility of the shepherd is not only to direct the destiny of the flock, but to provide an account of each sheep and all of their actions; everything that happens, and everything they are likely to do. 2) In contrast to the rational underpinning of Greek obedience (i.e., necessary persuasion), with Christianity the basis of obedience is shifted into the realm of submission and virtue. Obedience is permanent, involving an overcoming (apatheia) of willpower (pathos).

3) Christian pastorship involves a highly individualized relation of shepherd and sheep. Not only must the flock as a whole be known, but this knowledge must be deepened: involving a knowledge of the soul of each sheep, ‘his secret sins’, and his progress on the path to salvation. Borrowing also from already well-established themes of the guidance of conscience and self-examination (among the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, the Epicureans), Foucault saw ‘a very strange phenomenon’ emerge in Graeco-Roman civilization: a melding of Greek and Roman themes with those of the Christian pastorship: a ‘link between total obedience, knowledge of oneself and confession to someone else.’ A governing of individuals by their own verity.⁹ 4) A final aspect — to Foucault, perhaps the most important — was the emergence of the notion of ‘mortification’: the renunciation of the world and oneself. This would be the end of all these relations of truth, of obedience, or self-examination and confession. In all, Foucault argued, the Christian pastoral introduced a “game” to the Greeks that neither they nor the Hebrews could ever have imagined: ‘A strange game whose elements are life, death, truth, obedience, individuals, self-identity; a game which seems to have nothing to do with the game of the city surviving through the sacrifice of the citizens.’ Our societies, he continued, ‘proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two games — the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game — in what we call modern states.’¹⁰

The state that says “yes”

Perhaps Foucault’s outline of the Christian pastoral would not be one with which Illich could agree in whole. But in their reading of what happens next they barely differ. Foucault’s next problem was to explain how these themes became established at the heart of the modern state. Illich’s problem was to explain how the Christian message had been perverted by the emergence of the notion of ‘Human life.’ He saw developing from this notion (what he called a new fetish), and the scarcity and preciousness attached to it, a whole panoply of institutions, specialists, guardians and caretakers. In short, a whole grid of political management over the lives of individuals. Foucault’s concern, somewhat mirroring Illich, was how ‘life’ became an object of direction for the state. In particular, how life became an object passing through the government of individuals in relation to their own truth.

To pose the question in this way was not to suggest that in the intervening centuries — those between the emergence of Christian themes in the Graeco-Roman world, and the emergence and development of the modern state — pastoral themes disappeared. On the contrary, constant struggles — recounts Foucault — occurred around this idea of the pastoral. Internally, in the reform of monastic orders in particular, themes of self-examination and the direction of conscience — a knowledge of individuals — were vital. Meanwhile in society at large, though dominated by political relations of a quite different kind (feudalism), and a population dispersed in a rural as well as an urban economy, struggles took on numerous aspects; sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent; sometimes limited, sometimes extensive. A ‘yearning’ to arrange pastoral relations among men, Foucault tells us, was a deep aspiration, touching the ‘mystical tide’ and the millenarian dreams of the Middle Ages.¹¹ That these struggles intersected with the kinds of rationalities employed in the exercise in state power, was what Foucault was interested in exploring. As he had said, everywhere we hear of the development of legal frameworks and the legal state form. But would it be possible to describe a different history; not so much one of centralization and legality, but pastorship and differentiation?

The key to the puzzle lay with two rationalities: reason of state and the theory of police. In the second of his lectures Foucault explained what was at stake in each, on his way to understanding how ‘life’ itself became a target of power. First, reason of state is contextualized. It has a number of characteristics. 1) It is regarded as an art employing knowledge — in particular, rational knowledge. It was, in the words of Palazzo (Discourse on Government and the True Reason of State, 1606): ‘A rule or art enabling us to discover how to establish peace and order within the Republic.’¹² 2) It draws its rationale not from God or law — from divine law, laws of nature or human law — but from what the state is; what its exigencies are.¹³ 3) It is opposed — at least in part — to Machiavelli’s tradition. Here the problem is not one of forging the links between prince and state, but one of reinforcing and increasing the strength the state itself. 4) This presumes a certain type of knowledge: a knowledge of state forces and state capacities — ‘concrete, precise, measured knowledge.’ Henceforth populations become statistical phenomena; the subject of ‘politicall arithmetick.’¹⁴ Added to the great demographic upswing which culminates in the eighteenth century and ‘the necessity for co-ordinating and integrating it into the apparatus of production and (…) controlling it with finer and more adequate power mechanisms,’

This project is epitomized nowhere better than in the utopia and programme of the theoreticians of ‘the police’ — the second doctrine Foucault identified in his history of modern political reason. Exemplified in the writings of Seckendorff (Der Teutsche Fürsten Staat, 1655), Dithmar (Einleitung in die oeconomische Policei- und Cameral-Wissenshaften, 1745), Darjes (Erste Gründe der Cameral-Wissenshaften, 1756), Justi (Staatwirthschaft, 1758), and Sonnenfels (Grundsätze der Policey, 1787), among others, the aim of this new technology of population — known to contemporaries as “cameralistics” — was to make individuals useful for the world in such a way that their development also fostered the strength of the state.¹⁶ This strength of the state was conceived in two ways: on the one hand, as the material result of the harnessing and channeling of energies (i.e., industry) into the productive economy, and on the other, as the securitization of governance through workfare, occupation and the incentive to profit (enrichment). Productivity, diligence and happiness emerged as the objectives of the mode of government that dominated the classical age; simultaneously differentiated (in the classification and organization of bodies) and aggregated (in the policing of rhythms and processes of populations).

Further characteristics can be listed: 1) the police embraced everything. In many of the texts finance and production together with the judiciary and the army are listed as the key objects of ‘policey.’ In practice, these categorizations slip. 2) Police includes everything. In other words, the existence of men — the full range of their lives — could be sustained from within the police (i.e., police gives a model and a home for man — the ‘live, active, productive man’).¹⁷ This means also the dangers (disease, accidents, etc.). Foucault later refers to Delamare’s Compendium, wherein, amidst hundreds of collected regulations, the police is given eleven domains of special responsibility: i) religion; ii) morals; iii) health; iv) supplies; v) roads, highways, town buildings; vi) public safety; vii) the liberal arts; viii) trade; ix) factories; x) manservants and laborers; xi) the poor. But perhaps the most remarkable formulation is that of von Berg, given at the beginning of the nineteenth century:

3) The practice is ‘totalitarian’; denoting an attention to all detail (be that the beauty, the order, the trading, the working, the ‘communication’, of a city). Here Foucault identifies what he takes to be an important principle: ‘As a form of rational intervention wielding political power over men, the role of the police is to supply them with a little extra life; and by so doing, supply the state with a little extra strength.’¹⁹ Between these great poles — reason of state and the theory of police — developed, argues Foucault, the rationalities and practices whereby the melding of those two games — the city-citizen game of the Greeks and the shepherd-flock game of the Christian pastoral — occurred. Between these two poles, Foucault argued, there develops a very specific form of political power: one which stakes its conditions of possibility in the population, and its rationality and rationale in the state itself.

And so back to our original point, or Foucault’s original point: how is in this established a history whereby power as such becomes decentralized; or in other words, specific to the lives of individuals? The objection will be that the police — and reason of state — are highly centralizing, if not the very model of centralization. This may be true, but something new has emerged — something Illich had seen. It is “life” which is the true object of the police: and it is the management of individuals that both flows from that, and is its source of support. “Happiness” and regular functioning of “society” are what Delamare himself sees as the special purview of the police. But he also says “living.” Thus in respect to religion the concern is with the ‘moral quality of life.’ In relation to supplies and health, the question is the ‘preservation of life.’ In relation to leisure, entertainment, literature and the like, the question is ‘life’s pleasures.’ And in relation to order, to security, to communication and workers, the question is the ‘conveniences of life.’ Summarized by Foucault, ‘That people survive, live, and even do better than just that, is what the police has to ensure.’²⁰

Leading men to this happiness — this fulfillment — is one aspect of the police. But to be truly effective, and to be efficient to the point of being automatic, means had to be found for men to become their own guides. And it is here that we find the beginnings — or perhaps the culmination of — a very different idea in the arts of governing men. And indeed, as we pass through the eighteenth century, especially in Germany and Austria, this different idea gathers support. Oeconomie is established. It is an idea founded upon the liberation of the individual; though ultimately, of course, it is an individual already constituted, in large part, by the diffuse and disparate, though surprizingly unified, organs of the police.²¹ The role of the police (polizei) is to foster those elements of individuality as a means to the improvement of life, while at the same time ensuring that those very same elements contribute to the well-being of the state. Die Politick, by contrast, entails fighting against internal and external enemies. Polizei and oeconomie have a positive role.

What Foucault was uncovering that evening at Stanford — and had been uncovering for some time in his investigations in general — was not only the outline of a history forged bottom-up through diverse practices (a relationship to the guidance of conscience that would become the model of relations of social communication, a relationship to the knowledge of state capacities that would gather under the guise of ‘statistics’ diverse forms of registration and inspection), but crucially a history which would be based not upon sovereign authorship, or law-based conceptions of power, but upon the formation of norms, within an overarching strategic field defined by the great question of organizing materials and men. These norms become the condition upon which, paradoxically, the police can retreat. In the words of Marc Raeff,

Foucault had already, in several of his history books, discussed the generalized space — emerging between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries — out of which the original question — the question of governing of men and things — bursts forth. He had also outlined what he saw as the beginnings of the resolution to this paradox of policy and practice (the paradox of aiming at establishing autonomy as the most efficient path to happiness and productivity against the practice of assuring both, which involved state intervention). As this question, or ‘problem,’ began to exact a greater pressure on the state (particularly in the eighteenth century) a profound transformation at the heart of political governance takes place. ‘Since the classical age’, Foucault wrote,

Readers of Foucault would have known that he had already outlined a version of this argument in his famous analysis of the shift from “spectacular” to reforming forms of punishment (Surveiller et punir was published first in 1975).²⁴ In The History of Sexuality, Foucault went even further into nature of what for him had always been an emblematic concern: the positive formation of society through positive interventions of power. Analyzing the shift from sovereign societies (what he called ‘societies of blood’) to modern societies (what he called ‘societies of knowledge’), Foucault outlined the nature of what he called an ‘age of bio-power.’ Two aspects were of key importance — a ‘great bipolar technology’ of power over Life. The first centered on the ‘body as a machine’; an ‘anatomo-politics’ aimed to extort forces and optimize capabilities. The second centered on the ‘adjustment of the phenomena of population’; a ‘bio-politics’ attentive to mortality, longevity, habitation, hygiene, contagion, marriage, procreation, diet — whereby the health and well-being of the civitas became a ‘general objective of policy’ and target of intervention. With the demographic take off of the eighteenth century new techniques became necessary for the maintenance of order. Power responds. Foucault names as ‘governmentalization’ the process whereby the techniques and the tactics of pastoral power become ever more established at the heart of the state.²⁵

This is no vague idea. Governmentalization, was, by contrast, an ‘absolutely conscious strategy’ appearing in both political texts and the ‘mass of unknown documents’ wherein real existences are played out.²⁶ Governmentalization is precisely that which melds the great truth games of history: the truth game of the state epitomized in the notion of raison d’état, and the truth game of the shepherd, epitomized in the theory of police. What Foucault in his historical studies — and that evening at Stanford — aimed to describe, in essence, was the simultaneous spatialization and deterritorialization of political government throughout the course of modernity. In the first instance, government widens its reach (and gaze); intervening in an ever greater number of spaces (psychology, pathology, sexuality, education, etc.), and locations (the asylum, the clinic, the prison, the school, the factory, the boulevard, the playground, etc.). On the other hand, government becomes integral: assumed within an individual code or structure of command (disposition, humor, temperament), and diffused throughout the social body as a whole (in law, in morality, customs, habits and social knowledge).

What does this mean for our purposes — for the purpose of retracing the emergence of private authority? Let’s fill in the blanks by looking a little closer at these transformations in the arts of governing.

Security, tranquillity, occupation

As stated, the great transformation in the schema of Western political technology takes place in the eighteenth century with the emergence of state forms which take as their objective the facilitation rather than the suppression of life. A new question emerges — that of ‘government’ understood as ‘an activity that undertakes to conduct individuals throughout their lives by placing them under the authority of a guide responsible for what they do and for what happens to them.’²⁷ What Foucault terms ‘pastoral power’ steadily gains hold in the state — epitomized in the writings of the theorists of police. Rather than a ‘secularization of the West’, we witness rather a theologicalization of the state. The aim becomes to facilitate, as far as possible, the productive capacities of individual and family while protecting each, to the greatest extent possible, from all kinds of misfortune and danger. It was no longer a question, therefore,

To these new meanings we can add new ends; for salvation, in this context — as intimated earlier — is not in its essence concerned with the well-being, spiritual or otherwise, of each citizen. The true object of this new formulation of power — “pastoral power” as exercised, or in Illich’s terms, perverted, by the state — is not first and foremost the care of the citizenry. Care becomes the means to a different end. This end is the regularization, or securitization of the state itself. The true salvation being assured is that of the state from rebellion and disorder. A virtuous circle had been detected: pastoral power, in emulating the familial role of the father, would secure the best overall conditions of tranquility within the populace. “Relief from man’s Estate” — idiom for improved health and prosperity — would rightly secure allegiance and compliance. “Life” and its protection secures the conditions of legitimacy for the presence of the state.²⁹ But this justification of absolutism — or on the other hand, this use of salvation to secure allegiance — was not without issue. One might ask, as the centralizing monarchs asked of those who suggested any need for justification: had not the state, by the middle of the eighteenth century, already established — by ‘burning into memory,’ so writes Nietzsche — its position as destiny and destination?³⁰ Why the quiet scramble for permanent and subtle controls? The explanation Michel Foucault himself provides in Discipline and Punish is both simple and eternal: people rebel.³¹ In truth it took much more than the Machiavelli’s, the Colbert’s, and the Bentham’s of the world anticipated to force the human animal to give up on the dream of Liberty and go quietly into the workhouse or the prison.

Only by passing back through history, one hundred years or so from where pastoral power takes hold, can we engage a true impression of the nature of what was really at stake. As autumn dawns on the Middle Ages we encounter times, described succinctly by Burckhardt, of ‘extraordinary need and peril.’³² Beneath the language — between the words — it is indeed this urgency that above all defines, and in many ways engenders, the newly emerging language of power; in Machiavelli, in Palazzo, through Zuccolo, up to Seckendorf, Obrecht and the first cameral theoreticians. Take Giovanni Botero, and the astonishing The Reason of State, published first in 1589, wherein the task of maintaining the stability of any state is described as an ‘almost superhuman undertaking.’³³ Everywhere — in near every word, on near every page — is the indelible mark of necessity: a new realism concerning an old problem — the task of coordinating men and things. Practically a new style of writing is born.³⁴ It is the great era of advice for statesmen, albeit dressed up as advice for princes. But though the designs may be grand, and no one can deny the majesty of the Discourses, we oughtn’t to forget that amongst the allegory and the history moves are being made further down the chain, toward the world of the mundane.

Already for Machiavelli — not unaware of the uses of religion — the essence of government is not to be found as intermediary with the Great Beyond, but in establishing order in the Great Here and Now. Similarly in Botero, where: ‘The preservation of a State depends on the peace and tranquillity of its subjects.’ Where military enterprises are ‘the most effective means of keeping a people occupied.’ And populations diverted by wars or dangers retain ‘no place for thoughts of revolt in their minds.’ When war is not pursuable mechanical trades must be encouraged: they ‘bind a man to his workshop as the source of his income and sustenance, and since the well-being of craftsmen depends upon the sale of what they produce such men are necessarily lovers of peace, in which trade may flourish and commerce flow. Cities which are full of craftsmen and merchants love peace and tranquillity.’ In addition to keeping men occupied by commerce or war, the ruler must ‘secure many good teachers for the indoctrination of children, and many earnest preachers (…) to expound and render acceptable the mysteries of our holy Faith.’ The first mystery to be made material, of course, is the benefits of familial life: for ‘Without the union of man and woman there can be no multiplication of the human species, but the number of these unions alone is not the only prerequisite of this multiplication: it is necessary in addition to bring them up with care, and to have the means of supporting them, otherwise they will either die before the natural time or they will be useless and of little value to their country.’ As the ‘true strength of a ruler consists in his people’ and the resources thereby provided, it is not at all difficult to see how spatialization and deterritorialization — or in other words, the spreading out of power to all kinds of new spaces (streets, the body, the household, etc.), and its penetration into customs, norms, and social practices — became both necessary and urgent.

By the mid- to late-seventeenth century, finding inspiration and points of resonance across diverse elements — passing through the imaginary of Leonardo, the great daybreak of Versalius’ first public autopsy, the materiality of Hobbes and Descartes, the taxonomy of Burton, Estienne, or Valverde — we start to see a reconstituted body, and space of human existence.³⁵ With new technical abilities came a greater degree of planning, and a very different economy of governing. It is not so much that this economy reflects the ‘spirit of the age’, but that the broader cosmological, scientific, philosophical and aesthetic currents also contain practical, contextual and technical elements. Again, we are passing lower down the chain, to the everyday mundane, and the shaping of the conduct of others. As Foucault describes,

A calculated ‘technology of state forces’ replaces the advice of the virtuous counsel. With it emerges a quite different perception of history. No longer is the political imagination domineered by visions of imperium. Rather, time is indefinite, and the new logic is one of states struggling against like states. Much different from dynastic rivalries.³⁷ As Foucault describes, what becomes increasingly important is a knowledge of state forces, and the rational techniques whereby one intervenes in those forces. Two ensembles of political knowledge and technology form: a ‘diplomatico-military technology’, aimed at increasing state strength in military competition and through the emergent alliance system. The second is the emergence of the ‘policey sciences’ — polizeiwissenschaft, aimed at increasing state forces from within.³⁸ It is in the intersection of these domains that we come to the rub, for our purposes here. In the words of Michel Foucault once more,

In short, at the intersection lies the emergence of international private economic initiative (commerce), which in and of itself multiplies state forces both within and without. The destination was established: homo oeconomicus — author of order through occupation and workfare, supplier of surplus for the sinews of mercantile war.⁴⁰

The birth of the self-generational subject — the private author of liberal political economy — was conditioned by the question of the government of men. It would not have been possible to solve the problem of state security — the organization, ordering and regularization of human existence — without the growth of a private domain of ‘occupation’ into which individuals were inserted by the million. Conversely, the emergence of the productive apparatus into which populations were inserted depended on the protection of private interest which could only be assured under conditions of police ordinance. The two processes — the emergence of “production” and the ordering of states — cannot be separated. Each is the condition of possibility of the other. The emergence of domains of private authority — such as they were at this time — cannot be separated from the incredible and complex history whereby private individuals (jurists, financiers, agricultural economists, physicians, pastors), brought order to their respective worlds. Neither can the growth of the state be separated from the history of techniques, tactics and strategies whereby the welfare of the citizenry, and each citizen alone, was taken to be, in very real terms, a primary concern of political government.

The “discovery of society”

Cameralistics and mercantilism merge. Each is essentially a coercive regulatory system for the management of the population-wealth problem.⁴¹ Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, and for complex reasons, it is realized that state-directed regulation is inadequate. It had already come under political criticism.⁴² In part this is a function of the huge demographic take-off mentioned earlier; itself no doubt a consequence of both the concern to ensure the populousness of the populace and the separation of the techniques employed to achieve this (sanitation, nutrition, housing, workfare, etc.) into self-generational domains of knowledge and practice (medicine, urban planning, political economy, and so on).⁴³ At the same time, the significant increase in pauperism confuses things; attesting to the failings of pastoral power?⁴⁴ Debate ensues. Fletcher and Davenport in England, Vauban and Boulainvilliers in France: absolutist economic management comes under attack (albeit in the name of noble privilege). Through the eighteenth century the ground shifts substantially. The Physiocrats (who become a half-way house between the ‘economists’ who later follow Smith, and the state-planners of the mercantile era) challenge the very rationale of interventionist management. By introducing natural law into the analysis of wealth they open the way for laissez-faire; policies which emulate the principles and laws upon which natural orders exist. A more outwardly systematic analysis of the various factors which impact upon population growth and wealth (taxation, distribution of profit, etc.) is established. The category of the ‘human race’ appears for the first time, refocusing attention on individual conduct in the context of the order of the whole (laissez-faire was yet to mean laissez-passer). Meanwhile the critique of nobility sets the standard against which the virtues of bourgeois morality (hard work as opposed to privilege; thrift as opposed to opulence) are established.⁴⁵ “Liberalism” enters.

Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, describes the next move: that following Smith, with the ‘discovery’ of the natural laws of society. The detail is less important than the overall consequence, so I shall simply summarize the key points of this next threshold in the emergence of the private domain: 1) poor relief emerges as a urgent problem somewhere around 1780. 2) Townsend’s Dissertation on the Poor Laws appears, wherein an allegorical story of goats and dogs illustrates a wholly new concept in political economy: hunger was the natural law of man. Approaching man from the animal side⁴⁶ — that men were indeed beasts (instead of being, as for example for Hobbes, only like beasts) — introduced the notion, surprizingly, that only a minimal amount of government was required. Magistrates were unnecessary. 3) Malthus and Ricardo follow, with population law and the theory of diminishing returns respectively.⁴⁷ Bentham follows, arguing against subsistence and for the necessity of increasing want; so as to make the physical sanction of hunger more effective. People ought to be driven to private initiative.⁴⁸ The basis of the theory of utility is established. Pleasure and pain were the new “sovereign masters.” Meanwhile the role of merchants is transformed (the way forward had already been suggested, earlier in the century, by the likes of Boisguilbert). Trade is no longer strictly a question of the production of surplus, but rather the multiplication of exchanges. Surplus, in the way of levy, is a non-productive use of resources. With the diversification that is encouraged by exchange, new goods will be brought in, creating new wants, and the encouragement to work. Breaking with police science, which took it upon itself to provide for the citizenry, the liberal concern is with ‘governing too much.’⁴⁹ A concern for opening up the sphere of private activity is coupled with a concern to make the practice of ‘government’ both politically and economically efficient. Indeed a new question emerges: ‘Why, in fact must one govern?’⁵⁰ Self-regulating “market society” emerges.

Yet in other ways the emergence of ‘liberal political economy’ is less of a break with the classical age than on the surface it seems. We will remember the ambiguity at the heart of the police project. Described by Raeff, the problem with encouraging individualism and autonomy as the surest way to state productivity and security was that one undermined, in their very emergence, the rationale supposedly at the very heart of cameralism and enlightened absolutism. But what if this individualism and autonomy were more important than the love of control? Or better still, what if this autonomy, this individual, was constituted in such a way to play automatically — in each life — the role of the police? In Raeff’s description, though he admits that one finds in the police ordinances major elements of what would become leitmotifs of Enlightenment, the interventionist policies of the cameral theorists backfired: creating a kind of individualism that turns back on the state, resulting in ‘a greater awareness on the part of the members of society of the desirability of maximizing their own creative energies’ and an ‘emerging class-consciousness determined by individual self-interest.’ This in turn, in Raeff’s account, stimulates a questioning of the legitimacy of absolutism and cameralism, ‘while at the same time pushing society and its active members onto the road of modernity and individualism.’⁵¹

But if we simply listen to the cameralists themselves, we find the basis of the disappearance they prepared for themselves. In the words of von Justi:

Not only note the language (‘equilibrium’), but the aim: to perfect the administrative relations of government to the point where individuals can provide for themselves. Many other examples of like-formulations could be cited. But the essence of the point is this: Townsend provides new means to a similar end. Smith, afterall, was indebted to the cameral theorists. Having established the regular framework of the state, the liberal economists provide new means — preferable in being efficient means — of sustaining the order of economy and state. Not a change of strategy, but a change of tactics. The police — as far as could be possible — would disappear into heads, into dispositions, into social laws and into wants. It is little wonder that the cameral writers quietly leave the stage.

As another example, the notion of self-regulation has deep roots in the Renaissance. The fascination with all kinds of clockwork mechanisms defined — until the nineteenth century — the technical imagination of machines and societies. The singular machine that dominated that imaginary was the automaton. Those tiny marvels of the mechanical arts heralded immense consequences in the realm of governmentality. And for years they actively impeded the emergence of authorship. As Jonathan Sawday in The Body Emblazoned, describes:

By necessity this would change, though the disciplines would remain, as toward the end of the nineteenth century — at the beginnings of modernity proper (the Napoleonic threshold) — the second law of thermodynamics (steam power) supplants the automaton in the generalized imaginary, giving rise to notions of balance and equilibrium, flows and feeds, and ultimately the metaphorical stock of liberal economy.⁵⁴ With the emergence of the ‘feedback’ principle we find a mobilization of — but not necessarily a change of real kind in the organization of — the relations between the political and technical imaginaries. New possibilities were being opened of course. But the society dreamt of by Napoleon (who inaugurates the shift from the classical to the modern eras), was — if not characterized by unthinking brute automatons — essentially machinic, despite his own adherence to the rhetoric of natural philosophy.⁵⁵ by machines.’ cf., Napoleon Bonaparte, A System of Education for the Infant King of Rome (London: Thomas Davison, 1820), p. 93.] Though the organicism of Hegel was supplanting the mechanical rationalism of the Enlightenment, it was never entirely possible to separate the evolution of historical thought from the immediacies of political governance, of which the former was more often than not, a mirror.

The interesting puzzle is how out of this organicist view of history and society — not one so conducive to private initiative — did a space for a distinct domain of private activity emerge. And it is exactly at this point that we find this intersection of historical and political imaginaries. The transitional phase of real importance is between modalities of the arts of governing: from on the one hand a concern with governing too little (the desire on the part of the police to look into, and modify if necessary, every compartment of life), to a suspicion that one is governing too much (the era fronted by Smith and Malthus, and underpinned, remarkably, by disciplinarians like Bentham).⁵⁶ It is a transitional phase which is mirrored in events by a melding of organicist and materialist metaphorics.⁵⁷ This melding — this bringing together of the two great themes of modern governmentality (intervention and self-constitution; order and regularity and innovation and equilibrium) — is crucial, and much worthy of study, if we are to understand the ways in which the rise of the private domain continued to intersect with, and bolster the security arrangements of the state. It is on the basis of a reading of this transition that I would suggest that the rise of private authority — or private authorship — in no way compromises the state. On the contrary, it has been, and continues to be, essential to it.

The eye of conscience

The emblematic event, to Foucault’s mind, which crystallizes this negotiation, bringing all the various elements together — the state’s concern for discipline and order vis-à-vis the population-wealth problem, the emergence of private domains of experience and activity (market society), as well as discourse and authorship (the emergence of the modern self) — is the birth of the modern prison. Unsurprisingly, this suggestion, first made by Foucault in the mid-1970s, created quite a stir. Away from the controversy, his analysis of the technology and emergence of the prison, and in particular his discussion of Bentham’s scheme for the ideal penitentiary, is essential, in my view, to an understanding of the emergence of domains both of the modern self (the domain of the private author), and privatized authority (by which I mean diffusions and devolutions of power). Again, I shall leave the detail for further reading. The key salient points are as follows: 1) the Panopticon — Bentham’s ideal reformatory, and the lynchpin around which Foucault based his analysis of the emergence of modern social power — is essentially an automatism.⁵⁸ Once built the very architecture of the construction itself takes over, ensuring the circulation — or “feedback”, in nineteenth century metaphorical terms — of power relations. For those unfamiliar with Bentham’s plans, it is worth quoting at length Foucault’s own description:

‘The major effect,’ Foucault continues,

Its key technology being surveillance, the Panopticon was essentially that odd phenomenon of a centralized decentralization. In other words, its operation depended upon the constant feeling on behalf of the inmate of being observed. Thus the inmate is subjected not only to uncertainty, but a discourse with the self which brings forth the voice of conscience. All of this happens whether a guard is in the control tower or not. In other words, power operates in the head of each inmate, but its consequence is a reinforcement of a centralized economy of domination. 2) The individual has his or her own space. He or she is the author of their own actions, but is set within a broader, regular, permanent geometry of registration and inspection. The cell is intended to be, for all intents and purposes, a stage, whereupon, each single day, the inmate performs the dual role of convict and governor. In both instances through penitence.

3) Power is no longer exercised in a sovereign manner. Rather it is invested in a ‘certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement … ’⁶¹ It is deterritorialized. 4) In the end, what else does the modern prison really aim to achieve but the complete ordering of men? The point of the Panopticon was to release relations of power — ‘unlock’ the disciplines — to have them operate in diffuse, multiple and polyvalent ways throughout the social body as well as the prison (remember, Bentham’s scheme was intended as a model for ‘any sort of establishment’ wherein persons are to be kept under inspection). Thus would be ensured — through the stringing together of all kinds of institutions (schools, factories, prisons, charity houses, barracks, hospitals, asylums, etc.) — the emergence of a space of self-organization and autobiographical authorship, whereby the individual, penetrated by power, acting upon the self, would become automatic, calculable, regular.⁶² Surveillance in the prison replicates hunger in society, and henceforth would take over where hunger itself failed. At the threshold of modernity — via this great transformation in the arts of governing whereby the police state which discovered life becomes the liberal state which privatizes discipline — the effects of surveillance (the dispersal throughout society of individualizing forms of power) had become so apparent as to become transparent — in other words, open: the open landscape upon which the man of modern industrial civilization is found — remembering words, scratching around, picking up tools, directed now not by a king, but a path upon which he is drawn by the echo of his own voice.

The birth of the author

Now we can talk of the birth of the author! Over to Nietzsche:

This autonomous, supra-ethical individual, of independent and durable will, proud consciousness and awareness of freedom, sounds remarkably similar, at least to my ears, to the laissez passer, homo oeconomicus of utilitarian liberalism. Both that and the inmate of the reformatory, whose,

No doubt for Nietzsche either from what misfortunes such a man emerges. ‘An act of violence’, rather than a gradual or voluntary alteration occasioned the shaping of the raw material of people and “semi-animals.” Only, indeed, the ‘terrible tyranny’ and ‘repressive and ruthless machinery’ of the state could burn into memory such sovereign freedoms as ‘duty’, and ‘debt.’ Nietzsche isn’t fooled by the policeman posing as shepherd. And it is obvious, he tells us, who is meant by this term ‘the state’: the conquerors and “unconscious artists” whose hammer blows come like fate, without cause or reason, all too terrible and sudden, and convincing, just like lightning, to be hated. ‘Where they appear,’

When exactly this happens is only intimated. The Great Inquisitions would make a suitable background. In The History of Sexuality, of course, Foucault pushed the boundaries further back before the modern age: at least if not of the despotic state, then the formation of a discourse on the self.⁶⁶ But though he studied there — in antiquity I mean — several domains of this vast living structure — this emerging discourse on the self, and its intersections with the broader discursive constitution of society in general — setting forth to analyze what he saw as the emergence of various ‘technologies of the self’ (forms of cultivation, self-enhancement, and self-knowledge), Foucault’s constant concern, played out like so many reflections in the mirror of history, was the passage of a decidedly modern self.⁶⁷ Amidst the detail he was aiming at a simple truth — one not lost on Nietzsche, despite the force with which he recounts his genealogy. ‘Governing people,’ Foucault suggested,

In his view, this modification of the self (the very essence of surveillance) had become the principle means, in the societies in which we live, or sustaining social order. In my view, this intersection of “government” and “subjectivation” (or how relations of subjectivation manufacture subjects) describes much about the stakes involved in the emergence of, and the ideological justifications of, domains of private authority. If Foucault is right — that these types of intersections dominate the modern world — do we not get a very different political reading of the ‘individualization of biographical forms’ that Beck talks of? Does not this demand we take account of a far broader horizon of knowledge/power relations when thinking of the “private domain”?

Final voice

‘One must oblige people to speak,’ wrote Napoleon.⁶⁹ To be sure, this is nothing new. In Book III of On the State, Cicero described the first act of government in the following way:

Engendering speech is essential to any state. But in Cicero’s republic communication was simply functional, while oratory was left to the governors, consuls, rhetors and statesmen. It is panopticism which provides the first clear societal model of privatized oratory: a governed soul who is invited to speak with him or herself.⁷¹ The essence of surveillance is that the individual modifies his or her own behavior without the direct intervention of the guardian. All the less objectionable when the subjected is the author. A permanent and self-generational, circular operation of power relations ensure the optimal ‘economy of government’ — diffused and efficient. In a word, sub-contracted.

Rather like a flock of sheep scattered in the absence of their master, modern societies are decentralized against the illusion of the disappearance of the state. But just as the shepherd need only whistle for the flock to assemble, so also, in the contemporary world, need the state only appear for relations of authority to ascend again upward, and coalesce again within it. Rather as though the sheep are wise, wily, and mature, so modern societies are left to their own devices to the extent to which they have achieved the ability to self-organize (to become authors of their own biographies). In this sense the state does not so much disappear as appear everywhere — in events and the behavior of people — like the proverbial wood obscured by the trees. Only with the emergence of rebellion from within, or new and absolute dangers from without (which, because the flock of men is so vast, means dangers of huge proportions), does the shepherd, or the state, need again to reveal its presence. Minor illegalities, minor infringements of the master’s will are acceptable. Indeed they are generative, teaching self-reliance and a kind of ‘smartness’ which is in itself useful, productive, and to the common good.⁷²

So is the self-organization of the flock — the emergence of domains of private authorship — in any way a challenge to his master’s voice? Not in my view. On the contrary, it is a reinforcement, an automatic functioning, of the shepherd’s discipline. Just as the old division of the mad and the reasonable does not disappear because the therapist’s couch replaces the padded cell, so the simple appearance of the actor on stage delivering lines in no way denotes that he wrote them himself. Like the analyst and the analysand, the state has realized it need only keep us talking; mirroring the ceaseless accumulation of capital with a ceaseless accumulation of discourse. ‘Let us speak without disguise or constraint’, begs d’Alembert, at the very moment society is “discovered.” Yet the freedom to speak by no means assures that in actuality one is authoring one’s life. To the monotonous flow of discourse — the droning on and on of authors — one can add the disciplines of that other perpetual theatre, the market, both of which together suggest that in depth one is no less free in a private organization than one is in the iron cage of state bureaucracy. An illusion of (market) sovereignty replaces the reality of (capitalist) subjection in equal measure to the illusion of (societal) authorship, which obscures the reality of voicelessness. In truth, each collapses into the other, as Kafka so profoundly recognized when he wrote,

Only if we believe power is repressive — exercised as a negative — can we maintain the illusion that self-assertion is transgressive and liberating. What leads us to say with such passion that sovereign individuality is the great overcoming of slavery? What led us to believe that the ‘laborious Slave’ was the source of all progress?⁷⁴ What if power could be exercised in the positive — engendering and permitting, rather than prohibiting and censoring? We would pass from techniques which police the limits of the acceptable to techniques which suggest the limitlessness of the possible. Would not then the grasping of authorship — the grabbing of the microphone — or the struggle of the working slave, dreaming of becoming master, not transfigure self-assertion into “emulation”, liberality into self-discipline? Each slave is encouraged to become master, but in so doing accepts as destiny a subjectivity already decided by the original master — the true sovereign of individuality. All the more important, therefore, to continue defining what it is to speak the truth, and what it is to take risks — particularly with one’s “self.”⁷⁵ ‘The “growing autonomy of the individual”,’ wrote Nietzsche:

So before we too easily talk of the “challenges of private authority” hadn’t we better pause — at least for a moment — to consider in detail the political nature of the space opened up, from the early modern era through the present, for the emergence and the operation of “private authorship”? The order of the law, suggested Blanchot, is never so sovereign than at the moment it envelops precisely that which had tried to overturn it. Perhaps we should subject to analysis the regime of truth within which the notion of ‘authorship as critique’ is located, and in particular that of the “sovereign individual.” Perhaps we should see in this phrase what it really means: the melding of two forms that have fought each other through history — the state-form based in discipline and training, and the nomad, or people-form enamoured of freedom.⁷⁷ Perhaps by so doing we can uncover not only the history of the diffusion of authority, but the political history of the creation of authors — not only of the truth of the voice which can speak, but the political history of the knowledge which is spoken.

disorder was replaced by functional order, diversity
by serial repetition, and surprize by uniform expectancy
— Christine Boyer

So when I proposed a title for this session I thought it might be worthwhile to attempt to outline this application and its genealogical development through a careful study of the doctrines and evolution of that field of knowledge most apt and concerned with ‘civic security’ in the formative years of the modern period. Understanding this field of knowledge – what was known at the time as politizeiwissenschaft, cameralistics, or police science – is, I will argue, essential in our attempts to locate contemporary power and the power to govern. We still exist within the parameters of a technology of power imagined and enacted in the classical age. Though this may sound like a bold statement, it isn’t. That the modern age is indebted to the classical age has often been noted. Even the correspondence between modern liberalism and early-modern police science – my focus here – has been suggested elsewhere. In the words of Marc Raeff,

In that case we might ask why the likes of Johann von Justi, Joachim Darjes, Justus Dithmar, Johann Moser, Ludwig von Seckendorff and Georg Heinrich Zinke, among others, have become such forgotten names in our general discussions of government and the power to govern. Perhaps we should rediscover their lost registers in the hope of better understanding the essential prehistory of our contemporary experience of ‘the political’. That at least was my aim when I set out into the dark archive with my lantern.

Unfortunately, I failed in my own task. So I ask you to bear in mind that the argument that follows is fragile, schematised too violently by far, and only one element in what is surely a rich pattern; that which makes up our modern experience of power, space, knowledge and time (the parameters of civic security). Let me spell out my thesis. Five thresholds – I argue – can be traced within our overall modern experience of civic security. The last of which we are arriving at now. The first threshold emerges with the birth of the modern state itself. It is characterised by a technology of power concerned to fix populations in space and time. The second threshold emerges with the birth of police science in early modern Europe. It is characterised by the investment in bodies as dispensers of forces. The third threshold emerges in the age of Baroque commerce. It is characterised by the biologicalization of the state under the metaphors of circulation and flow. The fourth threshold is marked by the end of the French Revolution. It is characterised by a technology that will invest in motorization. The final threshold is marked by the age of telepresence. It is characterised by the final geometrical extension of the power to govern in the automotion of ‘real-time’.

None of these thresholds would have been imaginable without a basic shift in the nature of power to which I will return shortly.

Frozen space

I want to begin by quoting at length a quite stunning description from the third section of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Here Foucault recounts the measures to be taken, according to an order published in the 17th century, when a plague appeared in a town.

This desire to see all, to set forth a ‘system of permanent registration’, survived well into the modern period. A perfect representation of this immobilization can be found in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s (1995) The Horseman on the Roof, where lead characters Olivier Martinez and Juliette Binoche struggle to escape the military descent upon a plagued 1830s Provence.

But this ‘freezing’ of space and time was not only an emergency measure. As Foucault describes, it was also an administrative goal; seen first on the military courtyard,

This amazing reversal of function – stone dancing, men frozen – is what essentially characterises the first threshold of modern civic security. It gave the sign and correlative disciplines that would come to define the ‘state of emergency’, ‘traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing .. immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies’ – this was ‘the utopia of the perfectly governed city’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 198). In the pages that follow, Foucault describes how this complete control of movement and gesture would be enshrined not only as an emergency medical measure, but a constant capillary power in the over-exposed cell of the modern prison, workhouse, factory, school and asylum. The entire space of early-modern Europe, as attested in portraiture, architecture, pastimes and trivial pursuits, would be modelled on the pose of the frozen soldier.

The discovery of motion

It is important however to see this as an ideal, for in reality by the end of the 17th century the broad technology of power that underpinned society had already long passed its second major threshold, entailing a profound culmination of transformative impulses at least as far back as the 16th and 15th, if not 14th and 13th centuries (Burckhardt, 1960, Huizinga, 1927). In his introduction to the multi-volume The History of Sexuality, Foucault described in outline the nature of this culmination. ‘Since the classical age’, he wrote,

What consequence, asked Foucault, does the rise of enabling power have for notions and practices of political right and practical government? For Foucault this ascendance marked the threshold of what he termed the ‘age of bio-power’. Two poles of political intervention emerged; a ‘great bipolar technology’ of power over life. The first centred on the ‘body as a machine’; an ‘anatomo-politics’ aimed to extort forces and optimize capabilities, ‘without at the same time making them more difficult to govern’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 141). The second centred on the ‘adjustment of the phenomena of population’; a ‘bio-politics’ focused on demography, the synchronization of resources and citizens, the social constitution of contracts and interests, wherein the health and well-being of the civitas became a ‘general objective of policy’ and domain of investment.

In Foucault’s philosophical and historical works this theme of the discovery of usable forces in positive constitution of modern society is well established; from Madness and Civilization (as much a tour-de-force on the birth of ‘industrious society’ as a history of insanity), through The Birth of the Clinic (note in particular the discussions of the ‘political consciousness’ of the well-governed body), to The History of Sexuality (on the birth of the ‘knowing subject’, and the body that constitutes itself as an object of knowledge). His description, however, of the ‘discovery of society’ is attested nowhere better than in his excavations of raison d’etat, politizeiwissenschaft, and what he called ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 1979, 1981, 1991). These writings are particularly significant in that they entailed a refocusing of Foucault’s own historical gaze. Rather than be satisfied with the archaeology of the ‘dark, but firm web of our experience’ (Foucault, 1973, p. 199), Foucault increasingly turned his attention to the ‘absolutely conscious strategy’ attested in both political texts and the ‘mass of unknown documents’ constitutive of government; its historical politics, techniques and practices. ‘Governmentalization’ was, for Foucault,

The essential prehistory to this ‘governmentalization of the state’ was the emergence of populations as a statistical problem.¹ For Foucault this emerges first in the notion of raison d’etat, where the greatness of cities and states is linked to the strength and productivity of the civitas.² Added to the ‘great eighteenth-century demographic upswing in Western Europe’ – no doubt in part a consequence of this new concern with the collective power of people – and ‘the necessity for co-ordinating and integrating it into the apparatus of production and the urgency of controlling it with finer and more adequate power mechanisms’,

Epitomised in the writings of Seckendorff (1656, 1693), Wolff (1719, 1728), Dithmar (1731), Darjes (1749, 1753, 1756, 1776), Zinke (1751), Moser (1758), Bergius (1767-74), and Mueller (1790), among others, the aim of this new technology of population – known to contemporaries as ‘cameralistics’, Oeconomie, polizeiwissenschaft, or ‘police science’ – was to make individuals ‘useful for the world’ in such a way that ‘their development also fosters the strength of the state’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 252).³ This strength of the state was conceived in two ways: one the one hand, as the material result of the harnessing and channelling of energies (industry) into the productive economy, and on the other, as the securitization of governance through workfare, occupation and the incentive to profit (enrichment). Productivity, diligence and happiness emerged as the objectives of the mode of government that dominated the classical age; simultaneously differentiated (in the classification and organization of bodies) and aggregated (in the policing of rhythms and processes of populations). The dream of automotion was taking shape.

In the words of Martin Heidegger, ‘The breeding of human beings is not a taming in the sense of a suppression and hobbling of sensuality; rather, breeding is the accumulation and purification of energies in the univocity of the strictly controllable ‘automatism’ of every activity’ (Heidegger, 1991, pp. 230-1). Not least the most important innovation of the classical age was the emergence of a form of political reason that would take as its focus the knowledge and facilitation of this automatism. From Leonardo’s anatomical notes and drawings, Versalius’ first public anatomy and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), Descartes’ declaration that the body is no more than an ensemble of ‘moving machines’, Hobbes’ assertion that the universe is ‘corporeal’, the flashpoints in that history are no doubt well known. What was emerging was a new spatial imagination of human existence, but also a temporal one.

As Jonathan Sawday has so rightly described,

One doesn’t have to take too many guesses to find the link between the new body of regular motion and the birth of the disciplined and tranquil society dreamed of by the 18th century practitioners of ‘police science’.⁴ With the discovery of planetary motion, the psychology of perception and duration, the social diffusion of the clock, the rise of artistic perspectivism, and the mathematical and geometrical revolutions, a new interest in the possibilities and aesthetics of uniform motion was born (Hall, 1983, Reiss, 1997, Mumford, 1934, 1961). Uniformity through space: the automata of movement fast came to define the parameters of ‘public safety’, good order, and the functioning society.

The great displacement

This link between motion and civic order has been highlighted in a number of works by Michel Foucault. In Madness and Civilization (1967, pp. 123-34, pp. 160-77), for example, Foucault described how reason itself was constituted in the classical age in reference to the extremes of movement; mania related to an ‘excessive mobility of the fibres’, leading to a lightness in disposition, and melancholia to a congestion and thickening of the blood, and subsequent dullness of character. What emerged was not only a medical perception of the corporeal body, but a series of practices, suggestions and knowledges aimed to regulate motion in the body-politic. The testing ground was the body of unreason, where mobility,

The result, as Foucault described (and also in Discipline and Punish) was the gradual emergence of a ‘science of time’ mediating man’s relation to motion within the confines of acceptable limits to reason and order defined in the movements of the natural world and celestial heavens. The condemnation of idleness as the ‘source of all disorders’, culminating in the obligation to work (Huizinga, 1927, Foucault, 1967) is perhaps the most conspicuous indication of the links newly forged between motion, good order and the individual. As Mumford describes, ‘Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie, time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as a heinous waste’ (Mumford, 1934, p. 197). In this, ‘the “power” of the soul gave way to a sequence of mechanical movements .. the silent forces of springs, wheels, and cogs, operating as a contrived whole’. As Sawday continues, ‘The modern body had emerged: a body which worked rather than existed’ (Sawday, 1995, p. 32).

In Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett takes up the point of how these references to motion (through medical perception and the birth of the productive economy) came to define the early-modern city. In doing so, Sennett, like Foucault, makes the crucial link between the organization of bodies and that of the broader body-politic. New principles of urban planning and policing were emerging based upon new medical metaphors of ‘circulation’ and ‘flow’ (Harvey, 1628, Willis, 1684). The health of the body became the comparison against which the greatness of cities and states would be measured. The ‘veins’ and ‘arteries’ of the new urban design were to be freed from all sources of possible blockage,

The regularisation of cleanliness and sanitation, and the removal of madmen, beggars and idlers from the highway can be related to the question of the efficiency of movement that dominated the historical imaginary of the classical age. As Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1748) would remark, only organized matter was endowed with the principle of motion. We may also add that matter endowed with the principle of motion was increasingly regarded as ‘ordered’. What was emerging was a particular relation between politics, space and time. Expressed with perfection in the words of Guillaute (a French police officer writing in 1749), ‘Public order will reign if we are careful to distribute our human time and space by a severe regulation of transit; if we are attentive to schedules as well as to alignments and signal systems; if by environmental standardization the entire city is made transparent, that is, familiar to the policeman’s eye’ (Guillaute, quoted in Virilio, 1986, p. 18).

Here again it is necessary to remember the military; both in their impact on cities and their impact on bodies. In terms of the former, as Mumford describes,

In terms of the latter – as described earlier – before man could be made to run at the enemy he has first to be taught how to stand in space and time. The neostoic revival in military discipline and drill embodied in the practices and procedures of Lipsius, Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus and Montecuccoli, and passed through to Eugene, Marlborough, Guibert and Frederick II, and the French Revolutionaries also helped set the technical parameters of government.⁵ Practised first on the military courtyard, and then in the field, the hospital, the workhouse, the almshouse, the prison, the birth of a new age of military logistics is inseparable from the episteme of organized motion emerging as a political technology of civic order.⁶ Progressively as we move through the third threshold – what we may call the ‘great displacement’ – the image of society emerging was one of a complex of relays; each to be synchronised, made efficient and effective. In the remarkable words of Johann von Justi (1755, 1761-4, 1769), ‘A properly constituted state must be exactly analogous to a machine, in which all the wheels and gears are precisely adjusted to one another; and the ruler must be the foreman, and the main-spring, or the soul .. which sets everything in motion’ (Justi, quoted in Parry, 1963, p. 182).

Frederick the Great, the ’meticulous king of small machines’, was surely the first statesman to bring together the two themes that would dominate the historical horizon of the modern period; bio-power and moving-power. By the turn of the 19thC these themes were running in parallel, a fact of which Foucault seemed well aware,

A ‘collective, obligatory rhythm’ was emerging; a ‘meticulous meshing’. ‘We have passed’, Foucault continues,

As Foucault goes on to describe, it was exactly this implementation of a new economy of movement through time that enabled Frederick to dominate the 18thC, becoming the model for military knowledge from there on in. Speed was to be taught as a virtue.

The dromological revolution

Yet if Frederick was the foreman of this newly constituted machine-in-motion, Napoleon would surely become it’s soul. More than anyone prior, he would embody the next phase of history, defined not so much by the ‘art of governing’, as what we might describe – with a certain sense of misgiving – as the ‘art of motorizing’.⁷ Under the Committee of Public Safety the levée en masse is established providing the first clear model of modern conscription. Perfected by the hand of Bonaparte, the energy thrown into the conduct of war was ‘immensely increased’, with whole populations ‘mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 137).

And not only in warfare did the principle of speed dominate, but also in his Civil Code – the Code Napoléon - of which he claimed the, ‘most compact government with the most rapid circulation and the most energetic movement that ever existed’ (Napoleon, quoted in Crawley, 1965, p. 319). All of this was unthinkable without the elaborate ensemble of powers in which the new kinetic state was anchored; the disciplinary codes that would come to define modern governance. Prefigured perfectly in the words of French military reformer Comte de Guilbert,

‘The best soldier’ Napoleon would declare, ‘is not so much the one who fights as the one who marches’ (Napoleon, quoted in Durant, 1975, p. 247). There is no doubt that this marks a threshold in the ‘evolution of human efforts to organize life on the planet’, militarily, governmentally and geo-strategically.

It is this moment in history that serves as urbanist Paul Virilio’s point of departure. Like Foucault, Mumford and Sennett, Virilio is also concerned with the birth of a new technical, geometric, chronographic imagination of men and things. What Virilio adds to the story is a more focused description of the 19th and 20th century experience of moving, and its correspondence with political technology and the genealogy of governance. ‘Up until the nineteenth century’ Virilio writes, ‘society was founded on the brake’ (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983, pp. 44-5). Agrarian society then gives way to industrial or transportational society (or in Virilio’s terms, ‘dromocratic society’⁸ … ). This society is built upon the possibility of ‘fabricating speed’. ‘And so they can pass from the age of the brakes to the age of the accelerator. In other words, power will be invested in acceleration itself’ (Virilio, in Virilio and Lotringer, 1983, pp. 44-5).⁹ An ‘unrecognised order of political circulation’ was emerging, crystallised in the French Revolution. The events of 1789, he writes,

The stage had been set for Bonaparte. As Will and Ariel Durant have described, ‘With Napoleon the ecstasy of liberty yielded to the dictatorship of order’ (Durant, 1975, p. 240).

From this consolidation point (of a broader political investment in motion running parallel to the rise of the money economy, the militant-bureaucratic state, and new advances in the physical and medical sciences), Virilio goes on to chart the active planning of the time and space horizons of whole societies; what he calls the, ‘primordial control of the masses by the organisms of urban defense’ (Virilio, 1986, p. 15). For Virilio then, as for Foucault, the aims of modern political rationality are clear; to make mobile the citizenry within the parameters of order, reason and tranquillity. Deterritorializing in a double sense (the investment in motion and the targeting of the populace), individuals become subordinated to a higher realm of ordering beyond territorialism: speed. ‘Revolution’ replaces ‘circulation’, automotion supplants motion: the increase in pace acting to secure tranquillity through compulsion; what Paul Virilio (1986, p. 46) has termed the ‘peace of exhaustion’. In essence (though largely unrecognised even by himself) Virilio’s work describes in outline the political technique through which the ‘problem’ of early modernity (of how to maximise the power of individuals for the prestige of the state within the confines of stability and good order) was transcended and neutralised.

Over the modern period proper, no longer is the dilemma of government how to mediate between the extremes of rapidity and stasis, productionism and docility, circulation and revolution. By the time of Napoleon, not only now would political rationality understand the motion of matter and bodies, it would seek above all to perfect the mechanisms of producing it. The ‘movement-of-movement’ as a technical achievement, emerges at this time (the early 19thC) as a societal principle, reordering the whole of the modern world. ‘What, then’ writes N.H. Gibbs, ‘was Napoleon’s distinguishing mark as a “great captain”?’,

Motion had become speed, and in focussing upon it in the most radical way possible, Paul Virilio begins to answer the question of how efficiency in the governing of men and things was established at the heart of modernity.

Let us imagine the flagpoints of this history in summary form: in early modernity we find a rabble populace, poorly disciplined, wandering and blighted by the spectres of unreason, idleness and environmental destitution. The aim of political reason – in the context of broader societal transformations (the discovery of order through production, the rise of the money economy, commercialism and early mercantilism¹⁰ … ) – is to navigate a course between the extremes of revolution and stagnancy. Having recognised that (in the words of Botero) the ‘true strength of a ruler consists in his people’, political rationality aims also to ‘multiply’ the citizenry as a productive force. A new politics of order, both of detail (looking into men’s souls), and of generality (the new concern with the biology of populations) becomes a technical necessity. Working together, these techniques of intervention (‘anatomo-power’ and ‘bio-power’) produced at the heart of the classical age an initial stasis; seen best in the military courtyard, the hospital, the prison and the school. The power of movement was subject to a territorial codification (in the city, in the workhouse, in the asylum, in the manufactory).

By the beginnings of the 19thC the place of the state and political reason in constituting spaces for existence had been secured, and a second ‘reordering’ could now be effected, heralding perhaps less the age of bio-politics as the age of bio-kinesis. Rather than charting the middle ground between rapidity and stasis, power would aim to ‘release’ the full productive, dynamic efficiency of the (national) population in and through time. ‘Motion’ (or more precisely, motorization¹¹ … ) had emerged as the destiny and law of a new politics of order. The full equivalence of Virilio’s ‘metabolic vehicles’ to Foucault’s ‘bearers of order’ becomes clear. ‘Dromological power’ – or in Foucault, ‘capillary power’ – had emerged as the practical basis and first principle of capitalist modernity established simultaneously with the apparatus of modern governance. Mobility, in other words, had become simultaneously the means to liberation and the means to domination; the accumulation of men running hand-in-hand with the accumulation of movement, and the illusion of its sovereign release. Speed was to be taught as a virtue because it had become in itself a discipline.

Terminality

This final threshold – of speed as discipline – indeed finds its birth in the formative years of modernity, and as such is inextricably linked with it. In the words of Richard Sennett (1994, p. 264), ‘the Enlightenment planner made motion and end in itself.’ No doubt this is when ‘terminality’ (though yet to find its linguistic expression) first emerged as the imaginary endpoint to liberal freedom. Expressed so well in the words of Karl Jaspers (1951, p. 17), ‘The surface of the world became universally accessible; space capitulated’. Or as Paul Virilio describes in Speed and Politics (1986, p. 73), ‘the dromocrat’s look .. causes distances to approach.’ An obligation-to-mobility (moving-power) had emerged, that for Virilio this is clearly worrying,

Does this automotion through telepresence not take us back to Foucault’s disease-ridden town? As William Mitchell (1995, p. 100) in City of Bits, has recently approved, ‘As networks and information appliances deliver expanding ranges of services, there will be fewer occasions to go out’. ‘The crowd’, wrote Foucault, ‘a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 201). When considered in the context of the rise of neoliberalism – indeed the liberal-rational capitalist project as a whole – one can surely see the answer to the question that Foucault poses for himself: ‘How is power to be strengthened in such a way that, far from impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and regulations, it actually facilitates such progress?’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 208) This is surely the true achievement of automotion: a form of power that simultaneously fixes and makes mobile to the speed of light the malleable body of the ‘terminal-citizen’.

‘If last century’s revolution in transportation’, writes Virilio,

‘Imagine order’, wrote Robert Musil,

Our current danger is that this plague will triumph not because the town is left open and exposed, but because it is frozen, and we with it, in time and space, becoming little more than prisoners of the utopia of the perfectly governed city.

In fact, there was no “industrial revolution”, but
only a “dromocratic revolution”; there is no democracy,
only dromocracy, there is no strategy, only dromology …
Thus, the related logic of knowing power, or power-
knowledge, is eliminated to the benefit of moving-power
— in other words the study of tendencies, of flows.
— Paul Virilio

So what does this mean? Three implications at least. First, that we may question the precision of Virilio’s dating of the ‘dromological revolution’, and the move to the ‘age of the accelerator’. As this qualification seems to me of interest only in passing I’ll not labour the point. Second, that we ought better to recognise — alongside military ‘dromomaniacs’ — the importance of a whole band of administrators, reformers, bureaucrats and technicians that sought actively to create societies at once suited for speed and tranquillity. This seems to me much more important, both as a corrective to Virilio’s overly militaristic reading of speed, and as a reminder that beneath the politics of speed (indeed, the politics of the military) is ultimately the politics of order. Third, that having better understood the history of man’s experience of power-in-motion over the modern epoch as a whole we may be better prepared to think about how political technology operates in our own immanent present. Taken together — I argue — Virilio and Foucault provide us with a whole battery of concepts with which we can approach the politics of contemporary dominant social realities.

I begin with the question of motion in the early modern period.

Imagining motion in the Classical age

In Madness and Civilization, philosopher Michel Foucault described how the ‘problem of mobility’ was central to the identification and diagnosis of insanity and unreason in the Classical age.¹ Within the popular imaginary, mania was related to an ‘excessive mobility of the fibres’, leading to a lightness in disposition, and melancholia to a congestion and thickening of the blood, and subsequent dullness of character. An episteme of medical perception arose around the question of movement within the body. This episteme was embodied and reflected in a series of practices, suggestions and knowledges aimed to regulate the centre ground between the extremes of rapidity and stasis:

The result, as Foucault described (also later in Discipline and Punish) was the gradual emergence of a ‘science of time’ mediating man’s relation to motion within the confines of acceptable limits to reason and order. The parameters of a whole society were established vis-à-vis the question of ‘movement’.

In Flesh and Stone, Foucault’s friend and collaborator, Richard Sennett, describes how this medical perception of movement came to define the organization of Classical and Baroque urban space. In doing so, Sennett, like Foucault, makes the crucial link between the organization of bodies and that of the broader ‘body-politic’. New principles of city planning and policing were emerging based upon the medical metaphors of ‘circulation’ and ‘flow’.³ The health of the body became the comparison against which the greatness of cities and states would be measured. The ‘veins’ and ‘arteries’ of the new urban design were to be freed from all sources of possible blockage:

The regularisation of cleanliness and sanitation, and the removal of madmen, beggars, vagabonds and idlers from the highway can be related to the question of the efficiency of movement that dominated the historical imaginary of the Classical age.⁵ As Julien Offray de La Mettrie would remark, only organised matter was endowed with the principle of motion.⁶ We may also add that matter endowed with the principle of motion was increasingly regarded as ‘ordered’. What was emerging was a particular relation between politics, space and time. In the words of Guillaute (a French police officer writing in 1749): “Public order will reign if we are careful to distribute our human time and space between the city and the country by a severe regulation of transit; if we are attentive to schedules as well as to alignments and signal systems; if by environmental standardization the entire city is made transparent, that is, familiar to the policeman’s eye.”⁷

Channelling movements

Running parallel to this mapping of the physical body, and the regularisation of the urban landscape, was a third form of motion — a kind of civic pulsation (the actual movement of bodies) — nascent and yet to be controlled. Contrary to common perception, this new civic energy finds its threshold not in the industrial and recreational innovations of the 19th century, but rather in transformations of state and society in the Classical age. Described by Mumford, it is the sixteenth century which marks the emergence of a new era of generalised mobility. The ‘new spirit of society’, he argues: “ .. was on the side of rapid transportation. The hastening of movement and the conquest of space, the feverish desire to ‘get somewhere’, were manifestations of the pervasive will-to-power. ‘The world’, as Stow remarked .. ‘runs on wheels’. Mass, velocity, and time were categories of social effort before Newton’s law was formulated.”⁸ Jacob Burckhardt’s classic study, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, traces this will-to-power back even further to the reconceptualisation of distance and space during the Crusades.⁹ For both, this new spirit could not be explained exclusively in terms of technology, but had to be seen within the context of what Burckhardt would call ‘systematisation’ (through which man would come to recognise himself), or what Mumford more knowingly would term biotechnics (the ways in which man codifies, differentiates and stratifies in establishing mastery over the realm of men and things).¹⁰

What both Mumford and Burckhardt point the way to is a pre-existing politico-administrative, rather than technico-military, history of speed, only in part foregrounded in the works of Paul Virilio. In actual fact — viewed in this way — the genealogy of speed takes on an entirely new dimension identified in the works of Michel Foucault, Gerhard Oestreich, and Brook Blair. In The Will to Know, for instance, Foucault traces the politico-theoretical imagination of what we may call ‘kinetic channelling’: the accumulation and direction of the energies and flows of the populace as a whole. In his classic study, Neostoicism and the early modern state, Oestreich charts a similar ambition in the Netherlands Movement, the revival of stoic values (late 16th century onward), and the rise of the constitutional state. Blair, more recently, has deepened this analysis to consider the advent of what he calls ‘universal productionist order’ and the ‘mass mobilizations’ of the modern epoch of biopower.¹¹

For Foucault, a critical threshold is reached with the genesis and ascendance of concepts and practices of ‘reason of state’. In the lecture, ‘Omnes et Singulatim’, he describes how during the course of the sixteenth century a new principle of ‘civil prudence’ emerged: the populace was to be maximised as a productive force.¹² The making of individuals ‘useful for the world’ became the central objective of political reason.¹³ Within this reason — dominated throughout the early modern epoch by the same physiological metaphors of ‘circulation’ and ‘fluidity’ — the principle of motion was in essence synonymous with the principle of production; of the functioning politico-economic order.

As Foucault was variously at pains to point out, this ‘functioning’ was to depend upon facilitating rather than the subduing the populace. In the words of von Rohr, writing at the turn of the 18thC: “The best means of enriching a land is to take care that many people are drawn into the land, and also that all the subjects though diligent labour may have their support and means of gain.”¹⁴ The metaphor of ‘drawing in’ captures perfectly what Foucault would describe with such effect as the broader transformation taking place: the ‘entry of life into history’ (the passing of the processes of human existence into the realm of knowledge, power and political technology).¹⁵ Underpinning this transformation was the neostoic revival in military discipline and drill embodied in the practices and procedures of Lipsius, Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus and Montecuccoli, and passed on through Eugene, Marlborough, Guibert and Frederick II, to the French Revolutionaries.¹⁶ Before men could be made to run at the enemy, they had first to be taught how to stand in space and time. This disciplinary revival — practised first on the military courtyard, and then in the General Hospital, the workhouse, the almshouse, and later the prison — was the essential first step in mastering and channelling the ‘release’ of energies of the newly ascendant masses, organised and brought forth (called forth even) by a whole range of political theorists and advisers.¹⁷

The image of society emerging was one of a complex of relays, each to be synchronised, made efficient and effective. In the words of 18th century thinker von Justi: “The domestic security of a state consists in such a well-ordered constitution of the same that all parts of the civic body are held in their appropriate correlation, and in the consequent repose .. ”¹⁸ If the ‘civil machine’ achieved a modicum of fluidity, productivity and order would be achieved simultaneously. As described by Immanuel Wallerstein, a new framework was required: “ .. within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation.”¹⁹ The aims of this process of mobilising and ordering would be expressed throughout the Eighteenth century in a mass of directives, codes and regulations through which modern social contractarianism was practised. “The foundations were laid .. ” writes Hubert Johnson, “ .. for the future development of an entrepreneurial bureaucracy that would, in the next century, work hand in glove with government.”²⁰

Police science and the regularisation of energies

These foundations are found nowhere better than in contemporaneous ‘cameralistic’ writings of Seckendorff, Dithmar, and Darjes, among others. Under the alternative name of ‘police science’, these writings, taken together, embody a commitment to the social order and the emergence of a progress defined in material production. The assurance of motion was, for the cameralists, the surest way to ensure the ‘happiness of the state’. Man at once decentred in the Copernican revolution was recentred at the heart of political economy — or perhaps more precisely, political technology. This recentering had its own implications. Slowly but surely an organic view of society was emerging; one in which the dynamic relations of ‘men and things’ were to be synchronised. Niccolò Machiavelli clearly stands at a threshold here, but it is not until well into the eighteenth century that the parameters of the social order emerging could be recognised, and acted upon. Alongside the ‘system of positivities’ emerging the fields of science, medicine, jurisprudence, and commerce developed an equally important order of knowledge defined not by its space, but its relation to time; what we might call an episteme of conscious mobility.²¹ The new requirements for social order that developed with the turbulence of the money economy in the 15th and 16th centuries had, almost independently, suggested the means by which populations could be at once maximised and minimised.

This episteme is expressed nowhere better than in the actions of the single most successful and influential figure of the period: Frederick II of Prussia. Indeed, so aware it seems was he of the new requirements of conscious mobility (not only in warfare, also in bureaucratic management²² was its rapidity .. His secretaries and ministers testify to the tyrannical discipline which he exercised over his mind and body.  With punctilious regularity he disposed of everything as soon as it came to him .. He was compelled to order his ministers to send reports of no more than two folio pages … The kind was forever threatening officials with disgrace and dismissal if their reports were not drawn up with the utmost brevity.” Walter L. Dorn, ‘The Prussian Bureaucracy in the Eighteenth Century’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XLVI (1931), pp. 412-4.] … ) that one imagines that the remarkable words of the cameralist von Justi were written entirely for him: “A properly constituted state must be exactly analogous to a machine, in which all the wheels and gears are precisely adjusted to one another; and the ruler must be the foreman, and the main-spring, or the soul .. which sets everything in motion.”²³ The threshold in the political economy of power at which he stands is so significant that perhaps it is necessary to add to Foucault’s formulation of the ‘birth of biopower’ with the notion of the ‘birth of biokinesis’ (the passing of movement into History, and the realm of political technology).

1789 and the disciplinary/dromological revolution

In the words of Martin Heidegger: “The breeding of human beings is not a taming in the sense of a suppression and hobbling of sensuality; rather, breeding is the accumulation and purification of energies in the univocity of the strictly controllable ‘automatism’ of every activity.”²⁴ With Frederick we find the first statesman of the modern period to bring together the two themes that were emerging to dominate an historical horizon: biopower and dromological power. It is true that at the turn of the 19thC these elements were in any case running parallel. Foucault seemed well aware of this:

A ‘collective, obligatory rhythm’ was emerging; a ‘meticulous meshing’. “We have passed .. ” Foucault continues:

As Foucault goes on to describe, it was exactly this implementation of a new economy of movement through time that enabled Frederick to dominate the 18thC, becoming the model for military knowledge from there on in. Speed was to be taught as a virtue. Yet if Frederick was the foreman of this newly constituted machine-in-motion, Napoleon Bonaparte would become it’s soul. That great disciplinarian, commander of detail, would make his life-project the discovery of disciplinary-kinetics. More than anyone prior, he would embody the next phase of history, defined not so much by the ‘art of governing’, as what we might describe — with a certain sense of misgiving — as the ‘art of motorizing’.²⁷ How far had European practice travelled from the Bourbon King who declared, “l’etat, c’est moi.”, to the military-Emperor who drew the subtle and yet profound distinction, declaring, “I am the man of the state. I am the revolution.”²⁸

It is this moment in history that serves — as we know — as Paul Virilio’s point of departure. “Up until the nineteenth century .. ” he writes, “ .. society was founded on the brake.”²⁹ Agrarian society then gives way to industrial or transportational society (or better still, ‘dromocratic society’). This society is built upon the possibility of ‘fabricating speed’: “And so they can pass from the age of the brakes to the age of the accelerator. In other words, power will be invested in acceleration itself.”³⁰ An ‘unrecognised order of political circulation’ was emerging, crystallised finally in the French Revolution. The events of 1789, he writes:

From this turning point (which was perhaps nothing more than a confirmation of a broader political investment in motion running parallel to the rise of commerce and the money economy, the militant-bureaucratic state, and new advances in the physical and medical sciences), Virilio goes on to charts the active planning of the time and space horizons of whole societies: what he calls the: “ .. primordial control of the masses by the organisms of urban defense.”³² For Virilio, as for Foucault, the aims of modern political rationality are clear: to make mobile the citizenry within the parameters of order, reason and tranquillity. Yet for Virilio, as again for Foucault, these parameters also included the channelling of surplus civic/kinetic energy for warfare. In the words of Virilio:

And in the words of Foucault:

So what we find — clearer in Foucault, but implicit in Virilio — is a parallel development of biopower and dromological power: a power that invests in bodies, and a power that puts those bodies in motion. Both forms of power — as their very roots in the classical age highlight — are concerned in the last analysis with the ordering, channelling, and disciplining of populations.

The biopolitical/dromological reversal

What Virilio adds to the story is a more focused description of the nineteenth century evolution of political technology, hinted at yet not fully assimilated in the works of Michel Foucault. From the threshold of modernity onward, disciplinary power invests less in the constitution of space than in the constitution of time. We may think of this as something of a rupture at the heart of modern political technology — one which continues to affect the practicalities of our lives. Individuals become subordinated to a higher realm of ordering (speed). Despite his interest in architecture, Virilio is then less concerned with the ways in which ‘stone can make people docile and knowable’, than the means by which revolution and not stasis has established itself as the universal principle of modern order, leading finally to what he has termed the ‘peace of exhaustion’.³⁵ In essence (though Virilio seems uninterested in extending his historical analysis to take account of the early modern period) his works describe in outline the political technique through which the ‘problem’ of early modernity (of how to maximise the power of individuals for the prestige of the state within the confines of stability and good order) was transcended and neutralised. Over the modern period proper, no longer is the dilemma of government how to mediate between the extremes of rapidity and stasis, productionism and docility, circulation and revolution. By the time of Napoleon, the sentiments expressed just fifty years earlier by Julien Offray de La Mettrie had already been surpassed. As he had written:

Not only now would political rationality understand the motion of matter, and of bodies, it would seek above all to perfect the mechanisms of producing it. The ‘movement-of-movement’, or ‘speed’, as a technical achievement, emerges at this time (the early 19thC) as a societal principle, reordering the whole of the modern world.³⁷ In the most radical way possible Virilio begins to answer the question of how efficiency was established in the modern urban landscape. He also uncovers — in the most discreet and disarming way (despite his want for rhetoric) — a whole new realm of power; one that still — 20 years after Speed and Politics was written — is yet to be explored in detail.

In the way of a summary of the history that I have aimed to highlight, let us imagine the flagpoints of that history in an alternative form: in early modernity we find a rabble populace, poorly disciplined, wandering, and blighted by the spectres of unreason, idleness and environmental destitution. The aim of political reason — in the context of broader societal transformations (the discovery of order through production, the rise of the money economy, commercialism and early mercantilism³⁸ … ) — is to navigate a course between the extremes of revolution and stagnancy. Having recognised that (in the words of Botero) the ‘true strength of a ruler consists in his people’, political rationality aims to ‘multiply’ the citizenry as a productive force.³⁹ A new politics of order, both of detail (looking into men’s souls), and of generality (the constitution of a whole society) becomes a technical necessity. Working together (what Foucault would describe as ‘anatomo-power’ and ‘biopower’), these techniques of intervention produced at the heart of the Classical age an initial halt. The power of movement was subject to a spatial codification (in the city, in the workhouse, in the hospital, in the manufactory).

By the beginnings of the 19thC this ‘codification’ had been achieved, and a second ‘reordering’ could now be effected. This reordering, rather than charting the middle ground between rapidity and stasis, aimed to ‘release’ the full productive, dynamic efficiency of the (national) population in and through time. Motion had emerged as the destiny and law of a new politics of order. The full equivalence of Virilio’s ‘metabolic vehicles’ to Foucault’s ‘bearers of order’ becomes clear. Dromological power — or in the words of Foucault, ‘capillary power’ — had emerged as the practical basis and first principle of the ‘free society’ and ‘coded individual’ established simultaneously with the apparatus of modern ‘governmentality’. Mobility, in other words, had become simultaneously the means to liberation and the means to domination; the ‘accumulation of men’ running simultaneously with ‘the accumulation of movement’, and — one might add — the ‘accumulation of capital’.

Bio-dromology and (global) capitalist modernity

On this note I want to change gear, moving now to consider — if only briefly — the importance of deepening Virilio’s genealogy of motion in the fashion outlined. As alluded to in the introduction, all of the above is not introduced as a corrective to Virilio’s historical slant. To do so would in many ways be irrelevant. Virilio is a dromologist, not an historian. As he himself admits: “I don’t believe in explanations. I believe in suggestions, in the obvious quality of the implicit.”⁴⁰ Rather, the reason why I have attempted to sketch-out, in crude simplicity, the development of our modern experience of motion is because I think that together, the works of Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault describe in that experience the genealogy of capitalism. In doing so they open up a whole new political space for the effective critique of contemporary discourses of social reality, and in particular the ‘social reality’ of contemporary ‘advanced capitalism’.

For Foucault, biopower was the essential missing link in genealogy of capitalist modernity. As he insisted in Discipline and Punish: “ .. the two processes — the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital — cannot be separated.”⁴¹ On the other side of the equation, Paul Virilio has stressed that his focus on speed in no way detracts from the importance of capital. As he insisted in Pure War: “Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed is the hidden side of wealth.”⁴² And lest we forget, Marx also understood the political advantages of the collision of dromological/biopolitical technology:

Once in motion, political rationality had only to: “ .. give rhythm to the mobile mass’s trajectory through vulgar stimulation.”⁴⁴

Nowhere better do we find resonances of this ‘vulgar stimulation’ than the ensemble of discourses that seem now in the ascendant (the discourses of globalism and globalization), fast overtaking the globe, and in the same movement creating anew a fast globe. These discourses, and their subsidiaries (informatisation, risk, competition, efficiency) — reflected and enacted in a whole panoply of specific practices —  are all linked the double movement sketched out above (the ‘will-to-speed’ and ‘modern governmentality’). Taken together — I argue — we stumble across the unwritten history of globalization, and in that, the unwritten history of contemporary advanced capitalism.

The links are fairly simple. With dromology: the will-to-speed finds its final realisation in the destruction of the space (astronautical flight, space obliterated in proportion to the velocity of the vehicle). This destruction, as a social principle (Mumford’s ‘desire to get somewhere’), has reduced the expanse of the world to naught, thrusting us into the global epoch. With governmentality: we need look only to the proliferating discourses of risk, competition, informatization, self-monitoring, self-organization, efficiency, effectiveness and excellence to get a taste of the ways in which the discourse of speed works to order the world into which individuals — indeed whole societies — are thrown. Each element feeds of the other: dromocratic power has encouraged the release of the will-to-speed through which we face what Virilio has termed the ‘negative horizon’ (the implosion of space under the violence of speed). In parallel, disciplinary society has actively sought to produce this violence of speed (first in the military, then in the factory, then in the school, then in the prison) as a technical instrument in the ordering of populations (‘populations at speed’).

Two principles then: speed and governmentality. These principles conform to two others: spatial annihilation; and the obligation-to-motivation. Both impulses are reflected in the deep social myths that accompany the discourses of globalism in our contemporary era. On spatial annihilation: in 1973 First National City Bank run an advertisement for their ‘global transfer system’ with the headline: “Citibank — the bank to look to for speed in moving money.”⁴⁵ In 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev hails the ‘mechanism of acceleration’, and the putting of ‘society in motion’, by quoting the words of a Western politician: “If you do what you’ve conceived, this will have fantastic, truly global consequences.”⁴⁶ “You wanted to travel?”, asks an ad for Sky-TV: “No need to bother.” “We believe .. ” runs a promotion for Kawasaki, “ .. that to fulfil our potential as a global corporation, we have to continually push back frontiers of space .. “⁴⁷ On the obligation-to-motivation: in 1989 Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric talks of the ‘global moment’, of ‘lightening speed’, ‘fast action’, and ‘acting with speed’. “The world moves much faster today.”⁴⁸ In 1991, President and CEO of Asea Brown Boveri, asks: “Why emphasise speed over precision? Because the costs of delay exceed the costs of mistakes.”⁴⁹ In September 1994 The International Herald Tribune, distil perfectly the fearful risks apparent to all that operate to ensure the operation of universal governmentality: “For U.S. Corporations, the Modern-Day Byword Is ‘Globalize or Die’”.⁵⁰

As suggested, both impulses have a deeper history. The following words accompanied a picture of the globe from space on an advertisement published for Ashland Oil and Refining Company in 1969:

Alternatively, take the advertisement for Daimler Benz published in 19 under the epigraph ‘Progress is the realisation of Utopias’ (Oscar Wilde), and beneath, the NASA earthrise. The dialogue ran as follows:

The automobile is linked to the planets, the planets to the dreams of the ancients, and ourselves to the possibilities of the future. It is that future itself which establishes the obligation-to-motivation. “Companies that do not adapt to the new global realities will become victims of those that do.”⁵³ “The good news is .. ” writes Tom Peters, “ .. You have no choice.”⁵⁴ There is, in the words of Walter Wriston, ‘no place to hide’.⁵⁵ ‘Man waiting for motivation’, ‘productivity through people’, ‘involve everyone in everything’, ‘create a sense of urgency’, establish ‘friction-free capitalism’: as Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, in the face of global competition: “ .. people are going round with guillotines over their heads.”⁵⁶

Bio-global, biokinetic society: securitization through speed

“[I]t is the permanence of speed that creates the total peace, the peace of exhaustion.”⁵⁷ In one sentence Virilio illustrates perfectly what I would argue are the biopolitical impulses of our immanent (global) present. What I have tried to do is to introduce the longer political history to this ‘peace of exhaustion’, through an analysis of the imagination of motion in the early modern period, and its subsequent inclusion into the development of disciplinary society. I also suggested along the way that what we see emerge — over the period of modernity as a whole — is something more than simply disciplinary society. This ‘something more’ is a form of society that, in the words of Virilio again, pursues peace through exhaustion, that is, through speed. In this sense it might be possible to add to Michel Foucault’s formulation of the ‘birth of biopolitics’ (the techniques of disciplinary society), the notion of the ‘birth of biokinesis’ (the techniques of dromo-disciplinary society). In particular this seems a fruitful way to politicise the rise to hegemony of the political discourses of globalization, informatisation, risk and competition. What I have suggested is that in combination the works of urbanist Paul Virilio late philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, open new ground by which to interrogate modern political technology, and in particular, its contemporary transformations and appearances.

Virilio then, I would suggest finally, stands in part as the successor, debtor, and faithful disciple — if unrecognised — of the late professor of the Collège de France. No doubt there were differences between them (if indeed they had regular contact).⁵⁸ Yet the similarities, to me, are more striking. Virilio, like Foucault, is clearly ‘taking aim at the heart of the present’.⁵⁹ In doing so — again like Foucault — he opens up, as he writes, multiple sites of contestation and struggle. Indeed, if Foucault was the thinker in our century to radicalise — in his genealogies of the asylum, the clinic, philology, natural history, political economy, the prison, and sexuality — the politics of space, perhaps we may say that Paul Virilio is his complement, both in method and range, in his radicalisation of the politics of time. It remains, however, to be seen whether Virilio will, like Foucault, take on the role of an opener of worlds, suggesting, if not prescribing, how the practices and rationalities of violence that surround us may be faced-down with courage and defiance. Perhaps Virilio is himself too fascinated by velocity to pause enough to think out the alternatives.