What are we? What is the future? What is
the past? What magic fluid envelops us
and hides from us the things it is most
important for us to know? We are born, we
live, and we die in the midst of the marvelous.
— Napoleon Bonaparte

This is not a world history. Though the human animal stands at its center, neither is it an anthropology. It is an inquiry into the formative aspects of the development of modernity through the lens, or the eye, of genealogy. No need here to rehearse what everyone knows. Let us just say — in order to get to the heart of things — that genealogy is about power.¹ And so, at the most general, most useful level, this essay is about power and the formation of the modern world. Its particular concern is with the globalizing history of the West. But let us draw a third distinction. This is not a history of empires. Traditional categorizations — system, hegemony, sovereignty — are not at the heart of what follows. The globalizing history at issue is not one Thucydides would write. Nor does it owe much to Le Carré, Tom Clancy, or Frederick Forsyth. “Intrigue” would serve well enough to sum up their world: the world of brinkmanship, great cunning and high stakes. Our concern is more purposely mundane. It is with a certain strata, or plane of our history; the plane which marks the passage into bodies, through souls, of so many disciplines, regulations, rules. If this history can be revealed from the vantage of international studies it is doubtless because it shares with that field a common frontier: the problem, and problematic of security. Though this essay comes at it from below, dragging to it criticism and philosophy, what follows might indeed be seen in the light of that discourse. Albeit consulting an atypical range of authors, and concerned with so many issues traditionally ignored (prisons, schools, bodies, time … ), this work has developed nonetheless on the outer edge of the shadow of traditional international studies. And as such it must be read. Set in the light of what is disregarded there. For what I would mark out here are elements of a history which has yet to be revealed either there or elsewhere. Not a high politics of security, but a subterranean history which could, by another name, be a global history of power.

It is strange that it was Napoleon, a man better known as the embodiment of grand politics, who musing upon this world expressed it so clearly: “What are we? What is the future? What is the past? What magic fluid envelops us and hides from us the things it is most important for us to know? We are born, we live, and we die in the midst of the marvelous.”² I remember reading this passage to a friend. “The mundane is fascinating,” he replied. What might be this magic fluid that envelops us? What does it conceal — what does it hide from us? I had been concerned up until this point with discourse: the storehouse of statements, signs, systems, constitutive of the effective knowledge, or “truth” of a culture.³ But now was suggested something more; a positive overcoding of our existence, a pollution of resonance, a dulling down of the marvelous. Between so many points along the arc of security — not the grand politics of states, but the minor politics of the everyday — could there be discerned, as a kind of geometry of correspondence, or space of coincidence, held doubtless in tension, but nonetheless constituting — unstable though evolving, between so many institutions — the blueprint of a general method⁴, an economy or organization, or otherwise a fluid, an ocean overlaying us?

Was this Bonaparte not the same who had dreamt of the world of detail? What had he seen in that dream? “I have believed in it ever since I was fifteen. I was concerned with it then, and this memory lives within me, as an obsession never to be abandoned … “⁵. Though not the first to discover it, we know he set out to organize it⁶, this Newton of the “small bodies”, the small movements, who wished to arrange around him “a mechanism of power that would enable him to see the very smallest event”⁷ — and by means of discipline, “‘to embrace the whole of this vast machine without the slightest detail escaping his attention.’”⁸ Might a globalism of sorts be discerned in this gaze bearing down on the mundane? Might a history of security working up from the detail not otherwise be, for the want of a better term, a globalizing tendency of power? Could the magic fluid that surrounds us — a concealment of the “marvelous” — be formed of so many refusals, humiliations, denials, of all kinds of infamies, intensities, desires? Might a politics of globalism not indeed be found resting upon that deepest level of the ordering of our world — how it was forged, who in it was judged, and how we with so many have been shaped?

No longer would it seem enough to write history from the points from which power announced its presence (the alliances, the reason, the diplomatics of state). A new method suggested itself: “One must conduct an ascending analysis of power, starting, that is, from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which have their own history, their trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been — and continue to be — invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc., by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination.”⁹ It was around the vicissitudes of the marvelous that I set out to gather, as a subjugated memory, or illicit history, the experience and the struggle around globalism and power. If I had been unsatisfied with seeing “globalization” as simply the next stage of capital — if I had been seeking, without knowing, something unnamable — it is doubtless because I myself am playing that strange little game whereby everyday of our lives we vie with something so essential, and yet invisible, and through so many practices which constitute us, and at the same time doubtless hide from us I know not what marvels — exclude or otherwise blunt so many things — practices, conceits, which set apart, or taken together, in correspondence with one another, living within each other, supporting or canceling out the need for one or other, might otherwise form a kind of fluid surrounding us.

A double sense began to appear around the word “contraction.” Not simply the contraction of the extension of the world (the very actuality of globalism), but a contraction as a function of an evolving political globalism, grounded in the practices and rationalities of security. Friends soon enough countered that globalism concerns the outward orientation of the mind of man, and that nothing could be so far from its essence as the narrowing down I imagined. It has been my attempt, however, to provide the basis for precisely this alternative conception. Globalism — to my mind — has got nothing to do with expansion, but rather everything to do with reduction. Not simply the reduction of the expanse of the world, but the reduction of the mind of man — a progressive securitization. We must explore that other side of rationality: the fear that drives knowledge, and which constitutes it, though everywhere enlightenment is given the ring of heroism. I aim to reveal how globalism is in fact a fearful rationality. It delimits and it reduces on the basis of this fear. Immediately suggested is that subjugated archive — of so many condemned, disgraced, disqualified. And indeed this will be my main point: that globalism is a technology of the State, reductive in its very essence of the vibrancy and resonance of life and the world, and it grows within people along the lines of a fearing of things (and a will borne of fear to provide means for the securing of things), and that in order to escape it — and to radically reorient our present — we’d do well to reread the history of our societies relative to this fear. For this fear is how we’ve enclosed ourselves in upon ourselves, and as such it is the wellspring for the fluid that surrounds us, shielding the marvelous, living its violence in us, hiding so much.¹⁰

I: Traversing oceans

If this fear, this concealment, has washed over existence it is to the extent to which we’ve forgotten, or lost trust in, an ocean that lies both within and around us.

Compare two visions. First, a drawing by Charles Baudelaire (Illustration 1). The scene is of rolling seas. At the center, on a mountainous wave, the keel of a large ship rises up from a dark valley. No hint of security. Second, find the fortress — the lazaretto, watchful of the liquid continent, permanent, stable (Illustration 2). In the sky, idyllic clouds frame the hills. The building’s façade at once calming and humbling. The message of this print is simple to discern. Serenity, calm, oversight, organization. So many windows say everything has its place. The building cut at right angles portrays strength and endurance. It is a vision of modernity, though it dates from the 15th century. But our former is not so easily assigned. What is this vision of the keel of a boat? The poem to which it’s attached gives us its context. Sketched below the final stanza of ‘Les Sept vieillards,’ (See Appendix) Baudelaire in this poem describes a typically fantastic vision. He is walking one day in the dank streets of the city when he sees amid the mire an old beggar of sorts:

Not bent but broken, slipping in the mud and snow, an old yellowed beggar makes his way toward the poet, “pupils steeped in gall”; “not indifferent to the universe but hostile.” Suddenly there are two, borne from the same hell hole: spectral and indistinguishable, marching with the same rhythm. And then more! Minute by minute they multiply: there are seven! The poet watches aghast — but can he wait for an eighth? He turns away in horror, too terrified to see his “second self” next appear. From this procession from Hell he flees, returning where valor had already combated weariness in setting out at all. But then the twist:

He ends with the final lines,

We come to our vision. Contrary to our fortress there is no serenity here. Worse even, there is positive danger. This ship is fettered. It is mast-less — it is impotent. But this is how Baudelaire likes it — not indifferent but violent! This is what he grabs joy from in this vision trudging toward him — this vision, no less, of fate (the eighth as his second self)! His carcass turns to run, but in a deeper place momentarily he finds epiphany and magic in this dirty old tramp, this muckworm! Back in his hovel, with Reason overwhelmed, his heart dances — O blessed nonsense! He is fearless. And the existence he sketches, thankful for its fragility, is borne out on an ocean that is limitless. Heaven bless this delirium — this overcoming of rationalism! Lost in the absurdity, raging like a madman, we imagine the Parisian dancing and understanding, in a positive glow, the words of Hölderlin on the fate of Hyperion:

If Hölderlin laments the human misadventure, Baudelaire is ecstatic: Bring forth disaster! For there is teaching in the fall, as there was in his vision (opposing utilitarianism that seeks only pleasure, eschewing pain). In perfect opposition to our second representation — the fortress with its ninety eyes — we find here a celebration not of the powers but the limits to Reason’s Empire. Stripped of his ego (having witnessed his sorry destiny), the poet dances free, magically relieved of worry, his energies redoubled. In the lunacy he is free, and it is in this freedom that he holds on — not to land or fixture, but to the ocean of all experience. There is no direction to this journey. The greatest joy is that nothing is certain.¹⁴ How different in nature from the vision from surety and calm of the Genoese quarantine!

And as if to underscore it — but also, to move to our point — regard a second example of this latter (Illustration 3). Here our two philosophies are brought together. In the distance the lazaretto. Flat across the landscape. In the foreground, choppy waters, and above clouds threatening. But it is the center that holds the message; a lake just like a mirror. An artificial bay, perfectly circular. A ship is sailing in, another sedately anchored. The narrow channel transitional — a passageway and junction. The interface from which thereafter the order of things will reign.¹⁵

If were possible, I would like to suggest that the essence of globalization might be found in this crossing. Set against Baudelaire’s ocean, contrast this building and this lake; a breathless moment in the procession of order, an idealized portrait. It is significant that this last be a fantasy of the mind. It is the cerebral dream, but we must oppose to it its opposite, which here in the etching lies just on the edge of it. All too well is betrayed what the main object is born for. To the dangers of the waters will be opposed the tranquility of the mirror. It is the Empire of Mind — which in Baudelaire fails — which is here celebrated with pride. Not unlike that other location of the sovereign eye that Michel Foucault would contrast with that other listless vessel, the ship of fools. Where general confinement — the Zuchthaus, the almshouse — would await the idiot cargo of boats and mussel shells, here a perfect calm awaits all mast-less travelers. It is the calm that at least one Florentine sought after his whole life. Leonardo Da Vinci, it is said, was consumed in his final years by a fear which surely he would have found met and answered here — a fear of uncontrollable waters; a fear which surpassed, for this first man of science, that of earthquake, famine and fire:

We can see readily enough in the astonishing representations he left to us the violent center of the core of his dream. A deluge overtakes a town (Illustration 4). Landscape, animal and man are swept up in its path. It comes from nowhere — it just comes. Rivers that burst their banks, oceans that overcome lands, heavens that break and rain down a flood: these are the dramas and the solitary visions which would take to the heart of this greatest intelligence. He studied these monstrous torrents his whole life.¹⁷ He worked toward, but never completed, a book on the nature of water. He was fascinated, it seems, above all with its encompassing properties. Water would always find a way around any obstacle. Wherever space opened up, were it there, it filled it. Its will was unassailable. But whereas he feared it, he also engineered around it, instigating one of the boldest of all human endeavors — the attempt, no less, to channel nature¹⁸ — perhaps in doing so influencing, in ways all too fateful, his compatriot and contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli, who (so typical of him) turns the vision of horror into a light, illuminating human power:

Perhaps then, after all, it is not so much the lazaretto as the canal which ought to stand as our first monument to man’s maturity. Over and above confining, embanking and directing is indeed by far the more prominent activity of our modernity. Power cannot be — nor was it intentionally for so very long — the equivalent of King Canute holding back the wave. One cannot contain an ocean, no matter how many cells one builds. But I’m stepping ahead of myself. For the initial contrast I want to emphasize here is indeed that between the ordered tranquility of the idealized lake and the disordered abandon of the Parisian. For though these words and these visions of Machiavelli and Leonardo lead us to a theme central to any genealogy of globalization (the history of channeling; the organization of movements), perhaps it is in these starker figures that we find our higher aspect. It is the latter — the ocean of becoming on which the poet sails mast-less — that the State will rise up to traverse and to order. The ocean within which it itself, as an amalgam of so many listless souls, will soon enough mark out a location. Conversely, it is the lazar house, with its steady and regular signal, that will transform so many directionless vessels into tranquil vehicles, like those represented coming in safe from the high seas. In doing so it will take its place, along an arc of evolving institutions, in the production of the greater order — the State “standing out,” regularizing and dividing its internal elements, fortifying and bracing itself, reducing what is extraneous.

Not simply nature’s rivers, but every wandering water will be encompassed. Once again it is Baudelaire who leaps between the centuries, suggesting in a poem named ‘Le voyage,’ a possible series linking the dreams of the Renaissance scientist and the gaze of the Florentine technician, indeed much of the imaginary of the early modernity:

Whereas the scientist will be consumed by the terrors of free rivers, it is his compatriot and friend — Niccolò Machiavelli — who will instinctually find in these inveterate nightmares a different ocean to control. The rivers of men. And more so than that, in this incredible turn of phrase, “so that our free will not be eliminated,” it is Machiavelli who will best understand the paradox and epiphany of the relation between man and power. He will establish free will as the heart of the latter, and run a series through that will between the latter and the former. With the ascendance of this series — the security grid which the infamous Machiavel would do so much to establish (if not yet the institutions, the language) — we find the transformation of the engineers’ vision. Waters become bodies. The crowd becomes the ocean. Upon the high seas an old ghost will appear.²¹ Within philosophy’s outlook no longer does the citizen stand alone at the center. The State stands behind him — the well-ordered Republic. It will seek to live within him. And to this end, despite its look outward, the renascentia romanitatis will turn the eye once again inward. To the old Delphic principle, “Know thyself”, will be added the injunction, “Order thyself.” And where the message is not heeded glorious fortune appears to assume the task. For Machiavelli’s concern was not simply with virtue. It is with the standing out in history of the political manifestation of authority. As the scientist assesses his instruments so the technician looks to his means — to the training of men, the cloud of their desires, and the management of their forces.²²

Indeed, in this transformation — the taking up and the facing of this cloudstorm of men — might we not find the tremor of the scientist pass through to the technician? The two meld together: for Leonardo, the fear of being washed out to sea is negated in Machiavelli’s organization of the republican body. For Machiavelli, the attempt to measure and make regular one’s humors is mirrored in these studies Leonardo makes of water. Each establishes “being” at the very heart of their efforts — attempting in turn to ground it, to secure it, amid becoming. The scientist will traverse the ocean of knowledge. The technician will traverse the ocean of men. But though great navigators and journeymen, each in their separate ways, in each of their souls will live a certain calling to return. To measure one’s bearings and keep one eye on the shore. For though between them they discover two worlds, theirs is the will to encompass and know. Though so much will be owed to them, and history transformed by them, what emanates from them is the ontology of the fortress. It is the gaze of the lazaretto — a rejection of the greater ocean. A fear, one could say, of sailing mast-less.

II: Worldliness

But a generation later this caution will find an accuser:

Of all the critiques of globalization I’ve read I never found one more powerful than this. “Belief in the world,” wrote Gilles Deleuze, “is what we lack most; we have completely lost the world; they have dispossessed us of it.”²⁴ To my mind there is an unremarked aspect to globalization: the construction of the fortress of “being”, and the dilution, thereby, of the resonance of the world through the will to certainty of knowledge. Knowledge — the eye that will go out into the world and take within itself all encountered danger — will establish not only the conditions for the enfolding of the world in upon itself, but a distrust — as the very fuel of its journey — that will dispossess man from his world as much as it provides the conditions by which he will possess it. I will describe in a moment how this distrust and diminution developed. But for now the point to emphasize is the overall effect: the desertion from the world with the removal from the natural scheme of man in his self-consciousness.²⁵ To my mind, globalism — the ascendance of that will to certainty, that distrust of the world — ought to be seen as a kind of nihilism that lives within things when they despair (that is to say, when they fear a relation to outside worlds, and head out into the world only with the goal of securing the frontiers of their own). This nihilism will ascend in polyvalent ways; but most particularly, and most virulently, through the distasteful history whereby institutions, power relations, modes of domination, etc., have arisen to exploit, deepen, and condition this fear.²⁶ Globalism, for us here, is the march through the world not only of order but a kind of stupidity; a stupidity that seeks not connection but dominion, or otherwise the absence of that which it fears.

It is said that we fear what we do not sensually perceive. This may be true. But let us say, while noting that the eye is perhaps the least sensual of the senses, that the greater reaction of animal man to fear is not flight, but seeing.²⁷ I am supposing a critical link between fear and mobility in this way: fear mobilizes the eye.²⁸ Thousands of calculations done in a split-second, the sole object to comprehend the source of fear in time and space (to chart its trajectory; the extent of its danger relative to its growth in time). Is it increasing or decreasing? Does it move nearer or retreat? These questions demand something different from sense perception. They demand the lingering of the eye on the object in question. The eye and soul become a mirror and the screen of what assails; charting it, comprehending it, all in a few moments. From being ‘here’ the soul and the eye go ‘there.’ They are displaced, and in turn they displace time and space, bringing what is there near (anticipation as “forward thought” always involves bringing the event closer to hand — telescoping it, accelerating it²⁹). Displacement precedes flight. Soon this way of conceiving becomes the only way. Doubtless in part it was in reaction to this mechanic — which perhaps I express badly — that Nietzsche would formulate, in his attempt to escape the fortress mentality, the task of reorientation in this way: that learning to see — which he took to be prior to learning to think, or to speak, or to write — involved, “letting things come up” to the eye; allowing things themselves to approach.³⁰ Then it would be a question not of conceiving but experiencing.

Not so globalism. I am supposing that grounded in fear (knowledge’s incessant quest to contain everything; everything, that is, which it sees — i.e., that which is a danger, or which can be used against danger), globalism by nature sets the eye out into the world to bring it back within itself. In so doing it strips the world in every direction it looks, erasing its volume, detail, resonance in a glance (in a way of focusing which also cancels). The eye in going out into the world takes the world and reduces it. Where it has seemed adventurous, or even heroic, it is in actuality the very opposite. For heroism or adventure has always depended upon a certain risk observed by the hero. Globalism admits no risk. Even in the great voyages — those of Magellan, Drake or Spilbergen — it doesn’t go out to experience anything. It goes out to know something. That is, to bring it within the dominion of man. But to the extent to which dominion increases, man “stands out”³¹; that is, he sets himself apart from the world. It is here that we find the genesis of the dispossession Deleuze laments. And we have a clue to its nature in what gives birth to the will to knowledge (or which in the Garden of Eden was the consequence of it³²): self-consciousness. That is, identification.

Schiller once said that the ancients felt naturally and the moderns had a feeling for what is natural. We might say that whereas the ancients trusted in their world, we have a knowledge of the globe. Indeed, it is my argument that globalism can be contrasted as a synthetic, that is, artificial³³ philosophy, with and against “worldliness.” My argument concerns the alienating effects of security. Part of the thesis is familiar enough — the objectification of “the Other” which transforms him or her — or it — into a sign, or a non-entity. Rather less remarked are the effects on the objectifier — for the prison-guard, like an omnipotent and hence eternally lonesome God, suffers something also. The question at issue is not so much one of a lack of spiritualism, as is often supposed, but rather a diminishing materialism; where one’s relation to the world — either captive or captor — is crucially emptied of lived-experience, or better yet, connectivity and embodiment. If a distinction can be introduced between globalism and worldliness, I mean at least the following — each of which relate to this diminution of materiality:

1) Principle of exteriority. Globalism erases the world. It is a condition of being exterior to the world, and enclosing it within a glance. Worldliness, per contra, goes out within the world; it doesn’t aim to conquer or encompass anything. 2) Principle of certainty. Globalism is grounded on security. It has developed, that is, from knowledge, and from technologies of control swarming up in a serial fashion, and as such is a power formation in its own right. Worldliness has nothing to do with control. It opposes to “knowledge” the possibilities of experience.³⁴ 3) Principle of interiority. Globalism crashes boundaries, and in doing so pulls the world in upon a “negative horizon”³⁵; that is, the true model of the globalized citizen is the one who goes everywhere without leaving anywhere. Worldliness has nothing to do with getting anywhere. If it transgresses boundaries, it does so with a different goal. It is a question of experimentation, not destination. Its opposite vision is the secluded channel surfer. 4) Principle of trust. It follows that worldliness has little to do with the will to know which rests at the heart of globalism. Whereas the latter develops in response to the paranoia of power, the former gives up on fear, letting happen what happens as its fundamental orientation. It is no longer a question of fearing what one might encounter en route (a fear that calls on the eye to advance before the body to render all things secure), but of allowing for things — most particularly the “inattributable” within things, to unfold as they will. It is a trusting, not a distrusting. An experimentalism based not so much on hope as a kind of “confidence — a belief-in-the-world.”³⁶ “Embark philosophers!,” implores Nietzsche³⁷: the world seen anew as a “mad zone of indetermination and experimentation from which new connections may emerge.”³⁸ The ontology of mind gives way to sense and experience. Hope — a forethought — gives way to trust — a sensation.

Contrary to Cartesianism (or again, Platonism), a philosophy of sensation is not dependant upon a sovereign model of knowledge. Indeed it may be inimical to it.³⁹ One must leave what one has thought behind.⁴⁰ Experimentation, after all, is empty as a concept if certainty creeps in before experience occurs. After Nietzsche it may be Deleuze who has taken this furthest. In the Deleuzian world of indetermination, “making connections,” is about all that one strives for. Contrary to globalism — the fortress of knowledge — the Deleuzian ship is “mast-less”; departing from global theory which always concerns territory, and proposing instead an open relation to experience. To this end Nietzsche’s choice of metaphor for his basic anti-foundationalism is appropriate: “I would not build a house for myself, and I count it part of my good fortune that I do not own a house. But if I had to, then I should build it as some of the Romans did — right into the sea. I should not mind sharing a few secrets with this beautiful monster.”⁴¹

Contrasted with comfort, peace, safety, and security, the ocean of worldly experience may appear fearsome⁴², but it is nonetheless the world we inhabit, embody and are. To be afraid of this world is in the Deleuzian sense a “stupidity.”⁴³ “Transcendence” — the false quest for conditions of experience — would only add to the basic failure to go out into the world as it is, and engage with that world as it comes. Inertia, to Deleuze, is deadly. And to return to our nautical theme, perhaps a few words from Montaigne can be adapted and bent to our meaning: “There are thousands who are wrecked in port.”⁴⁴ The question becomes one of trust⁴⁵ — and through trust the freeing of oneself from fear.⁴⁶ Nothing ensures that the journey will not be arduous. Indeed a relation to risk — as already suggested — would seem supposed in the very possibility of experimentation. On the other hand the stupidity of security is summed up well enough by author Tom Robbins;

Stepping away from trancendentalism⁴⁸ (the attempt to formulate conditions of possibility for experience), theorists like Deleuze — and before him, Nietzsche — point the way to a new kind of experimentalism. It is an experimentalism, in fact, which is the reverse of Kantianism: the question is no longer one of seeking one’s higher subjectivity but rather ridding oneself of it — rather as Baudelaire will depicting himself as a mast-less barge — and hence engaging a level of experience prior to the division of things into subjects and objects, outside and inside. This level of experience, argues Deleuze, is the level where sensation engages the “plane of immanence” (or the field of becoming). This plane of “sense”, with a “logic” of its own sort⁴⁹, is not in any way related to “common sense”⁵⁰, and rests equally outside impression.⁵¹ It is, no less (though he finds it, as noted, from a reverse perspective), the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) found materially, not phenomenologically: established not as reasoned experience for which there are “conditions” of possibility, but a sensual experiment to which there are no pre-established paths. “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” wrote William Blake, “every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”⁵² Rather as did the Romantics⁵³, Deleuze challenges the idea that outside “identity” and established determinations (logical or pragmatic divisions), there is only absurdity, anarchy, or chaos.⁵⁴ Per contra, for Deleuze there is a “sense prior to code.”⁵⁵

Most importantly, this “uncovering” — of the plane of becoming and the multiplicity of experience that follows from it and constitutes it — opens the way to the possibility of a far deeper, more powerful way of suggesting unity among things and peoples. Not the false globalism of the false suns of rationality⁵⁶, but a unity borne of a recognition of that place which each of us has in that broader plane of becoming that Deleuze names the “plane of immanence.” It has nothing to do with ego — or the eye of knowledge. Removed from hubris it constitutes something much more critical. As John Rajchman notes in The Deleuze Connections, it is as if ‘under the “second nature” of our persons and identities, there lay a prior potential Life capable of bringing us together without abolishing what makes us singular.’⁵⁷ Nothing to do with “transcendence” — the elevated dream of a new global citizenship — but rather a descent. A “going under” in order to go over. Going under, in this sense, is a reinsertion into the world. And again, here, we must strike a note of difference between a nascent philosophy we’re describing in outline (worldliness), and the dominant philosophy we’re criticizing in kind (globalism). Where globalism concerns an empowerment of the self and a transcendence of limits engaging with a broader whole, worldliness involves a departure from the ego and a humility that sees itself as one among millions, though valuable — indeed crucial — to the resonance of the whole.

In a semi-fictional novel by Hervé Guibert there is a passage which recounts an encounter with Michel Foucault (renamed “Muzil”, for storytelling purposes), where the nature of the withdrawal from the self (and/or from certainty, from security — perhaps even “knowledge”), and the self-same reinsertion into the world, is made clear. It refers to a plan of one Dr. Nacier to make a name for himself through the design of a high-tech suicide clinic, replacing the death agonies of whoever might seek such a service. The doctor approaches Foucault as a moral authority to lend credence, and a certain protection to the idea. “Muzil” — or Foucault — dismisses the idea as worthless, but nonetheless is quite beside himself when he and his friend, Hervé, meet following the medic’s departure. He imparts:

As Baudelaire’s barge can make no moves on its own, so here, in this reverie, all parts of oneself would eagerly be sloughed off: like stepping out of one’s skin (the possibility of being born again). Nothing need suggest sadness in this moment. The anonymity embraced is not lonely, but rather “immanent.” It is but a giving up on the ego (that part of us so intent on the will to secure), where ” … impersonality is not an alienation or an ‘inauthenticity’ of das Man, but on the contrary the condition of singularization, a lightening-up of life and its possibilities.”⁵⁹ Rather like Kleist’s marionette, at issue is the loss of “bad conscience.” To be free of oneself is the first stage of “breaking out” of the prison-house of rationalization; after which, perhaps, materially, in this world, “the marvelous” can once again appear.⁶⁰ And being stripped of one’s ego would, it would seem, redeliver the innocence that was lost in self-identification.⁶¹

Precisely per contra to the model of globalism with its “individualization of biographical forms”⁶², the “world” aspect of worldliness aims to “get away from seeing ourselves in terms of identity and identification or as distinct persons or selves, however many or ‘dissociated.’”⁶³ The ‘arts of disappearance’ so dear to Baudrillard⁶⁴; “working on one’s suicide,” in the sentient phrase of Foucault⁶⁵, concern precisely giving up on the fortress model of knowledge and passing over, without assurances, to something more akin to a “sense” prior to identification (again, not a “common sense”, but something more akin to a diagram, or a field). This passing over is no less than the reinsertion of the soul into the world — its liberation from the straitjacket of identity with all of its “performances.” Contrary to the current fashion of celebrating “difference,” the way pointed to in the works of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, among others⁶⁶ — with some irony, as they are seen as difference’s champions — is to conceive of the self as fundamentally empty⁶⁷ (that is, as counterfeit⁶⁸), and that by going down below us⁶⁹, as it were, something ‘smaller’ than the most specified individual, larger than the most general category.” Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, p. 54.] we find our place democratically in the multiplicity of the world which the hubris of identity (like the hubris of the brain in Bergson’s formulation⁷⁰), conceals from us.⁷¹ This world is not simply that of “all peoples”, but rather of all things; no less, indeed, than the whole of existence. The political point attendant is that the divisions which otherwise lie at the center of so much morality (normal/abnormal, vital/pathological, citizen/delinquent, etc.), fall away as absurd — absurd, that is, to all except the various organs and institutions which regulate the dominant “order of things”, and thereby the lives of men. In the “world” imagined by Deleuze or Foucault — among others I might draw upon — there is no such thing as infamy because there can be no morality; only ethics, and the importance of “friendship.”

It is clear, then, that neither worldliness nor ocean life has much to do with being governed: “I have dreamed of the scented, mountainous archipelago, lost in a deep and unknown sea where shipwreck has cast us both, forgotten, far from the laws that govern the world.”⁷² What Foucault and Deleuze, among others, imagine is a political divination more akin to art than to judgment. Fighting against the suffocating sense of ‘given possibilities’ (the work of mourning of Antigone), Deleuze sees in art a struggle for mobility, for vitality, against stasis — that is, that which essentially may be thought of as depression.⁷³ Whereas transcendental philosophy has continually sought after the correct means for experiencing the world, Deleuze swaps this around. In a striking phrase, John Rajchman sums up: “Instead of looking for ‘conditions of possibility’ of sensation, we might [look] to sensation for the condition of other possibilities of life and thought.”⁷⁴ An “art of seeing” based on aesthetics and sensation — taking note of singularities and not simply “unities” (nation, “politics,” media, and so on) — allows sight and thus thought to “unground” itself from established discourse and concepts. “Intuition” is revalidated as the task of feeling-thinking⁷⁵ becomes not one of seeking certainties but rather “intensities.” Where the judgment-model ossifies, the sensation-model moves. In moving — in becoming vital — thought then escapes the “melancholy” of idealization, lightening the mind, body, perhaps even the soul, in order that new connections can be sought.

One point of qualification: if I argue for “trust” above “hope” it is not because I take embarking upon the ocean as a Crusoe-like adventure. I am not unaware that the real Robinson — one Alexander Selkirk — returned from his exile not a self-sustaining gentleman, but a sniveling wretch, able barely to utter two words together.⁷⁶ Shipwreck may not be for everyone. “Never a social revolution without terror,” Napoleon was fond of saying. Salvation, all told, is not the proper object of trust. Rather trust is a question of refusing to fear danger⁷⁷ — of retaining one’s freedom of movement, one’s maneuverability — so that when connections break down, decompositions occur and new intensities are born, we can “catch the sea foam”⁷⁸, and take our place in the new dance. Memory and hope, like asceticism, will keep one where one is. Trust and belief⁷⁹ measured with “active forgetting”⁸⁰ allows one to go beyond where one has been. This is not a patience that waits for divine revelation.⁸¹ Nor is it a piety that prepares one for the next world. It is a “play” that goes out to experiment, verify⁸², and create new possibilities in this world — the world that Eduardo Galeano calls the “Great Here and Now.” Perhaps through sensation the way can be opened to a post-metaphysical, or materialist metaphysics (a materialist ontology allowing an “expressive materialism”⁸³): not a metaphysics which grounds Being in meaning, but becoming in bodies.⁸⁴ Engaging the world materially — sensually, if that word can be used without coyness — is, then, becoming worldly. This is not a security model of life; it is a challenge, and simply an orientation to — and new way of seeing — the emergence of events⁸⁵ (what in Foucault leads to “problematization”), to which we must aim “not to be unworthy.”

Striking a difference from the model of transcendence, to attack globalism, then, from the standpoint of genealogy might not so much be to correct an error. It might even not be a case of dispelling ideology.⁸⁶ Rather, genealogy would fashion tools for making visible forces which are concealed by a dogma which fears and which reduces. To reveal — even through the act of thinking one’s way through a history or a dream of power — is to allow for new ways of experimenting, both in thought and in action.⁸⁷ The globalism I here suggest is marching is the very opposite of “worldliness”, a value whose opposition I have attempted in some way to reveal. It is an opposition that I would like to establish as the effective political backdrop to this work. The politics of globalism, read through the lens of genealogy, opens the way to reframing — bringing back in, in such an age as ours — the very broadest, deepest struggles at the heart of the organization of things; struggles which too easily are forgotten; to which we become blinded as their seemingly sole and valid outcome — order — is established and takes the air of truth. Our attempt at seeing⁸⁸ is aimed instead at clearing a ground upon which something more than the lyricism of protest may flourish. Indeed this initial effort to theorize the issue of worldliness versus globalism is aimed to provide the tools for a material, manifest struggle. To my mind, the politics of globalism is but a name — or it ought to be one — for the politics of the very possibility of a life. Not the life established by biology, checked over by medicine, regularized by education, drilled in the factory, recoded in the prison, sedated by television, stimulated by banality, disposed of at the mortuary — the life we will chart, in part, through this genealogy — but an indefinite life rising up as a combination of so many free flowing forces; forces that spring up everywhere, which everyone recognizes, but which we cannot now speak of, too dangerous is it to our established “identities.”⁸⁹

III: Globalization in context

If globalism can be read as knowledge’s pursuit of security (as well as the ordering effect of power/knowledge through history), presaging the inward enfolding of space (the collapse of distance rendering the world proximate and hence global), the zone of coincidence between these two might be understood, perhaps, as the political project of globalization. A political reading of globalization might be established as revealing the melding of these two aspects: in a word, how the eradication of space (i.e., the technical collapse of the world), renders effects of security in the realm of knowledge (i.e., an ordered relation between things and of things); and conversely how the evolution of knowledge establishes order and proximity in space (allowing for the world to be represented on the map of the “I can”⁹⁰). In this way globalization concerns not merely the evolution of knowledge, on the one hand, or the pollution of space on the other (and hence to raise the problem of either in isolation from the other would be inadequate), but rather the political collision between them, and their fusion into a whole greater than the sum of their parts. The characteristic of this whole would be: 1) the use of motion (the technical surpassing of the world), as a modality of discipline (or, in other words, “security”); and 2) the threshold at which knowledge no longer will only dominate space, but will — and must — invest itself within time and temporality (or otherwise, the “life” of the phenomenon it seeks to comprehend and order). The latter aspect is the deeper of the two. The former concerns, simply, the uses of speed, pace, rapidity and momentum within the arena of social governance and power. Though this is important, and has yet to be comprehended in depth ⁹¹, it is the lesser of the more explosive ideas I am revealing. The latter, per contra, concerns the predestined destiny of our current predicament (the information intense world of globalization), springing forth, no less, not so much from capital as from knowledge.⁹² One turns to the institution which above others that has established itself on the horizon as the filter through which knowledge must pass — the State.

So the history — political and cultural, social and technological — I would reveal is one that through knowledge passes through the evolution of the State-form.⁹³, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 82-3). What I have in mind here, above all, are the material aspects of our lives — indeed how the whole of our existence unfolds amid objects and relations which are fundamentally ordered. This is not merely a modern bureaucratic phenomenon. Moreover, it is not only an organic one. The State-form can be found all around us: in our buildings, parks, furniture, tools, kitchenware, assorted objects, the paint on our walls … It is the order that lives within things, and within us when amid things. What is most important about our second and third denominations — the State and the State-form — is the way in which they intersect with, perhaps spring from, the actualization of being from the immanence of becoming. Whereas Weberian states transform, the “state as general effect” (in our denomination, the State capitalized), persists outside changes here or there between office-holders or the governmental class. Indeed, the most remarkable phenomena is that though in truth the state is remade with every new day, the order of things as whole persists, both yearly, across generations, indeed across eras. That political struggle occurs is not underrated, of course. And often — truth be told — politics arises not around policy but the “general effect” of an order; even if all kinds of mechanisms rise up to take that emergence and deny it of its true and effective object (the radicalism that soon becomes naivety, sublimated by politics as the art of the possible). What this general effect denominates is the remarkable phenomenon — little focused upon indeed — of a state of things in general “standing out”, as it were, amid the ocean of becoming as a whole. It is the “globalism” I would reveal as the history of evolving securities working up from our lives.] And in this sense I offer something new (indeed challenging to many — if not most — other accounts): not simply a refocusing on speed as the political technology underpinning the march of modernity — though this must surely be a viewpoint the emergence of which has been one of the more exciting theoretical developments in recent years (with the actuality itself grounding, arguably constituting, the history and realization of globality⁹⁴) — but a philosophical questioning of the nature of the broader movement; being the reign of knowledge over things, and the ways in which, historically — practically, lest we forget — the world, subjected to knowledge, has not only been ordered but accelerated and transformed. The added equation being the diminution, territorialization and codification, of all kinds of lines, flows, appearances, which had nothing to do with security and much more to do with becomings: the becomings to which, in the first place, knowledge, or fear, responds.

Without doubt, the first State does not appear to fulfill a social contract.⁹⁵ Upon the landscape of events it appears as a terrible violence.⁹⁶ As interface between it and the absolute, the army of men is established as a working force. Amid the continual flow of becoming, the first State appears to lay claim to its being. It marks a heavy point in relations of power — a node around which power will slow down⁹⁷, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 87-104).], no longer in movement, but centered around itself. In the ocean of becoming — across the plane of immanence — the first State appears as a mark of human persistence. It reflects the will to permanence — and in this sense personifies life.⁹⁸ But rather as the body must be trained in order to best perform, this marking out — this “standing out” of the State in the flow of becoming — has depended, and depends, on the uses to which men can be put. Millions have gone to the wheel to secure the existence of a life beyond their own. Seeming unending cycles of violence have followed — all kinds of cruelties as order (appearance) has been established. Thought of in this way, the truth of the first State is found in reduction in two ways: the imposition of order through the physical limitation of movement, and the staking out of an aspect of becoming and the alignment of other elements around this singularity. But as presence is not permanent, and moreover is threatened by the appearance of other “states” (not simple nations, but rather “states of domination”⁹⁹ or local singularities¹⁰⁰), something more than confinement — the simple amassing of gravity — is needed if the State is to endure in history and now.

If order at the transcendental level of the State is dependent, in this way, upon presence — or permanence — in the vast plane of becoming, and if this has depended not simply upon accumulation, but also upon transformation (i.e., a dynamic adaptation to the plane of becoming itself, and also — though at a far more obvious level — of the competition between nodes, states, or center points of gravitation in this cosmos), we must, one presumes, be able thereby to trace, as a tactical history of a transcendental and evolving State security, technological frontiers in the uses of men and their accommodation to this broader State purpose. No doubt it is not freely that men give up liberty to live and die in the name of something other. This “tactical” question — of methods of political control — is arguably the most important of all “fields”, as it were, of what we understand as “political.” It points far and way above (though in all truth it may better be seen below), the more familiar limits we accept of what we imagine as politics (i.e., politics conceived of in terms of institutions, governments, parties, personnel, etc.). This transcendental survival politics of the State would cut through, if not constitute in large part, the framework within which this closer strata of “the political” unfolds. Meanwhile, at that level of the Here and Now — of the politics of everyday life, and the evolution of worldly governance — we might mark, through successive moments, the evolution of certain strategic or tactical arrangements, intersecting and supporting that transcendental history of State security. Though doubtless an ominous undertaking (not least, one must say, because there is no recorded history, and barely anything either in the way of analysis, of this at once transcendental and material plane of the State), it is to this very problem — which to me is the deepest concern with the problem of order — that the following analysis responds, in some way identifying, in the context of this history of permanentizing, the ways and the means, the technologies and the strategies, used by power, organized in the field of becoming, to secure its own presence as mark of the life of man.

I am concerned, then, with the interrelation between the globalism of general safety (the globalism of the will to knowledge as power and order), on the one hand, and an effect of its evolution on the other (the collapse of spatial expanse and the rendering of the world proximate, rapid, immediate). What is particularly important is the extent to which this latter aspect — following on from the former — becomes self-sustaining and self-generating; moreover, bending back on the first aspect and producing effects of governance or order. The mechanism is a simple one: as the distance between things collapses (as what is distant is rendered proximate as the world folds in upon itself), the pace of life picks up. The self has to mobilize at ever-increasing pace (simply because we exist in a world based on private property — speed in this instance being the “hidden side of capital”¹⁰¹). The demand for speed demands new and ever complex forms of reflexivity (itself feeding into the global consciousness which feeds the acceleration). The end result is governance through exhaustion coupled with self-organization that allows for the structural disappearance of that field of tactical and strategic alignments under the sign of domination and order — the State. As man establishes a world (weltbildend), the reduction of phenomena which allows for survival gathers man within the process. Speed emerges as a general principle of safety (the eye that habitually passes out into the world; a forgetting of the local, of the immediate manifestations of power), and political technology (underpinning the mechanism — and constituting it — whereby man will be rendered governed). It is through the will to order at the lowest level (the gaze that sets the eye in motion through the world), that the impetus is released for the ascendance of the will to know that will clear space for — indeed, call out for — ever generalizing, globalizing mechanisms of control.

Taken as a whole, this mechanism explains how globalization ascends from the mundane: how in order to understand it at all we must redirect our focus from — while not losing heed of — the voice of the global master in the form of multinational corporations and institutions and look instead to how globalism ascends within each of us, and how ultimately it finds its pool of energy, its means of sustenance, there. If our fear is of universal knowledge, we’d do well to look to how the most mundane of all things — our bodies, our souls, the landscape of everyday life — was secured, involuted, invested and transformed. As a world phenomenon, what is at stake — no less — is the emergence to dominance of the State as a Being on the landscape that we compose, as the plane of becoming. In other words, how as a political form it has aggregated and transformed (in many ways diminished), what we are, and how we are. This latter is important, for as we have seen in our last section, the politics of globalism is about more than simply what is cancelled out in that coming to Being of the State. It is more than simply the right to walk unknown paths. It is the very possibility, which is at the very core of our destiny, to find our place unhindered upon that plane of immanence. For in transforming us, the State has transformed how we can engage with becoming — no doubt why, for philosophers like Deleuze, the notion of creating a “shock” within the doxa (within, that is, our familiar ways of thinking), is not an idle concept, but may be — as we shall see — the last condition that we have to partake in this great adventure that is living.

Posed another way, I am interested in two forms of erasure and their combined effect as an order. On the one hand, the erasure of space (the pollution of extension by speed and the steady ascendance to dominance of the vehicle). On the other, a more profound reduction: the erasure of resonance as order is established, through knowledge, in the world of men and things. That the two are related is as simple as noting that looking is in actual fact always a “moving.”¹⁰² On the one hand we have the folding in upon itself of the surface of the world — or the rendering known, and hence nil, the field of the very globe. As knowledge, or sight, passes over and through space, the horizon approaches, entering the known.¹⁰³ No longer is there a zone of indetermination beyond the bounds of what is seen. For the vehicle will take the eye right over any boundary, bringing knowledge of the beyond into the eye of the mind. Hence the real time pollution of space always creates effects of certainty. On the other hand, I am concerned with the progressive and assertive project of canceling out a certain range of things — things not altogether useful to, or which immediately have a bearing on, the survival of the eye which looks. Whether that eye be an institution, or that out of which so many institutions have developed, the effect is the same. The reduction of all phenomena to the appropriable or the useable.

IV: Outline for further research

In the ambitious space of thought set out thus far — the conceptualization of globalism as the concealment of becoming, and globalization as the political project of the dull mind of order — we can establish at least four much more mundane questions demanding our attention. These can be taken as guides for immediate and future research: 1) The problem of the emergence of the state relative to the crowd and to knowledge. Here the effort must be to outline the means by which a basic level of knowledge of state forces developed through early modern and modern history, and to the extent to which these have allowed — indeed grounded — the transformation of political governance that must most concern us as a theoretical and political question (the displacement of spatial for temporal, or kinetic, modes of governance). 2) As an outcome, the progressive colonization of the soul of the citizen by the organisms of civil defense. This history is important relative to two developments: a) the evolution of decentralized systems which live within individuals and transform them in kind; b) the beginnings — through this process — of automated relations of governmentality that ground the temporal organization of state in the ascendant. Where everywhere the dominant ideology has it that markets are challenging the efficacy of the state, we must argue, per contra, that the evolution of modern governance has relied upon decentralization and dispersal as its basic economy — that the state has disappeared only to the extent to which: a) it has inscripted itself within the command structure of individuals; and b) to the extent to which autonomous systems of self-generational governance have allowed for its disappearance.

A key concern for me has been the impetus of order fed into the productive chain of the citizenry as a whole. This marks the conditions of possibility for the eclipse of the state, but also the grounding of a third aspect for further elucidation and research. 3) The displacement of the self — both as a philosophical question (the hijacking of the soul), and as a socio-technical, geo-chronographical phenomenon (the progressive displacement of perception and bodies through the reign of what Paul Virilio will call “the vehicle”). We must find here the context and explanation for the ever-forward-moving age in which we live. Again, we must read the eclipse of the state as somewhat more enigmatic than has been done until now. Revealing the ways in which we govern and mobilize ourselves — or are encouraged to — we must expose the lie, which is surely dangerous, that the old politics of discipline simply no longer applies. As spatial technologies of control have ceded to temporal or kinetic ones, it may be the case that we’re more governed than ever. 4) The coupling of control and motion in the “generalized arrival” of globalization. Finally, this narrative will reach a conclusion. We must examine the possibility that the speed revolution of transportation and communication is producing — in this age of telepresence — the effects of a physical incarceration while establishing the continued conditions of human productivity. Order and speed combine, I suggest, in the inert body of the ‘third wave’ surfer; clicking away but not going anywhere. An ultimate security, we must ask if a far broader genealogy to this figure might be discerned than we’ve so far allowed for.

V: Conclusion

In summary, a genealogy that takes as its focus a globalization that ascends from the ground up: working within things and in people, but producing — across a series — effects of a global phenomenon. This phenomenon is the securitization, or the ordering of the world. The globalization at issue, therefore, is the proliferation of disciplines that across so many fields produce effects of a general, or global safety. Ascending through institutions, power relations and apparatuses of domination, and with “security” as its rationality, I suggest the existence of an unremarked globalism — the standing out of “being” and the ordering of the world in turn. Rather than rest here I seek to highlight what is lost in this ordering. Conceiving globalism as the “standing out” (ek-sistence) of being, I have suggested ways in which the evolution of securities essential to that project — all kinds of disciplines, regulations, codes — has drawn strength from, indeed grounded itself in, a fearing of a broader, oceanic world of becoming. I suggested thereby that globalism is a fearful rationality, and may indeed be grounded in our very will to life. This is why — at least in part — we cannot view globalization as external or exogenous (for indeed this broader aspect grounds and makes comprehensible the more usual forms of globalization we’re used to discussing). Rather it is indigenous, working within us to the extent to which we lose faith in the ocean that we both are, and are inevitably upon. I suggested that the will to knowledge as life might be what makes up this dulling down — this reduction of things, and the closing in of things, though everywhere globalism is seen as an opening out. To this extent, knowledge is a primary route for globalization conceived as the enclosing of the world in upon itself.

To substantiate this point I introduced two visions. First, a pen drawing of Baudelaire: a ship on a wild ocean (a visual metaphor of the soul which is ungrounded, shaken up, or unseated). In contrast I placed the lazaretto, both in its aesthetic (that is, its visual manifestation), but also as a way of introducing what must be the orientation of immediate and future research — the history of the evolution of the State, and what is, in my view, its main function: the bringing to order of danger; or, “being’s” ascent amid the forces of becoming. The lazaretto, as transitional point between danger and order is in tension with the ocean that Baudelaire celebrates. Our second example of the former — an idealized depiction — makes our point clear. Contrasted are the barely subdued ominous waters outside, with the mirror-like calm of the lake within. Rather than see here the fine upstanding bearing of man, we reveal fear. The limitless is disallowed. Knowledge and control ensures a perfect calm. I suggested that this ordering, this making tranquil, is a condition of fear, and that this fear — of raging waters, of the limitless and unknowable — is found across the broad space of early modernity; indeed, that the rise of modernity may be the very wellspring of it. Humanism moors the ship of fools as a hospital. No longer will madness be free to roam where it will, and no longer will the ocean outside be the limitless limit of the state. While Leonardo dreams of a fearsome deluge, Niccolò Machiavelli, grounding the space of modern political theory, will respond by underwriting, legitimating, and providing basis for, the political project that will take root in the state: the ascent and the securitization of being through knowledge. I suggested that the flood, the deluge, the cloudstorm, be taken metaphorically (as suggested by Baudelaire) for that other ocean to be traversed — that to which Machiavelli’s mind responds. The early modern state, if it responds to anything, is above all — if sublimated below the surface — formed to respond to the ocean of men. In doing so it responds to the vicissitudes of the marvelous (becoming), where the crowd, like waters, are unlimited and overwhelming. The State will arise to disallow their free movements. The “letting go” we see in Baudelaire’s vision will no longer have a place in the proper ways of men.

I suggest that this suppression — the suppression of the marvelous, the limitless, the “letting go” appropriate to trust — be seen as the economy of globalism, with “worldliness” (a “belief-in-the-world”), as its contrast. I attempted to ground what each was to the other: the philosophy of the ocean contrasted with the philosophy of the fortress. Worldliness, I argued — seen in this vision of Baudelaire — concerns trust and believing, as well as a certain verve (“You tremble carcass .. ?”). Globalism, per contra, is that which limits, which reduces; not simply the expanse of the world, but the expanse of the free play of the mind and the body — indeed the soul — of man. Drawing particularly on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze I aimed to suggest that this is very much still a “live” debate; that globalism, and globalization, is not at all inevitable, but rather depends on how ethically, and philosophically, we approach our lives. In suggesting the possibilities of “worldliness” our aim is to establish the elements of a counter-philosophy to globalism: one that escapes the traps and the “sadness” of what I take to be its main supportive structure; the fear borne of insecurity, and the security borne of that fear.

The tension between globalism as the securitization of the world (both the ocean-world of the crowd and the ocean of all existence), conceived as a fearing of things, and ‘worldliness’ as a counter-philosophy, and philosophical underpinning to my critical reading of globalism, are the two figures I have tried to establish. Against the melancholy and brutal march of security we must formulate a way of being-in-the-world not based on fear but on a certain form of believing underpinned by a transformation of our perception — in particular, seeking after the resonance of the marvelous, the everyday mundane, the fascinating all around us — and a transformation of our relation to being (particularly identity and ego). Globalization is a political project of state concerned with dulling down the otherwise resonant aspects of our lives. It works in a serial fashion, living within us, and it thrives on fear — a fear of the unknown, of the difficult, or the dangerous. Its opposite — around which the politics of anti-globalization might focus — is a trust in the world; a belief-in-the-world, that, if we seek to escape the circuits of violence and domination that globalism and globalization represent, must be now at the heart of our revolutionary thinking. I suggested that “being” as such (the identity model of existence) ought to be replaced with becomings (denoting continual connections, disconnections, reconnections), whereby the fear of death (the fear of being absent), could be ameliorated, or “lost” by a profound reconceptualization of the meaning of affirming life. Not a utilitarianism that seeks to survive in a bubble of nirvana, but a materially grounded living that embraces the epiphany and the pain of the adventure of life.

The development of global governance is part
of the evolution of human efforts to organize
life on the planet, and that process will
always be going on. Our work is no more than
a transit stop on that journey.
— The Commission for Global Governance

The organization of life is the project, global in scope, an endpoint to which human societies are inexorably in motion. In The Poverty of Historicism, Karl Popper warned against the tyranny inherent to any political discourse that claimed to be riding a tide of inevitability. The 1995 report of the Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood, is a case in point. The epigraph above is representive of the danger: a whole history of interventions, of misfortunes, scattered lives, is lost in the grandeur of two sentences. Let us attempt here to regain it.

Unlike one or two of my fellow authors, I argue in what follows that globalization is in no way in tension with governance, indeed each is the logic of the other. I argue that the root of this equivalence can be found deep within the genealogy of the modern state. In tracing this equivalence I suggest not only that we re-examine popular notions concerning the decline of public authority and the hollowing out of states, but also that we pay greater attention to the political genealogy of concepts such as individualism, freedom and democratic peace.

In so doing we can open a space for a fresh evaluation of contemporary discourses and practices of global governance. The latter endeavour is particularly important, for it is not only what is lost or not said in the Commission’s report that is of interest. Equally significant are the actions and values sanctioned and affirmed. Above all, it is this ‘positive’ program of both the Commission and a range of other actors that I wish to subject to a political and historical reading. What I aim to disturb is not so much a silence as a monologue of reason that has concealed the intervention of power, transformed so many real lives, real people, and given dignity, if not legitimacy, to the violence of a kind of disciplinary governance that has become our destiny and destination. The ‘evolution of human efforts to organize life on the planet’ is indeed the type of governance in question, at least in this essay.

I will attempt to outline the archaeology of this reason to the extent that it highlights an alternative reading of the politics of globalization and its intersection with the reality and politics of bringing order to the world.

Governance and the power to govern

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault described what he saw as a profound transformation at the heart of political governance. ‘Since the classical age’, he wrote,

For Foucault this ascendance marked the threshold of modernity and 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. The second centred on the ‘adjustment of the phenomena of population’; a ‘bio-politics’ focused on demography (distribution, longevity, procreation), economy (the synchronization of resources and citizens), and social security (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 positive constitution of modern society is well established. From Madness and Civilization is as much a tour-de-force on the birth of ‘industrious society’ as a history of insanity. The Birth of the Clinic charts the emergence of a medical perception as much concerned with illuminating social as corporeal pathology. Discipline and Punish — the history of the prison — is first and foremost concerned with the training (positive sign) of bodies and souls; the dream of a kind of automatic social functioning. And finally — perhaps most profoundly — we have The History of Sexuality, which traces the birth of the ‘knowing subject’; the body that constitutes itself as an object of knowledge. Power — at least since the 18thC — is seen as productive; inscripted in knowledge, revealed as truth, operative at the level of the everyday mundane. Foucault gave the name ‘governmentalization’ to the general process of the emergence of self-organizing, self-reliant networks of governance, in which individuals themselves were to play positive roles. Government, was for Foucault the ‘overall effect’ of a complex interplay of rationalities and technicalities, as well as — of course — political contingency. The single thread that linked all modern experiences of politics was the targeting of life above and beyond death.

This theme dominated Foucault’s lecture and seminar series at the Collège de France between the years 1976 and 1980. Although no comprehensive study emerged from Foucault’s researches, we have — as well as transcripts of his lectures — several short essays and papers (Foucault, 1988, 1989, 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 question of order; its historical politics, techniques and practices. Still concerned with ‘bio-power’, Foucault sought to uncover the inscribed history of the birth of modern society; the ‘absolutely conscious strategy’ attested in both political texts and the ‘mass of unknown documents’ constitutive of the ‘effective discourse of a political action’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 149). This ordering was to be found — argued Foucault — in,

The first step toward this ‘governmentalization of the state’ is taken when populations emerge as a statistical problem.¹ Foucault traces this emergence first in the notion of raison d’état, 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’,

Epitomized in the writings of Seckendorff (1656), Wolff (1719), Dithmar (1731), Darjes (1749, 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’, 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: on the one hand, as the material result of the harnessing and channeling 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). Freedom, inner strength and security emerged as dominant principles in the discursive constitution of civic order; conditioning the historical development of practical and political government from the 18th century onward.

What Foucault’s historical studies describe in essence, is 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, and so on). On the other hand, government becomes integral; diffused at the level of the social body as a whole (in law, morality, customs, habits and social knowledge), and assumed within an individual code or structure of command (in disposition, humor, temperament). For heuristic purposes this double movement corresponds to Foucault’s identification of ‘specific governmental practices’ on the one hand, and ‘a whole complex of savoirs’ on the other, with spatialization constituting the former, and deterritorialization the latter.

What I suggest — again for heuristic purposes, rather than as a strict categorization of the history of power — is that this distinction might also be useful in helping us think of the significance of the ascendance of a discourse of ‘governance’ over that of ‘government’. The latter is indicative of a political reason concerned with the margins and boundaries of civil security (the delinquent, the libertine, the madman). In this sense it is spatialized and territorialized. The former is indicative of a political reason concerned with strengthening the ‘normality’ of the mass. In this sense it is deterritorialized and temporalized (normality defined according to historical expediency). Michel Foucault himself never felt the need to conceptually separate these out, no doubt for good reason. Indeed his notion of ‘governmentalization’ rightly emphasizes both elements of this emerging power over life. I would like to suggest that contemporary discussions of governance would do well to remember this centrality of government; both in the sense of the spatiality of power, and in the ‘government’ essentially served in its deterritorialization (the passing of the command structure into the very constitution of the individual).

In this paper, however, I aim to do more than simply raise that objection. I want also to make a preliminary move to understanding the technicalities of what I take to be a form of political intervention concerned less with the homology of civil space than with the constitution of civil time — its rhythms, its pace, its motion. In this I want to emphasize the notion of ‘governance’ while not divorcing it from the ‘specific governmental practices’ that lurk behind the outward surface of this deterritorialization. Maintaining this focus on government while trying to describe the parameters of governance is indeed essential as both emerge from the same political reason (the targeting of populations by power).

Let us begin by revisiting the Commission on Global Governance.

Our global neighbourhood

As the report of the Commission continued, I realized that I was reading an historical document, essentially the same in nature to the decrees and lost registers whose vibrations Foucault felt, and whose intensity he dreamt of restoring. I imagined myself surrounded by its forebears — their names rising up through the centuries — Botero, Darjes, Saint-Simon, Bentham. From the discussion of ‘civic ethics’ to ‘economic stability’, from ‘development assistance’ to the ‘enforcement of law’, from the ‘empowerment of people’ to ‘enlightened leadership’, here was encapsulated the grand themes of the modern epoch. The aims of this Commission were clear: to develop a ‘multifaceted strategy for global governance’, one that would ‘draw on the skill of a diversity of people and institutions at many levels .. [building] .. networks of institutions and processes — that enable global actors to pool information, knowledge, and capacities’ (Commission for Global Governance, 1995, pp. 4-5). ‘Governance’, in their terms, was to be found in the promotion of security ‘in its widest sense’.

On the Commission’s account this was a text about ‘a new world’; one caught up in the midst of a profound revolution. ‘Never before’ it attests, ‘has change come so rapidly — in some ways, all at once — on such a global scale, and with such global visibility’ (Commission on Global Governance, 1995, p. 12). Yet the echoes of all those brief lives, those lowly figures upon whom power, many centuries hence, had turned its attention, kept jumping up as I read. Something was amiss. Though it took me some time to see it, the outline of an equivalence between global governance and the genealogy of modern governmentality and bio-politics was materializing on the very page before me. Where once the theoreticians of police had conceived of the dignity, power and dynamism of the state in terms of facilitating happiness and self-sustenance, now we were being told,

In response, ‘Nation-states must adjust to the appearance of all these forces and take advantage of their capabilities’ (Commission for Global Governance, 1995, p. xvi). Leaders, argued the Commission, must recognise the ‘collective power of people’. ‘Mobilizing that power to make life in the twenty-first century more democratic, more secure, and sustainable, is the foremost challenge of this generation’ (Commission on Global Governance, 1995, p. 1).

Despite the fact that ‘bio-power’ emerges as a political rationale and practical strategy in the 18th century, popularising government in its very modus operandi (advanced liberal democracy), the picture sketched by the Commission is one of the crisis of government as a whole because of its decentralization. In this proposition it is not alone. This mistake is particularly prevalent in contemporary discussion of the state and globalization in the disciplines of international relations and political economy. Susan Strange, for example, in an essay entitled ‘The Defective State’ writes, ‘state authority has leaked away, upwards, sideways, and downwards. In some matters, it seems even to have gone nowhere, just evaporated. The realm of anarchy in society and economy has become more extensive as that of all kinds of authority has diminished’ (Strange, 1995, p. 56). The state, for Strange, is ‘hollowing out’. In Strange’s view we are witness to a process by which centralised authority over society and economy has become ‘diffused’ in a ‘neomedieval fashion’, with ‘some necessary authority once exercised by states .. now exercised by no one’ (Strange, 1995, p. 71). Governments are the ‘victims’ of a shift in the ‘state-market balance of power’.

Alternatively, take the writings of Phil Cerny. ‘The essence of the state — and the main practical condition for its viability’ he writes,

Left all alone, the future for the state, in Cerny’s view, is bleak. The essential presumption is set up in the first line; states are nothing if not territorially (and ethnically) discreet. Similar themes are developed by Theodore Levitt. ‘Cosmopolitanism’, he writes,

Here again the metaphor is one of penetration. The hold of the ship of state (its homology) has been fractured. Per axiom this entails a crisis of government, indeed its obsolescence. ‘The Nation State’ writes Kenichi Ohmae, ‘has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional unit for organising human activity and managing economic endeavour in a borderless world’ (Ohmae, 1993, p. 78). From its role in the constitution and policing of boundaries, ‘politics .. [itself] .. has entered an age of increasing limits’ (Riddell, 1995, p. 14). The key index of this limit — it is argued — is found in the inability of governments to control forms of movement. In the words of Mathew Horsman and Andrew Marshall,

Yet we might ask, from where did man learn the value of motion? Let’s return to the question of the deterritorialization of government and the birth of modern notions of governance.

The discovery of motion

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 (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.

Though often overlooked, this link between motion and civic order was highlighted in a number of historical 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 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, 1973) 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). Ever more, ‘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 are but two general projects born of the question of the efficiency of movement that dominates 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).

Let us not also forget the military, both in its impact on cities and its impact on bodies. In terms of the former, as Mumford describes,

And before these men could be commanded to run at the enemy they had first to be taught to stand firm 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 the French Revolutionaries, also helped set the technical parameters of government.⁵ Practiced 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 The image of society was one of a complex of relays; each to be synchronised, made efficient and effective. In the remarkable words of Johann von Justi, ‘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 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,

It was exactly this implementation of a new economy of movement through time that enabled Frederick to dominate the 18thC.

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 rightful misgiving — as the ‘art of motorizing’.⁷ Again, the crucial link is the birth of bio-politics, and the transformation of the power to govern. In the words of Carl von Clausewitz (1968, p. 384), ‘War had suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen of the State’. 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 principles of efficiency and movement 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’, both militarily and governmentally.

Prolegomenon to global governance

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. Virilio also serves as the link to my main argument: that this experience of motion, and its greater facilitation and extension throughout every level of society, is the hidden history of globalism and global governance. Though Virilio has only recently turned his attention to the discourses of globalization (1995b), his writings — I suggest — provide the political and historical reading so lacking in our present discussions. For lack of space let me pick out its main themes.

‘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 what Virilio calls, ‘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). An ‘unrecognised order of political circulation’ was emerging, crystallised in the French Revolution. The events of 1789, he writes,

The stage was set for Bonaparte. ‘With Napoleon’, write the Durants, ‘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 Virilio (1986, p. 46) has termed the ‘peace of exhaustion’. In essence (though largely unrecognised, perhaps 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 of 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 mercantilism⁹ … ) — 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, motorization) 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 in itself emerged as a discipline.

Discourses and practices of contemporary political reason

No doubt this is when ‘globalism’ (though yet to find its linguistic expression) first emerged as the imaginary endpoint to liberal freedom. ‘To be truly free requires a life without boundaries’: the passport to that future is the technical control of motion.¹⁰ As Paul Virilio (1986, p. 73) describes, ‘the dromocrat’s look .. causes distances to approach.’ This negation of ‘the world as a field’ is contained nowhere better than in the very image of the Earth as seen from space. Indeed, if this blue orb is an icon of anything it is of the final frontier in the ascendance of kinetic political technology. Hardly a surprise then that Martin Heidegger feared this image more than he did the atom bomb. As he described so perfectly, the ‘uprooting of man has taken place’ (Heidegger, 1993, pp. 105-6).

This uprooting, or incitement to motion, is well represented in the discourses and practices of contemporary political reason. Again, our classical themes prevail: deterritorialization (disappearances of all kinds of materiality) and spatialization (self-constitution and regulation). The former can be regarded as the ‘modality of becoming’ of globalism — the emptying out of all kinds of territory (first of the state, then the world itself). The latter corresponds to the channeling of energies, the optimization of forces, the temporal parameters of modern governance. In practice, like the somewhat shaky distinction between governance and government, these impulses are often intermixed. ‘You wanted to travel?’, asks a promotion for Sky television, ‘No need to bother.’ Here speed not only consumes distance, but in bringing everything to hand that is distant (without even the need for physical movement) assures the ideal political state of life without boundaries: immobilism. For Paul Virilio this is clearly worrying,

As a critique of the dream of globalization Virilio’s analysis of the emergence of the ‘terminal-citizen’ is unmatched.¹¹ Not only does it help us reflect politically upon the dominant discourses of our epoch, but again — like Foucault — it allows us to raise, at least for a moment, the question of the implications of contemporary practices for the constitution of contemporary political governance. What interests are better served by this immobilization of humanity under the illusion of the freedom of speed?

This ‘space-distortion’, for Virilio, finds its origins in the military, but can equally be seen across whole sections of society. ‘We believe’ runs a promotion for Kawasaki, ‘that to fulfill our potential as a global corporation, we have to continually push back frontiers of space’ (The Economist, 1994, p. 8). ‘For U.S. Corporations’ The Herald Tribune affirms, ‘the Modern-Day Byword Is “Globalize or Die”’ (International Herald Tribune, 1994, p. 15). In 1989 chairman and CEO of General Electric Jack Welch, talks of the ‘global moment’, of ‘lightening speed’, ‘fast action’, and ‘acting with speed’. ‘The world moves much faster today’ (Tichy and Charan, 1989, p. 115). In 1991 President and CEO of Asea Brown Boveri Percy Barnevik, prompts, ‘Why emphasize speed over precision? Because the costs of delay exceed the costs of mistakes’ (Taylor, 1991, p. 104). In 1994, Vice President Al Gore talks of a ‘planetary information network that transmits messages and images at the speed of light’, allowing ‘families and friends’ to ‘transcend the barriers of time and distance’ (Gore, 1994). In 1995 a special issue of TIME on technology and the ‘global agenda’ begins the cover story article with one word, followed by a full stop. The word is ‘acceleration’.

From Mumford’s desire to ‘get somewhere’ to cameralism’s investment in motion, a deeper history and practical development lies behind this new vernacular of global-neoliberal dromoscopic-space; a fact of which even the advertisers seem occasionally aware. Note, for example, the astounding words that accompanied one of the first promotions to use the image of the globe as seen from ‘deep space’,

A similar point was made more recently in the equally astonishing words of a promotion for Daimler Benz published widely during 1995. Under a double-page spread of the ‘NASA earthrise’, and the subtitle ‘Progress is the realization of utopia’, the dialogue ran,

Automotion fulfills history in the liberation of man from the Earth! Who can fail to be moved by the visuality of the technical result? Clearly the image of the globe is itself essential, now almost obligatory, in the ‘image bank’ of every major corporation. We have the power, it says, to go beyond the critical threshold of orbital speed (the ‘speed of liberation’, ‘escape velocity’), and in doing so not only separate our existence from the Earth, but destroy in one movement the expanse of the planet. Once even the most seasoned philosophers dared not estimate the size of our Earth. It seemed infinite, immeasurable. But in the middle of this century, we escaped all that, so that now we find — whether we like it or not (and we usually do) — just how small our terrestrial habitat really is. In the words of Buzz Aldrin, ‘The Earth would eventually be so small I could blot it out of the universe simply by holding up my thumb’ (Aldrin, in Kelley, 1988, plate 37).

We should ask questions about this disappearance of geometrical space. We might ask whether communications have not long prepared us for this moment where the necessity of immediacy takes its place as the technical achievement of a political governance in which the absence of distance, of space and expanse serves specifically to establish and maintain the equivalence between motion and good order. Are not our discourses of globalism the contemporary monologue of reason that have concealed the political history of the movement of bodies and the extortion of their productive forces? Is not that single snapshot — the NASA Earth — the visual representation of the final stages of the governmentalization of the state and our systems of politics, as globalism, motion and tranquillity become synonymous? Even if we’re shy about asking such questions, one can surely see that the implications of the discourses, practices and aesthetics of contemporary political reason have been immense.

Perhaps most conspicuous has been the historical reversal of ‘motivational crises’ (Habermas, 1975), achieved through an intensification of general anxiety about immediacy and the distortion of distance. The spectre of ‘global competition’ (“Work smarter, not just harder”¹² … ), ‘risk society’, the ‘fear of unemployment’, subcontracting, outsourcing and ‘just-in-time’ production; all have collided in the discourses and practices of neo-liberal globalization. The result has not only been an enormous injection of energy into the process of capital accumulation, pulling the failing welfare economies of 1970s into the age of hyper-efficiency. Along with the trajectory we find a wholesale transformation of our perceptions of reality, both in a negative sense of what is disavowed (‘There is no alternative’, ‘You have no choice’, there is ‘no place to hide’¹³ … ), and the positive sense of what becomes necessary (‘Create a sense of urgency’, ‘involve everyone in everything’, establish ‘friction-free capitalism’).¹⁴

The distant echo of those technicians of government who dreamt of the assembly of men and things in dynamic repose becomes an uproar in every global city, and all their peripheries. ‘Activité, activité, vitesse’ — Napoleon’s watchword¹⁵ — has indeed become the law of our own world. ‘Man’, write Peters and Waterman (1982), ‘is waiting for motivation’. The long and steady disappearance of the visible markers of the state serves well to conceal the politics behind the decentralization, diffusion and mobilization of the populace as a whole. Yet in the eyes of our favoured detectives (Cerny, Strange, Ohmae, etc.), authority is nothing if not holistic, defined negatively against all other constituencies. A naivety that is politically dangerous. All government is equated with negative power (the power to restrict, to confine, to separate and beat-down). It is this presupposition that helps validate globalism as something in which individuals should invest faith. Yet in failing to consider either the history or consequences of the outward deterritorialization it effects, commentators have surely succumbed to the illusion no doubt marked out for them in advance, in order to conceal the real nature of what is at stake; the substitution of governance for government, automatism for autonomy, immediacy for history, dromocracy for democracy.¹⁶

Rethinking globalization as governance

That innovations in political technology were essential to the development of political economy was one of Michel Foucault’s lasting contributions to critical politics. As he himself described,

All of this, for Foucault, was something more than the rise of an ascetic ideal. What occurred in the 18th century,

Why is it that our contemporary commentators believe that this history of political intervention has suddenly ‘evaporated’?

The reason, as we have seen, is their failure to think deeply about governance and the power to govern. Contemporary transformations, for these commentators, are indicative of (and follow from) a generalized shift in the locus of command from the state to the people. Understood as such it would be misguided to view the consequences of such changes as anything other than, on the one hand, the accidental outcome of technological and market forces, or on the other, as the logic of these forces played out (transhistorically) over the longue durée. Yet as we have seen, such a view cannot survive even a cursory reading of the genealogy of governance. Al Gore is indeed right to point out, ‘Governments didn’t do this. People did’. But this says nothing about the decline of authority, for as we have seen, this authority, at least from the 18th century onward specifically targeted individuals to become the vectors of their own processes of transformation. The technology of self-constitution, that Foucault in Discipline and Punish described as ‘panopticism’, runs hand-in-hand with the ascendance of liberal freedom. As Foucault would describe, ‘The Enlightenment which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 222). In this light — of the development of mechanics of self-constitution, subjectification, the passing of the command structure into the minds of individuals (what I have referred to in the essay as ‘governance’) — the state cannot be defined merely as the institutions of government. Governance is in that sense a broader phenomenon; precisely the ‘efforts to organize life on the planet’ that so concerns the Commission for Global Governance.

The question of ‘authority’ then, can only to be viewed in its historical setting and against its developmental transformations. That genealogy reveals that for 300 years at least the implicit objective of political reason has been to pass the responsibilities of government onto the shoulders of individuals. Formulated best in the words of von Justi, modern political reason was to be, ‘concerned chiefly with the conduct and sustenance of the subjects, and its great purpose is to put both in such equilibrium and correlation that the subjects of the republic will be useful, and in a position easily to support themselves.’ (Justi, quoted in Small, 1909, p. 328). The contemporary dissolution of the face of government (institutional fragmentation, dispersion of state authority, diminishing policy autonomy, and so on), says nothing of this longer history of diffusion that lies at the heart of the modern rational order imagined in the classical age. As Paul Virilio has described, the age of visibility (institutions, governments) gives way to the age of disappearance (networks, dispersions), but not as reduction in power. Just as the replacement of the scaffold by the prison was, ‘not to punish less, but to punish better .. to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 82), so the disappearance of the state has run parallel with the ascendance of new modalities of governance based on the positive constitution of individuals themselves (globalism, competitiveness, self-motivation, rapidity, agility, responsiveness, proactivity, etc.).

Ironically we can agree — in part — with the assessment of Strange, Cerny, Ohmae and others. The state is increasingly hollow! What they have failed to consider, however, is the historical reason why it is so. Having considered some of these reasons here (the birth of bio-power made necessary by the birth of the commercial economy and the emergence of populations as a statistical problem) I dispute that our contemporary epoch is a ‘return to medievalism’ (cf. Kobrin’s chapter in this volume). What we are witnessing at the level of institutions is simply the replicant process of deterritorialization effected first at the level of individuals during the course of the transition from the classical to the modern epoch whereby sovereign power was supplanted by bio-power. As Foucault described, ‘we should not be deceived by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised, a whole continual and clamorous legislative activity: these were the forms that made an essentially normalizing power acceptable’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 144). Perhaps we can now add that our notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘territoriality’ have similarly obscured the fate of the state, progressively emptying itself out in its own bio-political mutation.

I suggest, then, that the birth of bio-power at the level of subjectivity is the rightful precursor of the globalization of the state. From the point at which this transition took place (with the emergence of the notion of reason of state, police science and the question of ‘government’) this endpoint was established as the logic of political reason. The governmentalization of the state is indeed the globalization of the state. The neomedieval metaphor, in mistaking this deterritorialization for a ‘return’ to anarchical disorganization, merely obscures further the relations of power that first ‘discovered society’ (Polanyi, 1957) as the true site of modern governance, followed by ‘global society’ as the object of global governance.

For those that would maintain that this discovery of (global) society signals the decline in state power, let us remember that Bodin’s notion of ‘sovereignty’ was not first and foremost one of territory, but one of the supreme power of the state over its subjects (‘unique and absolved from the laws’). As Meinecke describes, ‘Bodin did not distinguish the question of what is the supreme authority within the State from the question of what is the supreme authority of the State’ (Meinecke, 1957, p. 57). That said, for Bodin the reforms of the cameral thinkers and philosophes of the Enlightenment (the birth of active society) would have been unthinkable. The very idea of participatory ‘civil society’ was, for him, abhorrent. Yet again, we must return to the notion of bio-power, and note that the birth of active society — called forth in the writings of the first technicians of the modern state — was conceived in its origin in terms of the ‘strength of the state’, both commercially and governmentally. In that sense Bodin and the scientists of police and modern governance would surely have agreed on the basic premise that underpins each of their actions; the pursuit of public security (salus populi) and the productive society.¹⁷ As Friedrich Meinecke might say, ‘The difference between the two lay only in the means, not the ends’ (Meinecke, 1957, p. 214).¹⁸

Conceiving ‘governance’ as ‘diffusion’, and diffusion as ‘civic security’, one can see that globalization actually extends, rather than fragments, state-ordered power. This form of ‘government’ cannot be reduced instrumentally to the actions of institutions. As Colin Gordon suggests, ‘the state has no essence’ (Gordon, 1991, p. 4). Authority, then — at least over the modern period — has to be traced beyond the state, into the ‘positive unconscious’ and codes of a culture, ‘its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices .. the space of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1970, pp. xx-xxii). ‘The question of power’, Foucault reflects,

In setting up a simple distinction between diffusion (anarchy) and centralization (authority), Strange, Cerny, Ohmae and others simply misread the history of the modern state, and the genealogy of modern power.

‘Until the last few years’ writes Cerny, ‘the long-term development of the “modern” world order has been characterized by a process of centralization and hierachization of power’ (cf. Cerny’s chapter in this volume). The reverse is the case. The modern world order has been characterized over the long term by a political project of decentralization and diffusion. In highlighting this process as it reaches its final threshold, Cerny actually ends up diverting attention from its own logic, which indeed we are beginning to witness now. This is the reversal now effecting itself at the level of individuals, where this whole technology of power was born. Now, we witness not so much a diffusion and deterritorialization (this has already been achieved). Rather, as Virilio is beginning to describe, we witness a deeper, true centralization and hierachization. The former is effected in the homogenization of whole societies caught up in the necessities of global competitiveness, and ‘global time’ (as well as the imposition of a kind of physical incarceration now that everything arrives without us having to leave). The latter is effected in the very structure of global governance that has emerged to replace the territorial nation-state; the dromological order where the fastest win and the slowest lose, effecting a new and more violent hierarchization of the world.

The pathology of global governance

The final question that a political reading would raise, if only to leave hanging, is the value of global governance in itself. As the history that I have attempted to sketch attests, the development of systems of governance is hardly a neutral process. Any discussion, therefore, of global governance has to confront the question; ‘to what problem is global governance the solution’? It is that question that makes necessary the opening out of the field of discussion into the interrogation of our deepest presuppositions on the value and politics of governing the relations of men and things. ‘Imagine order’ wrote Robert Musil,

Our greatest danger might be to underestimate the extent to which order — perhaps entropy — is served by the deterritorialization of the state. This decentralization was imagined first by an ensemble of thinkers who referred to their own work as the ‘theory of police’.

But Musil‘s words raise the final question, unanswerable here; what are the consequences of universal governance? The works of Paul Virilio — in shifting our attention from the organization of space to the constitution of time — stand, I suggest, as documents charting exactly that universalization of order over the modern period as a whole. Foucault can also act as a reference, in his studies of the internalization of command that goes hand-in-hand with the governmentalization of the state. In each we find a body of work that can be turned profitably to comment on the politics of globalization, and not only that, but a political comment on the nature of governance, that in our current discussions we’d do well to remember. Perhaps it is time, in the words of Gayatri Spivak (1990, p. 30), that ‘the Western theoretical establishment take a moratorium on producing a global solution’, if not out of modesty, then the hope of recapturing life’s authenticity.

We must keep open the debate on globalization and governance.