Julie, I’d like to begin with your recent experiences in Latin America. In January and February of this year you travelled to Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Santiago. The field research you were doing there was for a forthcoming study on the changing nature of urban politics in those cities, and also Mexico City. Tell us what you found there, and why you think these cities are particularly important at present.
Well, first what I found was that the streets found me. I experienced at every step the incredible power practiced by buildings and streetscapes on ordinary people’s everyday lives in the city. Of course, the powers practiced by architecture are not peculiar to Latin American cities, but the three cities that I’m studying are focal points of urban architectural change in the Americas. There’s an immense process of dislocation and transformation of place going on in these cities as a result of the ideological wave of neoliberalism and free-tradism sweeping through the hemisphere and the socio-economic policies and practices associated with that ideology.
In many respects, the street work I did as the “field research” for the project was a journey in search of myself: Latin America has always been for me a mirror in which we in the US could see more clearly the beauties and horrors, aspirations and failures of ourselves as Americans in the broadest hemispheric sense of the word. This is partly because the neo-colonial projects of the United States in the hemisphere and the world are so alive there but also because indigenous American cultures have survived and reconverted (neo)colonialism in intensely vivid ways. The powers of architecture and streets which I experienced reflected all my greatest fears and hopes for myself caught up in, and steadfastly resistant to, the dislocations of neoliberalism and what is called globalization.

We’ve talked about this before, and you often tell me of small, seemingly inconsequential forms of rearticulation, reconversion, that for you add up to something significant; for example the security guard of one tower or other who uses the roof as a private garden. When you tell me these things I hear hope in your voice; a certain laughter and awe for the ingenuity, dignity and multiplicity of forms of resistance, and also astonishment at the contradictions so clear, yet accommodated in these people’s lives. Yet I can’t help but feel – though the last thing I want to do is to trap these poor souls in my words – that as soon as these buildings appear, that’s the end of something significant. These great steel and glass structures seem to suggest something to me, and I’m not hopeful at all about the possibilities of still living as human beings in front of them. New York is one thing; there it’s a kind of social thrill. But I cannot but feel that elsewhere, perhaps in the cities you’re studying, these buildings become something else: both a form of violence and a permanent police. Is it possible for people to resist the power of buildings? Are there senseless acts of beauty that still can be significant though played out in their shadow?
Yes, there is no doubt in my mind that ultra-modern, fortress banks, corporate towers, and luxury hotels and apartment buildings are indeed forms of violence and policing, as you suggest. I would add that they are vertical bunkers as well. Bunkers in two senses: they embody notions of fortification in at least two ways.
In one sense, these new corporate towers claim, defend, and proliferate the territoriality of neoliberal economic operations vis-à-vis the millions of urban residents in Latin America who pay the staggering human costs of globalization. It is quite odd that bunkers should proliferate in an era of telematics. Paradoxically, however, I have found in Latin America that the more that neoliberal economic operations expand globally through telematic transmissions, the more that global capital seems to build skyscraper bunkers in world cities in order to facilitate urban networks for world business (this may be somewhat parallel to the system of military bases that the U.S. government built in the post-war era of U.S. hegemony). The 1990s skyscrapers house the weapons of global commerce — primarily computers — and also serve as fortified, luxury interfaces and retreats for wargames meetings between executives.
These buildings also fight a visual war in the landscape of the cities. Unlike the underground fortifications of 20th century war-making, the bunkers of neoliberalism are necessarily vertical and visible, often dominating the skylines of the rebuilt centers of Latin American cities. They fortify global commerce visually and culturally through the architectural languages of ultra-modernity. Their designs and materials of steel and reflective glass speak of invincibility, permanence, exclusivity, and the final defeat of antiquity and indigenous difference from the industrial West. To some poor, indigenous residents of the cities, the spectacle of these towers is perhaps as culturally arresting and daunting as the sight of an invading, foreign army.
How to resist the powers of these buildings, then? With difficulty. I think we need to rethink resistance in light of the urban geopolitical, war-making conditions that I described above. I am hopeful that the visual war in cities is not yet won by global commerce. Not all urban graffiti is effectively “channeled” in to designated walls established by the authorities.1 Similarly, street vendors with their vendor architecture on the sidewalks have refused to be interned (like prisoners of war … ) into state-planned marketplace areas far from downtown — urban reservations for street vendors have been tried but have failed in Mexico City, for instance. In terms of resisting the arsenal-like characteristics of these skyscrapers, I sense that the security of such buildings is increasingly at stake. Violence against urban buildings may emerge as an increasingly prominent feature of Latin American urban life. Aesthetic cultural resistance, it seems to me, however, promises to confront neoliberal destruction with an alternative visual permanence that makes it difficult for global capital to erase. Cultural products, then, from architecture to rooftop gardens to murals to graffiti, become the ultimate hope for resistance.

There are three things in what you say here I’d like to pursue: first, you suggest a positive relationship between the increased use of telematics and the emergence of these new urban ‘bunkers’. This to me is a fascinating idea. It’s as though the negative sign of the last great dromological wave — which lead to the disappearance of artillery batteries, firing units, observational posts and the like (the beachhead fortifications of the Atlantic Wall made irrelevant by allied air supremacy, stratospheric rockets, and finally, intercontinental ballistic missiles) — has been met and made positive by extending its force and intensifying its effect (the transportational power of rockets supplanted by the transmissional power of telematics). Something that was at first destructive of the military blockade is now remaking it: these great points of reference in the global matrix (the world trade centres, the corporate towers you study) both dependant upon and in many ways formed by, “the path”, the trajectory (now of information, then of the projectile). If this is indeed the case, it’s a very radical reversal in what would seem from the outside to be a continuum of the technological/dromological direction (the transmissional revolution that extends the transportational one). So the ‘Fortress’, once a victim of the path, reappears as a function of it (the globalization of communications, corporate reach, financial and informational networks, etc.); this time on the urban landscape rather than the coastal one. As land and territory become less important we move from the scale of continental shores, back through the boundaries of nations, down to specific cities, and increasingly specific networks: a set of moves conditioned at each turn by the nature and form of apparent and predominant trajective technologies, their reach, their effect upon real space, and so on. So now, in the age of telematics, it is indeed the smallest spaces which are at stake: the space of everyday life, everyday thoughts in the polis, the city; these new structures not so much indicative of the commercialization and commodification of the South as the general militarization of social space in age of telematics, and all of the people therein. The purest form of warfare is the effect of technology.
The second thing I’d like to comment on in what you said is the question of visibility. This is interesting. For sure not many will have looked at these buildings in the same way that you have; as military outposts, in effect. But at the same time, I think subconsciously, people would recognise what you propose. These buildings don’t hide their function in same way that the asylum, the prison or the factory would once do: in looking alike these early institutions would often become indistinguishable, their exact nature unknown from the outside, blending in as far as possible to the general environment, and within the general system of discipline of which each was part. With the new corporate towers of global capital there is no mistake either in the general message (there is no blurring with other architectural/institutional forms), and there is no dissolution of the force of the message because of this. They have no competition in terms of their actual form. This means that they can look the same (just as the prisons, the factories, the hospitals), but because they are essentially one and the same (unlike prisons, government buildings, police headquarters which have differing functions), the force of the message is pure, a direct line. For the ordinary citizen walking in and around these incredible structures the purity of the message is undeniable; it’s absolutely visible. It goes something like, ‘capitalism won’. It’s not a mixed message, like, ‘we are responsible for your body’ (the hospital), ‘we are responsible for your mind’ (the asylum), or ‘we are responsible for your soul’ (the prison).
But interestingly it would seem, unlike the prison, the manufactory, the hospital, these new towers don’t rely on the power of truth as invested in the voice, the character that speaks. These buildings don’t speak, but get their observants to speak. The message comes from within the subject, not the object, which once was the case of the old institutions. The prison, the asylum could be read from the outside. Though of anonymous form (architecturally similar), once discovered it was clear that one faced an institution. Now, one invariably faces one’s own reflection, and in the very centre of the city. Whereas the nineteenth century institutions were often located on the outside, these new institutions are in the centre, so visible on the skyline as to be almost inescapable. The result is that the voice transmitting the message is no longer a doctor, a psychiatrist, a prison warden or factory foreman, but the ego and the conscience of outside observer. The power of the confessional!
Finally, returning to your comparison with the bunker, I had a question about both the transformative power of these buildings and their strategic place in the overall constitution and reproduction of social order. Your work suggests that the new architecture of the Americas is a weapon and a tactic used by both the urban police and their colonial masters, and transnational capital and the global economy in general. In each case architecture is productive; producing certain modes of behaviour, instilling a certain economy, certain relations of force, etc. While these buildings also work to prevent certain things they do so more by way of what they produce, what they expect in the way of a response, the contrast as it performs positively in the minds of indigenous urban populations. This positive transformative power is held in the actual form of the new urban topology; the place these buildings take in the city. As well as being positive this transformative power in being invested in metal and glass is also anonymous to the extent that the direct line between the forms of social order produced and the functionaries and aficionados of this order are obscured. An interesting effect: the transformative power of these buildings is reproduced in their visibility, yet the beneficiaries and conduits are individually invisible. Perhaps this is in part an explanation for the trend you identify; buildings themselves becoming terrorist targets (in Oklahoma, in New York, in Nairobi, etc.). People blow them up just in order to see who exactly is on the inside.
Yet I wonder about the true nature of this crisis of social struggle, with individuals stunted and denied a point of accountability, and yet faced on a daily basis with the image and the form of these overpowering buildings. Could it be — and this is simply a suggestion — that like we were wrong about the original bunkers (the real war not being waged on the ground, but in the air), might we equally be wrong about these new ones? For it seems to me possible that in addition to structuring movements, possibilities, trajectories, etc., these buildings also serve as a focus of critique; but an impossible one (as a function of its target). As we know these bunkers are equally fortified, able, through advanced design, to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes as well as car bombs and riots. The inanimate has never been easy to assail, and these buildings are less so than ever; their very form and legibility constituting a space where the revolutionary looks entirely out of place. And yet might this be part of their function; like great magnets of forces, of peoples, of ideas? These bunkers like their earlier form attract the attack, while taking attention away from where power really is (in the air, the circuit, the politics, the tyrannies, the disgraces of everyday life). When the state pursues a strategy of diffusion (as it has at least since the classical age) the illusion of centrality comes to hold a social function; it is the illusion that provides a focus for political critique, gathering it once in the parliament, once in the assembly, and now in the street, effectively against buildings. Convenient enemies, permanent forces, visibility a trap, as Foucault suggested, in more than one sense: both in the vision of the skyline and its transformative force (discipline, self-constitution), in the impossibility of hiding from the gaze of these buildings (their omnipresence as a function of their form), and in the channeling of critique to the inanimate and the static, where the real problem in life is the animate and the mobile.
I guess what I would say is that visibility matters: it matters a lot to telematic capitalism. It helps prevent us from seeing what’s going on. The more visible that ultra-modern financial towers become, the less we are able to see about telematic capitalism. I think that one reason why people blow up such buildings is so that they don’t have to look at them anymore. They block one’s view, literally and symbolically.
They provoke multiple blindnesses in their very visuality. What they wish us to see / what they force us to see / is stability, predictability, invincibility, the triumph of global capitalism, as you suggest. The basic impact is this: if we can literally see that invincibility and ultra-efficiency, then it must be true …
What the buildings try to prevent from seeing, among other things, is an insane capital volatility, crippling imbalances of payments, monstrous deficits, impending global tendencies toward collapse, unpredictable-invisible-ever-constant flows of capital and power with devastating consequences on people’s lives.
So, yes, you’re right: visibility is a trap. It is the genius of global capital to invent a new landscape of buildings so that we are unable to see. I call this incredible power over our sight a form of fortification. To produce everyday blindness to the profoundly volatile nature of global finance and commerce is to fortify in aesthetico-physical ways everything about the way world capitalism works. Electronic pulses of money are placeless: they have no attachment to community, to people. But, the buildings construct lies about place-making that are a mile high.
The buildings say: “We are to stay. We are here to take care of you, to ensure the modernity of the economy and its efficient functioning.’ The capital flows are not “here to stay,” though. Not at all. Their nature is to flow all over the world at any time. Electronic pulses of money are not going to speak to people of reassurances of their well-being. The buildings, then, embody all the lies that the electronic pulses cannot.
In cities in Latin American where individual residents are generally not yet wired with personal computers, the reflective tower architecture and the city as whole become the screen. The buildings are like “public” art with a very didactic, state-supportive purpose. What the grand revolutionary public murals of the past did for the state, the buildings and cityscapes now perform. They teach how not to see; how not to understand.
I’ve been on major streets in São Paulo where there were literal, giant screens placed periodically along the length of the commercial avenue. To complement the reflective glass skyscrapers, where one can see nothing but a reflection of oneself, the giant screens were like moving, animate murals teaching people that global commerce has indeed won and seemingly for all time.
So, the buildings deflect the placelessness, volatility, and everyday destructiveness of telematic capitalism. In this sense, they don’t straightforwardly invite attack: they seem to invent place and security and socio-economic well-being for communities that are actually being ravaged by electronic pulses of money. People are less prone to attack what seem to be the basis of their economic future. On the other hand, when the lies are exposed and capitalism revealed as volatile and disloyal, I can imagine people wanting to clear the lies from their line of sight.
In any case, the buildings and the pulses embrace each other. My own intuition is that people like streetwalkers and vendors see through the lies of these buildings immediately.

 

Julie Murphy-Erfani is associate professor in social and behavioural sciences at Arizona State University.

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.

I am not a moralist
— Paul Virilio

‘The real problem is: what kind of life?’, states Paul Virilio in conversation with Sylvère Lotringer in the remarkable Pure War.¹ Ethics is nearly always grounded in two elements: discourse and space. For example, take Habermas and the public sphere of speech. Alternatively Foucault, and technologies of the self. Each is spatial — perhaps more obviously so the former (which is not in any way to say the latter is less ethical). As an ethics of the body, or the soul, or the social, each is marked, if not by a territory then a place (however transitory, however impossible). Certainly if we think of ethics’ own object, it’s clear that at issue is being “here in the world”. Even the ethics of alterity (the encounter), is essentially spatial: a kind of “positioning” (a concern with distance and proximity, a kind of ‘shifting’) through which we establish our perceptual reality; which is to say, our perception of where we are and might be in the world. Yet lived reality — at least until recently — dictated that this “being here” was also a “being now”, in other words, rooted in, and tied to, a certain temporality (the body that is marked, the soul that remembers, the social that transforms, the organism that lives). So what would seem hidden from the very beginning in our ethical thinking has been, in addition to discourse and space, the fundamental irreducibility of time.Yet what can we think when we find ourselves in a culture where being here and now is no longer a given; where the space of our real lives is decaying and “passing”? Where our worst problems are not borderlines but the vectors that obliterate them. Where automaticity (momentum), exhaustion (interconnection), disappearance (proliferation) reign absolute.² We’re struck by illusions and unable to engage. Territory, sovereignty, location, Law: that power has a form, a place that it invests in. But what would the world look like if we suddenly discovered that all of our investigations of practice and truth turned out to be bound to a certain corporeality — a metaphysics of space — which itself had disappeared when we weren’t looking? That is to say, if space were simply not there as such; if indeed the very soil beneath our feet–as Foucault famously argued — had already become mobile, shifting and drifting, and turning itself over in spite of our presence. In short, what if the temporal supplanted the spatial, not as a replacement of the actually physical, but the durational, or expansive part of our social existence (the pace of public life overtaking the place of public existence)? What kind of crisis might arise in our thinking: about politics, the city, the self, the Other, in our strategies and our tactics, in our ethical systems, if all of a sudden we were to find our world absent, and were faced with a politics of some other dimension, perhaps time?

I

4 propositions, 4 accusations:

1) Everything spatial in our culture is undergoing a process of mass irradiation. From the first telegraphics of the Napoleonic wars to the railroad, the airplane, the launch of the satellite: the physical duration of the world has been, and is being, obliterated in the invisible war of Marinetti’s straight line.³ Since the age of Alexander space became first and foremost a temporal value (the time taken to eradicate distance), made permanent since the Quattrocento and the mapping of the world via linear perspective.⁴ It’s clear we find a threshold in birthplace of modernity⁵ of which electromagnetics, now opto-electronics are but a hyperrealization. In short, geography is history.⁶

2) It seems clear, from at least a certain critical viewpoint, that public power, or the question of hegemony (let’s say ‘discipline’), has adjusted to the birth of these new technologies. If we look back at the Classical age we find an age of enclosure: spaces matter, buildings appear. With the take-off of modernity we see a reversal of the tendency: a project emerge for the deterritorialization of power. Power would be passed into the souls of individuals (carried in their bodies, their gestures, their disposition, their readiness). Now we find a third transformation, with the end of the project of mass mobilization. Where once it was a question of holding form suspended, becoming, in turn, one of constituting rhythm, now we find a tendency toward the depletion of horizon; a kind of inertia borne out of the instantaneity of movement.⁷ It is my argument at least, that this transformation of political technique cannot be separated from the basic State project of the organization of bodies, of aptitudes and lives.

3) It seems clear that we are passing into a period of a profound crisis in identity: just, of course, as identities begin to reassert themselves more clearly. The essential phenomenon is the obliteration of alterity (that we might suggest in itself is of course an age old State project). In the words of Jean Baudrillard, ‘Our society is entirely dedicated to neutralizing otherness, to destroying the other as a natural point of reference in a vast flood of aseptic communication and interaction, of illusory exchange and contact.’⁸ The effacement of the Other through the proliferation of media — the radical multiplication, indeed production, of difference — demands we reassess the temporality of identity. Again what we’re seeing is a shift in the tendency. It’s not that spaces are unimportant, but acceleration, diffusion, fragmentation, dispersion takes command. If effacement and transidentification were counter-strategies of identity in age of spaces⁹, they no longer can be when asylums become empty. As an aside, it would be interesting at this point to discuss French cultural politics — by which I mean the experience from about ‘58 to ‘78 — but we’re probably too close to the death of Foucault to be able to do so. Nonetheless, I wonder if we’d find in the experience of his stand against power, a whole series of lessons, tactical and political, that would help us come to terms with these new technologies of time, and their effect on our lives.

4) We must come to terms with what Virilio has termed the ‘disappearance aesthetic’. When the politics of motion becomes a ‘movement of movement’ we move into an age of cinematography. We lose persistence; the characteristic of the aesthetics of appearance. As Virilio writes, ‘persistence [becomes] retinal, it is persistence of memory, of the mental image’.¹⁰ From the general effect, we can identify at a broad level at least three disappearances: that of subjectivity, objectivity, and history. Think of the first this way. If Foucault was concerned with the passing of ‘life into history’ (where life became a object of political intervention), Virilio is concerned with the passing of ‘history into life’, by which we might understand, the fundamental ways in which over the last 2/300 years, life has become ‘automatic’. Essentially ‘displaced’ we’re no more than ‘passengers in transit’.¹¹ For Virilio what we are talking about is nothing less than the ‘total, unavowed disqualification of the human in favour of the definitive instrumental conditioning of the individual’.¹² ‘All of us’, he writes, ‘are already civilian soldiers’.¹³

In terms of objectivity we might understand the loss of the world as horizon, or obstacle. In Virilio’s terms, dromocratic rationality has ‘ceaselessly distanced us’ from what we’ve taken to be the ‘objective world’: ‘the rapid tour, the accelerated transport of people, signs or things, reproduce .. the effects of picnolepsy [a kind of momentary sleep, with effects of amnesia], since they provoke a perpetually repeated hijacking of the subject from any spatial-temporal context.’¹⁴ When perceptual mobility catches up with electromagnetics, we find ourselves facing, ‘the unheard-of situation of the interchangeability of places’.¹⁵ So along with the “where-and-when?” of the disappearing subject we find shifts in all directions of actual objects! ‘It is this intervention’, writes Virilio, ‘which destroys the world as we know it.’¹⁶

Finally, in terms of history, what is at stake is ‘History as extensiveness — of time that lasts’. With technologies of instaneity the event wins out, the end of duration marking the advent of ubiquity and the rise of ‘transpolitics’: what Virilio calls, ‘a final oblivion of matter and of own presence in the world.’¹⁷ ‘Democracy, consultation, the basis of politics requires time’, he writes. ‘Duration is the proper of man; he is inscribed within it.’¹⁸ With the disappearance of duration disappears ‘all finalities, all referentials, all meanings’.¹⁹ Taken together, these three disappearances mark what Virilio calls the ‘primal accident’, whereby human society is defeated by exhaustion, a universal peace borne of absolute acceleration.²⁰

II

‘Europe, wrote Napoleon, ‘will never be tranquil until natural limits are restored’.²¹ Prophesy indeed as Virilio would have it in his book Inertie Polaire, and more recently Open Sky.²² No longer now the genealogy of that general displacement of peoples, indeed whole societies, under forward motion of industrial speed. Now, even more daringly, Virilio warns us of an oncoming confinement — indeed a perfect tranquillity — as a result of the restoration of natural limits; or more precisely, the final realization of that fascination with speed that is for him the unwritten law of Occidental modernity. The “speed of liberation”, as we’re fast finding out, is not quite the field of dreams we were told it would be. On the contrary, along with these multiple disappearances, the ‘universal dromos’ is now actually incarcerating us. Discontent to destroy dimension we’re now set on eradicating duration; the two in their absence defining the ‘no-place’ of light-speed existence (virtuality, cyberspace, cyberpace). From a culture of imperial geophysics (the politics of territory, its regularization and mapping) we pass into the ‘state of emergency’ of chronographics (ubiquity, immediacy, information intensity); all of us passive witnesses to the radical recasting of governance and citizenship alike.

This passivity is, for Virilio, latent within information technology. Now that everything arrives on the screen without the incumbent having even to leave, only the control of the real instant will remain; an illusive control that we have already passed over to the domain of sensors, captors and various microprocessing interfaces (DataGlove, DataSuit, trackpad and so on) allowing us to “meet at a distance” (telepresence); indeed, see, hear and feel at a distance (television, teleaudition, tele-tactition). This new generalized remote control, made possible by electromagnetic, and now optoelectronic communications, is revolutionizing — argues Virilio — man’s relation to himself, to others, to technology, to politics, and most particularly to the planet. Where the last century’s revolution in transportation gave rise to an era of generalized mobility, our own tools of instantaneous transmission are reversing the tendency. With the dissolution of the scale of our human environment (prefigured by the telescope and radicalized by the satellite), the very reality of the world is reduced to nil (or next to nothing), leading inevitably to a ‘catastrophic sense of incarceration now that humanity is literally deprived of horizon.’²³ Having lost our sense of the journey in the commutation of space during the industrial age, we now lose departure in the age of electromagnetics and the speed of light.

‘Behavioural inertia’ sets in. A rigor mortis all-too-evident in the soon-to-be-ideal ‘terminal-citizen’; ‘decked out to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the ‘spastic’, wired to control his or her domestic environment without having physically to stir.’²⁴ In obliterating space, this ‘armchair navigator’²⁵ replicates the experience of the astronaut in breaking through the vertical littoral of universal attraction – poking a hole through the sky – only to find that ‘beyond Earth’s pull there is no space worthy of the name, but only time’; a universal inert time patently self-evident to the passengers of Apollo 11, landing on the lunar region named so aptly thereafter, Tranquillity Base.²⁶ Back here on Earth, optoelectronics, having restored natural limits by exhausting all possible forward acceleration (nothing, we are reminded, moves faster than light), will indeed have secured, as Napoleon predicted, a kind of brutal tranquillity. Walled-in at home with our various interactive apparatuses – a veritable life-support system – and soon even an ‘electroergonomic double’ (the Datasuit, our virtual alter ego), we find ourselves the unwitting victims of a domestic enslavement identical to that of the para- or quadriplegic.²⁷ Our only salvation is to be found in illusion, in ‘flight from the reality of the moment’.²⁸ The circle is squared. A perfect panopticism where the inmate runs to the prison guard for protection against the institution within which he finds himself!

A radical dislocation, indeed physical removal from the space of politics and political existence. An individualism, as Virilio suggests, that has ‘little to do with a liberation of values.’²⁹ No one, of course, is informed in advance of this informational downside, nor of the immediate physiological pathology of having ‘everything within one’s reach’: the surreptitious obsolescence rendered on the body (in particular the muscles, but soon also memory and consciousness) through the proliferation of ‘remote control’. Much of Virilio’s recent work is in fact devoted to this very question; the revolution that follows that of transportation and transmission (bear in mind that we’ve scarcely come to terms with either of these, especially the latter). This ‘third revolution’ — that of transplantation — is, for Virilio, a natural consequence of the commutation of real space and the universalization of real time associated with the proliferation of transportation and transmission technologies respectively. Reductionism and miniaturization take over where networking and urbanization left off; mechanical communication supplanted by ‘electromagnetic proximity’.

The profound nature of this inversion is, for Virilio, seen best in the microphysical invasion of our very bodies by the ‘nanomachines’ of biotechnology. This invasion – of all kinds of stimulators, grafts and implants – is reversing, he argues, the very principle that has hitherto determined the social history of technology. Instead now of inhabiting machinery (the motor car, the elevator, the moving walkway, etc.) for the sake of conserving one’s own energy (what Virilio calls ‘the law of least effort’), now – in the age of telepresence – it is energy that instantaneously inhabits and governs us.³⁰ The ‘tragedy of the fusion of the “biological” and the “technological”’³¹, is thus that we lose – potentially – the very being of intentionality.³²

III

What Virilio proposes in response to all this–to the desertification of the world’s surface (inherently dematerializing duration); to the inertia-point of collision with real-time (entailing not only behavioural immobilism but the end of history itself); to the inward turn of technology on the human organism, not to mention the virtualization of perception and the frightful thought of not only acting at a distance but now even loving at a distance (cybersex)–is a radical new ecology and defense of perception. New, for as Virilio sees it, environmentalism has consistently failed to question the ‘man-machine dialogue’, and most especially the birth of machinic temporality.

By way of a corrective, Virilio asks that we engage the event at the speed it occurs; bringing forth not only a ‘true sociology’ of interactivity, but a ‘public dromology’ of the pace of public life (p. 23).  A ‘grey ecology’ (as ‘speed destroys colour’) would no longer deny the pollution of the ‘life-size’ or ‘scope’ of the planet by our various tools of technological proximity. On the other hand, an ‘ecology of images’ would mark a ‘conscientious objection’ to the hold of the public image by photo-cinematographic and video-infographic ‘seeing machines’. For with the speed of light we are not only talking of the de-location of the event (the confusion of here and there, now and then), but also a radical visual distortion of the event. As Virilio reminds us, until our own century man’s perception of existence – of time and space, the Earth in its detail – was bound to universal gravitation: precisely the force by which we measure the world, seeing with our own eyes the near and the far, the high and the low, depth and perspective, dimension and position. A defense of perception engaging the event necessarily would question the ‘immediacy’ of an image whose speed far outstrips the ‘escape velocity’ hitherto necessary to launch a vehicle off the Earth and into the stratosphere (now infosphere); breaking open the sky, stripping all weight (and meaning), a radical ‘flattening’ of reality and perception.

Coming back to our three disappearances we find also three ethics. An ethic of presence (of being-here-and-now-in-the-world); and ethic of permanence (a defense of the world’s being here-and-now); and an ethic of proximity (accepting the negative, the accident, the ‘being no longer’ that is the other side of History). All of these are interconnected. In terms of presence, akin to Levinas, Virilio’s conceives existence as ‘resisting the moment of arrival.’ Similar also to Levinas Virilio ends up arguing for a reimagination and revalidation of the space of the social; a proximity that is also “distant” in its reimagination of expanse and extension. Also there is the question of disappearance and what we identifed earlier as the historicization of life. This is not in contradiction to the rise of the event, rather life becomes more historical the more history itself passes. The historicization of life becomes a question of the pollution of life’s presence. As Virilio argues, ‘Life is generally identified with biographical duration, a history – but a micro-history, that of an individual from birth to death. Can we imagine life otherwise? Isn’t life also a matter of intensity?’ Being-here-and-now-in-the-world therefore takes on a kind of translucence: epitomized, if correctly read, by Virilio’s statement that, ‘Man is the closing point of the marvels of the universe.’³³

It is upon permanence that Virilio mounts his defense of habitat: the integrity of the world against ‘military intelligence’. Here it is not technology itself which is the demon, but rather the ways in which technology morphs into dromology, and polluting as it does so the ‘life-size’ of the planet. ‘All changes’, wrote Emerson, ‘pass without violence by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time’. Virilio’s here to say we face an ultimate violence. Virilio defense is of the inertia of the world (e.g., gravitation, topology, the barrier of sound, etc.). In denying ‘animal man’ the rationality of defeating the world, an ethic of permanence delinks man’s status as mere ‘standing reserve’, insofar as he and the world become yet again obstacles to technology.³⁴ Quoting the words of Saint-Exupery, ‘The Earth teaches us a lot more about ourselves than all the books in the world, because it resists us. Man only finds himself when he measures himself against an obstacle.’³⁵

Finally it is upon proximity that Virilio mounts a counter-stance to the passing of life into history. But here is distinguished the virtual and actual, for the proximity in mind is obviously that of the city; not the illusory proximity of ‘virtual communities’. A second meaning to proximity is proximity to the interruption, or the accident: which as careful readers know, has a dual life in his writings. Here the accident in mind is that of the final interruption of dying, which for Virilio becomes key to a philosophy or ethic of socially living. As Virilio notes, ‘If we’re conscious, it’s because we’re mortal. Death and consciousness are allied’. When ‘in the end, unconsciousness is the aim of Pure War’, by which Virilio means the dromological horizon of our militarized societies, recapturing sociality (he even says ‘Being’) is really a question of recapturing the question of death.³⁶ Hence dealing with the negative of History allows Virilio to reject the privatization of virtuality (by which I don’t just mean computers, but the virtual existence of modern society), and return — or seek a return — to the real space of the city, with it’s presence, it’s meeting points, it’s essential vitality.³⁷

Taken together Virilio’s grey ecology, ‘hyper-vigilance regarding immediate perception’, as well as ethics of presence, permanence and proximity, constitute a bold reaffirmation not only the life of the planet, but our own lives, our memories, the anima of our souls; everything that distinguishes us from mere automata. The right not to be rushed. The right to find distances–the true measure of the world–in one’s own heart. The right to screen-out motorized appearances, to affirm one’s freedom of perception and imagination. The right to protect the meaning of our immediate environment, our loved ones, the very bodies around us, from the stream of sequences rendering reality less than relative, if not irrelevant by optoelectronic fetishism.³⁸ The right to say no to the Pure War of generalized amnesia, fast taking us out of cities and secluding us in our homes. Ultimately, Virilio’s concern is with a politics that is not so virtual. The ‘ecological’ merges with the theological: the defense of the planet–its essential enigma–a means to recapture our humanity by way of the very weight of our bodies. With nothing beyond man, we are left only with practicalities; of what we can do, can try to invent: systems of movement, ethics of rhythm, critical dynamism, democratic speeds that find reason between the extremes of immediacy and inertia.

just imagine a complete and universal order embracing
all humanity, in a word, a state of perfect civilian order.
Take my word for it, it’s sheer entropy, rigor mortis,
a landscape on the moon, a geometrical plague ..
— Robert Musil

In the third section of Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault described the measures to be taken — according to military ordinance — when a plague or contagion appeared in a 17th century city or town. ‘First, a strict spatial partitioning’:

This immobilization of the populace — this ‘freezing’ of time and space — was not only an emergency measure. It was also the first principle of the ‘correct means of training’ (the psycho-politico/physical organization of the human type itself) witnessed foremost on the military courtyeard, and writ large across the spaces of early-modernity. ‘Disciplina militaris restitua’; the legend that is borne on the coin commemorating the symbolic importance for the age, of Louis XIVs first military review, whereupon, also engraved, as Foucault described, stands the king,

This incredible reversal of function (the inanimate becomes animate, the mobile becomes sedentary) is emblematic of the security-aesthetic of the pre-classical age.¹ The pose of the frozen soldier gave the sign and correlative disciplines to define not only the “state of emergency” but the state of normality, traversed throughout with surveillance and hierarchy, classification and writing; the regularization of power over segmented bodies. At the critical phase in the birth of our world, these imaginaries overlap, repeat and converge, filtering down into the image and the dream of the ‘utopia of the perfectly governed city’; secured not by the threat or the practice of dispersion, but an individualized inertia of meticulous discipline ..

The discovery of motion

It is important however to see this as an ideal, for in practice by the end of the 17th century the broad technology of power that underpinned the emerging modern society was already beginning to rethink its own modus operandi; the result of a profound culmination of transformative impulses, practices and fragments of knowledges stretching back at least as far as the 16th and 15th, if not 14th and 13th centuries, but finding a home in the governmental requirements of ascendant modernity.² In The Will to Know, Foucault described in outline the nature of these requirements, and more importantly, their consequence. ‘Since the classical age’, he wrote,

Witness then the emergence of a power bent on generating trajectories, lines of flight, life-forces, rather than incarcerating them. From where did such a profound revolution spring?

Foucault’s own suggestions lie within the broad parameters of the theme that would dominate his writings in the mid- to late-1970s: his analysis of security and populations in the ‘age of bio-power’. Two poles of intervention of this ‘power over life’ emerge in Foucault’s account. The first centres on the ‘body as a machine’; an ‘anatomo-politics’ aimed to extort individual energies and optimize capabilities (without, however, ‘making them more difficult to govern’). The second centres on the ‘adjustment of the phenomena of population’ (its very broadest trajectory) to the material constraints of the state in question; a ‘bio-politics’ focused on demography, the synchronization of resources and citizens, the social constitution of contracts and interests, wherein the health and well-being of the civitas became a ‘general objective of policy’ and domain of investment. Rather than be satisfied with the archaeology of the ‘dark, but firm web of our experience’, Foucault increasingly turned his attention to the ‘absolutely conscious strategy’ attested in both political texts and the ‘mass of unknown documents’ constitutive of the question of government; its historical politics, techniques and practices.

Foucault’s genealogy begins with the birth of statistics (the mathematics of state).³ It was this domain of knowledge that first attempted to tabulate the unpredictable nature of the body’s forces in order that they be made probable. For Foucault this science finds its zenith in the notion of ‘reason of state’ (in the writings of among others, Botero, Rosello, Piccolomini, and Segni); the Italian revolution in the language and practice of politics, where the greatness of cities and states is linked to the strength and productivity of the population.⁴ 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 — adds only urgency to already established necessity for co-ordinating and integrating bodies into the apparatuses of production and adequate power mechanisms, whereby,

With this subtle shift from observation to intervention we pass from the age of ‘fearing’ to the age of ‘facilitating’, populations. Statistica gives way to political arithmetik. Annotation gives way to adding-up. This new accomodation with the once regarded ‘dangers’ of the mass is epitomised best in the writings of the Austrian and Prussian “consulate administrators” — whose work was known to contemporaries as Oeconomie, policey-wissenschaft, or ‘police science’ — domains mysteriously forgotten in our usual histories of the rise of the West; a fact all the more curious as, in the words of Marc Raeff,

In many respects the forerunners to ‘political economy’, Seckendorff (1656, 1693), Wolff (1719, 1728), Dithmar (1731), Darjes (1749, 1753, 1756, 1776), Zinke (1751), Moser (1758), Bergius (1767-74), and Mueller (1790), among others, aimed to produce a new combinatory technology of population; ‘cameralistics’. To make individuals ‘useful for the world’ in such a way that ‘their development also fosters the strength of the state’ was the sole aim of these lost registers.⁵

This ‘strength of the state’ was (importantly) conceived in two ways: one the one hand, as the material result of the harnessing and channelling of energies and trajectories (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 came to dominate the classical age and inscript itself into the utilitarianism of modern liberalism. This new mode of governing — simultaneously differentiated (in the classification and organization of bodies) and aggregated (in the policing of rhythms and processes of populations) — is a true innovation of quite incredible proportion; a kind of kinetic arithmetic, or constitution of useable forces. A universal power of engendering; at least in ambition.

Kinetic arithmetic

‘The breeding of human beings’ as Martin Heidegger reminds us, ‘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’. Not least the most important innovation of the classical age was the emergence of a comprehensive practical reason that would take as its focus the knowledge and facilitation of this automatism. Police science was among the foremost in this aim. Finding inspiration in a whole array of ‘advances’, from Leonardo’s anatomical notes and drawings, Versalius’ first public autopsy 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’ (and indeed his own fascination with motion⁶ … ), this practical reason heralds nothing less than a new spatio-temporal imagination of human existence: the appropriation of the world of men and things built upon the geometrical classification that had dominated the pre-classical/post-Renaissance age, known to everyone universally as ‘mechanics’.

‘Mechanism’, as Jonathan Sawday has so rightly described,

This new physical body of regular motion finds its home in the body-politic of the disciplined and tranquil society. With progressions in the knowledge of planetary movements, the psychology of perception and duration, the social diffusion of the clock, the mathematical, cartographic and anatomical revolutions, a new interest in the possibilities and aesthetics of uniformity was born. With the coming together of the historical sciences (which as Cassirer has reminded us is much more an 18th than a 19th century phenomena), the notion of the kinetic and dynamic trajectory of society through time and space — the awareness of the very possibility of molding populations into giant automata of movement — fast came to define the parameters of ‘public safety’, good order, and the functioning society, measured and controlled, regular and real; made to obey the rules of the world’s movements.

In addition to the physical body let us not forget the inward reorganization of the human type itself; by which I mean the soul and the conscience, and the seals of ‘responsibility’. For not the least part of the kinetic and biopolitical revolutions of the classical age was the burning into memory, as Nietzsche would have it, of the very possibility of acting within a structure of promises and contracts. The mind — as he so forcefully describes in The Genealogy of Morality — that can project itself into the historical future. ‘To breed an animal’ he writes, ‘that can make promises — is that not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man?’ That the kinetic and biopolitical revolutions would become linked with the rise of modern capitalism becomes clear: the making of promises — or transcending time, or of launching the mind in and through time — is only possible when the human ‘animal’ has become, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘calculable, regular, necessary’. This making of men calculable is precisely what political arithmetic took as its task.

The burning into memory — what Nietzsche calls ‘mnemo-technics’ — of the ability to promise was, as Nietzsche described, achieved for hundreds of years by the scaffold, the stocks, the pillory, or the rack. Yet by the end of the 18th century — as Foucault would describe with such efficiency and precision in Discipline and Punish — new requirements were being generated. And so we might rename Nietzsche’s mnemotechnics, mnemo-kinetics. The will becomes indistinguishable from the trajectory of contracts. Responsibilty ensures the memory will never stray too far from the pressures of the future: a future of conscience and promises, burned into the psyche by pursuasion and coercion. Suddenly whole masses of men — the state — can be conceived as ‘progressive’; synchronized according to expediency, and put into motion at the the will of the govenor. Note in this regard the remarkable words of Johann von Justi (1755), Prussian cameral administrator, writing in the middle of the 18th century, summarising precisely the nature of the great displacement effected in the name of the grandeur of the state. ‘A properly constituted state’ he writes, ‘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’.

Frederick the Great, the ’meticulous king of small machines’, was surely the first statesman to bring together the two themes that would dominate the historical horizon of the modern period; bio-power and moving-power (mnemo-technics and mnemo-kinetics). 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,

What we find then is 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 and inscripted into the day–to-day realities of the commercial and industrial economy. The condemnation of idleness as the ‘source of all disorders’, culminating in the obligation to work (madness as ‘the absence of work’⁸ … ) is surely 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’. In this, as described by Jonathan Sawday, ‘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 .. The modern body had emerged: a body which worked rather than existed’.

The implications were both enormous and diffuse. In Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett takes up the point of how these references to motion and capital accumulation came to define the very design of early-modern city. New principles of urban planning and policing emerge based upon new medical metaphors of ‘circulation’ and ‘flow’ (Harvey, 1628, Willis, 1684). The health of the body becomes the comparison against which the greatness of cities and states will be measured. The ‘veins’ and ‘arteries’ of the new urban design are to be freed from all sources of possible blockage. ‘Enlightenment planners’, writes Sennett,

The regularisation of cleanliness and sanitation, and the removal of madmen, beggars and idlers from the highway can all be related to the question of the efficiency of movement that dominated the historical imaginary of the classical age. As Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1748) would remark, only organized matter was endowed with the principle of motion. We may also add that matter endowed with the principle of motion was increasingly regarded as ‘ordered’. 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.’⁹ When transparency and transport come together in Guillaute’s words; when mnemo-technics joins mnemo-kinetics in the constitution of order; this is when we reach the threshold of the world of which we are still prisoners; the world brought to being on the back of the classical dream of the tranquil society — achieved, despite its violence, in the universalization of societies founded on the dual daemonic principle: ‘facilitate life, facilitate speed’. Forget about post-modernity: let’s excavate the birth of biokinetic society.

The birth of biokinetic society

If Frederick was the foreman of this newly constituted machine-in-motion, Napoleon would surely become it’s soul. If we need any further confirmation that the genealogy of kinetics runs hand-in-hand with the state we need look no further than the subject of Goya’s Collosus; the true addition to Hobbes’ Leviathan. More than anyone prior, Napoleon would embody the next phase of history, defined not so much by the ‘art of governing’, as the ‘art of motorizing’.¹⁰

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 tapped from the newly mobile populations was unmatched in history. And not only in warfare did the principle of kinetic force come to 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’. 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; its permissions and illegalities, nature and future. Prefigured perfectly in the words of French military reformer Comte de Guilbert,

More than anyone before him Napoleon would understand the real politics of supply. In the measured words of Emerson, ‘Such a man was wanted, and such a man was born; a man of stone .. a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money and in troops .. a master-workman .. with the speed and spring of a tiger in action.’ In Napoleon’s own words, “I am the revolution.” Witness the birth of a new technical, geometric, chronographic imagination of men and things: an ‘unrecognised order of political circulation’, in the words of Paul Virilio, tragically crystallised in the French Revolution, which,

Revolution replaces circulation, automotion supplants motion: the increase in pace acting to secure tranquillity through compulsion; what Paul Virilio has termed so profoundly, the ‘peace of exhaustion’. In looking at the birth of biopower as a kinetic phenomenon, we gain the essence of a possible outline of the political technique through which the ‘problem’ of early modernity (the problem of populations) was transcended and turned to the advantage of the new state that would quite literally march through history. Populations become, from this silent threshold, nothing more than armies at speed; beaten into submission by the very velocity of their lives. With Napoleon, as Will and Ariel Durant have so perfectly described, ‘the ecstasy of liberty yielded to the dictatorship of order’.

The illusion of liberation

Let us imagine before concluding the flagpoints of this history — this geometrical plague of political order — 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 mercantilism¹¹ … ) — 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, motorization¹² … ) 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 an illusionary liberation and the means to an all-too-real domination; the accumulation of men running hand-in-hand with the accumulation of movement. Speed was to be taught as a virtue because it has in itself become an incarcerating discipline.

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

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

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

Of this in a very similar thesis Louis Mumford warned us over 25 years ago. As he wrote then,

There is a term in scientific discourse for an object that appears to be moving while actually static. Its called an autokinetic illusion. What can we say about the world being destroyed by dromomania? Is this world in its entirety an autokinetic illusion? Finally to our epigraph: ‘Imagine order’, wrote Robert Musil,

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

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

Since I arrived here I’ve been mainly concerned with the works of Michel Foucault and Paul Virilio. Throwing both together – I have argued – is an important first step in understanding the genealogy and domination of globalization. Yet although my driving force for doing this work at all is to mark out and locate political technology in the present, as I have worked on this project it has become increasingly clear to me that it is not possible to take this technology of power as one only inscripted in the discourses and practices of our own special ‘nowtime’. Rather, I have found myself tracking, if not hunting out, a deeper set of impulses that seem to run throughout the heart of modernity, and within it, the constitution of civic security in its widest application.

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

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

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

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

Frozen space

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

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

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

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

The discovery of motion

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Jonathan Sawday has so rightly described,

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

The great displacement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dromological revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terminality

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

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

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

‘Imagine order’, wrote Robert Musil,

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

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

In this short essay I aim to make a simple point: that dromocratic society cannot be understood in the absence of an historical reading of its predecessor and co-existent: disciplinary society. Paul Virilio’s claim therefore for the elimination of the logic of ‘power/knowledge’ by that of ‘moving-power’, though important, should be approached with caution. Both exist in parallel throughout modernity, the latter being only possible upon the precondition of the former.

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

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

Imagining motion in the Classical age

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

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

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

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

Channelling movements

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

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

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

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

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

Police science and the regularisation of energies

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

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

1789 and the disciplinary/dromological revolution

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

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

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

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

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

And in the words of Foucault:

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

The biopolitical/dromological reversal

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

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

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

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

Bio-dromology and (global) capitalist modernity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bio-global, biokinetic society: securitization through speed

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

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

Throughout the human sciences ‘globalization’ has become the explanatory concept of social change in the 1990s. In the study of political economy a rich combination of interconnected characteristics are conventionally identified as constituents of the larger dynamic: the ascendance of the ‘stateless corporation’; the emergence of the trillion dollar ‘24–hour, integrated global financial market–place’; the sharpening of competition under capital mobility and the ‘law of one price’; the proliferation of foreign direct investment; the increase in intercontinental migration; and the emergence of a ‘global information society’. Of consequences, everything from the reimagining of urban space, the fragmentation of institutions and institutional boundaries, and the rise of neoliberal transnational technocracy, to decolonisation, democratisation, pluralism and sub-nationalism, and crises of governance, ecology and citizenship, have been explained in relation to the ‘globalization process’.

Equally important, though rather less studied, has been the way in which a series of social imperatives have been established on the back of the rise to hegemony of the concept of globalization. These imperatives include: ‘agility’, ‘rapidity’ and ‘mobility’; ‘transformation’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘invention’; ‘competitiveness’, ‘outlook’ and ‘foresight’; ‘self-reliance’, ‘self-motivation’ and ‘self-monitoring’; ‘economy’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘excellence’, the list continues. Indeed, a whole new lexicon has emerged alongside the more concrete characteristics studied in detail by political scientists and economists. What is less certain, but surely intriguing, is the way in which this new range of icons, slogans and words have engendered a ‘political rhythm’, or a rationality of government. And yet no-one has raised the question. Not one sustained analysis of the discourse of globalization has been written. Globalization has yet to be interrogated as a conduct of politics.

It would seem that this line of approach has been largely ignored because globalization has been seen foremost to be a fragmentary movement, driven by markets and independent actors, and entailing the transcendence of state-authorial structures. This thesis has implications for a ‘politics of resistance’ to globalization. The critique of globalization as a form of political ordering has been foreclosed by the hegemony of market, technical, accidental and developmental explanations of its ascendance.¹ In each, the forces deemed to be constitutive of globalization are seen to have come from outside the political body. Globalization is seen to be inexorable (a logic to which ‘there is no alternative’), and inevitable (history conditioning the present). Questions of power, order and politics are eradicated from the discussion. In the attempt to open up new spaces for critique, indeed existence, we may usefully begin by questioning this depoliticisation. In this brief essay I attempt to show how many of the most important constituent themes of our contemporary epoch have come from within, not without, the realm of political order.

Globalization and the end of state authority

The most conspicuous proponents of the claim to the externality of globalization are Theodore Levitt, Robert Reich, Kenichi Ohmae and Susan Strange. The primary evidence suggested for this externality is the decline of state authority in general. Strange, 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.” The state, for Strange, is increasingly ‘hollowing out’. “[A]ccelerating technological change … inevitably, relaxes the authority of the state over enterprises based and directed from inside their territorial borders.” In Strange’s view we are witness to a process by which: “ … authority over society and economy has become diffused in a neomedieval fashion, and that some necessary authority once exercised by states is now exercised by no one.”²

Similar themes are developed by Levitt. “Cosmopolitanism … ” he writes:

For Reich also: “Gone is the tight connection between the company, its community even its country. Vanishing too are the paternalistic corporate heads who used to feel a sense of responsibility for their local community … When it comes to global managers, no group of citizens, no government, has a special claim.”⁴

However accurate an assessment of reality these statements may be, they have been backed up by a whole wave of commentators and pundits who for varied reasons have sought to foretell the decline of the state and traditional authority. A number of sub-themes have emerged. First, free and unregulated global finance has outrun the ability of economists and ministers alike to keep up. “It is virtually impossible … ” writes Vincent Cable, “ … to go back to exchange controls as an economic regulator.”⁵ Inevitability is established. Second, the hypermobility of the ‘stateless corporation’ is deemed to challenge the legislative and taxing capacities of governmental institutions.⁶ “Governments are forced back onto indirect taxes … ”⁷ Further privatisation and marketisation is validated. Third, the rise of new market actors have rendered the nation state deficient. “The Nation State … ” writes Ohmae, “ … has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional unit for organising human activity and managing economic endeavour in a borderless world.”⁸ Globalism is naturalised within the popular unconscious. Fourth, in creating a ‘global society’ globalization has fragmented centralised authority.⁹ In the words of Mathew Horsman and Andrew Marshall:

Political agency is decentred. As Peter Riddell has argued: “ … politics has entered an age of increasing limits … ”¹¹

Restrictions of space prevent me from examining each of these claims here. In any case what is particularly apposite to me is not their actual truth index, but rather the truth that these claims set up by remote: the culture that they reflect and shape. Others are already questioning the globalization thesis on its own terms. Indeed, it has become something of a cottage industry. Of the more important refutations we may note in passing the excellent work of Eric Helleiner on the ways in which the historical reversal of the monetary principles of the Bretton Woods agreement was mediated and initiated by governments.¹² Alternatively we may look to the important analyses of Bob Jessop on how the transition to post-Fordism and the ‘Schumpeterian Workfare State’ entails not an outright rejection but the reformulation of the principles of the Keynesian Welfare State.¹³ We may also note the conceptual and empirical work of R.J.Barry Jones, Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson on internationalization, transnationalization, interdependence and globalization, and the distinctions between them.¹⁴ This work is welcome. Indeed, it allows us to think again about the concept of globalization, its, and the place of governments in the processes that are commonly put forward as its constituent parts. This research, however, needs to be supplemented. A far deeper reading is called for (and possible).

In my view, we need — for a brief moment at least — to think about the ways in which the impulses that surround us fit in to the historical development of modern political order. As the next section hopes to make clear, the analysis of this historical development raises important questions as to the validity of popular correspondence between globalization and the end of the state. My own substantive argument is that we are not witnessing the ‘evaporation of authority’ but its reverse: the deeper embedding of order through marketisation, the rise of neoliberal orthodoxy, and the reduction of the world to a single place. Globalization (a.k.a. for each of these) must be questioned as a ‘rationality of government’ and method of politics. The aim is not to evoke attitudes of fatalism, quietism and paralysis in the face of a reading of the equivalence between globalization and the modern development of codes and practices of order, but rather to begin the task — which is simultaneously the first responsibility of a ‘politics of resistance’ — of knowing the terrain within which we are situated. In the words of Lewis Mumford: “Without a long running start in history, we shall not have the momentum needed, in our consciousness, to take a sufficiently bold leap into the future … ”¹⁵

Globalization and the history of modern political order

At the deepest level, one principle can be seen to define globalization: the eradication of space through the domestication of time. It is this principle that underpins the contemporary discourse of the ‘stateless corporation’, the birth of an ‘information society’, the linking of all parts of the globe to virtual markets, and indeed, the end of the state. Yet contrary to popular belief, this principle is hardly new. Described by Mumford, it is the sixteenth century which marks the emergence of a new era of generalised mobility. The ‘new spirit of society’, he argues: “ … was on the side of rapid transportation … [t]he hastening of movement and the conquest of space … Mass, velocity, and time were categories of social effort before Newton’s law was formulated.”¹⁶ For Mumford, however, this ‘new spirit’ could not be explained only in terms of technology or accident, but had to be seen within the context of what he termed ‘biotechnics’ (the ways in which man establishes mastery over the realm of ‘men and things’).

Michel Foucault, in a number of philosophical and historical works, also identified the ‘problem of movement’ as one defining the modern epoch.¹⁷ Like Mumford, Foucault sought to explain this problem in relation to the development of certain forms of political order (the social structures through which populations have been organised, combined, multiplied and made effective). Analysing the birth of the modern citizenry as the precondition to the birth of modern capitalism, Foucault’s histories are an essential contribution to the history of modern political order. Of particular import to Foucault’s account was what he saw as the central aim of modern political rationality: the necessity of mobilising society for the goal of productivity, without making it more difficult to govern. A new political knowledge of capabilities and levers was necessary to control the activities of the ascendant masses. Chillingly, in the classical period this political knowledge was referred to as the ‘theory of police’.

Epitomised in the ‘cameralist’ writings of Seckendorff¹⁸, Dithmar¹⁹, Darjes²⁰ and Justi²¹, the aim of this new political knowledge was to make individuals ‘useful for the world’. Power had to reach into the very grain of individuals, their tastes, perceptions and desires.²² The central theme of cameralism’s ‘police science’ was the concern for the ordering of the populace. In the words of Justi: “The domestic security of a state consists in such a well-ordered constitution of the same that all parts of the civic body are held in their appropriate correlation, and in the consequent repose, while the persons and property of individuals are protected against all injustice and violence.” The aim was to maximise the benefits to the individual from society at the same time as the individual would him or herself be maximised for the benefit of the state. Described by Gerhard: “ … our civic science is chiefly concerned with finding out good external and voluntary means, through which, without harm or injustice to others, the welfare of the community [gemeinen Wessens], that is, the permanence and security of the same, may be properly maintained, promoted and increased.”²³ Thus we find the three coordinates of the cameralist state: freedom, inner strength and security.²⁴ Productivity, diligence and happiness were the techniques of the cameralist mode of government (simultaneously individual and total). For Foucault, the government of ‘all and one’ imagined in these writings was what defined modern political order. Where might globalization be found in this narrative?

Obviously much has changed since ‘police science’ was practised in continental Europe. In raising these issues vis-à-vis the question of globalization my aim is not to suggest a perfect match. Cameralism was collectivist, globalization is individualist. Whether we deem the end of the welfare state to be a political move or a market consequence, for sure individuals themselves, rather than the state, have been forced to provide for their own security. In addition, the contemporary state would seem to have little to do with sustaining and creating group and individual happiness. Yet a number of cameralist themes remain, to my mind, at the heart of the contemporary art of government. Moreover, globalization is making these themes more visible.

All and one, mobile yet docile

Foremost is the dual aim of mobilisation and government described by Foucault as the basic aim of modern political rationality. For cameralist and physiocratic thinkers the objective of the art of government was: “ … to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters the strength of the state.”²⁵ It is this imperative that I read to be the hidden face of globalization: a form of power that at once reaches into the very grain of the individual and touches the political imagination of the whole of society. In its contemporary form this mode of power can be seen best in the discourse of globalism.

A number of developments are both indicative of, and follow on from the ascendance of the discourse of globalism. On the one hand is the imperative of shrinking the world (“For U.S. Corporations, the Modern-Day Byword Is ‘Globalize or Die’”²⁶ … ). On the other, the potential power of holding that world in one’s hand (“Just plug in and the world is yours.”²⁷ … ). In both instances the impulse is individualising. Yet the implications are broader. The importance of not only predicting the future, but attempting to shape it, necessitates greater form of synchronicity between the levels of society, institution, or firm. The means by which this is done is the acquisition of technology (in particular informatics). Whole societies move to what Paul Virilio has called ‘technological time’, ensuring a correspondence of referents, standards, codes and basic practices. The globe itself is the most powerful metaphor of this synchronisation of all and one. At once it is mobilising, in the sense of common purpose and history it imposes upon the social body. It is also levelling, inspiring the awe of which Heidegger once spoke.²⁸ One may indeed argue that the NASA ‘earthrise’ is the most important single political image ever to be ‘captured’ on film. It has certainly invaded the popular unconscious in ways that would seem worthy of further study.²⁹

In terms of the implications of the discourse of globalism for the art of government, foremost has been the historical reversal of motivational crises.³⁰ This has been achieved through an intensification of anxiety allied perfectly with the discourse of the ‘defective state’. The spectre of ‘global competition’, described by Kevin Philips as the ‘continuation of war by other means’, begins to haunt, with increased rigour, the dreams of contemporary man.³¹ To transform, to evolve, to learn and move on, become the social principles in a new discourse of exploration institutionalised through a global paranoic politics. “Companies that do not adapt to the new global realities will become victims of those that do.”³² There is, in the words of Walter Wriston, ‘no place to hide’.³³ ‘Risk’ and ‘doubt’ become central organising concepts. As described by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, people become the ‘centre for their own lifeworlds’. Self-monitoring becomes the social imperative of our contemporary order.³⁴ … what they are doing is competitive.” Richard O’Brien (Chief Economist at American Express Bank), in interview, BBC ‘Horizon’, (April 1995).]

The correspondence with Foucault’s emphasis on the ‘interiorisation’ of power is striking. Disciplinary power, rather than moulding all to a single mass: “ … separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units.”³⁵ As we move from the political management of bodies to the political management of souls, self-examination, self-organisation and self-reliance take on a new level of importance. It was in response to this modification of the political economy of power that Foucault sought to highlight the problem of subjectivity (of how, in an inward modification of temperament, attitude and disposition, the individual turns him or herself into a subject). “Globalization … ” we are told, “ … has placed new demands on business executives … ”³⁶ Developing: “ … a global strategy requires managers to think in new ways.”³⁷ As Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, in the face of global competition: “ … people are going round with guillotines over their heads.”³⁸

Movement becomes speed

This image of the guillotine is an appropriate one from which to return to the history of modern political order. Variously described as ‘the most efficient killing machine in history’, the guillotine was defined, of course, by its speed. In this sense the image of headless corporate bodies dotting from one continent to another serves as a perfect bridge between the concerns of early modernity with ‘circulation’, ‘economy’ and ‘exchange’, and the accelerated impulses that continue to inform our own epoch. The difference is but one of degree: in late modernity the ‘problem of movement’ is substituted for what Paul Virilio has termed the ‘movement of movement’ (speed). The principle of order, however, is the same.

In the words of Elias Canetti: “ … the regulation of time is the primary attribute of all government.”³⁹ Like Canetti, Foucault also linked the control of time to the constitution of political and social power. In Foucault’s account, from the Classical period onward, an art of ‘political anatomy’ was born, defining the means by which to ensure not only that others’ bodies may do what one commands, but that: “ … they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines.”⁴⁰ Urbanist Paul Virilio in a series of books and essays has picked up these themes and single-handedly radicalised the ‘politics of time and movement’ in what he terms ‘speed’. In particular Virilio has sought to trace the passing of Occidental culture into the ‘age of the accelerator’, entailing the disappearance of power itself in a form of absolute colonization.⁴¹ His insights are mirrored in few places better than the discourse of globalization. And one doesn’t have to dig too deep to find it.

In 1973 First National City Bank run an advertisement for their ‘global transfer system’ with the headline: “Citibank — the bank to look to for speed in moving money.”⁴² In 1978 Chase Bank run an advertisement with the pun, ‘Today’s Chase’, followed by the subtitle: “Everyone talks global network. Our bank has it.”⁴³ In 1983 business guru Theodore Levitt argues that two ‘vectors’ shape the contemporary world — technology and globalization. In 1988 Walter Wriston talks of a ‘velocity of change’ so great that there are ‘literally no precedents to guide us’.⁴⁴ In 1989 Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric talks of ‘lightening speed’, ‘fast action’, and ‘acting with speed’. “The world moves much faster today.”⁴⁵ In 1991, President and CEO of Asea Brown Boveri, asks: “Why emphasise speed over precision? Because the costs of delay exceed the costs of mistakes.”⁴⁶ In 1994, Susan Strange talks of the ‘accelerating pace of technological change’, and of ‘rapid change’.⁴⁷ In 1995, Kenichi Ohmae talks of the ‘speed and volume of transactions’, the ‘accelerating convergence of tastes’.⁴⁸ For Nicholas Negroponte and Danny Goodman, ‘being digital’ and ‘living at light speed’ is the only means to avoid being roadkill on the information superhighway.⁴⁹ Rapid change is both desirable and ‘unstoppable’, global and ‘inexorable’. Reginald Dale talks of ‘accelerating world trade’, the ‘speed of change’, the ‘split-second flows of international funds’, and the ‘dynamic world of the 21st century’.⁵⁰ U.S. Treasury Under Secretary Lawrence Summers suggests: “ … it is only a slight exaggeration to say that this is the era when 3 billion people got on a rapid escalator to modernity.”⁵¹ 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’.

In terms of the implications of the ‘logic of the race’ for the art of government, foremost again has been the historical reversal of motivational crises. “Work smarter, not just harder”, is indeed a touch of genius, underwriting both the imperative of self-monitoring, and the power of speed.⁵² The growth of subcontracting, small-batch production, outsourcing and ‘Just-in-time’ epitomise the pursuit of rapidity. ‘Feel the burn’ was the catchphrase of the 1980s. “[I]f you’re not flexible enough to handle rapid change and make quick decisions, you won’t win.”⁵³ The growth in part-time, unsecure wage labour, the ‘fear of unemployment’, and the erosion of trades unions only adds to the pressures borne by the individual in the global age of political economy. The discourse of speed and uncertainty, having altered the composition of labour markets, ensure optimum performance at no expense to the employer.

In the ascendance of globalism and the social extension of speed outlined above, to what else are we witness if not the historic mobilisation of individuals to the rhythms of political order of a type envisaged by Justi, Sonnenfels and Quesney, and enshrined in Clausewitz’s ‘assembly of forces’ and Napoleon’s ‘motorized armies’?⁵⁴ There is, of course, the immediate objection: ‘but all you have described is the market, not the state’. Yet the state cannot, nor ever could, be defined merely as the institutions of government. To return to the defective state thesis, one can agree with the assessment of Susan Strange: the ‘state’ is hollow! The difference between the assessment I suggest and that of Strange is that despite our agreement on that point alone, I dispute that our contemporary epoch is a ‘return’ to neomedievalism. The modern state was ever thus. Since the rejection of Machiavelli and the rise of social contractarianism the modus operandi of state authority has been diffusion: to find new means by which to mobilise the populace. In cameralist as well as physiocratic writings it is clear that the ‘just administrator’ is he who can steer the automatism of society (both state and market). If the genealogy of modern political authority teaches us anything it is that populations are bearers of order. From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward it is the task of channelling this automatism that emerges at the heart of political rationality. In this sense whole societies, rather than demarcated bureaucracies, are affected by the processes of rationalization. This form of ‘government’ cannot be reduced instrumentally to the actions of institutions. As Colin Gordon suggests, ‘the state has no essence’.⁵⁵ In simple terms, the dissolution of the face of government (institutional fragmentation, dispersion of state authority, diminishing policy autonomy, and so on), says nothing of the practices of governance. ‘The state’, then, has to be more widely defined. In this way, Foucault’s work may serve as a template for the investigation of governance beyond the state, into what he termed the ‘positive unconscious’, or ‘code of knowledge’: “The fundamental codes of a culture — those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices … the space of knowledge.”⁵⁶

Can we really say that ‘authority’ in this sense has ‘evaporated’?

In setting up a simple distinction between diffusion (anarchy) and authority (order), Strange, Ohmae, Reich and others simply misread the history of the modern state. To be sure, physical territory was important to Bodin, Justi, Sonnenfels, Napoleon and others. But is there any reason to think that the information economy is not also a battle for territory? Is there any reason to think that the decline in the importance of place correlates to a fracture, rather than reformulation, of civil authority? It is clear that current research on the issue of globalization, in remaining blind to the genealogy of modern political rationality, is unable to effect anything near the strength of critique needed to highlight the political interests that profit from the governing of men and things. Moreover, in the context of the discourse of globalization, this blindness to the history of modern political order has worked in important ways to legitimate a series of truth claims of an ascendant ideology (neoliberalism).

Underpinning the ‘withdrawal of the state’ has been a broad consensus that state mediation is no longer possible. During the mid to late 1970s, this in itself became a popular presupposition, galvanising popular and intellectual allegiance to the icon of the market, and laying the foundations upon which the project of globalization could be built. Two themes were central in normalising the notion that state mediation was no longer possible. These two themes are clearly identifiable in the social, economic and political literature of the time. The first theme centered on ‘capital’ and developed through the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s, predominantly (though not exclusively) in the Marxist/Left tradition. Its central message was that the world economy was approaching (if not on the brink of) a structural crisis of capitalism.⁵⁷ Though in a historical sense this was a fascinating discourse in itself, what is more important is the way in which this initial discourse of crisis created the environment in which the second theme could emerge. This theme focused not on capital, but on the limits to capital.⁵⁸

The message of this second theme was that the rumblings within the world economy that might spark a global crisis of capital, could be traced to the attempts to regulate and restrain world markets. Governments were getting in the way. This discourse emerged as a political force in the mid to late 1970s and ran throughout the 1980s, accelerating after the stock market crash of 1987, and the world-economic slowdown in the early 1990s.⁵⁹, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntingdon and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies [Trilateral Commission, 1975], William P. Bundy, The World Economic Crisis [Council on Foreign Relations, 1975]), military security (e.g., Colin S. Gray, War and Peace and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century [Simon and Schuster, 1990], Keith Suter, Global Change: Armageddon and the New World Order [Albatross, 1992]), fiscal policy (e.g., J. O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State [St. Martin’s Press, 1973]), the welfare state (e.g., Institute of Economic Affairs, Crisis ’75 … ? [London, 1975], Ken Judge, ‘Is there a crisis in the welfare state?’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol. 1 No. 2 [1981], Adrian De Kok, ‘Crisis in the Welfare States’, Social Policy and Adminstration Vol. 18 No. 2 [1984]), immigration and population (e.g., 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, Dan Gallin, ‘Inside the New World Order: Drawing the Battle Lines’, New Politics Vol. 5 No. 1 [1994]), the environment (e.g., David W. Orr and Marvin S. Sorros, The Global Predicament: Ecological Perspectives on World Order [University of North Carolina, 1979]), and the moral foundations of American capitalism (e.g., Robert Wuthnow, ‘The moral crisis in American capitalism’, Harvard Business Review, [March-April, 1982]).] This second theme established neoliberal claims to the redundancy (indeed, counter-productivity) of governmental management of the economy.⁶⁰ This in turn preempted and sterilised opposition in the face of a deep and rapid rationalisation of the ‘advanced’ economies (labour markets in particular), in the context of the wider rumblings described earlier by the Marxist-left as the beginnings of the historical crisis of capitalism.⁶¹

Taken together, the (Marxist) capital-based theme and the (neoliberal) government-based theme fed the perception that the 1970s signified in a double sense ‘the end of the state’. In parallel a new range of concepts emerge, transcending the state itself (‘global governance’, ‘global responsibility’, ‘globalism’, ‘global risk’, ‘global crisis’, ‘global opportunity’, the ‘global imperative’). We also see the (re)emergence of certain implicit and unstated organising principles: competition, innovation, scientific wealth, informatisation, the ‘mastery of chance’, and the ‘elimination of uncertainty’. The birth of a global economy is the hidden background to the turbulence of this period in history. The historical withdrawal of the state could be presented as a logic of ‘global capital’, and global capital could be presented as the logic of the withdrawal of the state. The true history of the role of the state was obscured by the sound and the fury. It is only now that the noise has died down enough to allow alternative voices to be heard. I would suggest that we reread this epoch. It may be time to invert the Habermasian thesis: rather than a crisis of rationality and legitimation, we have witnessed a legitimation of a series of rationalisations through the discourse of crisis.

Globalization and political resistance

It is in this process of rereading that perhaps we find our greatest chances of profound resistance. In not allowing concepts and meanings to become static we can guard against their exclusive inclusion into the political projects of social groups of whatever kind. We must leave open the paths of negotiation. Against the silent practices that demark globalization as a domain of power we should reserve our right to raise objections. In this way we may break open the discursive limits of the contemporary art of government, and globalization as a form of that political reason. This is not to say that we ignore the critique of actual situations, but that our aim should be, in addition, to interrogate the rationality at stake. Beyond the nature of political economy and the regimes of international and transnational relations we need to think of the broader social structures that define what is permissible in our society. In doing so we’ll better understand the order of which we are part. And having understood that, in the words of one philosopher: “ … the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”⁶²

Globalization then, in this essay, refers not so much to the day-to-day workings of the IMF, the GATT, the World Bank and other such visible institutions, but rather the deeper forms of ‘assembling’ (often reflected in these institutions) that affect the day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens. In conceiving ‘the state’ in terms only of its instrumental functions (legislature, taxation, border controls, etc.), analysts have missed these forms of ordering that support, rather than fragment, political rationality. In doing so they have artificially delimited forms of possible resistance. Hence, in the current environment, the most radical statement that can be made is to call for a nationally regulated, socialised market. My analysis proposes that we rethink the concepts of state and governance. Clearly this entails the rethinking of many of the themes basic to the contemporary study of political economy and international relations. So be it. Under any other illusion we’re missing the fact that globalization is itself a form of power: not so much a bonfire of controls as a recoding of the politics of order.⁶³

By internalising the discourse of ‘the global’, and its associate myths, we all become ‘vectors’ ensuring the transmission of the new normalcy. The recognition of our current dangers is not an abstract nihilism, but the only possible beginning in the task of thinking anew about the possibilities of the future.

Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the
absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent
speed .. we must prepare for the immanent, inevitable
identification of man with the motor …
— Tommaso Filippo Marinetti

If we wish to reinvent politics, we must find a way to
politicise speed.
— Paul Virilio

Opening the first issue of the Review of International Political Economy in Spring of 1994, Stephen Krasner began with the following words. “Change, globalization, transnationalism, the erosion of the state, the transformation of political life. New, new, change, change. Academic reflections about international political economy are beginning to sound more and more like American political campaigns.”¹ Krasner was ready for a ‘moment’s reflection’.

Given the past history of reactions to such desires there seemed to be a double importance to this particular admonition.² Rather surprising from one of the regular drivers of the ‘big American car of IR’. Who knows .. perhaps Krasner was disheartened not only with the tone of the debate, but the players in the game itself. But no. Disappointment lay ahead for anyone who might have expected an inclusive, heterodox dialogue to have followed. Krasner’s thesis of the enduring nature of our analytical approaches to the understanding of the ‘fundamental problems’ of international politics and international political economy seemed anything but reflective. The standard big three were reproduced, along with a fourth, labelled ‘systemic’. But certainly no reference to Foucault, Deleuze, Virilio, or any of the other enfant terribles of continental social theory. Yet despite Krasner’s oversight, it is the argument of this paper that there remains much to be drawn from continental thought for the current round in the spatial, temporal, and paradigmatic struggle. And where better to introduce this work than on a panel devoted to the issue of governance? I focus on ‘globalization’. But first, a moment’s reflection.

From cultural, urban, and media studies, through IPE and IR, to business and management analysis – and an increasing number of subfields of the human sciences – two common assertions are made in regard to globalization. First, that globalization is a function of new communication technologies. Second, that its significance lies in the interlinkage of states, firms, societies, and individuals.³ A combination of eight tendencies are conventionally analysed: the salience of the ‘stateless corporation’; changing corporate strategies; the relocation of production to non-industrial sites; the emergence of the trillion dollar ‘24–hour, integrated global financial market–place’; the proliferation of foreign direct investment; declining governmental efficacy in the context of rapid change; the institutionalisation of ‘global consciousness’ via media and borderless capital; the sharpening of ‘competition’ under the ‘law of one price’ and capital mobility.

As I hope to make clear in what follows my discomfort lies not with the identification of these tendencies themselves (though the list remains incomplete), nor for the most part with the specific observations introduced by analysts who have studied them (distorting though they may be, given their limited range). Rather, it is the failure of these studies to politicise these tendencies that has driven this response. This failure has helped engender three broad ‘reality claims’. The first is spatial, that ‘globalization’ is total (or in other words ‘global’). The second is temporal, that ‘globalization’ is the culmination of a logical process. The third is historical, that ‘globalization’ is inexorable. As the ‘global babble’ accelerates, these claims are echoed in a myriad of contexts for a myriad of motives.⁴ Debates are reborn, issues reframed, new orthodoxies emerge.⁵ Globalization, we are told, renders the state ‘defective’, affords new opportunities of efficiency and growth, and ensures the ‘harmonisation of preference’ through interdependent exchange.⁶ It touches everything. As Levitt describes: “Nothing is exempt.”⁷

Dissonant voices exist of course. But even these, on the whole, engage with the discourse on its own terms, advocating ‘difference’ instead of universality, the rise of trade blocs instead of the erosion of borders, the permanence of regulatory government in the face of multinationals and capital markets.⁸ The terminology, the logic of oppositions, the hidden assumptions about the nature of the state, or the public/private division, none of these are analysed in themselves, but pass for the most part unnoticed into the forum of accepted debate. The ‘language-games’ are sustained. We still hear of the ‘global web’, the ‘global lab’, the ‘global ecumene’, the ‘global-human condition’, and of an ‘emergent global culture’. While few have been as fervent as Levitt, even by the ‘glocalists’, we are deemed to exist under the ‘consequences of the globalizing process’.⁹

I have discussed elsewhere how many of these claims are misleading and ideologically distorting.¹⁰ I will not concentrate on that argument here. Rather in this paper I seek to go beyond such claims, to add a new voice to what is, despite appearances, a closed debate. This paper therefore is less a critique of theories of globalization than it is an attempt to reframe the whole question. I take this to be essential if we are to begin to understand the multiple ways in which the concept of globalization is being translated, (re)structuring so many lifeworlds. This complex of translations (which I refer to in this paper as the ‘geology of globali[z]ation’¹¹ation’ for three reasons. First, in highlighting the ‘z’, we are reminded that the concept of ‘globalization’ finds its origin in the American academy during the late 1960s/early 1970s. Second, by working with two different terms I aim to make clear the distinctions between my own analysis (globali[z]ation), and that of others (globalization). ‘Globalization’ in this paper is therefore taken to represent the discourse, whereas ‘globali[z]ation’ represents my assessment of the condition (or what I call the ‘geology’). Of course globali[z]ation is not singular (indeed, it may be more appropriate to talk of ‘globali[z]ations’). I rely on the good-will of the reader. Third, in bracketing the ‘z’, we are also able to view the term by means of its constitutive parts. As argued elsewhere (Douglas, 1994b, 1994c), this allows us to identify two of the assumptions hidden in conventional analysis: the assumption of an endpoint (‘globali’), and the assertion of an inexorable process towards its realisation (‘zation’). My interest, however, is in interrogating these assumptions, rather than providing a better ontological vehicle for their dissemination.] … ) is of defining significance. But it operates within spheres that common analysis ignores, and moreover is ill-equipped to address.

Genealogy, dromology, mythology

To address these translations I employ an approach consisting of three components: the governmentality and power-knowledge theory of Michel Foucault; the speed-philosophy of Paul Virilio; and the philosophical concerns of Ernst Cassirer with the role of myth across human societies. Through Foucault we gain an understanding of the normalisation of knowledge and discourse, and the contingency of power and subjectivity. Through Virilio we discover, in the concept of ‘speed’, a key reading of all political, strategic, and social situations. In Cassirer’s philosophy of myth we find not only a caution against historical relativism, but a corrective to the focus on production and technology at the heart of Western accounts of human development.¹² Drawing the three approaches together, we begin to see the outline of a reflective reading of contemporary political economy, one that emphasises both conjuncture and continuity, agency and inertia, production and signs. By extension we can open new channels for the analysis of globali[z]ation. Such channels would chart the role of discourses as signifiers, and images and symbols as mobilisers.

In focussing on globali[z]ation, I analyse the rise of a particular conception of social life. This conception, having evolved in an historically specific and spatially defined ‘world-scape’ – what I term the ‘central world political economy’ – is not merely an historical phenomenon, as others have suggested.¹³ The particular way in which the concept of globalization has arisen, has been appropriated, and deployed, lends itself to a genealogical reading, emphasising precisely the issues of power, knowledge, and subjectivity, that popular analyses ignore. The implicit critique of research devoted to the mapping of trade flows, lines of interdependency and communication, and the infrastructure of an emergent ‘business culture’, is not, however, to deny its value. Yet data in itself can say little about the ways in which globali[z]ation restructures the individual, or indeed the social, and still less about the normative implications of these changes. So keen have been some to keep pace with the corporate ‘globaloney’ that politics has perspired in the effort. We need to pause for breath. We need to ask the difficult questions, of why this knowledge emerged at this historical moment, of how it makes the world intelligible, of what source is its persuasive power, and what cost the ascendance of this new intellectual tradition.¹⁴ One means by which we can do this is to reinterpret globali[z]ation within the framework of modernity, and in particular the genealogy of the modern subject, not as a footnote, but as a sustained, decelerated reading.

My contribution will be argued in four sections. Section one outlines, in brief, what an archaeology of the concept of globalization might look like, what value such an archaeology would have, and what initial assessment I draw from my own archaeology. This assessment – namely, that the historical function of the concept and reality of ‘globalization’ has been the rationalisation of what I term ‘central accumulation’ – takes us beyond archaeology, and makes necessary a focus on power. Insection two I do precisely that, mapping out in detail the key elements of my poststructural reading. Following Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I begin the task of interpreting the motives and implications behind the appropriation of the concept of globalization. I argue that the ‘geology of globali[z]ation’ signals a profound spatial annihilation in late modernity. Central to this annihilation has been development of what I term ‘reflex-politics’. Section three extends and adapts a second element of Foucault’s analysis of governmentality by focussing on the nexus of power, time and disciplinarity. From here ‘dromology’ is offered as a key reading of globali[z]ation, and the ascendance of what I term ‘speed-politics’. In section four I describe the form that these spheres take when they collide. Globali[z]ation has become a powerful mythical complex through which whole societies are reassigned. The Deleuzian metaphor of ‘control’ is invoked to describe the structures of governance ever more apparent in the context of ‘accelerated subjectification’.

I: TOWARD AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF ‘GLOBALIZATION’

Three phases are identifiable in the work of philosopher Michel Foucault. The first, what he called the history of systems of thought, characterised his work in Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. The second, what we may call the archaeology of power, characterised his work in Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. The third, what we may call the genealogy of ethics, characterised The Uses of Pleasure, and The Care of the Self. The key to archaeology as I seek to employ in this section stems from Foucault’s middle to late phase, in which the excavation of continuities is politicised, and put to the service of genealogy. Central to this accommodation is a focus on discourse. By discourse Foucault understood the: “ .. delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge.”¹⁵ Discourse then, was a distorting, potentially dangerous locale. “We must conceive discourse .. ” writes Foucault, “ .. as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them .. ” It is in the context of discursive practice that: “ .. the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity.”¹⁶ The focus of our attention should be the ‘enmeshing’ of discourse in the historical process. The human sciences were for Foucault an exemplary site in the ‘order of discourse’. For Foucault this order was to be seen within the context of specific and conjunctural ‘rationalities of government’ serving functions of ‘normalisation’. Foucault’s substantive thesis is that our own societies are regulated by the exact same techniques of dressage developed in the prison, extended in the hospital, the school, the barracks, and the factory.

It is in this spirit that I approach ‘globalization’. To identify its transformations we must trace its lineage, recover its deviations, follow its tracks. Archaeology then, is necessarily an exercise in disturbance, awakening our senses to the mobile ground beneath our feet.¹⁷ That this lineage in the broadest sense is nothing less than the making of the modern states system, and the cumulation of ontologies through which to categorise and contain knowledge thereof, should not deter the archaeologist. For sure we are reflecting upon embedded meanings that have developed over several millennia, from the earliest practices of diplomacy in the Near East to the digital signals of late modernity. Moreover, any attempt to excavate the terms ‘globe’, ‘global’, and ‘globalism’, will inevitably face the challenge of contextual slippage, in particular as the ontologies of ‘world’, ‘international’ and ‘transnational’ blur the chronology.¹⁸ But the task is necessary. And despite the confusion, one can observe an intensification in the use of the terms ‘globe’ and ‘global’ during the early to mid-1960s. It is at this time also that the term ‘globalization’ emerges.¹⁹ The event horizon, therefore, of the discourse of ‘globalization’, while linked to deeper historical/mythical processes, is both identifiable and specific. All the more surprising to note that ‘globalization’, a concept that has been so fundamental to contemporary discourse, has never been systematically traced. While it is not the aim to begin a detailed archaeology here, it is important to describe – as a preface to the genealogy that follows – the key elements of this horizon. This may give us an indication as to why the discourse emerged, and what function it has fulfilled.

The following remarks should be viewed only as reference points in the politicisation of the text of ‘globalization’.

Command shifts in late modern transworld relations

²⁰

Central to the development of the concept of ‘globalization’ over the past thirty five years has been a number of shifts in the locus of command within the central world political economy. These include: the rise of neoliberal transnational technocracy²¹; the transfiguration of the military-industrial complex into the military-communications complex²²; the rationalisation of the postwar ‘global governance institutions’ (IMF, IBRD, GATT, NATO, UN, EC/U), and the rise of others (NAFTA, WTO, APEC, ASEAN, PECC); transition within the ‘multi-core complex’ (in particular the incorporation of the developmental states of East Asia)²³; decolonisation, dependent development and the reconstruction of hierarchical commodity chains against calls for a ‘New International Economic Order’²⁴; the disintegration of the corporate-liberal synthesis followed by the deeper embeddedness of state-capital relations²⁵; a broad transition of command between the manufacturing and service spheres of Western economies²⁶; and the demobilisation of labour unions.²⁷ From a systemic viewpoint, each shift can be seen as a ‘managed transition’, painful though some were to all involved. These transitions have operated on the one hand between social formations within the central world political economy (interstate, trans-state, transworld), and on the other within these social formations themselves (sub-state, sub-social, individual). Each transition entails a ‘centre shift’ in the configuration of social, economic and political hegemony vis-à-vis the dominant mode of accumulation.²⁸ This in itself provides the critical background against which to judge the configuration of new ‘objects of knowledge’, norms, procedures, and patterns of behaviour. I will focus on but two here: the historical reversal of the monetary principles of the Bretton Woods Agreement; and the ascendance of post-Fordism.

From production to finance

To understand the significance of the shift in command from production to finance in the central world political economy, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the key elements of the pax americana. At the macro scale we can identify four. First, the reconstruction of the defeated axis powers and their reintegration into the ‘Lockean heartland’ of advanced capitalism. Second, the regeneration of Western Europe through the export of U.S. capital (the Marshall Plan). Third, the logistical dismantling and remilitarisation undertaken through NATO. Fourth, the institutionalisation of the strategic and ideological rationale of the Cold War. These elements were transcended by the project of transnationalising capitalist economies, and (thereby) transnationalising capitalist societies. At the micro scale, the ‘internationalisation of the New Deal’ gave rise to three specific objectives. First, the institutionalisation of liberal democracy. Second, the development of a social class accommodation (the so-called corporate-liberal-synthesis). Third, the use of Keynesian aggregate demand management to ensure growth. These elements were transcended by the Fordist mode of production. The logic of the economic system was domesticist consumerism.

This basis was set out at Bretton Woods in 1944. Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes were clear that a restrictive financial order was a necessity for two reasons. First, speculation was to be prevented from damaging the interventionist welfare state. Second, capital controls were deemed central to the maintenance of a stable international exchange rate system and liberal trading order. Additional aspects of concern were the prospects for U.S. business. As expressed by the U.S. Department of Commerce: “Unless brought under control in the future, capital movements of this .. [speculative] .. nature might readily nullify other efforts to attain greater stability in international transactions and would decrease the amount of dollars available to foreigners for purchases of American goods and services.”²⁹ Open trade, controlled finance became the logic of the pax americana. Finance was to be the ‘servant, not the master, of human desires’.³⁰

Strange indeed, therefore, that from the mid to late 1960s transnational movements of private capital have exploded to a volume far outstripping production and trade.³¹ This historical reversal is vital to understanding the context in which the concept of globalization emerges. It has driven many to study the emerging pattern of ‘global cities’, new global actors, and no-sleep markets as the instantaneous vectors in the rise of the ‘global economy’. For simplicity, two viewpoints can be identified in the discourse.³² First, that transnational finance has developed autonomously through the market-led deployment of new communications technologies. Second, that transnationalisation has been supported and facilitated by the state.

Techno-rational/market-led development

In techno-rational/market-led discourse the effects of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement are clear. First, capital flight has rendered fiscal and macroeconomic policy independence impossible. Second, domestic financial regulation mechanisms have themselves been eroded. Third, flows of short-term capital have come to act as mechanisms of discipline on ‘left of centre’ governments. Quicksilver capital carries certain demands (the logic of ‘sound money’ and all-round austerity). These developments are seen to be the product of unstoppable technological forces.³³ Alan Bryant, for example, argues, ‘technological nonpolicy factors’: “ .. would have caused a progressive internationalisation of financial activity even without changes in government separation fences.”³⁴ Alternatively, in the words of Walter Wriston: “ .. we are witnessing a galloping new system of international finance – one that differs radically from its precursors .. [it] .. was not built by politicians, economists, central bankers or finance ministers .. it was built by technology .. by men and women who interconnected the planet with telecommunications and computers.”³⁵ The restoration of confidence in international financial transactions during the 1950s, the growth of MNEs through the late 1960s, and the response of the market to the oil price rise and the floating of exchange rates following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement (BWA) are also seen as dependent upon the diffusion of communication networks. It has been a cumulative market-led development.

Typical is the notion of ‘autonomous structural dynamic’ developed in the writings of Phil Cerny. Cerny traces the emergence of what he calls the ‘competition state’ to the effects of a series of particular events: the collapse of the BWA; the subsequent explosion of transnational financial flows; the decompartmentalisation of financial services; the deregulation of markets; and the proliferation of forms of disintermediation. Cerny holds that states found their capacity to make policy increasingly constrained. “Deregulation was the reaction of the American state of the problems it was experiencing in maintaining its financial – and therefore its political – hegemony, but deregulation, by its very nature, entailed the next turn of the screw.”³⁶ This autonomous dynamic merely grew in function, limiting further the parameters of governmental decision–making. A growth in financial innovation and ‘arbitrage’ enabled the transnational financial structure to act largely beyond the regulatory constraints of the state-system. For Cerny, an ‘embedded financial orthodoxy’ has emerged via which the state is rationalised and subordinated. Though the state still has a role (it is the agent of its own transformation), it clearly follows rather than leads the market.

Bringing the state back in

An alternative, and in my view more convincing, account is provided by Andrew Sobel, Ron Martin, and Eric Helleiner. For each, the state has played a crucial role in the transnationalisation of finance. For Sobel, the drive to ‘globalize’ has come not from an ideational or structural shift, but rather from the play of organised interests in the domestic context. While the view that the state cajoled market players into action is rejected, for Sobel, internationalisation was ‘motivate domestically’.³⁷ Martin is even more explicit, arguing that political engineering was at work, entailing a: “ .. reassertion by the state of an underlying disposition toward financial interests.”³⁸

The single best treatment of the emergence of fast capital is to be found, however, in the work of Eric Helleiner. For Helleiner, the state has been crucial precisely in providing the forum for an ideational transition. It has done so in three ways. First, in granting freedom to market actors through processes of liberalisation. This is particularly evident in the U.K. and the U.S., with the former keen to promote London as the world’s financial centre, and the latter keen to use dollar-holding markets to underwrite the deficit. Second, in choosing not to implement more effective controls on financial movement (either in the non-use of total capital controls, or in the absence of cooperative measures of control). The recycling of petrodollars through private banks rather than the IMF is indicative of the mood at this time, as was the market-orientated response to the U.K. ‘speculative crisis’ of 1976, and the run against the Franc in 1983. “[T]he disciplining effect of the international financial markets was applauded .. ”³⁹ Third, in preventing cumulative financial crises. Three instances are important: the collapse of the Herstatt and Franklin National banks in 1974; the Polish, Mexican, Argentinean and Brazilian debt crises through the early 1980s; and the world stock market crash in 1987. In each case the U.S. Federal Reserve acted quickly in cooperation with the G-10 and the Bank of International Settlements to calm the markets. In the last case, state reaction took the form of further deregulation!⁴⁰ For Helleiner, these factors are indicative of a growing enthusiasm among states for financial markets as instruments of competitive advantage. In contrast to the representation of states as marginal to the process (left to the whim of the 24-hr market and undermined by the outcome), Helleiner argues that the transnationalisation of finance has actively underwritten state interests (particularly those of the U.S. and the U.K.).

Three contingent factors are held by Helleiner to be important. First, the rebuilding of the alliance between the New York and the London bankers (crucial to the emergence of the euromarkets, and encouraging liberalisation). Second, the ideological shift away from ‘embedded liberalism’ to neo-liberal orthodoxy (leading to the abolition of capital controls, and the vigorous promotion of domestic and international efficiency). Third, the absence of political will to engage in ‘cooperative control’ following the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement. To be sure difficulties were apparent in controlling flight capital. Exchange controls became increasingly ineffective in the face of advances of technology and economic interdependence. But for Helleiner the lack of policy instruments for the control of finance was matched by a absence of support for regulation in any case. Open finance became a political objective. The dissolution of the principles of the pax americana was a controlled transition. As Helleiner argues, proposed multilateral controls were repeatedly: “ .. scuttled by states who wished to preserve a regulation-free environment in order to attract international financial business to their territory. In this sense, collective action problems prevented the preservation of a closed financial system rather than an open one, as in the case of the trade sector.”⁴¹ Whether by decision or non-decision, the state was fundamentally involved.

The non-crisis of Fordism

Further support for the ‘transition’ thesis can be found within debates concerning the nature of post-Fordism. Bob Jessop, for example, in analysing the emergence of what he terms the ‘Schumpeterian Workfare State’ (SWS), argues firmly that this need not entail the wholesale rejection of the ‘Keynesian Welfare State’ (KWS)⁴² We are witness, rather, to the emergence of an ‘adapted’ KWS, ‘suitably flexibilized’. The critical question, writes Jessop: “ .. is how the welfare state will be restructured .. without seriously undermining structural competitiveness or restraining the transition to post-Fordism.”⁴³ Central to the project has been a deep rationalisation of central accumulation. A new set of ‘organising principles’ comparable to Fordism or Taylorism have emerged, but in a systemic sense the accumulation logic has remained unchanged.⁴⁴ Of particular importance has been the reconfiguration of the mechanisms deployed by the KWS to balance labour and capital. The outcome has not been to the favour of the former. “There is no doubt .. ” write Hoogvelt and Yuasa, “ .. that for all the upbeat razzmatazz in the business pages of The Economist, the Harvard Business Review, Fortune Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, not to mention the outpourings of business gurus like Peter Drucker, Kenichi Ohmae, Alvin Toffler and many others about democracy in the workplace, about the humanisation of the factory floor, about the autonomy and empowerment of the individual, and other such noble sentiments, the whole system of lean production amounts to a horrendous tightening of the screws in the capital labour relation.”⁴⁵

In this ‘reorganisation of capitalism’ it is the state – as much, if not perhaps more so than the atomised market – that has played a critical role. Legislating for privatisation, intervening in the money supply, paring down the public sector, deregulating private capital, cutting taxes, abolishing price and dividend controls, all involve a role for government. This represents not a collapse, but a reversal of a set of historical mechanisms developed to mediate crises (Keynesian aggregate demand management; social welfarism, the corporate-liberal synthesis; and the productionist orientation of the pax americana). The new mechanisms were to be the reinvention of the self-regulating market and society, underpinned by populist/authoritarianism. On a techno-rational reading this ‘crisis of crisis management’ signifies the inability of states to mediate social conflicts. The alternative is that it signifies the unwillingness of states to even keep up the pretence. In the context of the transition of command from production to finance, and the so-called ‘crisis of Fordism’, it is the second reading that I find most persuasive. This increasing unwillingness has been both a symptom and a catalyst of globali[z]ation.

Discourses of crisis ⁴⁶

Underpinning the withdrawal of the state in this sense has been a broad consensus that mediation is no longer possible. During the mid to late 1970s, this in itself became a ‘discourse of crisis’, galvanising popular and intellectual allegiance to the icon of the market, and laying the foundations upon which the project of globali[z]ation could be built. Of central importance to this discourse has been its fluidity. Most analyses have taken the term ‘crisis’ as given, being more concerned with the identification of forms of dislocation.⁴⁷ During the early stages of the discourse the assumption was that the emergence of internal tensions (‘slumpflation’, the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement, Trade Union disputes, ‘underconsumption’, labour market disorganisation) signified the beginning of a deeper structural crisis, rather than say, ‘adaptation’, or transition.⁴⁸ This assumption was identified and reshaped by the emerging neoliberal transnational hegemony. Mobilising the structural language of the Marxian left, Keynesian demand management – as the structural logic of the postwar period – could then be demonized as the root cause of such dislocations. The confusion therefore of structure and conjuncture legitimated a wave of anti-welfarism, marketisation, and globalization.

My central claim is that there have been two ‘discourses of crisis’. The first, centred on ‘capital’, developed through the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s, predominantly (though not exclusively) in the Marxian/Left tradition. Here, the inherent teleological leanings within Marxian political economy contributed to an overestimation of the ‘crisis of Fordism’, and an underestimation of the recuperative abilities of the emerging state-capital alliance.⁴⁹ More important however was the way in which this initial discourse of crisis created the environment in which a second discourse of crisis could emerge. This discourse focussed not on capital, but on the limits to capital.⁵⁰ This discourse emerged as a political force in the mid to late 1970s and ran throughout the 1980s, accelerating after the stock market crash of 1987, and the slowdown within central accumulation in the early 1990s.⁵¹ This second discourse has underwritten neoliberal claims to the redundancy (indeed, counter-productivity) of governmental management of the economy.⁵² This has in turn preempted and sterilised opposition in the face of a deep and rapid rationalisation of economies (labour markets in particular).⁵³ Taken together, the macro analyses of the Marxian discourse and the micro/behavioural analyses of the neoliberal discourse fed the perception that the 1970s signified a qualitative break in capitalist development.⁵⁴ The willingness of the academy to appropriate new process-descriptive concepts, and the intellectual environment of ‘policy-relevant’ theory, focussed attention on conjunctural events to the cost of analyses of structural continuity. All reinforced the neoliberal claim to be at the forefront of a new tide of public opinion and expert analysis. As the discourse was wont through the 1980s to argue: ‘There is no alternative’. We see at this exact time a new range of concepts emerge: ‘global governance’, ‘global responsibility’, ‘globalism’, ‘global risk’, ‘global crisis’, ‘global opportunity’, the ‘global imperative’. We also see the (re)emergence of certain implicit and unstated organising principles: competition, innovation, scientific wealth, informatisation, the ‘mastery of chance’, and the ‘elimination of uncertainty’.

For Jessop the tumult represents merely a transition in the ‘mode of societalization’ (the political bargains, social alliances, and cohesive mechanisms that ‘stabilise’ a given pattern of development).⁵⁵ The genius lies in the fact that the transition was seen to be structural. It was given the legitimacy of self-autonomy. The pressures to ‘reorganise’ were deemed to come from ‘somewhere else’. This illusion has masked the political nature of the selective industrial restructuring effected within the central world political economy, and the extensive industrial de(con)struction across the greater world political economy. From this time on, economic success is defined less as mass employment than productivity efficiency. Accelerated competition becomes the focus for the (re)organisation of state-capital relations. ‘Hot money’ eradicates the principle of social protection.⁵⁶ One might wonder whether we have been witness not to the triumph of neoliberalism, but a highly organised military Keynesianism, bound to a false discourse of the debilitation of the state.⁵⁷ Perhaps it is more accurate to invert the Habermasian thesis: rather than a crisis of legitimation, we have witnessed a legitimation of a series of rationalisations through the discourse of crisis. This, of course, is precisely what happened in the 19th century with the ascendance of the first principle of the Polanyian ‘double movement’, the self regulating market.⁵⁸ During the Baroque period the discourse of crisis centred on the imperative of organising, codifying, and channelling mobile, immiserated populations.⁵⁹ Civil power felt the need for a new security apparatus in the face of the semi-autonomy that society had developed during the French Revolution. The new arrangements centred on the ‘myth of the machine’. In my view we are witness to a similar mobilization played out at the heart of Occidental culture. The difference is in the mode of civil power itself. Rather than be based on ubiquity contemporary civil power is based on absence. In the attempt to reformulate security given the overexposure of the state itself under mediatization, the myth of the machine has given way to the myth of globali[z]ation.

In summary, an archaeology of the concept of ‘globalization’ leads us to focus on the context in which the concept of globalization emerged. I have focussed here on the transition of command from production to finance, and the transition within modes of production from Fordism to post-Fordism. These transitions were mediated by the state in conjunction with finance capital. Giving legitimacy to these transitions has been a wide ranging ‘discourse of crisis’ (from democracy, governance and population, to rationality, ecology, and motivation). Within this context ‘globalization’ could be framed as the universal panacea to social ills. This appropriation has not been a neutral phenomena. New forms of discipline and subjectivity have arisen in the face of the challenge. Globali[z]ation constructs the conditions under which human beings will behave in a calculable manner.Against a crisis that was no crisis at all, the rise of globali[z]ation as a new governmental rationality represents a crunching of power.

From this basis I want to focus on the translation of concept into action. To do this we must go beyond archaeology to focus on non-discursive practices. A key reading for this can be found in Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’.

II: GOVERNMENTALITY, REFLEXIVITY AND THE GEOLOGY OF GLOBALI[Z]ATION

In the early work of Foucault the denaturalisation of embedded discourse took centre stage. However, in developing a theory of discursive regularity, and decentering the autonomous subject, Foucault was presented with a political and strategic impasse. His approach precluded a critical analysis of his social concerns.⁶⁰ The death of the subject and the zero degree of writing while important in opening the iron cage of logocentrism, were insufficient in themselves to highlight the regimes of truth and material coercions that in his view were at the heart of modernity. The publication of Discipline and Punish marks a turning point in Foucault’s methodology and political and ethical approach. From here, in what may be regarded as the second phase in his development, Foucault turned his attention to understanding the ‘transformation of individuals’. While the critique of the autonomous subject remained, this critique was itself put to service. Foucault would actively pursue critical autonomy through genealogy, to: “ .. expose a body totally imprinted by history .. [and], reestablish the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations.”⁶¹

Many have interpreted this shift as indicative of a concern with power in itself. Yet this is at best partial. Power, for sure, was placed at the centre of analysis, but it did not delimit this analysis. Indeed toward the end of his life (and what may be regarded as the third phase in his development) Foucault seemed keen to move beyond power itself. Something much more important was coming to light in his histories. This was the question of subjectivity.⁶² From this point, Foucault’s central hypothesis that the aim of the production of discourse is to mobilize, optimize, monitor, and order society, to ‘master the unpredictable event’, held a deeper resonance than merely the identification of ‘coercive institutions’. Foucault’s attention turned increasingly from anatomo-politics, the control of function, movement, and training, to bio-power, the control of rationale, conviction, humour and persuasion (itself an automata of the finest detail). Bio-power was to be seen as the power of subjectification: “ .. where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies, and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.”⁶³

The aim was to understand the means by which: “ .. everything would be controlled to the point of self-sustenance, without the need for intervention.”⁶⁴ Here we find in Foucault a ‘positive’ conception of power: of how power generates discourse and ‘rational order’. Most important, power was to be seen as a ‘chain’, a circulation, in which: “ .. individuals are the vehicles .. not its points of application.”⁶⁵ Through the concept of ‘governmentality’ Foucault sought to uncover the highly complex interaction of truth, power, and ethics, in an ‘historical knowledge of struggles’.⁶⁶ Understanding the relationship of subjectivity to governance – and in particular the ‘government of individualization’ – became for Foucault the central strategic concern outlined in his final uncompleted projects on the ‘genealogy of ethics’, and ‘technologies of the self’. Foucault was still fascinated by the question of command, but the task was to understand the point at which the articulation of power migrated from the sovereign to the individual. A key element of this migration was, for Foucault, the distribution of space, both physical and symbolic.

This focus on space, as the first element of governmentality, is central to my assessment of how the concept of globalization has been transformed into action-orientated behaviour. Elsewhere I develop this argument in reference to the spatial organisation of the ‘global city’, cyberspace, the ‘global corporation’, flexible specialisation, and the ‘global commons’. In the current discussion I will develop, albeit briefly, my thinking on the spatiality of contemporary historical consciousness. In particular I will focus upon how this historical consciousness (defined here as ‘reflexivity’) has been refigured under globali[z]ation. The imperative of reflexive thinking has sharpened, demanding simultaneously the expansion of spatial consciousness, and an annihilation of spatial separation. These demands correspond respectively to a new bio-politics of population control, and micro-politics of individual subjectivity. In globali[z]ation we are witness to the choreography of the mass and the self in what I term ‘reflex-politics’.

Spatiality, reflexivity, globality

The term ‘reflexivity’ has emerged in recent debate as a key reading of the nature of the relationship between the social and the individual in the context of modernity.⁶⁷ Yet many of the insights to emerge have former lives elsewhere. In the seminal essays ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and ‘Technologies of the Self’, and the interviews ‘Prison Talk’, and ‘Questions on Geography’, Foucault analyses the interiorisation of power, and the constitution of historical consciousness through what we might call the ‘imperative of the self’. In doing so he prefigures both Beck and Giddens in ways that would seem to have escaped both them, and many review commentators.⁶⁸ In reference to Baudelaire’s aesthetic assessment of the ‘heroism of modern life’, as Foucault describes, ‘modern man’: “ .. is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself.”⁶⁹ This invention is but one way in which modern man ensures his own subjectivity. Hence any transformation of the environment in which such invention takes place is an important social development affecting directly the range of possible subjectivities that may arise. The argument that I introduce is that historical consciousness, in the context of globali[z]ation, has passed into a mode of deep intensification, entailing what we might call an ‘annihilation of the self’.

A number of developments are both indicative of, and follow from, this intensification. Foremost has been the historical reversal of motivational crises. This has been achieved through an intensification of anxiety allied perfectly with the discourse of the ‘defective state’. A prime example is the spectre of ‘global competition’.⁷⁰ Fables of the ‘global agenda’, the ‘global enterprize’, and the ‘global harvest’ have institutionalised a ‘politics of paranoia’, reinforced in the daily transmission of utopian futures. Business World CNN focus on the developmental success of the East Asian ‘tigers’. The millennium, we are told, will mark the genesis of the ‘pacific century’. Flick the channel and Singapore’s IT 2000 programme aims to create a ‘digital city’, fully ‘plugged in’ to the ‘global system’ (its national symbol is already its airline). Flick again, and the ‘golden coast’, we are told, is the engine room of the global economy. The migration of these narratives is not without purpose. Perceptions of efficiency have been disseminated to legitimatise deep and painful rationalisations.⁷¹ .. what they are doing .. [is] .. competitive .. ” (O’Brien, in interview, BBC ‘Horizon’, April 1995).] And not only narratives of success. Dystopia is well represented. The East Asian ‘tigers’ become ‘dragons’. Liberia implodes on CBS. Drug running in Rio, atrocities in Rwanda, Somalia, and Sierra Leone, tragic narratives foretell the penalties of immobility, of non self-transformation, of territorial sedentarization.⁷² Fatal or ecstatic, the net effect is the same: to demand simultaneously, on the part of the individual and the social, a sense of expanse (of ‘global outlook’), and annihilation (of ‘global engagement’). Both are reflected in the words of U.S. Labour Secretary Robert Reich. “[W]e are witnessing .. ” he argues, “ .. the creation of a purer form of capitalism, practised globally by managers who are more distant – in essence more coldly rational in their decisions, having shed the old affiliations with people and place.”⁷³

“We will aim to create and cover global events .. ”, boasts Rupert Murdoch, reinforcing the imperative of reflexive (as opposed to reflective) living.⁷⁴ The only possible response is more knowledge of the competitive environment (hence the ascendance of industrial espionage and public surveillance). The importance of not only predicting the future, but attempting to shape it, necessitates a mode of spatial telescopy, an accelerated panopticism. Firms ‘go global’ precisely to eradicate dimension. Hence the infamous ‘think global, act local’. “We believe .. ” runs a promotion for Kawasaki, “ .. that to fulfil our potential as a global corporation, we have to continually push back frontiers of space .. “⁷⁵ The globe becomes a powerful aesthetic of organisation in direct ratio to the longing for the obliteration of horizons, of manifestations of distance.⁷⁶ “Companies that do not adapt to the new global realities will become victims of those that do.” This: “ .. is not a matter of opinion but of necessity.”⁷⁷ Utopia and dystopia, fear and faith, are played out less on a geographical than a geoconceptual scale. Fear is borne in the enormity of the task of globality, and the loss of perspective entailed in expanse. Faith, in the wholesale transcendence of the body, the community, and other manifestations of the limitations of place. Both are captured in a headline of the International Herald Tribune in the Fall of 1994: “For U.S. Corporations, the Modern-Day Byword Is ‘Globalize or Die’”⁷⁸ And not only corporations. New social movements, governments, universities, scientific communities, all subscribe to the discourse of expanse and annihilation.⁷⁹

A critical element of the imperative to expanse, and the imperative to annihilation, is the appropriation of communication technology. From the seemlessness of cyberspace to miniaturisation and remote control, in the current techno-rational discourse the strongest motivation is faith.⁸⁰ As Appleyard describes: “Companies, even small ones, now know they must surf the global technological wave .. ”⁸¹ Yet anxiety is also apparent. Technology is both liberator (increasing mobility and speed, and hence our advantage in the face of the challenge), and dominator (in threatening to replace the human in a bid for greater efficiency and reduction of error). The space we observe is increasingly man made, not born in nature. As man becomes ‘creator’ as well as ‘created’, a powerful range of fearful reactions emerge.⁸² Technologies become the nightmare represented in the cyberculture of ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Robocop’, ‘The Terminator’, ‘Predator’, and ‘Tetsuo’.Over a century ago, Nietzsche made clear that while man transforms nature through technology, man is transformed by the technology he employs. Each epoch: “ .. gives rise to a (physical) ideal of Man, a special characterology which is also and simultaneously a new body.”⁸³ In altering the nature of man, technology also transforms conceptions and realities of space.⁸⁴ In the 1960s we had McLuhan’s ‘global embrace’, in the 1970s we had Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’, and Brzezinski’s ‘technetronic society’, in the 1990s we have Mitchell’s ‘city of bits’, and the ‘infobahn’. The new ‘physical ideal of Man’ is set in a new environment, the ‘no-place’ of ‘teletopology’.⁸⁵

This absolute compression leads also to a new transparency of industrial society. This gives rise, as Beck has argued, to the ‘risk culture’, in which angst and doubt are central organising concepts. Here we find the formation of a particular form of reflexive behaviour. People become the centre for their own lifeworlds. As Beck describes: “Individualization in this sense means that each person’s biography is removed from given determination and placed in his or her own hands .. ”⁸⁶ In a process of differentiation and temporalisation, the individual is at once orientated (vis-à-vis the labour market, and globality), and differentiated (removed from social experience, a forced distanciation). Reflexive thinking, demanded by the logic of capital, emerges both as bio-political, and micro-political. A simultaneous mass and individual self-governance. The rise of communitarianism only confirms the dissolution of the social, negated by implosion (the zero degree of space).⁸⁷ith the organisation .. ” writes Habermas, “ .. by the state of scientfic-technical progress and a systematically pursued policy of expansion in the system of higher education .. the production of information, technology, organisations, and qualifications that increase productivity .. [has become] .. an integral part of the production process .. Mental labour is applied to itself.” (Habermas, 1976: 81).] Giddens argues a similar point in his focus on the construction of self vis-à-vis tradition. Of particular importance here is the way that reflexivity entails a monitoring of the self, a process which is driven to: “ .. chronic revision in the light of new information or knowledge.”⁸⁸ People look to their environments as a means of situating themselves, of looking into themselves. The analogies with Foucault’s emphasis on the ‘interiorisation’ of power are striking. “These are humble modalities, minor procedures .. ”, but a ‘permanent economy’.⁸⁹ Disciplinary power, rather than moulding all to a single mass: “ .. separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units.”⁹⁰

Yet perhaps ‘reflexivity’ is more interior even than this. One is reminded of the unfinished project begun in The Uses of Pleasure, and The Care of the Self, on what Foucault termed ‘technologies of the self’. Here the focus is not upon how the self has been objectified, but upon how, in a process of self-transformation the individual turns him or herself into a subject. This was to be understood within a broader framework of technologies (Foucault identifies three: production, signification, and domination), all of which related (and interrelated) to a certain type of government (a modification of individuals, the acquisition of certain attitudes). Foucault sought to trace the development of the ‘hermeneutics of the self’ through the study of Greco-Roman philosophy in the first two centuries A.D., and Christian spirituality developed in the fourth and fifth centuries of the late Roman Empire. The point was not just to understand these in themselves, but rather to reflect the ‘history of the present’ through an examination of the means by which the practice ‘take care of the city’ evolved into the practice ‘take care of oneself’, from which it was itself obscured by the Delphic principle ‘know oneself’.⁹¹ For Foucault this shift reflected a broader transition within Greek ethics from the problem of choosing a techne of ‘living’, to the imperative of developing a techne of the self.⁹² It is this shift that set the environment for the ascendance of Christian sex morality, with all its implications for codes of life in general. Are contemporary conditions sufficient to draw an historical analogy? As Giddens, for example, writes: “The reflexivity of modernity extends to the core of the self .. the altered self has to be explored and constructed as part of a reflexive process of connecting personal and social change.”⁹³ For Beck, while individualisation in itself is not new, in the context of flexible production systems, decentralisation of the workplace, changing family structures, new forms of leisure and neighbourhood relations produce ‘an essential peculiarity of individualisation’. “[N]o longer compensated by any conscience collective or by a social reference unit in the sphere of cultural life .. The individual himself or herself becomes the reproduction unit for the social in the lifeworld.”⁹⁴

It is my argument that globali[z]ation is central to this intensification of the ‘imperative of the self’. The nexus of reflexivity and globali[z]ation is not difficult to find. “Globalization .. ” we are told, “ .. has placed new demands on business executives .. ”⁹⁵ Developing: “ .. a global strategy requires managers to think in new ways.”⁹⁶ As Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, in the face of global competition: “ .. people are going round with guillotines over their heads.”⁹⁷ What we find here is both an intensification of the urgency of self, and a new spatial logic in which Baudelaire’s ‘invention’ is constrained to take place. So the current imperative – of looking to oneself, and finding answers in globality – is not only about space. Annihilation is crucial. For what is significant about contemporary transformations is their pace. The velocity is meteoric. These transformations are instantaneous, they seek immanence.

III: GOVERNMENTALITY, SPEED-POLITICS AND GLOBALITY

From space we must turn to the question of time. A useful place to begin is with Foucault’s analysis of the birth of the prison. Here, three techniques are identified via which time is mobilised. First – operating at the scale of control – was a new emphasis on the individual, both of the bodily mechanism and mental faculties, in a taxonomy of ‘movements, gestures, attitudes, and rapidity’, aimed to enshrine a new and infinitesimal power. Second, the object of control was no longer the ‘signifying elements of behaviour’ but their political anatomy: “ .. the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organisation.” Finally, modality, wherein behaviour is regulated not by result but rather constant coercion: “ .. a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, and movement.”⁹⁸ In the context of the prison, Foucault termed these methods of meticulous subjection, ‘disciplines’. But again, as Foucault’s thought developed into the third phase of his work, he became increasingly aware of the means by which individuals, beyond the walls of complete and austere institutions, subject themselves to these exact same economies. In this section I argue that these forms of control are mirrored respectively in globali[z]ation. First, through reflexivity and the centrality of information in late modernity. Second, in the importance of flexibility and efficiency in the context of global competition. Third, in the velocity with which the late modern individual is bombarded by images, messages, and imperatives. Having organised space and distribution – in the great confinement, the birth of the clinic, the school, the factory, and the asylum – the means by which Baroque civil power regulated these environments was in the ordering of time. Rather less surprising therefore to find that one of the first and sustained attempts to politicise the latter is to be found in the work of a Professor of Architecture. I refer to the speed-philosophy of Paul Virilio.

Tempo(rality), intensity, globality

In a series of books from Bunker Archeology, Speed and Politics, The Lost Dimension, and L’Horizon négatif, to The Vision Machine, The Art of the Motor, L’Inertie polaire, and most recently La Vitesse de libération, the most original analysis of the centrality of time to human organisation has been provided by Paul Virilio. Indeed Virilio has single-handedly created a whole science of speed and visuality (what he terms ‘dromoscopy’).⁹⁹ In Speed and Politics – Virilio’s best known philosophical statement – the point of departure is the 19th and 20th century ‘invention’ of mechanical propulsion. As Virilio describes in Pure War: “Up until the nineteenth century, society was founded on the brake. Means of furthering speed were very scant .. [t]hen suddenly there’s the great revolution that others have called the Industrial Revolution or the Transportation Revolution. I call it a dromocratic revolution because what was invented was not only, as has been said, the possibility of multiplying similar objects .. but especially the means of fabricating speed with the steam engine, then the combustion engine. 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.”¹⁰⁰

From here Virilio charts the links between militarism and vision in the pursuit of acceleration. Tracing what he calls the ‘logistics of perception’, Virilio’s wide-angle lens takes in a dazzling variety of issues, from political power and message transportation, urban architecture and military strategy, population control and nuclear deterrence, the aesthetics of twentieth century subjectivity and the psychology of the accident, to the logic of the ‘universal dromos’, neuroscience, bioethics, sport, democracy, mediatization, and virtuality. A focus on speed, for Virilio, has opened up a whole new perspective on technologies and their relationship to the drives inherent to human desire itself.¹⁰¹ The image is in the ascendant as the expression and vector of acceleration. We live in the context of a coup d’etat of real time history, a death drive to the final barrier, the speed of light. Speed decentres production as the motor of history.¹⁰² Central to Virilio’s understanding of this development is the theorisation of visuality and the migration of ‘vision machines’ from the battlefield to societies more generally.¹⁰³ This, for Virilio, is one element of the rise of what he terms ‘the transpolitical’, entailing the disappearance of bodies and the social under the impact of mediatisation and acceleration. The Art of the Motor is perhaps Virilio’s most accessible statement of his assessment of the driving force behind this obliteration of perception. For Virilio a ‘military-communications complex’ has accustomed us to a: “ .. series of discreet disappearances and multiple absences.”¹⁰⁴ The effect of ‘kinematic’ energy (motion combined with velocity) has decentred not only the human senses, but our whole relationship to time and reality.¹⁰⁵ Little surprise then that for one reviewer at least: “It would be difficult to imagine a more disturbing contemporary philosopher than Paul Virilio.”¹⁰⁶

What then does Virilio mean by ‘speed’? In a technical sense: “ .. speed is a transfer of energy. We can summarise this in two words: ‘stability-movement’ and ‘movement-of-movement’.”¹⁰⁷ Virilio’s specific interest is in understanding the rise of the ‘movement-of-movement’ as the locus of power. Virilio then, is interested in the regulation of time in the face of the contraction of distance. For Virilio we are in a transition of monumental proportions. This transition is one of pure acceleration, and entails a wholesale transcendence of everything material in the world. So by ‘speed’ Virilio means not only relative speed of perception to events, but, more importantly, societal acceleration itself: the deeper perceptual effect of motion in itself, of travel in itself, or thrust in itself. For Virilio governmentality exists no longer in real space, but in ‘real time’. This development has: “ .. the gravest consequences for our relation to the world, and for our vision of it.”¹⁰⁸ We see this in particular in the idea of ‘one world’, described by Virilio as an ‘illusory ideology’. “[W]hen the world is reduced to nothing and we have everything at hand, we’ll be happy.”¹⁰⁹ But as Virilio laments, in shrinking the earth through speed: “ .. we have lost the very place of freedom, which is expanse.”¹¹⁰

The rise of ‘chronopolitics’ (and what Virilio terms ‘dromocratic society’) signals for Virilio the end of ‘freedom of reason’, the end of philosophy, the end of history, and the end of politics under ‘intensive time’. “The rapidity of images and signs in the mirror of the journey, windshield, television or computer screen – after having excessively simplified and deformed the dromoscopic vision of the world at the turn of the century, today makes it subliminal.”¹¹¹ Authentic life goes underground. In the context of late modernity the body (both individual and social) becomes a vector of acceleration. In short the body is imprinted by phenomena, by technics, by forces, through which it gains momentum and energy, and from hence it migrates it own reference (becoming ‘soulless’, ‘metabolic’). Under the ‘empire of speed’, only the ‘will to nothingness’ remains: “ .. in a form of war that causes the ‘present’ to disappear in the instantaneousness of decision.”¹¹² For Virilio this reflects the logic of ‘dromomania’ (the hegemony of military-speed terror at the level of world society). The ‘absolute power of the instant’ has delivered a ‘the state of emergency’.¹¹³ Virilio, of course, is not entirely alone in his sense of alarm. One is reminded of Lewis Mumford’s condemnation of the technocratic drive. “Like a drunken locomotive engineer .. ” he wrote, “ .. on a streamlined train plunging through the darkness at one hundred miles an hour, we have been going past the danger signals without realising our speed, which springs from our mechanical facility, only increases our danger and will make more fatal the crash.”¹¹⁴ Yet Virilio is quite alone in taking acceleration to what he foresees as its logical resolution: the disappearance of ‘the political’ into speed, to be replaced with an accelerated media and military machine (the speed-body of the modern totalitarian state). We have become, in Virilio’s terms, a ‘population of time’ governed by the absolute assault: the saturation of the time and space of daily life with speed. The resulting paralysis is what Virilio calls ‘pure war’.¹¹⁵

Dromo-discourse and globali[z]ation

Despite Virilio’s focus on the media and the military, dromology can be used to read both capital relations and globali[z]ation. Indeed, it is mirrored in few places better than the logic of accumulation in late modernity. And one doesn’t have to dig too deep to find it. It is doubtful that the top 100 managers of alleged ‘global corporations’ have read Speed and Politics, but you’d be forgiven for allowing the thought to cross the mind if you listened to their discourse.¹¹⁶ Of course, metaphors of pace are not entirely new to the economic lexicon. From the ‘multiplier’, and the ‘escalator clause’, to the ‘accelerator principle’ and the ‘velocity of circulation’, not only it would seem is temporality important, but also tempo itself. But again, as with the terms ‘globe’ and ‘global’, it is the intensification of their use that is significant. In 1973 First National City Bank run an advertisement for their ‘global transfer system’ with the headline: “Citibank – the bank to look to for speed in moving money.”¹¹⁷ From this point onward the archetype is less the productionist image of an economy of waves than it is a futurology of superconductivity and obliterated space. In 1978 Chase Bank run an advertisement with the pun, ‘Today’s Chase’, followed by the subtitle: “Everyone talks global network. Our bank has it.”¹¹⁸ It is clear to the business civilization that a ‘new era of competition’ has emerged. The pressures of the law of one price and the transmission of information take command, and pace replaces quality as the key orientating conception of survival. The business world is already at this time super-lubricated by ‘footloose’ and ‘quicksilver’ capital (flexible, mobile, instant).¹¹⁹

In 1983 business guru Theodore Levitt argues that two ‘vectors’ shape the contemporary world – technology and globalization.¹²⁰ In the late 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev promoted accelerated collective learning (uskorenie), as the central plank of perestroika. In 1989 Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric talks of ‘lightening speed’, ‘fast action’, and ‘acting with speed’.¹²¹ Being: “ .. number one or number two globally .. ” Welch suggests, “ .. is more important than ever. But scale is not enough. You have to combine financial strength, market position, and technology leadership with an organisational focus on speed, agility, and simplicity. The world moves much faster today.”¹²² In 1990 Helmut Kohl sought to ‘intensify the pace’ of German reunification. In 1991, President and CEO of Asea Brown Boveri, asks: “Why emphasise speed over precision? Because the costs of delay exceed the costs of mistakes.”¹²³ In 1994, Susan Strange talks of the ‘accelerating pace of technological change’, and of ‘rapid change’.¹²⁴ In 1995, Kenichi Ohmae talks of the ‘speed and volume of transactions’, the ‘accelerating convergence of tastes’.¹²⁵ For Nicholas Negroponte and Danny Goodman, ‘being digital’ and ‘living at light speed’ is the only means to avoid being roadkill on the information superhighway.¹²⁶ Rapid change is both positive, ‘global’, ‘inexorable’, and ‘unstoppable’. Reginald Dale talks of ‘accelerating world trade’, the ‘speed of change’, the ‘split-second flows of international funds’, and the ‘dynamic world of the 21st century’.¹²⁷ U.S. Treasury Under Secretary Lawrence Summers suggests: “ .. it is only a slight exaggeration to say that this is the era when 3 billion people got on a rapid escalator to modernity.”¹²⁸ A special issue of TIME, International on technology and the ‘global agenda’ begins the cover story article with one word, followed by a full stop. The word is ‘acceleration’.

Within the geology of globali[z]ation, the ‘logic of the race’ is mirrored foremost in the emphasis on the ‘Information Revolution’ and the centrality of ‘knowledge’. “Work smarter, not just harder”, is indeed a touch of genius, underwriting both the imperative of reflexivity, and the ubiquity of speed.¹²⁹ Information is ‘vectorised’ in a datastream of ‘technoscapes’, of integrated domestic workplaces, of television shopping, and ‘global entertainment’. Information collation and its speed of deployment becomes the critical index of success.¹³⁰ The drive to accelerate speed through knowledge in the era of globali[z]ation is evident in multiple contexts. The deployment of micro-electronic technologies in the office, in the library, in the supermarket, in the home, foretell a particular relationship to speed, and to the world. The growth of subcontracting, small-batch production, and outsourcing is indicative of the pursuit of rapidity. ‘Just-in-time’, total quality management’, and ‘lean production’ concern the drive for total efficiency, and the objectification of time.¹³¹ The emergence of global media corporations act as transmission vehicles in the ascendance of the instant image. The consumer industry in the age of television has the perfect vector to pursue the quick sale (closing dates, special offers, credit-card hotlines). Contrary to Levitt’s vision of the globally standardised product, we find in production a particular form of acceleration, based on diversity and rapid obsolescence. The full use of simulation in design (allowing buildings to be built in a fraction of their former time), in art (facilitating a ‘special effects inflation’ and time-efficiency), and the preparation for warfare (accelerating the DEF CON, allowing cybertroops to annihilate each other, as well as space and time): all are indicative of information acceleration.

A second expression of speed is a focus on flexibility, efficiency and mobility. “Feel the burn” was the catchphrase of the 1980s. As Welch forewarned: “ .. if you’re not flexible enough to handle rapid change and make quick decisions, you won’t win.”¹³² A concern with flexibility is manifested on a number of levels from the familiar (the popularisation of body and health consciousness, the exact synchronisation of the workforce and technology, the speed layout of the city), to the profound (nanotechnology, artificial intelligence in military planning, cryonics). All forms of flexibilisation seek to regulate the individual in relation to the ‘world of time’. In contemporary form, the ‘imperative of flexibility’ (mobilisation) and the ‘necessity of limitation’ (normalisation) translate into radical shifts in social organisation. For example, in relation to production, flexibility and the ‘new politics of time’ radically alter the composition of labour markets, ensuring both optimum performance (the time hegemony of ‘lean production’), and the coercive legitimation of rationalisation (‘fear of unemployment’, the growth in part-time, unsecure wage labour, the erosion of the influence of trades unions).¹³³ As Drache describes: “ .. employers are using the rhetoric of flexibility to increase their control over their workforces.”¹³⁴ In this sense, mobility is being ‘tracked’.¹³⁵

A useful example of the focus on ‘flexibility’ lies in the discourse of British regeneration. In the late 1980s Samuel Huntington located the decline of nations not in ‘imperial overstretch’ but in inflexibility, the failure to change and adapt (to ‘keep up to speed’). In the early 1980s Mancur Olson made the same point. Inefficient producers, inflexible class systems, immobile governmental bureaucracies impeding the ‘creative destruction’ of capitalism. Hence we must find the panacea in movement, in a form of lateral speed. The prescription was simple. Enterprise must be encouraged. Technicians needed to ‘think strategically’, to target key sectors (high technology consumer goods, civilian aircraft production, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors). The exact same logic is held for politics as for economics. Social systems must adapt, must constantly reinvent themselves. In the celebratory essay ‘The Secret of Our Success’, published – not entirely surprisingly – in TIME, International’s ‘Bush Presidency Inaugural Issue’, Charles Krauthammer describes: “Of course the true basket case is the Soviet Union .. After 70 years of submission the Soviet people have lost the habit of innovation and renewal .. In the U.S., on the other hand, the continuing fluidity of society is its greatest asset .. ”¹³⁶ How useful it is therefore to have a political system that allows the ‘structures to be remade’. As Krauthammer concludes: “ .. the American blessing is to have invented a system that .. [allows] .. us to reimagine in the world – every four years.”¹³⁷

It is in the drive to reinvention that we find a third expression of speed. This lies in the constant image, message, and imperative bombardment of the individual in the context of accelerated ‘global engagement’. Time-shifting, techno-efficiency, techno-diplomacy, chronopolitics, chronoaesthetics, informatisation, competition, doubt, risk, annihilation: the very messages of globality are transmitted at a greater pace. And of course there is no shortage of vectors (radio, cinema, TV, video, satellites, libraries, private corporations). The messages themselves take on a certain velocity, a certain steady drive.¹³⁸ CBS, CNN, ABC, BBC, ITV survive (or die) on this image and message acceleration, entailing not only the desolation of space, but the annihilation of time.¹³⁹ And of course this applies not only to the media. “Speed guarantees the secret and thus the value of all information.”, writes Virilio.¹⁴⁰ Increasingly societies pursue the collision as the only means to retain the element of surprize. It is here that we find the meaning of Virilio’s metaphor of the museum of accidents. Future shock is increasingly central to capital relations. Corporation America has its own TV channel, collapsing space and time in a single box. And it is in this context that dromo-discourse becomes embedded.

As the individual is increasingly silenced by the bombardment of images and messages, a new level of reflexivity is both produced and demanded. The social moves in what Virilio has called ‘technological time’, to the pulse of the particle accelerator. Forced to take account of oneself, through globality is invented a new ideal man: adaptive, rapid, flexible, mobile, technical, prosthetic. The individual can transcend his or her own identity.¹⁴¹ Through globality it becomes possible both to lose oneself and find oneself in a new absolute space and time (the web page, the mobile phone, the pager). The ‘global’ therefore is a magical place, the site of the realisation of desire, which, by its very nature (zero-space, instant-time) heralds a process of deep synchronisation. The state, far from hollowing out, is reaching the terminal velocity of its power capabilities. We become objects of speed, under what I call ‘accelerated subjectification’: a mode of governmentality profoundly different from prior political economies of power. Other modes persist and coexist (e.g., the visible mode, the panoptic mode), but something significant is lost. Contemporary civil power has itself deterritorialized. The desire to be nowhere replaces the desire for omnipresence. The removal of the individual by the digital is indicative of the flight from the body into the pure circuit.¹⁴² Electromagnetic perception replaces biology in the race for speed-efficiency. “All the qualities of the body are transferred to the machine.”¹⁴³ The project envisioned by Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, and Bacon before them, is realised as man is identified with the motor.¹⁴⁴ At its most ‘advanced’ (derived primarily from military application), the boundary between accelerated subjectification and what we may call ‘accelerated disappearance’ (the absolute flight from reference, the hegemony of speed-space, escape velocity into the hyperreal) begins to fall. Disappearance becomes the locus of power, and its index. Whole societies mirror the logic of nuclear deterrence in a process of ‘absolute colonization’. Perhaps beyond speed, we may say that modes of disappearance have emerged as the motors of (post)history.¹⁴⁵ To update Giedion, it is not mechanization that takes command, but rather command that is mechanized to the point of the absence of reference. Real time governmentality takes over, both at the level of the social and the individual.

Pedestrian man passes into the realm of passivity, becoming, in Virilio’s words, no more than a ‘digital transfer machine’.¹⁴⁶ “[W]ith real time technologies, real presence bites the dust.”¹⁴⁷ We are witness to the simultaneous despatialization and chronopoliticisation of subjectivity, an anaesthesia of consciousness and reduction of will to power to the will to zero.¹⁴⁸ As Lewis Mumford warned, ‘not merely space but man shrinks’. Intensive time displaces extensive dimension. For Virilio it is clear that the basis of this radical negation has been the fascination of Occidental culture with vision, and the modern ‘synergy of eye and motor’. For Virilio we must add the ‘third dimension’ (light) to our analysis of subjectivity, and interrogate the relationship between perception and intensity (speed). Only in politicising the reality principle in this way may we gain any purchase on the disappearance of man behind the motor and lens of the vision machine. “[T]he mystery of speed remains a secret of light .. perpetually hijacking the subject from any spatial-temporal context.”¹⁴⁹ In a complementary statement, as Jean Baudrillard has written: “Ours is rather like the situation of the man who has lost his shadow: either he has become transparent, and the light passes right through him or, alternatively, he is lit from all angles, overexposed and defenceless against all sources of light. We are similarly exposed on all sides to the glare of technology, images and information, without any way of refracting their rays; and we are doomed in consequence to a whitewashing of all activity .. ”¹⁵⁰ Mediatization entails not only the attack on the objectivity of the individual but more generally an attack on all sites of reference and permanence. The ‘motor revolution’ that has cleared the path for the arrival of a new form of blindness that is simultaneously a precondition for the legitimation of acceleration. As Virilio describes, we can no longer perceive the movement of history, and its relative speed.¹⁵¹ Our disappearance of perception becomes the ultimate offence, the ultimate coup d’etat.

In summary, Foucauldian ‘governmentality’, in focussing on space and time as techniques of governance, provides a key reading of the geology of globali[z]ation. I have attempted to chart a ‘microphysics of power’ focussing on the imperatives of global orientation and rapid adaptation in the context of late-modern reflexivity. Implicit to the analysis is that genealogy as a mode of investigation provides for the study of globali[z]ation an ‘immanent critique’ of how power intervenes in the translation of discourse into action, and action into subjectification. Yet we need to travel further. We are already some way from Foucault’s initial concern with the normalisation and codification of discourse. In maintaining the momentum we are able to move deeper into the analysis of how globali[z]ation mobilises, as much as it immobilises. One means by which to understand mobilisation, both at the level of the individual and the bio-politics of whole societies, is to focus on the notion of myth.

In doing so we are asking directly questions that are too frequently misplaced, concerning for example, the links between individual appropriation and societal processes of transformation, and how these interact historically with the state, interstate, world, and transworld, in the context of subjectivity, praxis, and inertia.

IV: GLOBALI[Z]ATION AS MYTHO-POLITICS

In accelerated subjectification we find a new manifestation of governmentality. The question then becomes, What are its modes of legitimation? Allow me to return briefly to dromology.

As outlined in the previous section, the key to understanding the geology of globali[z]ation is to understand the nexus of acceleration and reflexivity. Yet within this nexus we do not find two equal forces. It is the pursuit of absolute speed that is in command. It is acceleration that has changed the nature of reflexivity, and of self-organisation. It is acceleration that has altered our perceptions of space and the location of history, politics and subjectivity. It is acceleration that has driven late modernity to its ‘escape velocity’.¹⁵² To understand acceleration is to understand globali[z]ation, and the means by which the concept itself has become self-fulfilling. It is speed that is central to the archetypical Baudrillardian movement: the passage into hyperreality and simulation. Societies orientate themselves to the imaginary referent rather than to a manifest condition. Indeed, the concept replaces the ‘reality’ in endless reproduction and message intensification. I argue that the concept of myth is useful in capturing the complexity of the links between discourse, power, and speed. Myth is the ‘vehicle’ to specific translation.

Genealogy, myth, history

I employ, therefore, a specific conception of the nature and role of myth. First, myth is not ‘irrational’. Per contra, ‘myth’, as I use it, is a form of hyper-rationality. Second, myth does not mean ‘untruth’.¹⁵³ True myth: “ .. presents its images and its imaginary actors, not with the playfulness of fantasy, but with a compelling authority.”¹⁵⁴ Third, myth does not oppose modernity. Modernity has its own exclusionary, powerful, and quasi-religious myths.¹⁵⁵ Indeed, as Blumenberg has argued: “That the course of things proceeded ‘from mythos to logos’ is a dangerous misconstruction .. ”¹⁵⁶ Myth is not merely something borne only in pre-modern theology. Emancipation from divinity (the Death of God), has not reduced the pervasion of myth. In the picture that I seek to uncover, myth is basic to the human condition, pervading all societies, so that: “Historically we find no great culture that is not dominated by and pervaded with mythical elements.”¹⁵⁷ Yet this need not imply a crude form of structuralism. Nietzsche shows the way.

For Nietzsche, myth was an overt aestheticising and ordering of the world. The ‘prison house of language’ prevents the direct experience of reality, structuring as it does cognitive activity and conceptualisation. Language appears grounded in the world, in nature while myth does not. Myth is clearly a cultural product (hence we can conceive of genealogies of myth). Here lies the point. Myths for Nietzsche are culturally specific rationalities (hence in this instance, I argue that ‘globali[z]ation’ is conceptually particular to the way in which the subjectification of globality has been accelerated in the central world political economy). This does not necessarily contradict the view that myth itself is a ubiquitous feature of human organisation. One might argue therefore that certain continuities exist between the specifics of the invention and mutation of myth, and previous forms of language, logic and discourse, which if nothing else provide the framework against which particular myths emerge or erupt.

With these qualifications in mind, I want to introduce the political philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. In Cassirer we find the first systematic interrogation of the links between language, symbolism, culture and technology, and the centrality of mythical thought in the contemporary world. ‘Symbolic forms’, he argues, function as techniques of ordering, setting the parameters of knowledge and identification.¹⁵⁸ For Cassirer, myth in particular was to be seen as ‘permanent’. There is no danger, he argues: “ .. that man will ever forget or renounce the language of myth. For this language is not restricted to a special field; it pervades the whole of man’s life and existence.”¹⁵⁹ Cassirer, therefore, shared the insights of Schelling and Goethe, amongst others. Here, it was argued that: “ .. language, poetry, art, religion, even metaphysics and science are in their origin bound up with mythical elements and interpenetrated with mythical imagination.”¹⁶⁰ This was contrasted with the philosophers of the Enlightenment for whom myth was of the lowest rank. In the modern episteme the triumph of reason was taken to entail the defeat of myth. Man was deemed to have passed from the ‘age of magic’ (homo magus) to ‘the age of technics’ (homo faber). Cassirer questions this simplistic notion. “Myth”, he writes: “ .. is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity.”¹⁶¹

In Cassirer’s later, overtly political writings, his focus shifted from symbolic forms to ‘modern political myth’ (in particular the ‘myth of the state’). In doing so Cassirer added to the Romanticist notion of ‘myth’ a role for political action. For Cassirer, myth itself had transformed. No longer operative exclusively in the realm of the ‘unconscious’, Cassirer saw in modern political myth a form of thought that could be regulated and organised: “ .. adjusted to political needs and used for concrete political ends.”¹⁶² ‘Magic’ had been fused with ‘technic’ in a heady mix of ‘deep human emotions’ and ‘social passions.¹⁶³ In another sense however, myth was something more. As Cassirer describes: “Myth cannot be described as a bare emotion because it is the expression of emotion. The expression of a feeling is not the feeling itself – it is the emotion turned into an image. This very fact implies a radical change. What hitherto was dimly and vaguely felt assumes a definite shape; what was a passive state becomes an active process.”¹⁶⁴ Defined by Cassirer as the ‘technique of myth’, this mode of mobilization is similar to the meaning I put to ‘appropriation’. The modern political myth was for Cassirer awakened residual energy (‘myth according to plan’). In this sense, even though the myth itself may be ‘irrational’, the technique of myth is “completely ‘rationalised’.”¹⁶⁵ The production of myth is controlled through the setting of what constitutes knowledge. The modern political myth, therefore, unlike systems of despotism, or religious struggles of consciousness, works beyond ubiquity. As Cassirer argues, the ‘myth of the twentieth century’: “ .. did not begin with demanding or prohibiting certain actions .. [but] .. undertook to change the men, in order to be able to regulate and control their deeds. The political myths acted in the same way as a serpent that tries to paralyse its victims before attacking them. Men fell victims to them without any serious resistance. They were vanquished and subdued before they had realised what actually happened.”¹⁶⁶

In a similar way to Foucault’s conception of governmentality, myth is a dialogue, a circular. Myth does not dominate the ‘subject’, because myth is part of the subject. This is not to say that forms of subjectivity do not operate. Per contra, the forms of subjectivity inherent to myth are more precise for their being from ‘within the object’. As technologies of the self, myths, in this sense, pervade a multiplicity of social practices and experience. Myth sets the ‘limits of the possible’. In a Gramscian sense, myth becomes an ‘historical necessity’ to which social formations react. These limits are not ‘fixed and immutable’, but rather in constant movement, existing temporarily within the context of a given social structure of accumulation, truth, power, and ethics. The modern political myth is a labyrinth of metaphysical meanings, contradistinctions, truisms and meta-beliefs. A knowledge, therefore, of: “ .. what the myths contain in the way of details which will actually form part of the history of the future is .. of small importance; they are not astrological almanacs; it is even possible that nothing they contain will ever come to pass .. ”¹⁶⁷ What is important to the study of myth is effect. Social myth mobilises popular consciousness, engineering emotion, fever, and the will to power. For Sorel: “ .. myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present .. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important .. ”¹⁶⁸

I argue that several elements of this analysis are mirrored in what I understand to be a third configurational sphere in the context of late modernity: ‘mytho-politics’. Three elements are central to my analysis. First, the proliferation of techno-economism. Second, the use of the image of the globe as icon. Third, the centrality of historicism to contemporary discourse.

Techno-economism

As Hoogvelt and Yuasa have argued, the creation of the ‘global’ is dependent upon the institutionalisation of new forms of social identification: “ .. a common world of understandings; a shared universe of meanings. Common myths have to be made, common stories have to be told.”¹⁶⁹ What better common story than than the techno-rational myth of globali[z]ation? “A powerful force .. ” writes Theodore Levitt, “ .. drives the world toward a converging commonality, and that force is technology.”¹⁷⁰ Held as the root logic of world development, the discourse of technology creates the preconditions of globali[z]ation, and establishes its relation to speed. Bill Gates tells us that 21st century technologies will be about making the world easier. “From Antiquity .. ” describes Virilio, “ .. a progressive simplification of written characters can be discerned, followed by a simplification of typographical composition which corresponded to an acceleration in the transmission of messages and led logically to the radical abbreviation of the contents of information.”¹⁷¹ Whether its Bill Gates or Jack Welch the message is the same: in technologies of simplification we speed up the medium, and speed up the message.¹⁷²

“Today .. ” write Hoogvelt and Yuasa, “ .. and world wide, there is an all-out drive ‘to go lean’. This is not just a fanciful commercial gimmick but a struggle for survival .. ”¹⁷³ Firms ‘digitise’, individuals informatise, the whole city is ‘wired’ to the Internet,but there are deeper implications to ‘will to speed’. We witness the creation of a simulated world, faster than the analogue, the chemical. This world we imagine to be one of ‘information flows’, circular not linear, global not transnational. Indeed it is a world to which we may escape the bumps, corners, and zigzags of our material life. We surf the waves of the Net. We never see car wreck in cybercity (because perhaps, as Virilio has argued, everything there is an accident in any case). As we log-on to the virtual new world it is easy to forget that the ‘opportunities’ for personal freedom, instant leisure, sexual and aesthetic independence, are commodified (the economism of techno-economism). Not only is the power industrial as opposed to ethereal, but you need to buy the ‘hardware’, and rent the ‘line’. Thousands of new users jack-in every hour (or at least we are told). When they get there there is a virtual mall waiting for them. Ecash, virtual accounts, the aim is hardly to inform, but to convert signs into dumb idols. Spectacle has long replaced meaning. As Webster and Robins describe: “The information revolution is largely about promoting the image of capitalist enterprises and stimulating the consumption of its products.”¹⁷⁴peed has as its corollary price.” (Internet & Comms Today, 1995: 53).]

The more important observations concern what this may tell us about our interface with technology. The machine described by Spengler at the turn of the century was already becoming ‘less and ever less human’.¹⁷⁵ Institutionalised by a series of ‘world fairs’, and ‘world exhibitions’, the mystique of technical rationality, productivity, efficiency, paralleled an intensive rationalisation during the first quarter of this century, foretelling the extension of the motor to all social relations. “They weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more and more immaterial, ever less noisy.” For Spengler the art of the motor became a means for man to recentre himself in the Universe. “It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience is set in motion, silent and irresistible.”¹⁷⁶ This is precisely what we find in the discourse of globality. Limitations on knowledge (inside/outside, forward/behind, everywhere/nowhere) collapse as the world becomes a single no-place. We can all play God in a way indicative of the disappearance of the state and the replacement of civil panopticism with civilian ubiquity. It is in this context that we can chart the importance of the aesthetics of globality. The photographic image of the globe itself is testament to the final removal: the flight from the very earth itself. This alters irrevocably man’s relationship to technology, and to power.¹⁷⁷ Once man and machine are able to escape safely from gravity, everything can be ‘viewed’, and mapped. Where Francis Bacon marks the ascendance of modern scientific human ‘self-assertion’, NASA is the vector for a second, perhaps final resolution.

The age of the world picture

For Paul Virilio, the progressive negation of distance under the impact of the ‘last vehicle’ (optical informatics), is matched by the ascendance of new forms of visual illusion, aimed to recreate the loss. In this sense I argue that the use of the earth as an icon is of profound significance. Of course this has a history. Indeed the sphere as a symbol is linked to religion, science, sovereign authority, and myth as far as can be traced.¹⁷⁸ One the one hand we witness merely a realisation of the cartographic imagination that has fascinated travellers, geographers, and astrologers from Dicaerchus¹⁷⁹.], Hecataeus¹⁸⁰.], Zhang Heng¹⁸¹.], and Schöner¹⁸².] to Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Kepler, and Newton. To be sure, this imagination has enjoyed prior intensifications (in particular when the sphere was enveloped with the map of the New World in 1515). On the other, we are witness to something profoundly different, perhaps the clearest indication of spatial annihilation. Distance and dimension are obliterated as the earth is viewed from the moon.¹⁸³ “Everything I see .. ” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “ .. is in principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, marked on the map of the ‘I can’.”¹⁸⁴

More important perhaps, this mode of annihilation is based not on centralisation, but de-centralisation.¹⁸⁵ Heidegger once said that pictures of the earth beamed live from the moon were more frightening to him than the atom bomb.¹⁸⁶ If he were still alive we might guess that from sheer terror he would not be watching cable television, nor looking at billboards, nor browsing in bookshops, nor departing from airports, nor walking in shopping malls, nor reading The Economist, Business Week, TIME, International, or Fortune 500. Rather than being held only by those of authority and influence (militarist, dromocrats, merchants, clergy, diplomats, monarchs, scientists, mathematicians), the world picture has disseminated through society to the point that everyone is impacted. The image of the world passes down the bandwidth at the speed of light. One wonders whether this data transmission is not indicative of a broader osmosis whereby not only the globe but our very ‘world’ has become an archive open for instant retrieval. “We are exposed .. ” writes Baudrillard, “ .. to the instantaneous retransmission of all our facts and gestures on whatever channel.”¹⁸⁷ Perhaps the image of the world is the icon not of annihilation (and hence control), but of disappearance (and hence alarm).

And indeed we find this played out as the modern drama. Observation satellites, complex geographical centres, the placing of a man on the moon, and the global-imagery of the global corporation, all create the illusion of mastery.¹⁸⁸ On the other hand, the image of ‘(mother)earth’, or the globe as the corporate challenge, foretells the deep sense of anxiety of late modernity.¹⁸⁹ The conceptual shift from ‘international’, ‘multinational’, and ‘worldwide’ fundamentally depended upon the emergence of this tension as a nexus of orientation. In the July-August, 1969 issue of the Harvard Business Review, U.S. based Ashland Oil and Refining Company run an advertisement entitled ‘The View from Outer Space’, complete with an image (courtesy of NASA) of the earth from 23,300 miles.¹⁹⁰ The words beneath the image ask: “Who can fail to be moved by the photograph of our earth – this great globe upon whose surface we dwell – taken from outer space? We gaze downward through the lens and from the vehicles of technology, seeing our planet from the perspectives provided by science.”¹⁹¹ The image has nothing to do with the functions of the corporation, but that is no matter. Up until this point, despite the popularity of figures like McLuhan, the terminology of ‘the global’ had not yet caught on.¹⁹² This visual event scene marks a point of departure in transworld relations, en route to the inevitable collision of annihilation and disappearance.

Globality and late modern historiography

A third mythic element to globali[z]ation concerns its teleology and historicism. Polanyi’s assertion that the creation of the ‘market economy’ required the creation of a ‘market society’ is as relevant to globali[z]ation as it was to the 19th century. His vision of the ‘satanic mill’ is mirrored in contemporary accelerated subjectification. The preconditions of ‘market society’, Polanyi argued, were the creation and institutionalisation of ‘economic man’ (the negation of the social status of the human being), and massive state intervention (continuous and centrally organised). Social space existed in the market, the future of order in the self-regulating political economy. We might say that these preconditions have already been radicalised under globali[z]ation. Rather than the hegemony of productionist ‘homo economicus’, we have now the hegemony of circulationist ‘homo-globus’. As for the state, in one sense the reconstruction of the market infrastructure has driven intervention.¹⁹³ In a deeper sense, however, this has itself been radicalised, as state power has diffused in a series of icons, messages, imperatives, and disappearances. Social space is replaced by zero space (globality). The self-regulating political economy is radicalised in the ascendance of the chronopolitical. Legitimation is afforded through teleology.¹⁹⁴

And few arguments are more teleological (or mythical) than Fukuyama’s version of the ‘end of History’. Described by Beck as ‘the mad joke’, for Fukuyama: “The enormously productive and dynamic economic world created by advanced technology and the rational organization of labor has a tremendously homogenising power. It is capable of linking societies around the world to one another physically through the creation of global markets, and of creating parallel economic aspirations and practices through a whole host of diverse societies.”¹⁹⁵ The teleology is both galvanising and indicative. As was demonstrated in the 1960s with the ‘end of ideology’, and McLuhan’s ‘global village’, or in the 1920s with Spengler’s ‘decline of the West’, teleology always holds a deep fascination. People love to think that something has begun or ended in their lifetimes, that they have been witness to a defining moment in history.¹⁹⁶ And of course, teleology is in itself founded upon a relationship to acceleration. As Popper describes: “Every version of historicism expresses the feeling of being swept into the future by irresistible forces .. Contrasting their ‘dynamic’ thinking with the static thinking of all previous generations .. [the modern historicists] .. believe that their own advance has been made possible by the fact that we are now ‘living in a revolution’ which has so much accelerated the speed of our development that social change can now be directly experienced within a single lifetime. This story is, of course, sheer mythology.”¹⁹⁷ Not that this is unique to contemporary theoreticians. Tommaso Campanella during the 16th century embraced physics, astronomy, and technology in the belief that the: “ .. coming age would have more history within a hundred years ‘than all the world had had in the four thousand years before’.”¹⁹⁸ He was more or less correct, though it was not inevitable.

Yet beneath the seduction, does not the longing for the historical event belie a deep sense of anxiety? Reading Fukuyama and Spengler in conjunction, one is inevitably reminded of Nietzsche’s assessment of Occidental reason. “The fanaticism .. ” he writes, “ .. with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was at peril, one had only one choice: either to perish – or be absurdly rational .. ”¹⁹⁹ Absurd rationality, the fall of a civilisation, the desire to live ‘after the orgy’, all are understood in precision by contemporary political technicians. The millennium, writes Cassirer: “ .. is predicted over and over again.”²⁰⁰ The faith in globality is in one sense no more than the contemporary playing out of what Eric Voegelin described as the basis of ideological consciousness (civilizational crisis). This disorder, Voegelin argued was a reaction to the decentering of man in Greek philosophy and the Old Testament. A tension was created between philosophical consciousness (the ‘turning around of the soul’ toward ‘transcendent reality’), and ideological consciousness (the turning away from transcendent reality toward the contingency of human existence, e.g., productive relations, historical progress, scientific rationality, the will to power).²⁰¹ Two sets of reactions are discernible. On the one hand, celebration of the ‘Kingdom of God’ and the promise of salvation (metastatic faith and parousiasm). On the other, rejection of the Gods, or (modern) attempts to perfect the ‘estate of man’ (Promethean revolt and ideological consciousness).²⁰² Common to both reactions is teleology: the fundamental symbolic continuity that Voegelin argued existed between disordered consciousness across time, whether the Christian telos of ‘approaching Kingdom’, Hegelian ‘end of History’, or Marxian ‘realm of freedom’. Teleology was the platform for the rise of scientism to the exclusion of metaphysics (the alleged triumph of rationality over myth).

The dream of the ‘information society’ is part of the same telos. Described by Hermano as: ” .. the most total revolution that the human race has witnessed since the Industrial Revolution.”, one is reminded of Blumenberg’s notion of the ‘breathing space’, where reason is employed in the struggle against biology and uncertainty.²⁰³ Myth creates the ‘distance’ that allows self-assertion to develop. For Blumenberg then, the dichotomy between rationality and myth found both in modern foundationalism and Romanticist critique is overstated.²⁰⁴ To the extent therefore, that Blumenberg describes the nature of the modern foundationalism in light of this new understanding of the nexus of reason and myth, we can also question techno-rational teleology, and understand more fully the ways in which science, technology, and reason have established their dominance through the appropriation of myth. In a sense Blumenberg’s attempt to establish ‘the legitimacy of the modern age’ is a description par excellence of the means by which the modern age legitimates itself.²⁰⁵ In technology we have simply found new ways to ‘work on myth’. As Virilio has argued: “People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God .. All technologies converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a Deus ex Machina, a machine-God.”²⁰⁶ We will have realised the ‘multiplied man’, constructed for an ‘omnipresent velocity’, described with adulation by Marinetti at the turn of the century. “Speed finally gives to human life one of the characteristics of divinity: the straight line.”²⁰⁷

V: FORGET GLOBALI[Z]ATION

The final metaphor that I want to develop to capture the collision of reflexivity, speed, and myth, is drawn from Gilles Deleuze: the ‘society of control’. Here Deleuze’s vision can be contrasted to that of Foucault. For Foucault, the basis of ‘disciplinary society’ is rhythm, routine, practice and repetition. For Deleuze something deeper has been enacted. In a sense, for Deleuze, the whole of society becomes the asylum, where identities are lost and reassigned, where electrotherapy domesticates the unruly, and where the aesthetics of individuality are blinded by the ‘code’ of compliance.²⁰⁸ For Deleuze this is based not upon routine, but immanence. In what we might call ‘programmed society’, the time lapse between power and subjectification disappears. We are ourselves the means to our own acceleration. The new forms of control are for Deleuze (borrowing from Virilio) ‘ultrarapid’. From the dromological corporation to the informatisation of the school, the prison, and the hospital: “ .. it is the permanence of speed that creates the total peace, the peace of exhaustion.”²⁰⁹

No less for the academy, and those all too willing to adopt techno-rational dromo-discourse. The speed at which the concept of globalization is integrated in debate is both telling and foreboding. As a concept, it is teleological (which ensures simplicity). It is totalising (which ensures clarity). It is visual (which ensures transmission). It is rapid (which ensures satisfaction). It is authoritative (which ensures exclusion). It is inclusive (which ensures misappropriation). It is a last resort (which ensures its currency). It is misunderstood by many (which ensures its constant repetition). It is meaningless (which ensures its future). It is banal (which ensures its immortality). The problem of course, is that it is also real. Our conceptions of the world become ‘material’ both by naming the object of desire and driving the discourses through which production, social life, and the individual are ordered.²¹⁰ The very act of identification calls forth the subject, as well as affecting its dynamics.²¹¹ Prophesies of ‘sweeping transformation’ set light to the imagination. Constant repetition is the convincing mechanism, and a ladder to fast and loose analysis. Such is now and always the importance of conceptual precision. We must resist the ‘language-game’, and remember our constant and unending moral responsibility. As Bryan Appleyard, profiling Kenichi Ohmae, has written: “What he says undoubtedly changes the minds of powerful people and, thereby, conditions us all, like it or not .. ”²¹²

Before concluding with some remarks about the task of critical thinking in the current conjuncture, allow me to restate my thesis, this time in reverse. I argue that the current conjuncture is one of the immediacy of time. Having passed the threshold from disciplinary societies to programmed societies, the ‘transpolitical’ is no longer an overstatement but a discernible form. Central to this form is the geology of globali[z]ation. This geology draws authority from a powerful configuration of mythical thought. Underpinning this complex are two social imperatives: speed and reflexivity. These imperatives have developed in the context of the translation from concept to action of the discourse of globalization. This discourse itself draws authority from deeper historical shifts in the assignation of identity and the development of ‘technologies of self’. Specific fractions of capital have sought in the face of a discourse of crisis to appropriate these longer historical processes and channel them into a hegemonic project (the ascendance of neoliberalism). In this context, the historical withdrawal of the state could be presented as a logic of ‘global capital’. This discourse has served to mask the reconstruction of the nineteenth century project of the self-regulating society governed by the self-regulating market. The mode of state governance has shifted from the ubiquity of austere institutions to the disappearance inherent in the acceleration of technologies of the self. In accepting the discourse of ‘the global’, the academy becomes a ‘vector’ ensuring the transmission of the ‘new normalcy’.

Popular defense/strategic reversal

We have reached the end of our argument, but the question remains: what would a ‘counter-conduct’ look like? And in what terms should popular defence be framed? In many areas globali[z]ation has become so embedded in the norms, behaviour, values, and popular culture of central accumulation as to be almost overwhelming. But the deeper questions concerns our very orientation to the philosophical/metatheoretical task. What value, we must ask, in mobilising a counter discourse? As Derrida would argue, it is in following the logic of binaries that we have found ourselves in the context of Western rationalism. The question then spirals to the inevitable, and misplaced, standard criticism of poststructuralism: that it removes the means to action by removing the seduction of rationality. As Blumenberg describes: “With the coup de main of negation – which is thoroughly contingent element in logic, since a kind of thinking that would lack negation is at least conceivable – all that reason has left open to itself, in each case where something is given, is to think of it as nonexistent, as totally different.”²¹³ Perhaps, however, we can think of a third, fourth, or nth way.

We might take solace in Foucauldian genealogy. Defined as an ‘attitude’ or ethos’: “ .. the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”²¹⁴ Per contra, Baudrillard would no doubt advise us to misread the world, to make mistakes, to adopt a ‘delusional standpoint to the world’ in the pursuit of ‘fatal theory’. This might entail, in Derridean terms, reinstating the impossible in order to retain creativity in philosophy and politics. On the other hand it may mean the constant invention of radical horizontalism, becoming, in Deleuzian terms, ‘desiring machines’.²¹⁵ Alternatively we might invent our own dance as a mix of all three. Then of course comes the question of praxis. For we should be in no doubt that these are real strategic issues that one way or another demand a form of reasoning constrained by the tyrannies of reflexivity and acceleration that surround us. So we go back to genealogy, we go back to schizoanalysis, we go back to dromology, we go back to fatal theory in the attempt by all means possible to politicise our situation. The problem lies in the attempt to turn ‘technologies of the self’, in the way foreseen by Foucault, on their own heads as means of resistance. Above all perhaps we should reclaim utopia, and resist the movement that condemns theory to conform to the limits of practice. Where better to witness this logic in motion than the teleology, fatalism, conservatism, techno-rationalism, and defeatism of the discourse of globali[z]ation?

As Lewis Mumford encouraged: “ .. the next move is ours .. Each one of us, as long as life stirs in him, may play a part in extricating himself .. from the domination of the pentagon of power.”²¹⁶ It is in reference to these struggles, to these responsibilities, to these unresolved tensions, that my first call is to ‘forget globali[z]ation’. My second call is to politicise all such ontologies, and place the historical micro-development of the modern subject at the centre of our attempts to comprehend transworld relations. Perhaps genealogy, dromology, and mythology in combination can offer new opportunities to recognise the profound de-territorialization and absolute chronopoliticisation of contemporary governmentality. This is the underside to globali[z]ation that continues to operate unrecognised. A challenge to techno-rational accounts is both warranted and urgent.

In the negative space of late modern politics we find neither the art of the possible, nor the dream of the impossible. A dictatorship of movement delivers the ‘art of the immediate’ – an instant power, and instant violence. We must politicise acceleration and the disappearance of duration. We must politicise subjectivity and the disappearance of the state. We must politicise space and the disappearance of expanse. Only then perhaps will we recognise the suicide drive of the ‘will to speed’, and head-off the next immanent accident.

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