Does anyone believe there is another way to steal a country?
— Eduardo Galeano

1. Summary

— The United States has committed and sponsored the crime of genocide in Iraq.¹

— Responsibility for genocide rests on specific intent and given or probable consequences of actions. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq was the culmination and intensification of a consistent US policy, spanning over 17 years, of destroying Iraq as a national and state entity.

— The United States attempted and succeeded to destroy the state of Iraq, but has failed and cannot succeed in its attempt to destroy the nation of Iraq.

— The Iraqi people have the legal right to resist occupation, colonialism and genocide by all available means, including armed struggle.

— The national popular resistance in Iraq is combating genocide directly where international law as a preventative and protective mechanism has failed.

— In defence of civilisation, people the world over should rise up in support of the national liberation struggle of the Iraqi people.

— In defence of international law, jurists and law associations should work to bring the charge of genocide against the United States, its leaders and its allies.

— The world must criminalise all forms of war. Defensive wars would not be necessary in the absence of wars of aggression.

2. Introduction

The illegal US invasion of Iraq was and is a humanitarian catastrophe. Some try to explain this catastrophe as a by-product. They justify their concept on the absence of intent. Reviewing applicable principles of international law and American policy towards Iraq, this paper aims to prove that the humanitarian catastrophe present in Iraq is an essential component of US policy, constituting premeditated genocide against the people of Iraq. The intent that some propose is absent is flagrantly evident.

Consequently, this paper constitutes a call to jurists, law associations, and individuals from all walks of life to act on ending genocide in Iraq. This study was made not only because of the horrid consequences of the illegal US invasion of Iraq, but to lay a basis for stopping imperial adventures and to enrich the political thinking of instruments that can save our civilisation.

3. Definitions

The prohibition and prevention of genocide is a peremptory norm of international law. No derogation is permitted: states are obliged, individually and severally, to prevent genocide from occurring and to prosecute perpetrators, conspirators, those complicit and those who incite it. When a crime is ongoing the duty of authorities to enforce law by halting the crime is of special urgency. Enforcing law means protecting potential victims and apprehending suspected perpetrators.

That the international community not only failed to prevent the illegal US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, but also supported what from 1990 has been a gathering US-led genocide in Iraq, is a catastrophic betrayal for the Iraqi people and an injury to us all.

The reasons are multiple and include: 1) Structural inequalities of power in world politics, epitomised in the UN Security Council, that assure domination for the few and subservience for the many; 2) Structural inequalities of power in the world economy, characterising capitalism on a world scale, that scare dependent states from speaking out on imperial crimes; 3) The general subordination of human rights to “peace and security” (i.e., pacification and impunity) illustrated in the perpetuation of a toothless, complicit and apologetic UN human rights system; and 4) The success of Zionist ideology in making the concept of genocide a synonym for “the holocaust”, thus both its own exclusive preserve and the model against which all alleged genocides must be compared.

The blanket of silence surrounding this grievous international crime contributes to the deaths of hundreds of Iraqis every day. If genocide cannot be prevented, the UN and its high ideals serve no function. At present nothing exists to prevent future atrocities on this scale or worse from occurring.

a) What is genocide?

Of all terms in the lexicon, genocide is the true word for what is happening in Iraq. The controversy the word elicits reveals its potential. Some warn against using the term so as not to “debase its currency”. This is a misunderstanding of what genocide means. Others fear that if used wantonly, antiwar protest may appear sensationalist. In reality, any other word for US actions in Iraq is dishonest.

Looking closer, we find that the word genocide has two lives: its common meaning and its legal substance. Commonly, genocide is taken to mean the total annihilation of a people. Nothing less counts, hence scepticism in using the word. On rapid reading, UN General Assembly Resolution 96 of 1946 authorising the drafting of a genocide convention suggests the same understanding: “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”² But this definition bears reading again, for it is not the fact of annihilation that constitutes the crime of genocide, but rather denial of the right of existence of an entire given group. This nuance is important.

Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention — now the legal standard³ — makes this point clear by focusing on the concept of intent, supplementing this with the important phrase, “in whole or in part”, thus grounding genocide not in numbers annihilated, but in the iniquity of a rationality that intends massively destructive consequences. This qualification is what ensures that the Genocide Convention is a preventative mechanism and not simply a reactive instrument. It also means that guilt is a moral determination.

Indeed, in origin the term itself — coined in the inter-war period by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish legal scholar — emerged from the effort to make “barbarity” and “vandalism” crimes under international law. It is intent to destroy that is the basis of the crime of genocide, illustrated in definable acts that constitute — or would — genocide.

Article 2 of the Genocide Convention reads:

Article 3 notes that punishable acts include:

From Article 2 a number of questions emerge: 1) what qualifies as “in part”? 2) What qualifies under each enumerated group? 3) What is the meaning of the destruction of an enumerated group “as such”? 4) What qualifies as “serious bodily or mental harm”? 5) What timeframe might “physical destruction” properly be determined on? 6) What qualifies as “destruction”? and 7) What is “intent”?

Given that the last question is the most important, I will address it separately below.

On the first question, though the convention itself simply says “in part,” which reasonably could be understood to mean one person (and indeed this is the way it is understood in the Elements of Crimes adopted by State Parties to the International Criminal Court, wherein, in Article 6 (a)-(e), corresponding to the acts enumerated in the Genocide Convention, it is simply noted that enumerated acts concern “one or more persons”⁴ … ), general jurisprudential custom deems it necessary to demonstrate that “in part” means a “substantial part” as, for example, stated in the United States Code.

Given that it is the United States that has perpetrated genocide in Iraq, it is fitting to use US Code definitions of the crime of genocide. Under Title 18, Section 1093 of US Code, dealing with definitions of genocide, it is stated: “the term ‘substantial part’ means a part of a group of such numerical significance that the destruction or loss of that part would cause the destruction of the group as a viable entity within the nation of which such group is a part.”⁵ This definition is nuanced, but arguably contains one element that may prove important in making the claim of US genocide in Iraq: the phrase “as a viable entity”.

“Viable entity” expands the qualification of what otherwise is often restricted to destruction as such: i.e., that the substantial part must be large enough to lead to the destruction of the whole group. Viable entity does not denote destruction — and certainly not physical destruction — necessarily. It simply denotes that the group would no longer function viably if a “substantial part” of it were destroyed or “lost”.

As to enumerated groups, US Code states:

The qualification “as such” in the Genocide Convention is an element of purposive specificity: that any of the acts enumerated are conducted against individuals as part of a group understood as a group as such. Thus one is obliged to provide some level of proof that: 1) the group was targeted as such (which can be established on the basis of a pattern of accumulated actions and not necessarily any stated objective or intent); and 2) the targeting of the group could be understood within the context of “specific intent” to perpetrate genocide, either of that group as such or, arguably, of the nation “within which such a group is part.”

As this paper aims to establish overall, a complex genocide has unfolded in Iraq involving the targeting of several definable groups in order to destroy a “substantial part” of the nation of Iraq “of such numerical significance” that the state and nation of Iraq would cease to exist a “viable entity”.

Strictly on the definition provided under US Code of ethnic group, the nation of Iraq as a whole would qualify (notwithstanding the category of national group), and within that nation, arguably, the Iraqi middle class and the impoverished Iraqi rural class. As a targeted “national group”, members of the Iraqi Baath Party, while political, may qualify. As a targeted religious group, it is clear that Sunni Arabs have been and remain, at present, the predominant target of the US occupation.

Finally, concerning what constitutes “serious bodily or mental harm”, what timeframe upon which “physical destruction” might properly be determined, and what qualifies as “destruction”, international jurisprudence and incorporations of the Genocide Convention into the national law of states varies. In some instances, specific aspects are named as to what might be deemed serious bodily or mental harm

Article 3 — as well as the focus on intent — indeed ensures that the Genocide Convention is not simply a reactive instrument to be invoked after a given genocide, but may be invoked before a single death has been recorded, particularly in section (b) where “conspiracy to commit” would appear to most strongly criminalise intent itself rather than the execution of that intent.

Reference to the crime of “complicity in genocide” also assures that the reach of the Genocide Convention is potentially very broad — in the case of Iraq, perhaps even criminalising the silence of the international community and responsible state leaders in the context of US actions that at the very least constitute — as defined by the Elements of Crimes of the ICC — the crimes against humanity of murder, extermination, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual violence, persecution, enforced disappearance and other humane acts, and the war crimes of wilful killing, torture, inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering, destruction and appropriation of property, denying fair trial, unlawful confinement, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, of excessive incidental death, injury or damage, of attacking undefended places, of killing or wounding a person hors de combat, of attacking protected objects, of destroying or seizing the enemy’s property, of depriving the nationals of the hostile power of rights or actions, of pillaging, of employing prohibited gases, liquids, materials or devices, of outrages upon personal dignity, of rape, of sexual violence, of starvation as a method of warfare, of murder, of cruel treatment, of torture, of taking hostages, of sentencing or execution without due process, of displacing civilians, and of treacherously killing or wounding, and which arguably constitute a pattern amounting to genocide.

In combination, from Articles 2 and 3 of the Genocide Convention we can conclude: 1) There is no threshold of genocide as such; rather, it is qualified on the basis of a determination of the moral degradation contained within qualifying acts that are conducted with the intent that destruction, or the rendering “unviable” of an enumerated group, whether in whole or in part, or substantial part, will be the consequence; 2) That genocide concerns an existential threat to a given group in intent, even if actual destruction of the group is not achieved; 3) That genocide also concerns the intent to annul the positive biological development of a group, whether by mental or bodily harm or by interceding to prevent propagation or disrupt social generation; 4) That intent alone is imputable under international law; and 5) That complicity with consequences that qualify as genocide is imputable under international law.

Once the complexity and flexibility of the operative articles of the Genocide Convention has been digested it is easier to understand what Lemkin opined when commenting on the incorporation of his concept into international law:

Lemkin’s prose definition of genocide is practically word for word what has happened in Iraq since 1990. The possibility of reading Lemkin’s definition into the Genocide Convention denotes that the convention is undoubtedly an undervalued instrument that could be used to pressure an end to US aggression on Iraq and potentially form the basis of reparative prosecutions. What is at issue, simply, is the burden of proof relative to specific intent, and substantiated argument relative to qualifying acts and enumerated groups “as such”.

Again, states are obliged, individually and severally, to prevent genocide from occurring and to prosecute perpetrators, conspirators, those complicit and those who incite it. After four years of US carnage and 13 years of prior US-UN sanctions, the antiwar movement, in connection with jurists and legal associations, has the material, expertise and organisational skills to ensure that this obligation is met.

b) What is intent?

Prosecution under the provisions of the Genocide Convention demands the demonstration of purposive or “specific intent”. Referred to also as the mens rea (“guilty mind”, “guilty or wrongful purpose”, or criminal intent), specific intent usually, though not always, must infer an understanding that the action undertaken would lead to the destruction, or rendering unviable, in whole or in part, or substantial part, of an enumerated group; that as such would constitute an unlawful act, and that the consequence is desired. It is perhaps fair that the gravest of international crimes sets the burden of proof so high, but in the case of Iraq it is not unreachable.

In criminal law there are traditionally five levels to intent, differentiated according to different degrees of foresight and criminal desire: 1) Purposive intent, where an unlawful consequence is foreseen, desired and planned for. In this category it is not strictly required that the actus rea — the given act or set of acts constituting genocide — is present, though if it is it adds significantly to the weight and charge of the offence; 2) Oblique intent, where simply the consequences can be seen as an assured outcome of a given act or set of acts; 3) Knowingly, where the accused knows or reasonably should know the certainty of the outcome of a given act or set of acts; 4) Recklessness, where the consequences are seen to be possible but the act or set of acts is undertaken anyway; and 5) Negligence, where liability is centred on a firm sense that the consequences should have been foreseen but where the accused did not foresee the consequences.

Purposive and oblique intent and knowingly undertaking a given act are all under the umbrella of “specific intent”, whereas recklessness and negligence are deemed “general intent”. In a sense, knowingly undertaking a given act within the framework of specific intent is akin to negligence in general intent, where both oblique intent and clear purposive intent could constitute the degree of specific intent necessary to secure conviction under the provisions of the Genocide Convention. On the other hand, recklessness might be deemed a grave disregard for human life, and thus constitute the “requisite mental element” required for prosecution under the Genocide Convention. Negligence would fail the test of specific intent.

Simply put, the argument that the occupation of Iraq has been one blunder after another is contrary to the elements of the crime of genocide, which perhaps explains its present currency in popular discourse. On the other hand, if it could be established that the consequences of US actions in Iraq were certain, or even that the US administration ought reasonably to have known, specific intent, and hence conviction for genocide could be established. Without doubt, if it could be shown that there was a strong desire — even undeclared — to bring about the consequences that constitute genocide, responsibility for the crime of genocide would be unavoidable.

In jurisprudence there are three essential categories for how intent is judged: 1) the objective test, where mens rea is imputed on the basis that any reasonable person would have had the requisite mental element in the same circumstances. Here the continuum between “inevitable, probable, possible and improbable”, related to projected consequences of acts, is explored relative to the specific circumstances of a given case; 2) The subjective test, where a given court must be satisfied that the accused had the requisite mental element, or either direct intent or knowingly undertaking the act, or recklessly undertaking the act; and 3) A hybrid of objective and subjective determinations. The essence of the act of adjudication is to determine the relation between foresight (or foreseeability) and desire for the given consequences to occur.

In time of war, “intent to destroy” may appear indistinguishable from warfare. This is not the case. While in restricted circumstances warfare may permit so-called “legal killing”⁷, in all instances it is governed by international humanitarian law. Not everything is permitted in so-called “legal war”. In the case of Iraq, all use of US force was and remains illegal under international law⁸; but at issue here is under what conditions might the use of force constitute “intent to destroy” as defined by the Genocide Convention.

In general, there are two conditions: 1) When the use of force is substantially disproportionate and indiscriminate (a determination based an assessment of the level of force necessary to achieve a military objective, and the extent to which the obligatory distinction between military and civilian targets has been observed in the action); and 2) When patterns of given consequences destroy — or could reasonably be foreseen to destroy — in whole or “substantial part” an enumerated group.

Relative to substantially disproportionate and indiscriminate force, as illustrations of the principle, the massive and overwhelming destruction of Fallujah, Tel Afar, Al-Qaem, Haditha and Ramadi, among other cities and towns destroyed, qualifies. In Fallujah, 75 per cent of the city was levelled. In the words of 1st Lieutenant Ben Klay, who took part in the decimation of Ramadi, “We’re used to taking down walls, doors and windows, but eight city blocks is something new to us.”⁹ Added to the illegal use of white phosphorus and napalm equivalent MK-77 in Fallujah and Tel Afar, these wilful illegalities reveal the mens rea of desire to destroy.¹⁰

Alternatively, the notion of “Shock and Awe” — 800 missiles raining down on Baghdad in the first 48 hours of a bombing campaign that lasted 300 hours — appears to declare outright intent to use disproportionate force, mortally targeting Iraqis as a national group as well as causing trauma and serious mental harm. As one Pentagon strategist boasted to CBS News, “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.”¹¹ This is also prime facie evidence of the mens rea of specific intent.

On whether the distinction between civilian and military targets has been respected and upheld, with credible studies reporting as many as 1,000,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since 2003 alone, a number that is increasing rapidly, US use of force would appear clearly indiscriminate.¹² Alternatively, the use of depleted uranium (DU) ordnance — about 2,000 tons to date since 2003, around 10 times what was used in the 1991 Gulf War — illustrates unequivocally indiscriminate and disproportionate force in that DU, which is airborne and waterborne, has a half-life of 4.7 billion years, causing sterility, cancer, leukaemia and birth defects, as well as rendering swathes of Iraqi land permanently lethal and unusable. Indeed, the United States has not only attacked living Iraqis, but also the unborn generations of Iraq.

Shuna Lennon makes an important point when stating: “desire to bring about the illegal result is not an essential component of intention, and that bringing something about because it is a means to a quite different end can be sufficient.”¹³ This illustrates the principle noted above of knowingly undertaking an act where the perpetrator claims either not to have known, or desired, the consequent outcome. In the instance of DU, it is simply unconvincing that US commanders could be unaware of the disproportionate and indiscriminate impact of its use. At best, it illustrates grave disregard for human life, and at worst oblique intention or direct intention. A strong argument could be made for the case of direct intent on the basis that many targets of US DU use are not military vehicles or other heavily armoured installations but rather civilian districts in Mosul, Basra, Samawa and Baghdad, among other towns and cities.¹⁴

On the other hand, specific intent can be inferred in the accumulated “pattern of purposeful action”. If the sum of the whole creates as a consequence the destruction, in whole or substantial part, of an enumerated group, and if these consequences are known or can be reasonably foreseen in advance, or even if brought to the attention of commanders mid-operation and ignored, this may be deemed genocide and mens rea specific intent. As Lennon states: “where a consequence is foreseen as a matter of moral certainty, intention can be said to be present.”

Ongoing attempts to impose a military solution on Iraq should be seen in this light, while the 13-year US-imposed UN sanctions regime that led to the “excess deaths” of 1,500,000 Iraqis is a clear example of “patterns of given consequences” where foreseeability was present and the policy continued, suggesting at the least oblique intention (which is sufficient for conviction on genocide in being a category of specific intent), but more plausibly — given constant US bullying in the UN to maintain the clearly destructive sanctions regime — purposive intent.

Sanctions also illustrate the principle of complicity in genocide. Lennon opines:

This conclusion formed the basis of Francis Boyle’s petition for relief from genocide submitted to the secretary general of the UN and other relevant bodies 18 September 1991. In this petition, after listing (paragraphs 5-18) the risks faced by the applicants of the petition (4.5 million Iraqi children), Boyle states:

Boyle’s conclusion is echoed in an article by Elias Davidsson wherein the relationship between “knowledge” and intent in international criminal law is discussed. Davidsson concludes:

So specific intent can also be established on the basis of reasonable foreknowledge of the consequences of a given action or pattern of actions; most especially when destructive consequences are identified midway into an action, or pattern of actions, and the concerned party fails to prevent these consequences, or continues to perpetrate them. In this instance not only are the consequences certain in and of themselves (oblique intention), and not only does the party know of them (knowingly undertaking a given act), but it cannot constitute reckless intent because the consequences are certain, not simply a possibility. It can only infer direct intent, or the highest level of criminal intent.¹⁸

Importantly, it would be for a court to decide if the pattern of consequences known and ignored or addressed insufficiently amounted to specific intent, not the individuals who perpetrated the acts. As explained by international law expert Roger O’Keefe, bodies like the International Court of Justice (ICJ) “can decide to convict on the balance of probabilities, rather than beyond all reasonable doubt.”¹⁹

In all events, it is unlikely that direct intention will be declared openly.²⁰ Jean-Paul Sartre in his essay “On Genocide”, written in the context of the Vietnam War, discusses the question of intent when direct proclamations are absent. His analysis is sentient in the context of the current occupation of Iraq and US attempts to break resistance to that occupation.

Cognizant that Hitler was an exception to the rule when it came to candour, Sartre writes:

Sartre’s understanding of premeditation is reflected in the Elements of Crimes of the ICC that stands as a legal reference point in developing definitions of genocide.²² This document contains illustrations of the kinds of conduct that would immediately qualify under subsections (a) to (e) of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention. Alongside intent is added “context”, which in all cases reads: “The conduct took place in the context of a manifest pattern of similar conduct directed against that group or was conduct that could itself effect such destruction.”

Indeed, a review of the strategic context of US Middle East policy, and Iraq policy specifically (see below), suggests that the 2003 invasion was but the “execution phase”, or “endgame” of a general strategy of destroying the state and nation of Iraq predicated on the premeditated destruction of a “substantial part” of the Iraqi population, rendering the state and nation unviable as entities.

As Sartre might say, the facts speak for themselves. In the words of John Pace, former human rights chief of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq: “The country has been blown apart in terms of its social structures and social fibre.”²³

4. Beyond law

Legal definitions by nature favour the exigencies of order. Ultimately, there is a second level — moral, civil and political — embodying the calling of common sense and conscience. While it is important, if the antiwar movement is to take up the term genocide, to understand in outline the legal issues, comprehending the broader context and its immediate manifestation is indispensable.

a) The genocidal logic of neo-colonial war

In his essay, “On Genocide”, Jean-Paul Sartre goes beyond legal definitions to place genocide as a “thing” in an evolving historical context. There is not one society that has not practised genocide, Sartre says, but the form that genocide takes is different relative to the nature of the state and states system from which it emerges, and the nature of warfare each suggests and produces.

From the 19th century, with the development of mass industry and the democratic evolution of bourgeois societies, Western states increasingly engaged one another in strategies of “total war”, entailing not only the industrial development of the machinery of war, but the breaking down of the distinction between the civilian population and the military, and the extension of competition between states into imperial acquisition worldwide. The logic of “total mobilisation” is the mirror of total war, in that defence of the nation becomes synonymous with defence of the “way of life” it expresses and embodies.²⁴ International laws — in particular the laws of war — are but a “vain” attempt to humanise total war.

Total war between “advanced” states, however, rarely becomes genocide. On the one hand, total war finds comfortable expression in industrial competition, only coming to actual war when powers reach parity that in duration blocks the dynamic of competition and wealth production that are based respectively in inequality and exploitation. More importantly, the general equality of advanced states forestalls outright genocide because of the possibility of retaliation it embodies.

A different logic exists in the imperialist process. Here there is no parity of forces, so no military consideration prevents wars of conquest from being genocidal. On the other hand, the colonial endeavour in nature, at least to some extent and not always, protected the populations of colonies from outright genocide. Colonialism is a system whereby natural resources are plundered and manufactured goods are sold back to colonised populations at world market prices. The destruction of colonised peoples undermines the very logic of that colonial exchange.

The problem is that, generally, no people can accept to be the slaves of others for long. Thus, constant massacres and torture were embedded in the colonial system, in order to keep the numerically superior colonised subservient to the colonial settlers. At the same time, the colonial system destroys pre-existing social structures; constituting genocide of a different kind and building pressures within the colonial system that ultimately break out in wars of national liberation. By the mid-20th century, bolstered by their experience as proxy armies for colonial states, and increasingly aware of the nature of the international colonial system, numerous former colonies seized their independence.

Neo-colonialism has been the response of the former colonial powers; on the one hand subjecting newly post-colonial states to an institutionalised system of unequal exchange, and on the other hand staking their existence within political frameworks that open the way to military occupation and re-colonisation. The Cold War was such a system, and the “War on Terror” is its successor. In general, neo-colonial wars are different because what is at stake in each instance is the example that must be set to all other post-colonial states: that the colonial relation did not end, but can and will be reasserted at will.

Principally, it is the instrumentalisation of international financial, economic and political relations that allows for neo-colonisation. Such was the role of the UN sanctions regime and weapons inspections programme for Iraq. Only when the United States was assured there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was it possible to wage the war it had long prepared; only when it was certain that economically and socially Iraq was on its knees could it invade. The US war on Iraq is not the conduct of politics by other means in any classical sense, nor even a classical war, but rather a neo-colonial war: a war of liquidation, genocide and plunder.

Neo-colonial war is “total war waged to the end by one side and with not one particle of reciprocity.” And it is this inequality that — akin to colonial suppression, only greater — contains within it the logic of genocide.

Sartre writes:

Sartre clarifies the point by exploring the psychology of the colonial soldier in Vietnam:

In neo-colonial “wars of example”, especially — as in Vietnam — where the economic interests are minimal, the “innate contradiction” in colonial logic that once forestalled genocide (keeping the natives alive as consumers for industrial goods), no longer pertains. In this case, Sartre writes, “Total genocide then reveals itself as the foundation of anti-guerrilla strategy. And, under certain circumstances, it would even present itself as the ultimate objective, either immediately or gradually.”

This is not to say that the people aggressed have no choice. There is always submission. But submission is simply the revitalisation of colonialism, and as such is genocide by another name. As Sartre explains: “One cannot colonise without systematically destroying the particular character of the natives, at the same time denying them the right of integration with the mother country and of benefiting from its advantages … It naturally follows that the colonised lose their national personality, their culture, their customs, sometimes even their language, and live in misery like shadows.”

So the commencement of physical genocide is used as blackmail to force the aggressed to accept another genocide. Here “substantial part” loses all meaning, for its annihilation is but a means to force the rest into submission. That the choice is posed between death and submission doesn’t stop the act from being genocide by intention. As Sartre writes:

Until submission: “villages are burnt, the population has to endure massive and deliberately destructive bombardments, the cattle are shot at, the vegetation is ruined by defoliants, what does grow is ruined by toxic elements, machine guns are aimed haphazardly, and everywhere there is killing, rape and pillage.” And not only the daily risk of death and environmental destruction, but also “the systematic destruction of the economic system, from the irrigation ditches to the factories of which ‘there must not be a brick left upon another brick’; destruction of hospitals, schools, places of worship, consistent effort towards wiping out [national] achievements.”

After submission: “most elementary needs are ignored. There is under-nourishment and complete lack of sanitation. The social structure is destroyed … family life no longer exists. As the homes are broken up, the birth rate diminishes; all possibility of cultural or religious life is abolished. Even work that will improve the standard of living is denied … The elder sister or the young mother, without a breadwinner and with so many mouths to feed, sinks to the utmost degradation in prostitution to the enemy.”

In reality, neo-colonial strategy presents the aggressed population with one choice: resistance or collective death or disintegration. So long as it resists, it faces massive deliberate attacks or the possibility of extinction in an overwhelming genocidal campaign, while if it submits, it faces conditions of life that amount to genocide of another kind. Insofar as there is no choice except resistance and survival, popular resistance wages its struggle in the hope of debilitating the aggressor sufficiently enough as to slow him down and spark unrest within his domestic population, while not overly provoking him into launching an all out campaign of extermination. This cat and mouse war of attrition will last so long as a political solution is absent (i.e., the withdrawal of the colonial state) and so long as the political will of the resisting population remains firm.

From the vantage point of the neo-colonial state, either the aggressor “gives way, makes peace and recognises that a whole nation is opposing him,” or else, realising that classical colonial repression will not work, resorts — if he can do so without damaging his own interests — to “extermination pure and simple.”

The resisting population, on the other hand, can only choose resistance, as resistance — to the extent to which the full discharge of the neo-colonial state is avoided, and to the extent to which the effects of colonial terror “in its psycho-social consequences”²⁵ can be ameliorated — is the only possible path to liberty and independence.

b) Genocide by occupation

One can surmise that because this equation must be understood in advance, the very waging of neo-colonial war is genocidal in that success amounts to cultural genocide for the colonised, while failure presents genocide as a solution for the colonial state. A logic of genocide is inherent to neo-colonial war in all respects: in its duration in the face of popular resistance; in the tactics it must resort to in order to quell popular resistance; in the possibility of massive escalation in the face of popular resistance; and in the outcome if submission is achieved.

The principle of genocide by duration is currently exhibited in occupied Iraq. Under international humanitarian law, the United States as an occupying power is obliged to provide for the wellbeing of Iraqis. Yet so long as they are occupied, the Iraqi people, naturally set against the occupying power in resistance and embodying as such the continuity of the state, have no interest in pursuing anything but bare survival lest the situation of occupation become normalised.

This mode of resistance is illustrated well in how quickly sabotage, especially of strategic infrastructure like oil pipelines, took hold in Iraq following the onset of the US occupation.²⁶ Naturally, any resistance movement to occupation has an interest in making the occupation as difficult and as costly as possible for the occupying power. Given that US officials, in order to get American public backing for the war, stressed that Iraqi oil would pay to rebuild the country they would imminently destroy²⁷, oil production has been constantly targeted by Iraqis themselves in order to drain the pocket of the American taxpayer.

Thus it is not simply the incompetence, corruption and punitive mentality of the United States and its local proxies that explain why four years into the US occupation even basic services like access to water and electricity are debilitated. The overall level of reconstruction is held at zero not only as a collective punitive measure, but also because the Iraqi resistance prevents Iraqi oil from reinforcing the occupation or paying for America’s war of aggression. The $50 billion in Iraqi assets that the US seized along with revenues from oil possibly exported has funded no real reconstruction in four years. Money is used, rather, on military and police operations, sunk into political corruption, or funding propaganda campaigns.

It is in this context that the intransigence of the US occupation — its unwillingness to accept its defeat and withdraw — suggests additional genocidal intent. So long as the US occupation continues, the overall suppression of Iraqi wellbeing persists, development and life-sustainability impeded. Intransigence leading to arrested development augments the toll of excess deaths and the general psychosis experienced by those living in continual fear of imminent annihilation, and steals from Iraq, every day the US occupation remains, countless productive life hours and life years.

Given that the US must be aware that Iraqi reconstruction is impossible so long as it remains an occupying power, the fact that it remains an occupying power is further evidence of the US “knowingly” committing genocide, or, if used as blackmail and punishment, “purposely” committing genocide as outlined above.

5. The destruction of the Iraqi state and national identity

Sartre’s analysis of the dynamics of neo-colonial war reveals the inner logic, in the abstract, of genocide inherent to contemporary colonialism — a logic that appears to the fore in two circumstances: 1) Where the innate contradiction of colonialism, represented in certain economic interests primarily, is absent; 2) When popular resistance to colonialism takes the form of guerrilla warfare and the entire aggressed population appears as a target. If this is indeed the inherent dynamic, all that would remain to be done would be to expose as neo-colonialism US aggression on Iraq. It is already clear that in Iraq popular resistance has taken the form of guerrilla warfare.

In reality, US policy in Iraq amounts to and exceeds colonialism. Current US actions in Iraq are an objective attempt to destroy Iraq as a state and nation. In this instance, the genocidal logic of neo-colonial war has been activated on purpose and established as the ultimate aim. It has nothing to do with accident or incompetence, and even goes beyond reactive vengeance. It is the outcome of an entire global, regional and national imperative. Thus we must penetrate, before outlining how the project has been implemented, the core context of Iraq’s destruction as such. The strategic context for US genocide in Iraq gives us a framework through which to interpret events as well as fully appreciate the gravity of these events.

a) The strategic context for genocide

There are three primary sets of reasons why Iraq was singled out for destruction. These reasons, attendant to three levels of policy (global, regional and national), form a single overarching imperial strategy, each part interrelated and dependent on the others.

i. Asserting US geopolitical, global hegemony

Being “a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power,”²⁸ command of the Middle East and Eurasia region is essential to any bid for world hegemony. Until 1989, US global supremacy was thwarted by the Soviet Union. Though embedded in the Middle East region economically and politically, US control remained virtual, not actual. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, President Jimmy Carter summed up Cold War US Middle East concerns: “Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by the use of any means necessary, including military force.”²⁹ Already in 1979, spurred by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter had created the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), an ad hoc assortment of US forces designated for possible deployment in the Middle East.

In 1981, President Reagan added the “Reagan Corollary to the Carter Doctrine”, proclaiming that the US would not only use military force to “defend” Middle Eastern oil supplies from “external” threats, but would also use military force to maintain the “internal stability” of the region. By “stability” Reagan meant exactly what he said: the maintenance of the engineered status quo: the non-unity of the Arab Muslim world and guaranteeing the presence and superiority of Israel. Consequently, in 1983 Reagan consolidated the RDJTF as US Central Command. By late 1989, with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and with the Soviet bloc fragmenting, the United States was left unopposed in the most important geopolitical and geo-economic region of the world. Objectives long suppressed by the Cold War could be activated in full.

In the words of Henry Kissinger, “Oil is too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.” If this sums up US policy that until 1990 was covert, from the collapse of the Warsaw Pact it became overt. The 1990 sanctions regime, followed by the 1991 Gulf War, marks the opening salvo of a US drive for Middle East and Eurasia control that continues until now. History will prove or disprove the reasons of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Legally Iraq had no right to invade Kuwait, but the sanctions regime adopted by the UN Security Council, in its rapidity, severity and results, is proof that already in 1990 there was a premeditated plan to destroy Iraq, rather than see only an end to the Kuwait invasion. If containment was the strategic philosophy of the Cold War, in 1990 it became subjugation and substitution. Sanctions reached into the heart of Iraq.

Why Iraq in particular? In addition to being sovereign over the world’s second largest proven reserves of oil, its geopolitical position is the answer. Regionally, “Iraq is a crossroads. Its land provides the necessary route for Iran to access Syria, Jordan and the Mediterranean, and for Syria and Jordan as they look towards Iran and the Arabian Gulf basin. It is also the natural path from Turkey to the Gulf, and vice versa.”³⁰ Globally, Iraq is positioned in the centre between Eurasia and the Mediterranean. If the US was to control the global economy, it could only do so by imposing itself as intermediary between Iraq, Europe and China. As formulated by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney (then US defense secretary) in 1992, the imperative was “precluding the emergence of any future potential global competitor” by maintaining the “mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”³¹

By 1997, sanctions were not working. With Europe and China ever rising, entailing competition for access to oil for development, a group of ideologues, Zionists and corporate lobbyists coalesce and send a wake-up call to Washington.³² Named the “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC), gone now is the language of “new era of multilateralism” attendant to the “new world order”. America’s very future depends, the PNAC neocons said, on “full spectrum dominance.” Military “presence in the Gulf region”, reads a PNAC 2000 strategy document, should be considered “a de facto permanent presence.” As the PNAC indiscreetly admitted: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”³³

ii. US policy aimed to break Arab unity

With the end of 1991 Gulf War, it was evident, although having suffered severe casualties and the enormous cost of war, that Iraq had a large and experienced army, capable of defending its national interests. Throughout the Iran-Iraq War, and the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi army proved that it was an army of technicians in all domains. In addition, the unity of the Iraqi people behind its government against other regimes was evident. Iraq emerged as a defender of all Arabs against imperialism, Zionism and the Shah-inaugurated expansionist ambitions of Iran adopted by Tehran’s Mullahs in 1979. This situation was threatening for pro-American Arab regimes, for Israel, and all those afraid of a rising Arab nation hoping to pursue unity, economic independence, democracy and progress.

Since 1948, the US has attempted to break Arab unity in three principal ways: 1) Unconditionally supporting the State of Israel — an entity founded on theft and a war of colonial aggression on the Palestinian people — and bargaining US political favour on this predicate; 2) Balkanising the Arab world both at a regional level (the undermining of Arab solidarity) and a national level (conspiring to internally partition Arab states); and 3) Destroying Arab developmental achievements to pave the way for US corporate globalisation. These elements of consistent US Middle East policy are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Overall, the US goal has long been to ensure that the Arab world remains an “arc of instability” wherein the United States, through an ever-increasing network of military bases, can play the role of permanent arbiter and final authority, guaranteeing US global hegemony and securing by military force US national interests.³⁴

Washington’s use of the State of Israel as an offensive spearhead breaking into the Arab world is well documented. After every Israeli aggressive war on the Arab world its aid package has increased.³⁵ Before 1990, Iraq was the only Arab state sufficiently independent, as well as militarily capable, to be a counter-balance to Israeli colonial expansionism and to challenge Israel’s illegal occupation of Arab lands. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf States, Iraq was not dependent on the US for security or the general welfare of its population. This independence placed Iraq — especially after the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel — at the centre of the political system of the Arab world. While Iraq’s development was tolerated when involved in a never-ending weakening war with its eastern neighbour, its achievements quickly appeared contrary to US regional and global interests as soon a ceasefire was reached with Iran.

That Israel has long wished that Arab states be divided up into small ethnic and sectarian entities is well known. In his 1982 essay, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, Oded Yinon argued:

In his 1999 book, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, David Wurmser, current Middle Adviser to Dick Cheney, would echo similar ideas when advocating that the US intervene to create a “loosely unified Iraqi confederal government, shaped around strong sectarian and provincial entities.”³⁷ Wurmser in 1996, along with Douglas Feith (US undersecretary of defense for policy, 2001-05) and Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee 2001-03), both key neoconservatives, wrote for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu the strategy document, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”. Therein Netanyahu is encouraged to “re-establish” the “principle of pre-emption,” including removing Saddam Hussein from power, deemed “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.”³⁸

Yinon’s essay and Wurmser’s book echo the assertions of former Israeli Labour Foreign Minister Abba Eban that the “Arab East” is a “mosaic” of ethnic divergence.³⁹ Present plans to partition Iraq into three weak and conflicting protectorates are their direct progeny.⁴⁰ In Iraq, the current “political process” is not about stability, but the pursuit of war by other means, aimed to break up the state and sow conflicts throughout the region. In the words of Abdul Ilah Albayaty and Hana Al Bayaty:

That partition is even a proposal, given that none of the stated aims of the 2003 illegal US invasion suggest it, reveals that the US has moved consciously to fulfil Israel’s agenda and bring about precisely this outcome. The overall result: a strategic victory for the State of Israel; ancillary benefits for Iran as a second level proxy; and justification for permanent and expanding US military presence in the whole of the Middle East region.

The third arm of US regional policy has been to destroy existing Arab developmental achievements, undermining and destroying Arab states as viable entities while promoting corrupt, incompetent and repressive regimes that serve the interests of foreign powers. Rejecting this destiny, it is well known that of all Arab states, Iraq prior to 1990 had the most developed system of national education, healthcare and primary state services. On the basis of a nationalised oil industry and Iraq’s water resources, Iraq was able to achieve significant state and national development autonomous from foreign capital and thus independent of foreign influence, encompassing infrastructure, science, military advance, and social security. Sanctions targeted Iraqis as a people and state, not only the Iraqi government or army. Indeed, the regimen of punitive sanctions imposed on Iraq stands unprecedented in modern history, systematically destroying its attained levels of economic, social, political and military development and leading to an estimated 1,500,000 excess deaths over 13 years.⁴¹

Overall, these three aspects of US regional policy — breaking regional unity by instrumentalising Israel; Balkanising and partitioning Arab states into ethnic and sectarian entities; and destroying Arab development capacities — by design aim to ensure that the Arab world as a whole never attains the requisite social, political, economic and military development to take advantage of the enormous oil, gas and mineral resources over which by right it is sovereign.

Keeping Iraq in particular unstable is key to US strategic designs for the whole Arab region. In the words of Abdul Ilah Albayaty and Hana Al Bayaty, given Iraq’s median geopolitical position: “The slightest deterioration in relations between Iraq and any of its neighbours is automatically a setback for cooperation throughout the whole region.⁴² Michael Ledeen, founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and a key neoconservative, in 2002 unabashedly told the truth about US regional policy in saying: “Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia … The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilise. Creative destruction is our middle name … Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) … we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.”⁴³

iii. The US national emergency and corporate interests

The entire entity of the United States is on death row. The end of the age of oil is its execution order. Spending $200,000 a minute on oil, no system of life on earth is as dependent on oil as that of the United States. The consumer economy, which depends on oil and relative high wages, is the guarantor of the internal tranquillity of the US. Many core US industries — protected and uncompetitive, and based on high wages — would collapse if guaranteed supplies of oil were to end, upon which guarantees stable prices depend. With the collapse of industries, the consumer economy would be oversupplied. Prices would plummet and growth would disappear. Outside the national sphere, US corporate globalisation, exploitative in nature, depends on the US military machine, which itself depends on foreign oil.⁴⁴ As the eclipse of the age of oil approaches, these objective realities constitute a national emergency for the United States.⁴⁵

US economic vulnerability is not only centred on the supply of oil. The entire entity of the United States is wagered on the use of the dollar as the primary currency of oil transactions. The US long forced OPEC oil sales to be transacted only in dollars, establishing the dollar as the global currency of reserve. Indeed, the global oil industry is the guarantor and engine of the global dollar economy. Any alteration of this arrangement threatens to explode the illusion on which American economic prowess is built. If dollars were to flood back into the United States, hyperinflation would take hold, followed by stagflation as uncompetitive and protected industries collapsed. As consciousness of the approaching end of the age of oil sinks in, and as others powers — the EU and China — rise, this monetary consideration is a second level to the US national emergency.⁴⁶

By 1997, the PNAC understands well the twin levels of the US national emergency and commits itself to address it. Though the US-led destruction of Iraq has already begun, the signatories of the PNAC express concern that the US is resting on its laurels — they undertake to accelerate it. The PNAC announces its presence with a question and a warning: “Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests? We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge. We are living off the capital — both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements — built up by past administrations.”⁴⁷ Admonishing the then Clinton administration, the neoconservatives of the PNAC argue for significant defence and foreign policy spending, to curtail — with no irony — “the promise of short-term commercial benefits” threatening to “override strategic considerations.”

In 1999, Dick Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, the largest post-invasion contractor in Iraq, muses on the issue of supply: “by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? … While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies. Even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.”⁴⁸ By September 2000, despite their ideas receiving some heed, the PNAC is running out of patience: “Global leadership is not something exercised at our leisure, when the mood strikes us or when our core national security interests are directly threatened; then it is already too late. Rather, it is a choice whether or not to maintain American military pre-eminence, to secure American geopolitical leadership, and to preserve the American peace.”⁴⁹

Much has been said about the PNAC’s claim that the transformation in American strategy would be slow and frustrating “absent some catastrophic and catalysing event — like a new Pearl Harbour.” Many believe that 9/11 was the convenient trigger. In reality, the true Pearl Harbour occurs within weeks of this PNAC prediction being published. On 6 November 2000, Iraq began selling oil in euros, with others (Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Libya) threatening to follow suit.⁵⁰ Later Iraq converted its $10 billion reserve fund at the UN also to euros. In the aftermath of the 7 November 2000 US presidential elections, the Republican right faced the long-term national emergency immediately. If the oil economy were to shift to euros, the American economy would collapse. This is the context surrounding the deliberations of the Cheney Energy Policy Task Force in early 2001, whose conclusions until now remain classified.⁵¹

The two national emergencies had rolled into one: Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people were weathering sanctions while other states were circumventing them, slowing down progress in Big Oil regional ambitions; and President Hussein played the bourse card, threatening the entire basis of the American economy in one move. Iraq was the country that didn’t compromise and succeeded in firing missiles on Israel; it was also the country that used its oil for progress and that aided poor countries in Asia, Africa and the Arab world, As a country that could defy imperialism when imperialism was victorious everywhere, Iraq signed its own death warrant. It should die. That US Big Oil corporations would make a killing on stolen Iraqi resources was a bonus.⁵² The real issue was national defence — that is, defence of the system of life of a nation that consumes 25 per cent of the world’s energy resources while it constitutes 4.6 per cent of the world’s population, a system that creates 600,000 tons of garbage per day.

iv. A unified strategy of genocide

To truly secure US supremacy, Iraq would have to become the 51st economy of the United States. This could only suggest genocide. By no other means could the United States control what has been a geopolitical entity for 6,000 years and a bastion of Arab nationalism throughout the 20th century. By no other means could the United States seize from Iraqis their principle source of material and future welfare, imposing on their culture the idea of foreign ownership of the riches of the land. Destroying the Iraqi state would not be enough. To control Iraq, in its median position, necessitates destroying its Arab Muslim identity — erasing its very being as a nation.

In combination, the above represents the strategic context and motive — global, regional and national — for destroying the state and nation of Iraq. No single aspect can be taken alone; each supports the others. It is through myriad acts meeting these three broad strategic concerns that US “intent to destroy” Iraq can be traced, while the general cohesion of these three pillars of US strategy suggests “intended destruction” of Iraq as the logical conclusion of well-established US Middle East and global strategic policy.

Nothing in this “logic” can excuse its execution. Indeed, nothing in this logic is excusable. It is specific intent, not implementation that defines the crime of genocide under international law. Claims of “benevolent hegemony” that accompany US global plans are irrelevant. These plans in intent constitute genocide. US national, regional and global designs dictate the rationality embedded in military planning and thinking. Implementation is merely the mirror of the intent. And if, in the words of Morris and Scharf, “it is unnecessary for an individual to have knowledge of all details of the genocidal plan or policy,” the pattern of implementation is enough to infer the crime.⁵³

b) Implementing genocide in Iraq⁵⁴

Having understood the desire, or mens rea, the means, or actus rea, becomes easier to unravel. From the above, it is clear that the United States had reasons to desire — within its own logic — the destruction of Iraq as a state and nation. The means by which it destroyed the Iraqi state, and attempted to destroy the Iraqi nation, follow on from and accord to these reasons.

Specifically, the US has sought to: 1) Destroy Iraq physically and culturally, and principally militarily, so that it can never re-emerge as an economic, political or military force; and 2) Break Iraq as a state and nation, substituting the state with three or more conflicting and weak entities based on ethnic and sectarian affiliations that presage the destruction of Iraq’s Muslim Arab identity. These two objectives, if achieved, would allow for the plunder of Iraq’s resource riches, control of its median position in order to attain global pre-eminence, serve in the protection of the US’s offensive regional instrument and proxy, Israel, and erase the last official remnant of the pan-Arab nationalist movement.

This project of intended destruction — the legal substance of genocide — has been going on for 17 years. All together, the pattern of intent is irrefutable. It has led to an estimated 1,500,000 excess Iraqi deaths under sanctions, and as many as 1,000,000 excess violent Iraqi deaths since the US illegal war of aggression. By any definition, but also defined in law, this is genocide.

i. Destroying Iraq physically and permanently

The destruction of Iraq began with sanctions in 1990 and the 1991 Gulf War. On the one hand, the war was not to liberate Kuwait. It was the opening shot of a broader objective of destroying Iraq, entailing permanently destroying its military capabilities and civil capacities, in order to replace the Iraqi state with an unviable entity in need of constant US assistance, while breaking its economy in order to break the will of the Iraqi people and later plunder Iraqi resources. Under sanctions, in finance and economy Iraq became a ward of the UN Security Council, its budget managed by foreign powers, and with no end in sight.⁵⁵

This marks the beginning of the dismantling of Iraq as a state and nation. Ground invasion takes place when established policy proves unable to achieve its goals.

Francis Boyle in his indictment for crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide describes well the 1991 Gulf War and its intent:

The material destruction of Iraq didn’t end with the ceasefire that supposedly marked the end of the 1991 Gulf War. General Michael J Dugan, former chief of staff of the US Air Force, revealed the deliberations of the US administration when he stated in mid-summer 1991 that if another war comes, “We will bomb Iraq back into the Stone Age.”

In reality, in the post-Gulf War period Iraq’s defences were systematically obliterated by numerous US-UK bombing raids under justification of unilaterally imposed and illegal no-fly zones — first in the north, in April 1991, and later in the south.⁵⁷ Thus, contrary to what is usually assumed, the occupation of Iraq didn’t start in 2003; it started in 1991. If occupation is the situation that pertains when the territory of a state is put under the authority of a foreign military power — as defined by The Hague IV Regulations⁵⁸ — then Iraq from this time, in losing effective military control of at least two thirds of its territory, became de facto occupied.

The no-fly zone system also had an ancillary agenda: 1) It imposed a de facto division of Iraq into three regions that corresponded to a political agenda of partition⁵⁹; 2) Provided political cover for continuous targeting of Iraq’s military and civil infrastructure; and 3) Provided air cover for the US to gather conspiring opposition forces and for the US and Israel to train Iraqi separatist militias, which later would replace the national army.

Tied to UN sanctions, the UN weapons inspections programme (United Nations Special Commission, UNSCOM) presented Iraq with constantly shifting demands. The “100 per cent” verification order was technically — even according to former inspectors — impossible to satisfy. Aside from that, according to a 1999 article in The Washington Post, “United States intelligence services infiltrated agents and espionage equipment for three years into United Nations arms control teams in Iraq to eavesdrop on the Iraqi military without the knowledge of the UN agency that it used to disguise its work, according to US government employees and documents describing the classified operation.”⁶⁰ Similar allegations surfaced in 2003 that the UK leaked false information on weapons in order to use inspections as political cover.

Combined, no-fly zones and weapons inspections allowed the United States and its allies to bomb Iraq at will for 13 years in the pre-invasion phase. Under the cover of weapons inspections in particular, scores of factories, schools, chemical plants of a civil nature — indeed anything suspected even remotely of having a prohibited military function — were blown up or bombed.

In the name of the no-fly zones, the US and allies hit infrastructure, communication lines, defensive installations and numerous non-military targets, ostensibly all in the name of protecting the civilian population. While the US administration was telling lies about seeking a diplomatic solution to the “Iraq crisis” it engineered, Operation Southern Focus begun in June 2002, entailing intensive bombing below the 33rd parallel, ostensibly to “soften up” Iraq for invasion. In September 2002 alone, US air forces dropped 54.6 tons of bombs, one month prior to Congress authorising war.

With the ground invasion the military and civil destruction of the Iraqi state accelerated dramatically. With the massive air bombing campaign dubbed “Shock and Awe”, the Iraqi state — already criminalised, as the “repressive arm” of the Iraqi Baath Party — in every instance of its human and infrastructural form was a target. Conscious that its forces were unequal to those of the foreign invaders, and after the Battle of Baghdad Airport where non-conventional weapons were used by the US, the Iraqi army disperses, a substantial part going underground to pursue pre-planned guerrilla warfare.

The police like the population as a whole stays home. Militias entering Baghdad alongside US forces inaugurate the breakdown of law and order sanctions long desired, looting and burning down all public institutions (ministries, hospitals, universities, schools, museums, libraries, cultural institutions, etc.), unopposed by US forces who have been ordered not to intervene. Nothing of exchange value belonging to the Iraqi state is not stolen; everything else is destroyed. This policy of tabula rasa amounts to the effacement of modern and ancient Iraq. The result is a state of national shock and of preparation of the confrontation between the occupation and the Iraqi state apparatus that went underground.

Order #2 of US Civil Administrator L Paul Bremer will disband the national Iraqi army⁶¹, leaving 400,000 well-trained and experienced men with no immediate means of material survival and no legitimate national force responsible for defending Iraq’s population and territory. In addition to the looting of civil institutions, systematic looting of military installations and armories is organised⁶², all left unprotected by occupation forces allegedly on Iraqi soil to disarm by force the Iraqi state. Heavy materiel from national armories is either sold as iron or carried to the north. Army personnel are criminalised as Saddam’s “henchmen”.

Armaments, equipment and archives are destroyed or stolen, personnel killed or detained, and Iraqi military ideology — of being an army defending the unity of Iraq and the Arab nation — considered racial and sectarian. Iraq’s experienced and strong army, dating in origin to 1921 and which defended the unity of the Iraqi state and participated in the defence of Palestine, Jordan and Syria, will be replaced by Kurdish separatist and pro-Iranian militias. The task of the new army is not to defend the unity and integrity of Iraq, but to defend the occupation and its local proxies against the people of Iraq labelled “terrorists” or “Saddamists”.

Iraq’s territorial borders are left unsecured. Private foreign security contractors working as mercenaries, create a parallel system of fear and danger, operating free of all accountability to law.⁶³ The militias of sectarian forces brought in with the occupation begin to operate across the Iraqi territory. Simultaneously, a wave of assassinations targets pilots, engineers, scientists and military officers, with reports linking the killing to intelligence agencies of Israel and Iran suspected of circulating elaborate “hit lists”. With weapons being disseminated across the country, kidnapping becomes a threat to daily civil security, along with extortion and summary execution. Corpses quickly start to appear on the streets of Baghdad.

Parallel to military campaigns, from 1990 the US deliberately pursued a policy of weakening Iraq economically to be sure that Iraq could not recover from the systematic destruction of civil infrastructure during the 1991 Gulf War and again emerge as an economically developing country. UN sanctions, which prevented the free sale of oil from 1990 onwards, had a devastating effect on Iraq’s economy, and necessarily the majority of Iraqi citizens. The majority of Iraq’s working population in 1990 were employed in the public sector and thus dependent on oil revenue that prior to 1990 comprised 90 per cent of Iraq’s GDP.

Given that Iraq was a welfare state, the debilitation of public services affected all Iraqi citizens. Ostensibly eased by the Oil-for-Food Programme, which was based on limited sales quotas until 1998 and thereafter remained heavily regulated, sanctions continued from 1996 to devastate commerce and infrastructure.⁶⁴ The banning of “dual use” items even included paper.⁶⁵ Sanctions also would play a role in the de facto partition of Iraq: the northern Kurdish area, under the no-fly zone, was effectively exempted, allowing Kurdish separatists to flourish and entrench their autonomy from the central government.

One aspect of the package established by UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 3 April 1991 was the UN Compensations Commission that throughout the period of sanctions, when economically Iraq was crippled and when over 5,000 children were dying monthly, collated damages claims from the Gulf War and siphoned a third of Iraq’s oil revenues (restricted under quotas) to pay reparations. This situation is ongoing with claims amounting to $352.5 billion.⁶⁶ For contrast, when in December 1996, under the Oil-for-Food Programme, Iraq was permitted to export oil in return for humanitarian supplies it was restricted to an overall quota of $2 billion in oil sales every six months. In effect, Iraq had no means of sustaining itself, the total of its remittances from oil amounting to disposable revenue of $15 per Iraqi per month. Exasperated by a system they deemed “genocide,” Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck (both former UN humanitarian coordinators for Iraq who resigned) in November 2001 wrote: “The uncomfortable truth is that the West is holding the Iraqi people hostage.”⁶⁷

Upon invasion, US strategy in Iraq can be summed up in one phrase: privatisation by military force. Order #12 of US Civil Administrator Bremer enacted on 7 June 2003 suspended all tariffs, customs duties, import taxes, licensing fees and similar surcharges for goods entering or leaving Iraq, and all other trade restrictions that may apply to such goods⁶⁸; Order #17 grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from Iraq’s laws⁶⁹; Order #39 allows for the privatisation of Iraq’s 200 state-owned enterprises, 100 per cent foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses, national treatment of foreign firms, unrestricted, tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds, and 40-year ownership licenses⁷⁰; Order #40 turns the banking sector from a state-run to a market-driven system overnight by allowing foreign banks to enter the Iraqi market and to purchase up to 50 per cent of Iraqi banks⁷¹; Order #49 drops the tax rate on corporations from a high of 40 per cent to a flat rate of 15 per cent. The income tax rate is also capped at 15 per cent⁷²; and Order # 81 prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries.⁷³ The common worldwide practice of saving heirloom seeds from one year to the next is made illegal in Iraq.

The consequences are as follows: 1) A rise of unemployment to over 70 per cent; 2) Systematic plunder by multinational corporations; 3) Corruption on a scale unprecedented; and 4) The institution of two economic realities: the economy of graft limited to the Green Zone, and the non-economy of the rest of Iraq, known as the “Red Zone”.

ii. Substituting the Iraqi state and nation

In its attempt to destroy and substitute the Iraqi state and nation, the United States pursued two parallel tracks: 1) Demonising the Arabism of the Iraqi state, of the Iraqi Baath Party — a non-sectarian national movement of six million sympathisers — and Saddam Hussein; and 2) Promoting, funding and organising sectarian groups of the Iraqi opposition.

Kick-starting the policy of destroying the Iraqi nation defined as being composed of Iraqis, Bush Sr encouraged the rebellion of “Kurds” and “Shias” against the Iraqi central government in 1991 as the Iraqi national army was demobilising, implying that those who ruled them were “Sunnis”. In the words of Francis Boyle: “Bush encouraged and aided Shiite Muslims and Kurds to rebel against the government of Iraq causing fratricidal violence, emigration, exposure, hunger and sickness and thousands of deaths. After the rebellion failed, the US invaded and occupied parts of Iraq without lawful authority in order to increase division and hostilities within Iraq.”⁷⁴

UN sanctions forced Iraq, as both a state and a nation, into complete isolation. While President Saddam Hussein, and by extension the Iraqi Baath Party, was the main focus of relentless vilification, from 1990 onwards to be non-Kurd Iraqi was to be suspect. With the demonisation of President Hussein began the process in discourse that would undermine the very concept of Iraqi citizenship: the imposition of sectarianism in allegations, now questioned, that “Saddam gassed the Kurds” and “oppressed the Shia”, and ruled in the name of the “Sunni minority”. The Iraqi Baath Party, central to the operation of the state, was falsely cast as “Sunni”, repressive of Iraqi Kurds and Shias as Kurds and Shias — a canard that would later allow for the targeting of Sunnis simply because they are Sunni.

Covertly, and later overtly, the United States started funding sectarian militias and opposition groups. The US-sponsored 1992 opposition conference in Salah El-Din (on Iraqi soil, with US security guarantees — a blatant breach of Iraqi sovereignty) crystallised the ideas of what would replace the political regime of the Iraqi Baath Party: a sectarian division of Iraq, as well as sectarian quotas in government. A decade of unsuccessful attempts to unify that opposition on the details of carving up Iraq would follow. By 1998, US official policy, announced in the Iraq Liberation Act, became “regime change”, including official funding of sectarian opposition groups. Within a month and a half of the passing of the act, the United States launched a major bombing campaign across Iraq. Various plots for a coup d’etat were supported and funded by the CIA.

After years of conspiracy, the December 2002 London conference of the Iraqi National Congress (INC; pre-1998 funded by the CIA, post-1998 funded by US Congress, and headed by Ahmed Chalabi) agreed on what percentages each participating faction of the US-assembled “opposition” would gain in the sectarian quota system. Unable to replace the Iraqi state and its national movement without the Islamist “factor”, the INC London conference also crystallised an accord between the US and Iran on how to, and who would, replace the regime of Saddam Hussein: an alliance between Kurdish separatists allied to the US; pro-US Iraqi liberals (the INC and the Iraqi National Accord of Iyad Allawi); and pro-Iranian Islamists under Mohammed Bakr Al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).⁷⁵

This constituted body of US-approved spokespeople for the virtual constituents of Iraqi society — Shias, Kurds, liberals — would help justify the need in the media for a ground invasion and provide candidates for the first US installed interim government. Silenced are the Iraqi people as well as the 23 February 2003 London meeting of authentic Iraqi opposition forces who opposed the US agenda of illegal pre-emptive war and the interference of foreign powers in Iraqi national affairs.⁷⁶

The phase of “creative destruction” in the Iraqi political domain starts with, and is predicated upon, an unprecedented propaganda campaign directed at both international and Iraqi public opinion, based on sectarian vocabulary and virtual identities and predating the invasion. It reads: 1) “The Kurds have been gassed,” so should be protected and given special rights, presaging Kurdish succession and the fragmentation of the Iraqi state; 2) “Shias are the majority” — a baseless assertion given that no reliable census has been conducted — oppressed not only by Saddam’s regime but also throughout their history, the “democratic process” simply the harbinger of social justice; 3) “Sunnis are the criminals” and oppose the “New Iraq” because of loss of privileges and the power to oppress others; 4) “Iraq is an artificial creation” comprised of three homogenous regions: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the centre, and Shias in the south.

Inherent to this propaganda is a purposive blurring of the distinction between ethnic and sectarian identities: the Shias and Sunnis are not Arab or Kurd; Kurds are not Muslim, be it Shia or Sunni; and there is no such thing as “the Iraqis”, only a composition of Sunni, Shia and Kurd. All other components of Iraqi society — Turkomans, Assyrians and other Christians, and Yaziids and Sabbits — are purposely ignored.

The aim of this propaganda is to facilitate US destruction of the Iraqi state. The first order passed into law by US Civil Administrator Bremer, outlaws the Iraqi Baath Party in its entirety.⁷⁷ Immediately 100,000 able members of the administrative cadre are criminalised and disbarred from state employment. Silenced is the fact that 58 per cent of those targeted by the US-imposed DeBaathification Commission are Shias. In place of the dissolved state, the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) is drafted and imposed, legislating the disbanding of the army and the privatisation of the economy. Civil and political resistance to the occupation is outlawed, and civil and political resistance to US corporate privatisation is criminalised.

No one who does not endorse the TAL is permitted to participate in the “political process”, which itself is reduced to a competition between sectarian leaders. The whole domain of Iraqi politics becomes US-drafted. The US claims to know who represents the Iraqi people better than the people itself. The TAL, in effect, legislates the alienation of the Iraqi people from democratic politics. Violating the UN Draft Articles on State Responsibility, UN Security Council Resolution 1546 in June 2004 “welcomes” and “endorses” the formation of a “fully sovereign” interim Iraqi government as a stage on the road to an independent, democratic and federal Iraq, thereby recognising the consequence of an illegal state act — the invasion.

The following period of general repression can be split between two phases: 1) The imposition of illegal elections; and 2) The imposition of a permanent constitution based on the TAL. Across Iraq, the occupation attempts to create three de facto realities on the ground: 1) Northern autonomy for the Kurds with promises of generous representation in parliament, and the annexation of oil-rich Kirkuk, allowing the occupation to justify its “democratic process” and in turn instrumentalise Kurdish militias to suppress the Iraqi resistance; 2) The promotion of Islamist clergy in the south in exchange for Sistani’s support of the political process and his compelling fatwas for all Shias to participate in national elections; 3) The central region identified as Sunni and subject to waves of violence, urbicide and terror.

Ahead of and after elections, waves of violence and arbitrary detentions target Sunni communities. The vilification of the Baath Party and its assimilation with Sunnis deepens. Media sources speak of “Sunni terrorists”, “Saddam loyalists”, “The Sunni Triangle”, “The Triangle of Death” and “Sunni Al-Qaeda”, all presaging and constituting the destruction of Iraq’s unifying Arab Muslim identity and the very idea of Iraqi citizenship and nationality. This sectarian propaganda will directly play a role in later attempts to spark civil war, and will contribute to the enforced homogenisation of city districts and justify the erasure by military force of whole towns in predominantly Sunni provinces. That these provinces rise up in resistance in response to US military aggression is taken as proof that the resistance is Sunni, thereby sectarian and should be repressed. In order to achieve its goals, the sectarian occupation accuses the Iraqi people and its resistance of sectarianism.

The so-called “political process” is but theatre in which the public has no right to change the issue. While Iraq is under real and concrete illegal occupation; while political free expression is absent thanks to the deBaathification and the repression of Sunnis; while Iraqi citizens cannot prove themselves citizens because of the absence of registers — destroyed in the looting⁷⁸ — and state institutions; while the condition of participating in politics is acceptance of the TAL; while those who survey and organise the elections are well known pro-occupation propagandists; while the political process is under the occupation’s guns; while you loose your food ration or your life if you don’t vote as you should, how can anyone think that the result is the real expression of Iraqi people? The elections can be summed in an Iraqi proverb: “You choose a rabbit, I give you a rabbit; you choose a gazelle, I give you a rabbit.” The spectacle is organised to institute a divided Iraq.

Further, elections will be based solely on sectarian lists, the main lists benefiting from generous US funding and access to US-sponsored media. Fifty per cent of Iraqis will boycott, despite the price of starvation exacted for non-participation. In the new National Assembly, contradictory agendas ensure permanent instability. The “political process”, already stripped of legitimacy, cannot but further deepen the confrontation between the occupation and the Iraqi people. How can a permanent constitution be drafted by a parliament that does not fairly represent the population and fails — and cannot succeed — to ensure peaceful coexistence in society?

The theatrical elections and the political process are unable to hide the gap between the real Iraq and the real plans of the occupation. The real occupation is using military force to impose its model. The “political process” simply creates a clique working for, or accepting, the occupation’s plan of destruction for Iraq. As with the elections, the constitution in 2005 is passed at gunpoint by referendum. Based on the TAL, it legislates the destruction of Iraq as a state and nation. By its central provisions and blurred jargon it: 1) Cancels the concept of the united republic of Iraq; 2) Cancels the concept of citizenship; and 3) Cancels the concept of Iraq as an Arab-Muslim nation.

The draft oil law — the major plank in the strategy of plunder of the US occupation — if passed would contribute to the de facto partition of Iraq in shrinking the funding source of central government, as well as opening the way to foreign ownership of Iraqi oil. As set in the illegal constitution, the proposed Oil Law that until now cannot be passed, has two objectives: 1) To end all public management of the Iraqi oil industry by opening it up to private capital; and 2) to pass to confederated regions real decisions on oil, neglecting the existence and the necessity of a united Iraq with a central government.

These two principles are more political propaganda to ignite local dreams and conflicts than real law to organise Iraq’s oil industry. All who are concerned with the oil industry in Iraq, including international oil companies, know it is impossible to direct the oil industry but by a central entity, whether it is public or private, and that these principles are a source of potential unending conflicts between Iraqis.

The US oil project is to give in the north the presenting producing fields of Kirkuk to the Kurds, and in the south the presently producing fields to Shias, while obliging the centre — which it names “Sunni” and which has, according to estimations, twice what the north and the south have — to render its oil to foreign companies. The occupation’s propaganda on oil is solely to ignite conflicts between Iraqis. All know it is unrealisable. Technically, oil fields do not respect sects and ethnicities. Legally, the occupation’s laws are not binding for Iraqis. And politically, all Iraqis believe that oil is the property of the nation and its privatisation is plunder and treason.

Iraq, prior to when the genocide began in 1990, was a modern Arab state led by its middle class culture. It became nothing less than hell for those living in it now. US “creative destruction” has touched all aspects of society as a whole. Through the dismantlement of the state, the middle class has been decimated. The targeted assassination of all kinds of professionals has accurately been described as the imposition of the “Salvador Option”⁷⁹ in Iraq. Not only has this lead to tens of thousands of murders, driving the middle class that remained, despite the first wave of migration during the sanctions period, into exile, but in stripping Iraq of its middle class culture it has led to a breakdown of social values at all levels.

Further, all welfare provision has completely collapsed, ensured by the disbanding of Iraq’s competent civil service under deBaathification and the promotion of sectarian and feudal forces that understand only nepotism. With mass deprivation, child begging has risen 450 per cent. Criminality and prostitution have burgeoned, as has the drug economy. Extortion and kidnapping is a whole parallel economy. Forced displacement has denied thousands of families of their possessions and property. For those unable to flee, the only economy is collaboration, which amounts to genocide of another kind. Instead of sustaining the occupation by joining the Iraqi army or the police, millions are choosing poverty and dignity.

Equally destructive has been the targeting of women. Iraq’s women have been central to its public history for generations. From enjoying the freedoms of liberty and progress, enshrined in pre-US invasion protective legislation, cancelled by the occupation, Iraqi women have been consigned to their homes, hundreds of thousands rendered widows, thousands more raped and abused, and millions forced behind the veil by the rise of sectarian Islamist fundamentalism, or as a general feeling of mourning and a counter-identity to the occupation. The violence that has been visited upon Iraqi women has deeply shocked Iraqi society. Mass detentions of men have driven many, separated from their husbands, into poverty. Further, rising sectarianism has broken thousands of families with divorce rates soaring, many women left struggling to feed themselves or their children.

The climate of general repression that is the outcome of the above touches all Iraqis, individually and collectively, and deeply. Mental disturbance and psychosis has proliferated. Constant witness to atrocities and death, 2007 saw the walling-in of whole communities, further isolating neighbourhoods and relatives, entailing de facto house arrest for millions. The parallel economy of extortion and violence has led to massive forced redistributions of wealth; many families forced to give everything they own in ransoms. Tens of thousands of children have been orphaned.

In the social sphere, a strategy of annihilation has been pursued from the beginning. “By destroying the Iraqi state,” in the words of Hana Al Bayaty, “the occupation has erased any potential intermediary with the Iraqi people and has had to face them directly.”⁸⁰ Not only has it had to; it wanted to and aimed to. After four years of its resistance, however, the Iraqi people have vindicated Sartre: if the US wants to break them, it will have to exterminate them to the last woman, child and man.

iii. Resistance to genocide

Of the few in the West that stood in solidarity with Iraq under sanctions and visited the country destroyed by unprecedented force in the 1991 Gulf War, many describe Iraq’s mode of survival under sanctions as a “miracle”. With ingenuity and determination, Iraqis rebuilt essential civil infrastructure bombed to oblivion and televised on screens worldwide. Under unprecedented forces, included intended starvation and the debilitation of primary services, the Iraqi nation did not fragment — indeed, it strengthened.

Following the ground invasion, Iraqi resistance began on the second day of the occupation of Baghdad with the killing of an American soldier in Al-Adhamiyah. By June 2003, the resistance is already strong enough to declare a programme of national liberation. What is evident now is that this resistance was prepared in parallel before the invasion as the sole way a small people can confront a military superpower.

Even before the supposed end of US major combat operations, resistance operations targeting occupation forces escalate, centred on Baghdad and its surrounding towns. It is clear to all military planners, whether from the invading armies or from the disbanded national army, that the control of Baghdad is essential to the control of the entirety of Iraqi territory.

There have been to this day, four attempts to pacify Baghdad since 2003. Iraq being a particularly centralised state, all roads passing across the country and linking it to neighbouring states, lead to or leave from the capital. From the very start of the occupation, the confrontation between the resistance and multinational forces has naturally concentrated itself on the control of these axes. The occupation cannot stabilise Iraq without the subjugation of Baghdad and its surrounding provinces. The Iraqi resistance as it grows from 2003 onwards will mainly operate in and around the capital in order to disrupt the supply chain and capacity of movement of occupation forces across the country. The success of this resistance strategy will cost the United States millions of dollars.

Because of its arrogance and ignorance and imperial calculations, Fallujah and Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba, and Hillah are daily criminalised as strongholds of the “Sunni” insurgency. In fact, they become known to the entire world simply because they respectively are the first towns on the roads going from Baghdad to Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran and the Arab Gulf. As a result of daily campaigns of indiscriminate bombings and arrests, civil and armed resistance in these provinces increases, thereafter used as the proof of the veracity of US propaganda.

As to Baghdad, it is historically a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural city where no ethnic or sectarian community is the majority. The provinces creating a ring around the Iraqi capital are traditionally and culturally patriotic and anti-occupation. This is proven by their sympathy and cooperation with resistance movements that developed throughout successive attempts by foreign imperial powers to occupy Iraq by taking its capital, be it at the time of the Mongols or the British.

The arrogance and ignorance of US strategists thought that by awe and corruption they could destroy Iraqi nationalism and identity. In attacking Sunnis they thought that they could win Kurds and Shias. They forgot the factors which stand against their theoretical suppositions: 1) There is no ethnically or sectarian pure region in Iraq. An important Sunni population in the south and one million Kurds in Baghdad illustrates this point; 2) A third of Iraqi marriages are inter-communal marriages; 3) Most Iraqi tribes are composed of Sunnis and Shias together; 4) The large Iraqi middle class is secular; 5) Iraqi identity has nothing to do with religion, sect or ethnicity; 6) Class interest is more important for the people than their ideologies; 7) Iraqis are all inheritors of the same civilisations, the latest being the Arab Muslim civilisation; and 8) More than 80 per cent of Iraqis are Arabs and they are proud of it.

In 2004, the US began a new phase in its project by attacking Fallujah and Najaf. It was evident then that the occupation was pushing all Iraq against its project. Whatever the propaganda, Iraqis understood that the US wants to subjugate them by force and that democracy is a lie. By late 2004, unable to break the backbone of the growing resistance movement, and due to the nature of guerrilla warfare being unable to differentiate the population from its assailants, the occupation further targets the population.

We now enter a period of escalating repression, especially affecting the central part of Iraq and running in parallel with the US militarily-imposed sectarian “political process”. Having disbanded the national army, the occupation relies primarily upon sectarian militias with poor local and no national ties, and a newly recruited Iraqi army, also based on sectarian quotas, that is to this day reported as being unreliable, poorly equipped and poorly trained. The occupation resorts to two different military tactics: 1) Terror and targeted assassinations, and 2) A campaign of urbicides and mass incarceration.

In an attempt to divide the Iraqi population and criminalise its popular resistance, the occupation conducts numerous “black-ops” — patent US and UK covert attacks on Shia populated areas such as markets, mosques, bus stations, etc. These operations are then attributed to the popular resistance in order to criminalise it and divide it from its base of support across the whole population. All bombings in mosques and civil gathering places, representative of a long list of acts aimed to agitate, divide and terrorise the Iraqi population, are denounced and denied by the Iraqi armed resistance and never investigated by so-called sovereign successive Iraqi governments.

Throughout the attempt to conduct illegal elections, feeding off propaganda criminalising the Baath Party and assimilating the Baath with Sunnis, waves of mass detentions are followed by the strafing and levelling of entire cities (including Fallujah and Tel Afar, Al-Qaem, Haditha, Ramadi, Samarra). Scandals of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and grave human rights abuses continually arise, and collective punishment through food deprivation and large-scale round-ups of the male population are common. The targeting of the educated middle class by occupation sponsored militias and death squads starts to spike by late 2004, especially in Baghdad, with thousands of forced disappearances and the beginning of an exodus from Iraq that by 2007 would top four million.

The Iraqi resistance, through its popular support, proves its capacity to collect information quicker than the occupying forces and their generous payouts. One major blow to the occupation is the attack inside a refectory within an American military base near Mosul, killing 19 soldiers and wounding 59 others.⁸¹ The Iraqi population, harbouring the resistance, was by then already a permanent target, but this attack widens US suspicion even to collaborators. The feeling of insecurity, even within their fortified barracks, and extreme tension due to the lack of trust in local translators, starts breaking the morale of the occupying troops.

After massive waves of indiscriminate repression, the central part of Iraq refuses to participate to the “elections”, while southern Iraq, under British occupation, is called by the clergy to participate, officially as a means to elect a parliament that would call for a timetable for withdrawal. Over 50 per cent of the population overall boycotts the elections, de-legitimising the “political process”. As the population stands in solidarity against US plans, the occupation appears increasingly eager to instrumentalise this division of tactics and pit Iraqis against each other. From this moment onwards, US forces try to build a “new army” by unofficially incorporating sectarian militias into the security apparatus, none of which have allegiance to the central government and largely operate outside of its control.

By the start of 2006, attempts to pacify Baghdad have failed for the third time. Despite indiscriminate incarceration, blackmail, hostage taking, the walling-off of towns, food deprivation and massive human rights violations, the resistance is reportedly developing more sophisticated weapons and able to conduct up to 1,000 attacks against occupation forces each month. Its resolve cannot be broken and new recruits volunteer everyday.

In February 2006, in what seems a desperate attempt to impose civil war, the occupation and its militias organise the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, one of the most sacred shrines for Shia communities worldwide. In a matter of hours, as expected, sectarian militias burn down holy Sunni mosques all over Baghdad and kill scores of civilians in summary executions, all under the protection and supervision of occupation force air cover. A campaign of ethnic cleansing at the hands of governmental militias is not contained and continues to this day.

With the failure of the political process due to the impossible real life conditions to which Iraqis are subjected, and the military, political and moral achievements of the Iraqi people represented by the resistance — that is to say the legal Iraqi army — the US tries to use the illegal tribunal it created to execute members of the legal Iraqi government as an instrument of propaganda. The fate and the illegal trial of President Saddam Hussein in particular is instrumentalised to revive sectarianism and to attempt to divide the different currents of the resistance among and within themselves.

Although the Iraqi resistance is not borne of a person, party, sect or religion, the trial, by refusing Saddam Hussein prisoner of war status, is aimed to revive the idea that Saddam Hussein equals Baathism that equals Sunnism that equals Arabism. Its political aim is to prevent the resistance from defending the Iraqi state by presenting them as only defending Saddam and the Sunnis. In addition, the trial is used to ignite sectarian divisions, as the chief prosecutor is known to be Shia and the presiding judge known to be Kurd.

As with the political process, the biased and flawed theatre of “victor’s justice” announces the nature of the entity the occupation intends to establish in place of the Iraqi state. Amid the US-authored genocide unfolding in ferocious force, Saddam Hussein’s alleged crimes pale in significance. In dignity and displaying essential Iraqi patriotism, Saddam Hussein succeeds in convincing Iraqis that he was not sectarian and remains anti-imperial. He reflects until his last breath the Iraqi people’s refusal to be subjugated.

Because of the trial’s failure to achieve its political goals, the hanging, its timing, method and perpetrators (an assuredly soon-to-be public execution overseen by a Shia government), is used by the occupation for the same ongoing purpose of igniting sectarian divisions and creating a vacuum of leadership in the Baath Party and the Iraqi resistance. Contrasted by the final dignity of Iraq’s legal president on the gallows, it is evident to all that the occupation has expended all its political cards. It is also forced to realise that the Baath current, personified in the integrity of the president, constitutes the backbone of the resistance to its occupation, and that in struggle it is experiencing a renaissance.

In hanging Saddam as a symbol, the US intended to create a leadership crisis among and between the old guard and the struggling new young Baathists — a confrontation between their cultures. The aim was to divide the movement and reveal potential candidates for compromise, as well as signifying clearly to the civil resistance that there is no limit to the occupation’s will. The hanging coming on the Muslim day of forgiveness — Eid Al-Adha — is a further intended injury and an insult to Muslims and Arabs worldwide. These calculations failed. The resistance intensified, declaring that in the place of Saddam Hussein thousands of Saddams will rise.

Neither the constitution nor the National Assembly will be able to achieve the core objective of the United States. Having destroyed the Iraqi state, the US’s own handpicked proxies prove unable to build a functioning state of any kind. In reality, a parallel state exists, composed of the Iraqi resistance, armed, political and popular. Faced with impending defeat, the US accuses its proxies of its own failure in hope of winning the hearts of Iraqis.

This marks the entrance of a strategy of annihilation in the political sphere. No one is the American’s friend. Timed revelations begin to surface about secret government prisons. Constant crisis meetings are held and public admonishments of puppet Prime Minister Maliki are frequent. Meanwhile, the Green Zone is all but empty. Iraqi parliamentarians award themselves a two-month 2007 summer holiday, several rumoured to be approaching Western states for asylum — an option the chief judge in the trial of Saddam Hussein took within days of the president’s summary execution.

The strategy of annihilation is paralleled in the military sphere with what in 2007 will be known as “the surge”. On 10 October 2006, resistance forces engage the occupation at Forward Base Camp Falcon, where occupation ammunition reserves for the whole of the Baghdad region are kept. An undisclosed number of occupation forces are killed as the entire camp burns to the ground, lighting up the skies of Baghdad. This defeat will cost the occupation $1 billion. This attack is so well planned and carried out that it seems impossible for the US to hide anymore that it is battling an experienced army.

The retaliation will show no mercy. Rejecting the Baker-Hamilton Report recommendations, and despite the concerns it expresses on the state of the US military, Bush orders an increase in US force levels, redeploying — whereas through much of 2006 they had been garrisoned — US forces back into Iraqi neighbourhoods. Exhausted by the armed resistance, US forces resort to walling-in entire districts of Baghdad — a strategy already tested in other Iraqi cities. Amid the shooting down of numerous US helicopters by the armed resistance, the US launches bombing campaigns that are as disproportionate and indiscriminate as they are futile. The Iraqi resistance responds by reportedly shooting down an F-16.

The US is out of options in its “New Iraq”. Although it continues manoeuvring politically, reinforcing its destruction of the life of Iraqi society, it has only two choices: 1) Accept its defeat and a humiliating exit; or 2) Exterminate the population. The “surge strategy”, the walling-in of Baghdad districts⁸², the project to impose on 50 localities the same constraints imposed on Fallujah (electronic IDs, check points at all points of entry, only proven residents allowed in), the four million exiled, the non-recognition of the resistance amid its continual attacks and military-style anti-occupation operations in Baghdad, reveals that the occupation, whatever choice it makes, has lost. It was genocide for a purpose, now it is genocide without purpose. Baghdad can never be subjugated.

As for Iraqi resources, in the time of the no-fly zones it was US that destroyed Iraq’s oil industry to prevent Iraq from profiting from oil revenues. After the occupation, it is the Iraqi people who prevent the occupation from using oil revenues to further its project of national subjugation. The US in its plans forgot that the central region that it calls “Sunni” controls all Iraq’s communications, pipelines and, for historical reasons, the military and technical and scientific cadre. Even if the US were to attempt to enforce its strategy of annihilation by imposing a parliament compliant enough to pass the oil law it wants, in the long term it will fail. Once the occupation leaves, all of its laws will be revoked, Iraqis reconstructing Iraq as they did under sanctions: in the name and the benefit of all Iraqis.

6. Interpreting genocide in Iraq

From the strategic context mapped above, it is clear that the United States not only had a desire, but also in the minds of the neoconservative right has been compelled to pursue a strategy of genocide in Iraq. This strategy has taken two forms: 1) An overall genocide contained in, and following from, the imperative of destroying Iraq as a state and a nation; 2) Specific genocide pursued through the implementation of this agenda against definable groups within the nation of Iraq.

In the first instance, the combination of 13 years of sanctions and the ravages of the ground occupation have demonstrably subjected the Iraqi people as a defined national group to conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. In reference to sanctions, in the words of Marc Bossuyt:

The destruction of the Iraqi state — a necessary condition of the implementation of US global, regional and national goals — has been an objective attempt to render “unviable” the nation of Iraq in the context of a strategy of partition, Balkanisation, the destruction of Iraq’s unifying Muslim Arab identity, and the erasure of the very concept of being “Iraqi”. Only by destroying Iraq as a state and nation could the United States advance in its bid for global hegemony and “full spectrum dominance.” Only by destroying the unifying Muslim Arab identity of Iraqis could the United States hope to control the 6,000-year old geopolitical entity that is Iraq.

In thinking about what the state is, we must bear in mind two aspects: 1) The state is the sum of the entire social, cultural, political and economic history of a given people, translated into language, social norms, customs, identifications, urban formations, patterns of life, and natural social unities that inform and mould the feeling of citizenship, and that exist independent of concepts as an historical reality; 2) The state is the historical guarantor of the propagation and development — the very existence — of a given people; it is indivisible and cross-generational, and is a necessity to existence itself.

In reference to post-invasion US policy, in the words of Abdul Ilah Albayaty:

DeBaathification is another pretext for the same ends. Given its centrality in the operation of the state, destroying the Baath Party — an openly stated objective of the US military intervention, consciously planned in advance⁸⁵ — necessarily subjected the entire Iraqi population to conditions of insecurity and mass deprivation. In reality, deBaathification is nothing more than collective punishment and a canard used to justify disbanding the army, the police, the education system, and the entire administrative cadre.

Further, the systematic destruction of education⁸⁶, healthcare⁸⁷, and all primary services⁸⁸, demonstrates US refusal that Iraq — and by example any Arab state — independently develop conditions of national development and life sustainability. The systematic assassination of academics⁸⁹, health professionals⁹⁰, engineers, journalists⁹¹, scientists, and lawyers⁹² throughout the period of US occupation reveals an objective attempt to liquidate, or forcedly expel, the educated Iraqi middle class that possesses the scientific, technical, administrative, civil and military skills necessary to guide Iraq on the strategic path of independence, democracy and development.

The US project of destroying the Iraqi state and nation, however, cannot but fail:

To the extent to which US strategists continue to refuse to recognise — or are not forced to recognise — this reality, the slow genocide of Iraq as a state and nation will continue.

In regards to specific genocide, it appears clear that: 1) Sunnis in Iraq have been disproportionately targeted by US military action and the constitution of a sectarian environment that criminalises Sunnis and militates towards their erasure for being Sunni. This constitutes genocide of a religious group as defined by the Genocide Convention; 2) Members of the Iraqi Baath Party have been targeted not only for assassination but also dispossessed of their material means of survival. That members of the Iraqi Baath Party adhere or not adhere to a political programme is irrelevant; their primary identity is their Iraqi citizenship, and they constitute an Iraqi national group objectively and by ideology, the loss of which in whole or substantial part renders the state of Iraq unviable as an entity, threatening the survival of the Iraqi nation; and 3) The targeting of the Iraqi middle class, as an ethnic group as enumerated in US Code, has also rendered the state of Iraq unviable, threatening the survival of the Iraqi nation.

In sum, the colonial nature of US policy is manifest, suggesting, along the lines set out by Sartre, that intent to commit genocide is inherent to its rationality. Certainly “submission” amounts to genocide for the Iraqi people; not only socially and culturally, under the yoke of sectarian forces imposed on Iraq by the US, but also economically, given that the overall US strategy is clearly defined as seizing Iraqi oil and controlling Iraq as a whole as part of a global strategy of commanding the resources of the entire Middle East and Eurasian area. The plunder and expropriation of the primary wealth-creating natural resources of a foreign state and nation by definition is an act that denies that state and nation its primary conditions of development and life.

Further, in the context of popular resistance, the “logic” of neo-colonial genocide is present. With the United States choosing a “surge strategy” over a timetable for withdrawal, it appears that a strategy of annihilation — tested and devolved into attempts to spark civil war until now — has been embraced in full. The overall tendency is not only towards the continuance of the slow genocide of Iraq as a nation, having destroyed the central state and brought about conditions of mass deprivation, but a possible spike in conscious extermination as the occupation struggles to survive in the face of overwhelming civil resistance.

For Sartre two conditions, in such a situation, lead to the only way out — the withdrawal of the colonial power: 1) Domestic unrest within the colonial state, opposing the barbarity of what is done in the name of “national interest”; and 2) A realisation on behalf of colonial state military commanders that the war cannot be won, leaving withdrawal as the only option.

The second condition appears present. Dissent within the US military — and not only at the level of ground troops — is growing. Only the arrogance and disregard for life and coexistence that is embodied in the ideologues and officials of the current US administration blocks common sense from prevailing. As Sartre stated 40 years ago, the United States is not guilty of having invented genocide; it is guilty of having “preferred a policy of war and aggression aimed at total genocide to a policy of peace, the only other alternative, because it would have implied a necessary reconsideration of [its] principal objectives.” This guilt, indeed, is summed up in the very notion of the “Project for a New American Century”.

As to the first condition, a mass injection of energy is needed. It is sad but a fact that people grow accustomed to atrocity. But Sartre’s analysis should be binding, for we have in mass action a chance to help bring all of this to an end. It is the decisive struggle of our time.

7. Conclusion

What has happened in Iraq is more than simple divide and rule. The biggest lie is that the US occupation of Iraq is a blunder. Analysis of the strategic logic for destroying Iraq, as well an understanding of the nature of colonial war and how the US occupation has unfolded, reveals that it is not the occupation that veered from its aims, but rather the Iraqi people who in courage resisted. The longer the situation persists, the more proven is the fortitude of the Iraqi people.

The US’s declaration of global permanent war has revived the strategy of total conquest, entailing a reduction of human life as a whole to its bare essence where people no longer have a history as such but are mere things. Akin to a domestic state of emergency, the global “war on terror” declared and policed by the United States presages a generalised suspension of customary global civil rights and inaugurates an era that militates towards total conquest or total destruction. While Iraqis have borne the brunt, in reality it is an attack on the whole of humanity.

As such, the ongoing US genocide on Iraq is clearly and demonstrably a threat to international peace. International law must be wrested from its foundation as a means of legitimising and humanising war and instead criminalise it unequivocally. Establishing as criminal US imperial policies is the first step towards forging the alternative world the bulk of humanity hopes for and believes in. Genocide is a crime over which all states should, and many can, exercise universal jurisdiction.⁹⁴ That states have fallen silent leaves agency to the people of the world.

To end this genocide unfolding in front of us, unity of purpose is necessary across the multiple fronts of action for social justice. Global civil disobedience need not be conceived along the lines of a single plan. Resistance is always a matter of situation. The aim must be coordinated action at local, national and international levels, in shifting alliances that gather and displace while maintaining pressure on all fronts.

Save the humanity in you by being against this genocide.

Whereas thousands of Iraqis are falling, in reality, the United States cannot make its strategy work. In pursuing a policy of genocide the United States has committed moral suicide. The people of the world can and must step into the vacuum its moral collapse opens. We must remember and claim what modern states supposedly concede: that people are the sole source of sovereignty, and that international law is the patrimony of the development of human civilisation.

In defending both, we defend the Iraqi people.

8. Appendix

According to Article 2 of the Genocide Convention, the following arguably constitute qualifying acts of genocide in Iraq, 1990-2007. All have been conducted by US forces, multinational forces, and/or US-supported death squads, militias or Iraqi security forces under the final military authority of the United States:

(a) Killing members of the group
Use of disproportionate and indiscriminate force
Disproportionate killings of members of the middle class as a defined national group
Disproportionate killings of Sunnis as a religious group
Wilful destruction of electricity and water infrastructure
Wilful destruction of sanitation infrastructure.
Widespread forced disappearances
Assassinations of members of the Baath Party as a defined national group
Assassinations of doctors as members of a national group
Assassinations of academics as members of a national group
Assassinations of lawyers as members of a national group
Assassinations of journalists as members of a national group
Killings by US-supported death squads
Killings by US-supported sectarian militias
Instigation of sectarian strife leading to tit-for-tat killings
Widespread use of DU leading to cancer and leukaemia
Wilful destruction of the healthcare system leading to mass preventable deaths

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Widespread use of torture
1990-2003 sanctions regime
Use of disproportionate and indiscriminate force
Widespread use of DU leading to cancer, leukaemia, sterility and birth defects
Wilful dismantling of the state in all its aspects, individually and severally
Wilful destruction of electricity and water infrastructure
Wilful destruction of sanitation infrastructure
Wilful destruction of Iraqi heritage
Wilful destruction of religious sites
Wilful destruction of Iraqi civil infrastructure
Disproportionate killings of members of the middle class
Disproportionate killings of Sunnis
Widespread forced disappearances
Assassinations of members of the Baath Party
Assassinations of doctors
Assassinations of academics
Assassinations of lawyers
Assassinations of journalists
US support for death squads
US support for sectarian militias
Instigation of general terror
Instigation of sectarian strife
Mass arbitrary detention
Mass kidnapping
Mass extortion
Mass rape
Mass corruption
Mass humiliation
Instigation of a drug culture
Instigation of prostitution
Mass unemployment
Mass impoverishment
Mass malnourishment
Ghettoisation
Restrictions on movement
Urbicide
Historicide
Sociocide
Policide

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
1990-2003 sanctions regime
Use of disproportionate and indiscriminate force
Widespread use of DU and the contamination of land and water resources
Wilful dismantling of the state in all its aspects, individually and severally
Wilful destruction of electricity and water infrastructure
Wilful destruction of sanitation infrastructure
Wilful destruction of Iraqi heritage
Wilful destruction of religious sites
Wilful destruction of Iraqi civil infrastructure
Disproportionate killings of members of the middle class
Disproportionate killings of Sunnis
Widespread forced disappearances
Assassinations of members of the Baath Party
Assassinations of the Iraqi resistance
Assassinations of doctors
Assassinations of academics
Assassinations of lawyers
Assassinations of journalists
US support for death squads
US support for sectarian militias
Instigation of general terror
Instigation of sectarian strife
Mass arbitrary detention
Mass kidnapping
Mass extortion
Mass torture
Mass rape
Mass corruption
Mass humiliation
Instigation of a drug culture
Instigation of prostitution
Mass unemployment
Mass impoverishment
Mass malnourishment
Ghettoisation
Restrictions on movement
Urbicide
Historicide
Sociocide
Policide

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Widespread use of DU leading to sterility and birth defects
Instigation of general terror
Mass arbitrary detention
Mass impoverishment
Mass malnourishment
Ghettoisation
Restrictions on movement
Urbicide
Sociocide

According to Article 3, the following arguably constitute qualifying crimes in Iraq:

(a) Genocide;
All aspects noted above, individually and severally

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
US strategic agenda in Iraq, 1990 to the present
Ongoing US strategic adjustments
All members of Multinational Force-Iraq (MNF-I), individually and severally
The Iraqi government as an arm of the occupation
All members of the United Nations, individually and severally, who supported sanctions and the 2003 invasion

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
“Shock and Awe”
Statements of US neoconservatives
Statements of US “liberal hawks”
Right wing and liberal US media alike in contributing to the vilification of Iraqis
Right wing and liberal US media alike in contributing to the vilification of the Iraqi Baath Party
Right wing and liberal US media alike in contributing to sectarian
US corporate propaganda

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
All aspects noted above, individually and severally

(e) Complicity in genocide.
All members of MNF-I, individually and severally
The Iraqi government as an arm of the occupation
All members of the United Nations, individually and severally, who failed to stop sanctions and the 2003 invasion

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

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

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

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

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

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

I: Traversing oceans

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

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

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

He ends with the final lines,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II: Worldliness

But a generation later this caution will find an accuser:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: Globalization in context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV: Outline for further research

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

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

V: Conclusion

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

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

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

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

The dream of technology is to reconstruct human beings
from images!
— Paul Virilio

What they do is to create and imprint forms instinctively,
they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are:
— where they appear, soon something new arises, a structure
of domination that lives, in which parts and functions are
differentiated and co-related, in which there is absolutely no
room for anything which does not first acquire ‘meaning’ with
regard to the whole. They do not know what guilt, responsibility,
consideration are, these born organizers; they are ruled by that
terrible inner artist’s egoism which has a brazen countenance
and sees itself justified to all eternity by the ‘work’, like the
mother in her child. They are not the ones in whom ‘bad conscience’
grew; that is obvious – but it would not have grown without them,
this ugly growth would not be there if a huge amount of freedom
had not been driven from the world, or at least driven out of
sight and, at the same time, made latent by the pressure of
their hammer blows and artist’s violence.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Nothing is as cinematic as war, though war must never be cinematic — we are told. For the most part it must never be seen. Enlightenment was to bring us together, united by the web of commerce. But Clausewitz knew that the greatest representation of commerce in society was war. Moreover, war as commerce must by needs be represented. The great armies that swept across the continent as the German was writing were not simply for action, but were also for show.¹

As far back as the Romans the visuality of death was something to be savored. The intimate relation between vision and violence is not, as we may have it, a modern phenomenon. Yet something occurred within the modern project, superceding the spectacle of ancient coliseum and modern formation alike. “Representation” was supposed to have replaced civil war, just as diplomacy was aimed to forestall interstate conflict. Modern political thought is grounded upon this substitution. The dream of citizenship and relative self-governance (“anarchy” in the realm of interstate politics), traded off against the renunciation of the strange love of killing. Social contract theory was born. But perhaps we have taken this too lightly. For representation is not, nor was it in intention, a matter only of elected officials. Rather it was from the beginning also a question of vision and conception. Not so much the uses of diplomacy to guarantee the cessation of hostilities, as the inscription into violence of a generalized order of signs. Less perhaps the disappearance of war as the engagement of a new war — the war of the image, or the geometrics of meaning. We stand now at a threshold, I believe, where this war has overtaken in cruelty direct war.

Points of entry

i) First point of entry: It is said that we fear what we do not sensually perceive. Let us note that the eye, at one time, was the most sensual of senses. Not always was it at the service of the martial gaze. At first thought the question of war and cinema would be one that addresses this alteration. How has it occurred that the eye became so close a cousin to the weapon? We are supposing a critical link between cinema and war in this way: fear mobilizes the eye. A thousand calculations done in a split-second. The sole object, to comprehend the source of fear in time and space (to chart its trajectory, the extent of its danger against its growth in time). Is it increasing or decreasing? Does it come nearer or retreat? These questions demand something different from sense perception. They demand a cinema of the eye vis-à-vis the object in view. The eye and the soul become a mirror and a screen for what assails them — charting it, comprehending it, all in a few moments. From being here, the soul and the eye go there. They are displaced, and in turn they displace, bringing what is there near. Anticipation as “forward thought” always involves bringing the event closer to hand. Telescoping it. Accelerating it. Soon this way of conceiving becomes the only way.² The first thing we have to understand — in order to understand the relation of war to cinema — is the relation of the eye to the mobilization of the world. But mine is the question not only of the preconditions of cinema — which are what these are — but the denigration through cinematic practice of materiality (I am calling this the “cinema dream of war”). The key to an understanding of this is to comprehend the relation between not so much sight and mobility, as sight and speed. For it is speed that erases the real volume of the world, so much as it also allows for actual cinema as we usually think of it (the rapid motion of images creative of the illusion that is “film”).

ii) Continuance … : Might we start with the first eye, or even the first perception of the life of life? Might we start with the first forward thought, based not simply on the consciousness of life, but the projection upon the infinity of matter of the will to survive as an expression of the refusal of any other truth than the life of life? Might we start with the dream, or the human soul; so flooded with images and passions and visions and memories? Or the founding of the first political constitutions, establishing in advance the whited eye of the State as warrior and future judge? If time would allow I would think any understanding of the evolution of cinema would have to account for all of these things, and other things, including: a) the emergence of linear and geometrical perspective in the Italian Quattrocento, and there within of an abstracted conception of real space held not as a dream but a transferable “diagram”, employed by architects and painters alike to “propagate” forms, and reproduce “likes”; b) the seeing inside of the human body itself, allowing, again, for an abstraction of complex matter, and the general illumination (first in the eye, and then in the book) of the unseen or concealed; c) the very notion of “renaissance”, which is nothing if not a re-imagination — and thus reproduction — of an original state (in some sense, therefore, the counterfeiting, or dissimulation, of an original work, or works); d) the complex history of differing scopic regimes, from the ancient world where light emanated from the eye to touch or caress the object to the modern era where the natural eye is ever more supplanted by automated perception, where sight is no longer exclusively an organic affair. There may be an inherent relation between representation, or the genealogy of the image, and dematerialization, or the emptying of volume, either in fear (the eradication of space, and the forward leap of the eye), or in everyday commerce, with the abstraction from real form of the lines and the points that makes possible the cartography of synthetic forms.

iii) Second point of entry: The image economy is not something which only now impacts upon life; neither only now upon war. The man of war has always faced the task of simultaneously embellishing the image (especially the self-image of violence in potentia), as well as falsifying it (i.e., hiding). Akin to modern cinema where appearance is only possible on the basis of an immanent absence (the nth frame which allows for the next instance of movement), the military man must disappear in order to remain, but also appear more, in order to do more — to live as such. The latter is the principle of deterrence.³ … is exactly the belief that the soldier and the Prince desire to inculcate in the populace: it helps to keep them in order without coming to an actual trial of strength … “ Lewis Mumford, The City in History (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1961), p. 369.] The former is the principle, or practice, of camouflage. Likely these are not the only coincidences between sight and war. But there is no point in reinventing Paul Virilio’s wheel. What interests me is not so much these small correspondences, as something quite different from direct war. What interests me is the series that runs in the opposite direction in the dialectical relationship between cinema and war. Not so much the infiltration of war by the image, or the aesthetic economy of permanent war (deterrence), but rather the martial economy of the image, and the cinematic war waged permanently in civil society. All told, too many theories address the dematerialization of war by cinema. I want to address the dematerialization of life pursued by the State in societies modeled on war. “The cinema dream of war” is the name I shall give the relentless propagation of images as a practice of permanent war. All indications foretell this is an end that will never end. As Paul Virilio provocatively writes, “One day the day will come when the day will not come.” On that day, if “humans” still exist, what conclusions will be drawn as to the place that cinema took in the overcoming of the world?⁴

iv) Continuance … : A usual thesis of this kind goes this way: that modern societies are thoroughly cinematic. Cinema is a violent realm of images, competing, overlapping and “swarming” in ways that displace human agency. They gain an autonomy. Our lives are displaced by an increasing show that we practically cannot now see with our own eyes, but only with the aid of automated perception machines, or “vision machines” (high definition screens, velocity engines in PCs). The world of illusion to which we are subject, and in which we increasingly live, stands in front of us — as medium — preventing us from experiencing real life. Our consolation is cinema — both as site of leisure (the mall theatre), and generalized preference, as we live out in our heads fantasies we are shown but don’t experience. That finally, the purity of modern cinema is like sleep. While I have reached a time in life when I don’t and can’t disagree with this catastrophic vision, this is not exactly my argument. It is the universal war machine bleeding back through the constellation of images that interests me. War might be cinema, but we cannot forget that society is war, and if cinema is so central to our civilizations it is likely because it is a site of the reproduction of the techniques of war; dissimulations, disappearances, effacements, forgettings. In warfare we automate our perception and proliferate our received signals in order to endure. In society we find ourselves absent as images overtake the realities and standards to which over millennia human animals had become accustomed, and which, in large part, allowed for our self-image of ourselves. No longer trusting our own eyes produces in society the opposite of what it produces in war. In war it leads precarious survival. In society it leads to the radical dispossession of those things which allow for social relations (certainties, contemplation, moments of empathy and understanding, “the face”, as Levinas would have it, etc.). But the question we must ask is this: Is society conceivable outside war? Is madness conceivable outside society? Cinema may reinvent war (or become a distinct location of it, continued permanently outside hostilities). But is this necessarily a bad thing? Are there Nietzscheans enough amongst us to be wary of the “standards” and “measures” which slowly formed as society, and which may be obliterated by the propagation of images?

v) Third point of entry: I want to chart a relation between the propagation of the image in cinema and a politics of effacement in the unremarked, permanent warfare immanent in modern societies. I wish to address the place of cinema in the history of the military dream of society. We have accounts of the “kill box” of the Gulf War.⁵ How the digitalization of war between states transforms the otherwise difficult task of killing human beings.⁶ Few have undertaken to reveal the importance of the emergence of imagery itself to the political domain.⁷ Even less vis-à-vis the dispossession — so feared by Deleuze — of animal man from a relation to the world that materially means anything. Put directly, it is time we addressed the “instrumental conditioning of individuals” vis-à-vis the proliferation of the image and the dematerialization of life. Through the era of “disciplines” and the structuring of formal thought, to the inauguration through cinema of an industrial absence and “disappearance aesthetic,” we must understand the relation of sight to matter, and the proper place in modern history of both image and war. How can we understand war without understanding seeing? How can we understand seeing without understanding war? Can we understand the eye apart from the desire that informs it? Can we understand desire apart from the acquisitive reach of the eye?

Dematerialization

It cannot be achieved here, in such a short space, to establish a full genealogy of the relation between war and image that in the terms of our argument is the ascendance to dominance of the State over material life. Two bodies of work appear. The history and understanding of vision, and the material histories of political communities and states. Historians like Lewis Mumford, Arnold Gehlan, Norbert Elias, and Michael Mann have written already the outlines of the latter. Theorists and historians like Ivan Illich, David Lindberg, Alain Besançon, and Gérard Simon are outlining the former. My interest is only in the general picture; a picture that can serve, I hope, as the basis of our discussion of war and cinema.

The core of my concern for this question is this: since the foundations of modernity a manifest project — it seems to me — has emerged for the shaping and concealment of the infinity of life, the complement of which has been the rise of the image. I would understand transformations of scopic regimes relative to this shaping, that ways of seeing must be seen as historical figures, and that it is the State that lies at the heart of this history. Let us listen, before examining this hypothesis, to the words of Kevin Robins;

This core of “dematerialization” has to be explained. We can find many ways of beginning this discussion. Sociologically, we can explain dematerialization relative to social class composition, and the generalized anomie of modern cities. This is a route pursued most effectively, for instance, by sociologist, Georg Simmel.⁹ Economically, we can explain dematerialization relation to the machine process, and the alienation of the worker from the product with the rise of the commodity-form. This is the route opened by Marx and adapted much later by the likes of Jean Baudrillard, and even Guy Debord. Psychologically, we can explain dematerialization relative to the march of “rationalization”; the rise of expert systems and knowledge structures, modern bureaucracies in which abstract tables reign over real lives. This was the message of Max Weber. But politically, this question remains neglected. We don’t have an easy theory for political dematerialization. It takes us — we imagine — into a style of thought which is too conspiratorial, too untimely, and we usually prefer optimism to pessimism when it comes to the understanding of politics. I would like to countenance the other view; that dematerialization is objective policy. It is what the military state was born for; not, as is thought, external aggrandizement or bounty. This history of the military would not exactly be red. It would be grey. It would be looking inward, not outward. Taking inspiration and fearing from the architecture of military power, and the permanent expression, across and within society, of obedience and “discipline” — the word chosen for this history I would prefer, as established by historians Michel Foucault and Gerhard Oestreich, and a small circle of others — it is a history that would mark a warlike concern with politics.

Paul Virilio may serve as an initial point of reference. Here, though our forum today concerns war and cinema (he wrote a book of that title), it is his earlier work that is most important. Books like Bunker Archaeology, and Speed and Politics, where the French urbanist reveals the geometry of the Atlantic Wall, and the history of the “boarding of metabolic vehicles” (humans) respectively, are astonishingly profitable in gleaning one insight: the military machine is autonomous from politics. Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles also establishes a broader critical perspective within which his later work on military perception (War and Cinema and The Vision Machine), unfolds. We can state his central hypotheses directly: military knowledge is autonomous both from technology and politics, and certainly from society. It emerged, rather as Deleuze and Guattari argued in the astonishing Anti-Oedipus, as a terrible despotism, in their phrase “fully armed.” The history of the military is one of the ecological — and increasingly “dromological” ransacking of the world, one which has established such dynamical forces that for Virilio, militarism, not materialism, is the engine of history. Extending the age old maxim that war is the mother of all things, Virilio explores the progression through different strategic and tactical movements of an autonomous military class, almost stripped entirely of human value or concern. The culmination of his narrative is the twentieth century in which he himself was born. “Pure War” is the culmination of all war; the permanent war Virilio understands as expressed initially and perfectly in deterrence and nuclear terror, but even more radically — following Deleuze — in information circuits, digitalization, and “communications.”

The nature of pure war, for Virilio, is grounded on an evolutionary relation between warring and seeing. But this is not a simple matter of the importance of the eye in direct conflict. It also concerns the evolution of technology, and even rationality, as that practice whereby man establishes for himself a secure and ordered world. For Virilio, quite cruelly, this will to rationality does nothing but distance us from each other, from reason, and from being. He counts in this the experience of cinema, and in particular the loss of sight of proper perspective and place relative to the jumps and jerks in cinematic time, space, and the relativity of each. As he writes,

Film is now invested with an important social and economic function: “ … the deferred time of the cinematographic motor empties the present world of appearances, the ubiquity allows millions of spectators that haunt the auditoriums (consigned to film like trains are to travel) to forget their material plight.”[11] What Virilio calls, “a new prosthetic synergy in process” emerges as the eye melds with the military, and extends to encompass the whole of society. Initially, at least, society is conceived by Virilio as a sphere apart. The city, the agora, is a sacred meeting point of real bodies and people. But looming above is the military soul. This soul aims simply at a singular goal: the totalitarian regularization of existence, established through technical forms (cinema, delivery systems, transportation lines, fortifications), and ideological reassignment (perceptual training, confusion, automation, the production of obedience, knowledge, recognition, etc.). As modernity develops this military soul no longer aims only at the regularization of space; indeed, from the first, the control of space is meaningless outside the control of time. This is what mobilizes the war machine, and will lead to the infiltration — as the maximal weapon — of the body itself, both metabolic and social. Nothing is the result but effacement:

As social history gives way to military history we find that the forms of society are effaced, or supplanted, by military forms. As strategy is established everywhere in social life — and across the entire plane of redesigned cities — one cinema is replaced for another; the cinema of actual life as one lived within cities is replaced for the cinema of light, depleted of bodies and real meaning as collisions no longer strictly occur. The accidental has been erased, or minimized, and with it the full vibrancy of life recedes. As Virilio describes, “ … the city is no longer a theatre (agora, forum) but the cinema of city lights … urbanism is in decline.”¹² A “displacement” has occurred in the “fixity of life”, once grounded on the city.¹³ In the most radical way imaginable, the progression of the military machine, swarming up through the ages, will have totally supplanted human life and society, and laid over it the unshakeable grid of “logistics” and “science”, in such a way to have,

Virilio in his focus on “pure war” corrects one misunderstanding we have of war. Pure war becomes, by sleight of hand, the permanent production of peace: the permanent preparation for war which assures the balance of terror which in turn assures civil peace. Reversing our received understanding, the organization of military intelligence finds its ultimate expression in peace, the purest of weapons. War — as I will comment on below — depends on the equality of forces within society. But the colonization Virilio is concerned with has no room for equality at all; it is the radical, massive inequality that ensures, by way of ultimate weapons, pure war as peace. The military, in the last analysis, is a police affair.

The cinema-war-police series

Continuing the story, I would argue that to understand cinema we have to understand the emergence of the political form of the image on this series; a cinema-war-police series. Three aspects seem to me important: 1) the emergence, in the modern era, of omnivoyance as practice and ideal; 2) the emergence, in the modern era, of the experience of the self-image (conscience); 3) and the emergence of mediatization in general. Let us take these in turn.

1) Omnivoyance/generalized illumination. If we are to understand cinema — and its political role in society — we have to understand, I believe, the emergence within political practice of a general concern with image. A number of things can we said. I don’t have in mind, at this point, the finery of great armies of warriors. Nor the pomp and circumstance of kings. Rather what interests me is the emergence, over the modern era, of a generalized concern for “oversight”; for omnivoyance. This practice, in our modern context, is epitomized nowhere better than in the utopia and program of a diffuse group of theoreticians known to their time — the eighteenth century — as “police.” Let us review them briefly.

Exemplified in the writings of, among others, Seckendorff (Der Teutsche Fürsten-Staat, 1656), von Schröder (Fürstliche Schatz- und Rentenkammer, 1686), Dithmar (Einleitung in die oeconomische Policei- und Cameral-Wissenshaften, 1745), Darjes (Erste Gründe der Cameral-Wissenshaften, 1756), Justi (Staatwirthschaft, 1758), and Sonnenfels (Grundsätze der Policey, 1787), police was an idea that finds its home in the classical age of absolutism, and is, in my view, an unremarked wellspring of cinema. The aim of this body of thought was the formulation of a complete and total “technology of population” — known among contemporaries as “cameralistics “ — aiming to make individuals “useful” for the world in such a way that their development also fostered the strength of the state. This strength of the state was conceived on the one hand, as the material result of harnessing and channeling their energies (i.e., industry), and on the other, as the securitization of governance through workfare, “occupation” and the incentive to profit (enrichment). Productivity, diligence and happiness emerged as the objectives of the mode of government that dominated the classical age; simultaneously differentiated (in the classification and organization of bodies) and aggregated (in the policing of rhythms and processes of populations). Further characteristics can be listed of importance to our theme: 1) the police embraced everything. 2) Police includes everything — the existence of men, and the full range of their lives. This also meant dangers (disease, accidents, etc.). It is the basis of this oversight that would establish the logic of the social contract, and the permanent peace that would become, in the nineteenth century, “representative democracy.”

Perhaps the most remarkable formulation of the series between sight and police is that of von Berg, given at the beginning of the nineteenth century:

This unremarked precursor to the particle accelerator, or light-enhancer, known as police, was crucial to the birth and the development of our world, and likely cinema as the scopic expression of ubiquitous vision. The practice was totalitarian, denoting an attention to all detail (be that the beauty, the order, the trading, the working, the communication, of a city, etc.). Summarized, police was not only the outline of a history forged bottom-up through diverse practices (a relationship to the guidance of conscience that would become the model of relations of social communication, a relationship to the knowledge of state capacities that would gather under the guise of ‘statistics’ diverse forms of registration, inspection and modification), but crucially a history which would be based not upon sovereign authorship, or law-based conceptions of power, but upon the formation of images, norms, perceptions, within an overarching strategic field defined by the great question of organizing materials and men. Nietzsche and Foucault would study such things, but the crucial point of importance is that images would penetrate the social plane and souls.

2) The movement to the self-image. Readers of Foucault will know that he outlined a similar argument in his famous analysis of the move from “spectacular” to reforming forms of punishment (in Surveiller et punir, published first in 1975). In The History of Sexuality, Foucault went further into nature of what for him had always been an emblematic concern: the positive formation of society through positive interventions of power. Analyzing the shift from sovereign societies (what he called ‘societies of blood’) to modern societies (what he called ‘societies of knowledge’), Foucault outlined the nature of what he called an ‘age of bio-power.’ “Governmentalization” would be the term he would later use to sum up the emergence, in the field of political vision, of two aspects: the first centered on the ‘body as a machine’ (an ‘anatomo-politics’ aimed to extort forces and optimize capabilities; the second centered on the ‘adjustment of the phenomena of population’ (a ‘bio-politics’ attentive to mortality, longevity, habitation, hygiene, contagion, marriage, procreation, diet and general health). With the demographic take off of the eighteenth century — in part a function of these new techniques of governing — new techniques became necessary for the maintenance of order.

Power responds. In the first instance, government widens its reach (its gaze); intervening in an ever greater number of spaces (psychology, pathology, sexuality, education, etc.), and locations (the asylum, the clinic, the prison, the school, the factory, the boulevard, the playground, etc.). On the other hand, government becomes integral: assumed within an individual code or structure of command (disposition, humor, temperament), and diffused throughout the social body as a whole (in law, in morality, customs, habits and social knowledge). As we move through modernity it is the latter which — with the saturation that goes with police — infiltrates everything, thereby constituting the subject in such a way that the former aspect (the spatialization of power), may recede, if in relative terms. The ground is being laid, in both thought and in practice, for the decentralization of governance as a whole, and the rise of the pure image as a means of regulation and constitution.

The emblematic event in this latter history, to Foucault’s mind, which crystallizes this negotiation overall (between repressive and liberatory forms of regulation and overcoding), bringing all the various elements together — the state’s concern for discipline and order vis-à-vis the population-wealth problem, the emergence of private domains of experience and activity (market society), as well as discourse and authorship (the emergence of the modern self) — is the birth of the modern prison. Though it must seem removed from any consideration of cinema, his analysis of the technology and emergence of the prison, and in particular his discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s scheme for the ideal penitentiary, is essential, in my view, to an understanding of the emergence of domains both of the modern self (the image of the self that will establish the general character of cinematic society), and privatized authority (by which I mean diffusions and devolutions of power which will underwrite the powerful dematerialization not only of standards, but of the political accountability of the State itself). Again, I must leave much detail aside, the salient points are: a) the Panopticon — Bentham’s ideal reformatory, and the lynchpin around which Foucault based his analysis of the emergence of modern power — is essentially an automatism. Once built the very architecture of the construction itself takes over , ensuring the circulation — or “feedback”, in nineteenth century metaphorical terms — of power relations. For those unfamiliar with Bentham’s plans, it is worth quoting at length Foucault’s own description:

‘The major effect,’ Foucault continues,

Its key technology being surveillance, the Panopticon was essentially that odd phenomenon of a decentralized centralization. In other words, its operation depended upon the constant feeling on behalf of the inmate of being observed. Thus the inmate is subjected not only to uncertainty (‘Where is the Master, Is he there, Is he watching?’), but a discourse with the self which brings forth the voice of conscience. All of this happens whether the guard is in the tower or not. In other words, power operates in the head of each inmate, but its consequence is a reinforcement of a centralized economy of domination.

b) The individual has his or her own space. He or she is the author of their own actions, but is set within a broader, regular, permanent geometry of registration and inspection. The cell is intended to be, for all intents and purposes, a stage, whereupon, each single day, the inmate performs the dual role of convict and governor. In both instances through penitence. c) Power is no longer exercised in a sovereign manner. Rather it is invested in a ‘certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement.’ It is deterritorialized. d) The point of the Panopticon was to release relations of power — ’unlock’ the disciplines — to have them operate in diffuse, multiple and polyvalent ways throughout the social body as well as the prison.¹⁷ Thus would be ensured — through the stringing together of all kinds of institutions (schools, factories, prisons, charity houses, barracks, hospitals, asylums, not forgetting families ) — the emergence of a space of self-organization and autobiographical authorship, whereby the individual, penetrated by power, acting upon the self , would become, in Nietzsche’s words, automatic, calculable, regular. 3) Surveillance in the prison replicates hunger in society, and henceforth would take over where hunger itself failed. At the threshold of modernity — via this great transformation in the arts of governing whereby the police state which discovered life becomes the liberal state which privatizes discipline — the effects of surveillance (the dispersal throughout society of individualizing forms of power) had become so apparent as to become transparent — in other words, open: the open landscape upon which the man of modern industrial civilization is found; remembering words, scratching around, picking up tools, directed now not by the king, but a path upon which he is drawn by the echo of his own voice.

3. The emergence of mediatization. Paul Virilio sums up what is most important about this passage between the classical age and the modern.

Out of surveillance — and Foucault very much theorized this — a generalized mediatization of life emerges (remember that mediatization meant in its original form the stripping of “rights”; i.e., the overcoming of the social contract via intimate controls). In Virilio’s terms, we are set off upon journeys, perceptual as well as technical: “ … train, car, jet, telephone, television … our whole life passes by in the prosthesis of accelerated voyages, of which we are no longer conscious …”¹⁹ Panopticism gives the first form to a generalized mobilization of the image within the head of the political subject — specifically as a form of governance and correction. We will always be running after our self-image. ‘What happens is so far ahead of what we think, of our intentions, that we can never catch up with it, and never really know its true appearance.’²⁰

Industrialized absence

That these two broad aspects — the dematerialization of life and the nature of the image as political space in the modern world — come together in complementary form is unsurprising, perhaps, but vital and radical nonetheless. Virilio, again, as been at the forefront of theorizing their complementarity. In the words of Virilio,

For Virilio, there is nothing “innocent” about cinema. Vision and visuality, in the post-cinematic — post dawning of cinema — age, are nothing but the remnants of a “dromological”, speed-crazy, ransacking of the world: the transformation of time and space by the organisms of military intelligence. As the enemy is brought closer, in order to be cancelled, the world is flattened. The eye of war produces effects of speed as the distant event, or the soul of the adversary, is brought forth, at rapid pace, for modification. One forestalls surprise by producing a mirror image of it; by enacting it (which is the tactical content of “intelligence” or knowledge), in one’s head before it can happen. “Cinema is the end in which the dominant philosophies and arts have come to confuse and lose themselves, a sort of primordial mixing of the human soul and the languages of the motor-soul.”²²

But if speed will kill the authentic imagining (the encounter, the embrace, the experience of human presence, or, on the other hand, a difficult absence), it also kills and will kill authenticity in general. This is where Virilio’s work becomes most inspiring: the theorization of the link not only of the death of “presence” (and the rise of the abstract image) to the reduction of authenticity in human relations, but also the impact of the speed of sight (kinesthetics) to infinity, or God. Virilio is a catholic, like Ellul and McLuhan. His concern is not simply temporal, but concerns also the effacement of that ultimate relation; the relation of man to God, at 300,000 kilometers per second. Can the speed of light illuminate God, or does man find a limit in his ability to see progressively as he controls the production of artificial light; the indirect light which is not God’s, but rather simply the effect of speed (the artificial lamp that glows by way of electromagnetic current, or the night vision goggles that enhance, and in some ways accelerate, light). Driving freedom from sight, to recall Nietzsche’s phrase, might refer indeed precisely to this overcoming of “revelation” by forced, accelerated (kinematic) vision.

The artists’ violence, then, is not simply the ordering of bodies; it is also the production of forms, or representations, into which lives are inserted. We know that society is founded on war when we marvel as the World Trade Center towers explode and hit the ground. We know that society is built upon war when we see everywhere the glorification of women purely as vehicles; as wombs and not people, where the shape of the thighs says something about destiny, and the mirror becomes both a confidant and an enemy. We know that society is founded on war in every movement of pop videos; either the kind that try to escape to a perverse childhood (a kind of institutionalized paedophilia), or the other kind which is nothing but the visualization of pure violence anyway. We know that society is modeled on war when everywhere children are “schooled”, as philosopher Ivan Illich would say. We know that society is founded on war when health becomes a matter not of mutual care, but of insurance. We know that society is founded on war when the monotony of daily life is so unspeakable nobody speaks of it. We know that society is founded on war when television exaggerates everything, yet conveys the gravity or importance of nothing. We know that society is founded on war when real wars are as close as we get to feeling like we exist at all; if, that is, we cancel out the false image we have of existence which for the most part is nothing of the kind, but rather “consumption.” We know that society is founded on war when channels are devoted to fashion shows of scantily clad girls. We know that society is founded on war when the abstract image historically has come to dominate subjective perception, and when historically the image itself has been deemed useful only to the ever-increasing respect of its pure objectivity.

With the decentralization of image production, everyone has the capability of waging war; not only in the age of virtual meeting points (the chat room, IRC, multi-user telephone calls), but in the age of photoshop and the aesthetic distortion of truth. Britney Spears, who has never appeared naked in any mainstream magazine, appears all the time, flashing on one screen or another, called up from servers where she has been placed, unclothed, thanks to the imagination and technical wizardry of layers, masks, and cut and paste. For some the likes of this is a great liberation; a great leap forward from an age of censorship and hierarchy. Print media, TV media, even art and books are all the domain big business. The internet reinvents, it would seem the world of the penmen of the classical age; the individual essayist, waging individual war within or on society. But now there are a million, or more, and the proliferation of forms of war (“hits”) is limited only by the software package, or the number of crashes per hour, or solid state memory. Is this the end of centralized sovereignty? It seems to me not of that order. Understood correctly, this proliferation of warriors is nothing, in fact, but the decentralization — and thereby extension — of warfare throughout society.

Cine agora, or war of representation

Michel Foucault writes,

There are always two models of war: direct intervention, and the permanent war of imagination. The latter is the space of “peace as the absence of civil war”, where the former is the fact of the absence of representation and the permanent war of “society.” The former is the war of the state against states, or against militias or rioters. The latter is the peace of stabilized servitude; the cessation of hostilities not enough in itself, as Gramsci was aware. “Hegemony” is the word that he gave traditional sovereignty; if we could break from the idea that sovereignty exists only through force. Neither, however, is contract or institution enough to ensure sovereignty; there must always have been the establishment of inequality (in the inequality of the vanquished, whether state, individual, or disquieted group or tribe). The two go together. The first war model is the permanent warring man. The second war model is the play of representations, as the permanent basis for human relations. War is not, therefore, subsumed. Rather it takes residence within representation; “ … not that of direct confrontation of forces — marked by blood, battles, and corpses — but rather a certain state of representations, which are played off against each other …”²⁴ Let us remember that Machiavelli saw “mixed government” as simply a directed, or constitutionalized form of civil war; the binary logic of two warring parties, set against each other, but undertaking their battle in the realm of representation. This institutionalized conflict is the very mechanism — perhaps only mechanism — that produces peace, order, civilization and the grandeur of the state itself. But what kind of peace?

The irony in political theory is that it is not in Locke, in Mill, in Bentham that we find a concern for the absence of civil war. In these we find the reverse. The placing of civil war at the heart of all political life, now transformed into a struggle between representations, or between images and lives played out in the conscience, or in consciousness (as that between pleasure and pain, in Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy). If we want to find the model of society based on the absence of civil war we have to turn, counter-intuitively, to Machiavelli, to Hobbes, and the attempt that they made, through establishing the aristocratic ideal, to create a permanent inequality that would mean the cessation — in the rendering of a large part of the population in service — of hostilities. In opposing the realm of self-government, however, Hobbes and Machiavelli deny themselves the foundation upon which true sovereignty emerges; the uses of liberty to establish recognition in the mind of the vanquished of the sovereign status of the conqueror. Machiavelli and Hobbes lacked legitimacy, in the final analysis, though perhaps it is Hobbes who recognizes for the first time the necessary conditions for it. Legitimacy would be based on the war of representations, or of images and self-images; and most especially on the protective relation of the sustenance of life and the abrogation, by a conquering form, of the fear of death. On the one hand, sovereignty isn’t based upon benevolence as such as the placing of the individual within a play of representations, allowing for a certain disorder to be in command, and not stifled, or smothered. On the other, the pactum repraesentationis is that which will follow the choice of life over death; it is the result of the elimination of war, or its replacement by a model of representational war, based around sovereign right, consented to in kind, and located within the heart of the modern political theory of the state.

The question may not be one of the relation of vision to war so much as the intensification of this relation in the twentieth century. This may entail not even so much the uses of cinema by the war machine, as such, as the blending together of war and cinema in the inward transformation of human life in the age of images. As the external world of maneuvers and exercises made necessary an overcoming of territory (the rendering of the world proximate, and “in reserve”, by the apparatus of military logistics), so the inward effects of the meeting point of the war of representation and citizens in the city renders relative the standards and understandings we once shared. “We have lost our spatial reference points right here — not out there, but right here — and even our relations with others have entered this de-territorialized dimension.”²⁵ War is waged on the citizen in direct proportion to the proliferation of images, just as the proliferation of images has become a key sector in the defense of society by the state. This war of images is not a direct war, but one borne of the loss of perspective, or more radically “proportion”, by a cinema-war-police series which always has existed, but which never has had access to so powerful a set of tools — nor the capital exploited with such precision from the poor in order to pay for these — perhaps, even, in the whole of history. The intensification of violence is of the intensification of this relation between vision and deterritorialization: of the passage of the cinema-war machine into our very heads, and the distorting effects on our even basically received notions (time, space, dimension), of the very location of our lives. Perhaps, then, there is no better question to pose that the nature of this cine agora, relative to the violence of vision, and the technical use of images by these two complimentary forces of police and the apparatus of war.

Permission to speak!
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Not so many years ago it was impossible not to hear of the death of the author. Looking around now we find nothing but authors: kids chatting endlessly in Yahoo!® teen rooms; a hundred thousand TV channels beaming live all over the world; decentralized business systems where everyone gets to play boss. Endless noise pollution. Too many people speaking. The possibility of your life at any time being transmitted without you even knowing (the endless multiplication of surveillance cameras, web-cams, voyeur-cams). Ulrich Beck talks of the ‘individualization of biographical forms’; the passing of each person’s biography into their own hands. Life, it is said, is a blackboard, and everyone has a box of crayons. In the great open gallery of the twenty-first century, to be famous for fifteen minutes just isn’t going to cut it.

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

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

First voice

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

Toward a knowledge of individuals

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

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

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

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

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

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

The state that says “yes”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Security, tranquillity, occupation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “discovery of society”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eye of conscience

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

‘The major effect,’ Foucault continues,

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

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

The birth of the author

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

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

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

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

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

Final voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.