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

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

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

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

Permission to speak!
— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

First voice

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

Toward a knowledge of individuals

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

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

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

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

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

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

The state that says “yes”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Security, tranquillity, occupation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “discovery of society”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eye of conscience

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

‘The major effect,’ Foucault continues,

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

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

The birth of the author

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

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

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

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

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

Final voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.