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

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

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

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

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

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

I: Traversing oceans

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

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

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

He ends with the final lines,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II: Worldliness

But a generation later this caution will find an accuser:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: Globalization in context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV: Outline for further research

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

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

V: Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Points of entry

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

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

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

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

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

Dematerialization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cinema-war-police series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The major effect,’ Foucault continues,

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

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

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

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

Industrialized absence

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

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

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

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

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

Cine agora, or war of representation

Michel Foucault writes,

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

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

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

Within sociology the concept of reflexive modernization has emerged as a key point of reference in a series of controversies, some particular to the field, others with import far beyond it. Modernization is a familiar concept to scholars of political economy. Reflexivity refers in a broad way to the emergence of new and critical forms of consciousness; both of groups and individuals. Introduced first by Ulrich Beck and developed by Anthony Giddens and others, the co-joining of these concepts is used in two senses: both as an organizing concept capturing a moment in modernity’s development, and as a diagnosis of the material conditions of late capitalism.

In terms of the first — reflexive modernization as an historical moment — the key argument is that *modernization has turned bad, producing more social risks than goods. As these risks become increasingly obvious (acid rain, ozone depletion, nuclear waste, and so on) new forms of social critique emerge (ecologism, anti-scientism, critiques of technology and progress, etc.), in turn transforming the basis of capital production and giving rise to new forms of individuality and collective identity. Rather than viewing these developments as indicative of either a structural crisis or a social revolution, theorists of reflexive modernization point to new forms of social learning emerging within modernity. In doing so they place their analysis of modernity and modernization between two extremes: that of Habermas, Marx and the utopians, on the one hand, and Adorno, Weber and the nouveaux philosophes on the other. Reflexive modernization is the process by which the hazards of modern systems of life and production are dealt with through a radicalization of modernity itself (reflexivity). Not so much a postmodern age as the modernization of the principles of industrial society.

In terms of the second use of the term—reflexive modernization as a diagnosis of late capitalism—the essence of the argument concerns the shift from rigid production systems to flexible, ‘disorganized’ ones (from Fordism to post-Fordism). ‘Knowledge’ becomes ever more important as advances in communications and transportation shrink the size of the planet, speeding up production and bringing both the competitor and the consumer closer to the producer. In Economies of Signs and Space, Scott Lash and John Urry go furthest in analyzing the implications for political economy of this move to knowledge-based industry. Focussing on the complex interplay of a series of transformations commonly grouped under the banner of ‘globalization’ (including, the internationalization of finance, the dissolution of the corporate-liberal synthesis, *deindustrialization and the absolute and relative decline of the working class), Lash and Urry put forward the notion of ‘reflexive accumulation’ as the best description of the decoded systems of late capital. To this they add sociological analyses of the commodification of leisure and lifestyle (what they call ‘reflexive consumption’), increasing migration and tourism, the ever-increasing importance of cultural signs and artifacts (fashion, advertising, etc.), as well as changes in family structures and what they call — following Giddens — ‘detraditionalization’, building a powerful sociology of contemporary global change.

See also:

post-Fordism, globalization, time-space compression

Further Reading:

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society, London: Sage. Seminal treatment of the emergence of a ‘new modernity’; published first in German in 1986.

Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994) Reflexive Modernization, Cambridge: Polity Press. A useful text bringing together the three major positions in the debate, with replies and critiques. 

Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Places reflexivity in the context of globalization and the emergence of ‘post-traditional’ society.

Poststructuralism in IPE emerges on the forefront of three issues: culture, power and history. In terms of culture, what poststructuralism tries to achieve is a respect for the real and material existence of people. This in itself invokes the question of power; both how power operates in society and everyday situations, and how it functions historically, informing the parameters of experience and behaviour. These parameters are seen as historically specific; unique to given apparatuses of knowledge and control. This concern for the interdependence of knowledge and power (or ‘power/knowledge’) is not simply reducible to familiar notions such as ‘identity interests’ or ‘cultural hegemony’. What is at stake is not the specific ways of doing things (denoted in French by connaissance), or the ebb and flow of ideology, but the schema within which actions become imaginable and find a coherence (savoir). These underlying knowledges form a matrix, or historical grid, within which a culture defines its relationship to the most basic and vital elements of its social existence (e.g., its relationship to discipline, to production, to security, to health, etc).

For the progenitors of IPE the main knowledge in contention was that of economy and capital relations. For poststructuralists, however, what lies behind the birth of capitalism (and ultimately the global political economy) is a more immanent question of order; of how societies are established and governed. Thus, like the Gramscians, poststructuralists are concerned with the question of social power. Yet unlike the Gramscians, the question of hegemony is not one of moral leadership or ideological consciousness, but the degree of efficiency with which bodies are organized, deployed and made productive. More than this, poststructuralists are concerned to reveal the ways in which subjects are encouraged, via the mobilization of particular discourses of truth, to constitute themselves as objects of knowledge, self-management and modification. Thus unlike the marxists, realists and liberals, power for poststructuralists is not simply the ability to say ‘no’. Rather, power is also the capacity to engender, to produce, and to optimize forces. Though similar in some ways to Susan Strange’s concept of *structural power, poststructuralists further deny that power has any structure, indeed that it has any essence at all. Rather, power is seen as invested within given practices and domains of knowledge (e.g., colonialism, political economy, theories of globalization, etc.). Power is at most a temporary illusion: the overall effect of a multiplicity of forces traversing bodies and societies. It is not acquired, seized or ever possessed. It is deeply contingent to the present; an insight which reopens questions of culture, history and politics. Through detailed study (sometimes called ‘archaeology’ or ‘genealogy’), poststructuralists aim to confront so-called ‘structures’, highlighting the fragility of things, and their openness to possible transformation.

See also:

power, modernity, world order

Further Reading:

Douglas, I. R. (1997) ‘Forget Globalization’, Available @ powerfoundation.org. On the genealogy and politics of globalism and globalization.

Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development, Princeton: Princeton University Press. From the author of one of the first sustained treatments of development discourse from a Foucauldian/poststructuralist perspective.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish, London: Allan Lane. One of the major philosophical voices of the 20th century outlines a history of the emergence of modern systems of power/knowledge.

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.

This interview was conducted within the context of joint work conducted on virtuality, power, security and globalization.
 

Ian Douglas: When you talk about virtual diplomacy, what exactly do you have in mind?
James Der Derian: Technically it means bringing ‘there’, ‘here’; collapsing distance, collapsing time. Unfortunately in the very use of the technology there is also the possibility of collapsing the distinction between fact and fiction, because its very easy to manipulate the images used. But the whole idea is that you have dual use. Here, at Ars Electronica, everyone is talking about the use of information for warfare. But this is about applying it as a mediation. So you a medium, meaning you’re separating belligerents, using the “media”, but you’re also using the medium to convey messages in new ways that can maybe break people out of their states of antagonism.

So insofar as it fits with military practice its part of the process of deterrence?
Well .. there are people who want to appropriate virtual diplomacy to those ends. I’m arguing for more of a more civilian based, non-governmental, transnational application of virtual diplomacy. There is a ‘beltway’ — meaning the Washington beltway — version, that is completely on the same continuum as virtual war. For instance, people down at STRICOM — the newest military base (Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command) — have projects now that use the same technologies that are used for command and control warfare, for getting people around a table to talk about what do you do when the last bullet is fired. They claim that it can be used to prevent warfare, but their idea of preventing warfare means often to subdue without fighting, the philosophy of Sun Szu; the best war is won where you don’t have to go to the battlefield to win. So, to be sure, there is a continuum between violence and diplomacy, where we saw in Bosnia where virtual diplomacy was used at Dayton Ohio, where they brought in the exact same technology that pilots used to train for the bombing runs of the Serbian installations, to convince mainly Slobodan Milosevic that he should widen the Gorazde corridor: this was the main sticking point, the whole Dayton accords was going to collapse. So they brought him into this ‘map room’ (we have this anachronistic term for it) and projected 3D images of Bosnia. They showed him exactly how if you only made it five miles there was all kinds of lines of fire that would make it impossible for you to have a peaceful transit. Slobo actually got a hold of the joystick, and started flying over Bosnia, and looking at other possibilities, and came away convinced. So this was a case where it worked. But it really only worked because he knew that the same technology could be used against him once again in a bombing campaign, if he did not agree. So the pure use of this I think has not been exercised yet, but certainly the coercive diplomacy — what we might call coercive virtual diplomacy (virtual diplomacy backed by force) — has been effective.

Is it the immediacy of the medium which makes it different?
Yes.

Because we’ve had for a long time the idea of the armchair-general, shifting pieces around a table—armies, artilery, cavalry—which is essentially a visualization of the theatre of war. What’s so different when its digitized and represented on a computer screen?
The enemy has a face, for one. The iconic representation of the enemy, gives you all kinds of distancing, so that the virtual element of it minimizes; doesn’t collapse, but minimizes. Now, is this a good or bad thing? It is if you want to be able to have a dialogue. Now suddenly you can project an image on a Barco table — which is basically a very large, very high resolution computer screen — which allows 3D representation of the opponent. You get people in the room, who wouldn’t normally ever sit across from each other; they can be on the screen, interacting. That can be a good thing. It means that you can have a give and take; it’s not static, like little pieces in a chess game, or figures moved around on paper. But, there’s danger, which I think you’re aware of — it’s implied in your question — which is that you might mistake this new “more real” representation with the real thing. If you put Yasser Arafat and Netanyahu on a Barco table under virtual diplomacy, I don’t think you’re going to mistake each other’s iconic representation for the real thing, for they have a long of history. But that history is missing. And it is believed that you can do this kind of sui generis creation of identities that people can negotiate from. When you go from that Barco table to the real world that agreement is going to fall apart; for it was based on what amounts to an artificial intelligence of their positions. So really what you try to do is create something that is in between: that combines experiencial history, takes away the gut level animosity that keeps them from meeting, and adds enough verisimilitude through technology that they can hash out issues, and get back to the so-called real world.

One of the things that Virilio asks in Bunker Archaeology, at the end of the first essay—which is republished in The Virilio Reader (Blackwells, 1998, ed. James Der Derian)—is ‘by the way, who invented Peace?’ As we know, alongside Kant when he writes his treatise on perpetual peace lies Clausewitz who takes war as a societal model, if not the very engine of history. What seems to have happened — when we think about virtualization — is a blurring of these positions, war and peace, so that now we no longer know in which state we’re in, or which is better than the other. Foucault, of course, also critiqued an overbearing politics of tranquility imposed from above from what was termed in the 1700s as the police. Virtual technologies seem to allow us to further blur the lines between war and peace, and further question whether peace is a solution to war; or at least bring to attention the dangers of winning wars in advance of the battle (which is what virtual technologies seem most to used for; they’re actually not so good in the context of “real war”). Is there any way for ordinary people like me and you resist this blurring, and its attendant dangers?
It is interesting you use this example of the police, because I think you’re right. A lot of people here — at Ars Electronca — have been arguing about the role of the military. But increasingly the military is seeking out a policing role. Technology allows them to intervene in civil society. What we traditionally conceive of as war — being organized violence between nation states — is clearly devolving into new forms, often invested within civil society; what Virilio calls “endocolonization”. It’s a fusing of peace and security, and this is what Virilio is trying to resist. All too often in the discourse of security peace is simply the absence of war. Now, how do you construct something which is based on a negativity? This is one place where the virtual can play a very positive role. Because the virtual, according to Deleuze, is not in opposition to reality. It’s in opposition to the actual. The virtual, according to Deleuze, is based on pure difference: it doesn’t have the same relationship as reality does to possibilities. It has a very creative constitutive relationship to the event. And so what you can do is use — now that we have the means — the virtual to make peace, and take these creative leaps, but at least it’s not based on the pure negativity of security discourse.

One of the things that Virilio suggests is that this move toward a domestic, or civic role for the military has long been in preparation. He sees this civic role as the last phase of the war machine: the idea of the war of preparation — Pure war, total war — which is internalized in modern society. So the endpoint of the military — which was in fact always its starting point — is essentially the control of civil security. It seems, at least, with this discourse of information war, we’re still laboring under this illusion of the external enemy, without coming to terms with the possibility that the first object of military intelligence is the internal population. All of this money is being spent in war-gaming, simulations, and so on, which can all be applied to a domestic insurrection. And yet this cannot be stated publicly. Are we being fooled by a mass dissuasion, or are external threats still important to the high command?
I wouldn’t put it quite in the terms of agency that you do; that the military is choosing to take a more internal pacification role. I think its one of these cases where the discourse is lagging behind new realities. Now, there’s always going to be this give and take between the extent to which a discourse shapes reality and reality determines discourse, but as I think some of the best students of transformation have demonstrated, is that it’s in periods of great cleavage between reality and the discourses which are supposed to help us understand it — what we may call the structures of experience — that’s when crisis arrives. This point about states of emergency that Benjamin talks about. What you have to do is mine those emergencies, because there’s are also — as we know — opportunities within the dangers that they present. So yes, I think there is this internalization of threat, because for one we’ve lost our most significant threat — the Soviet Union — which means we’ve lost the “we” behind the statement we have lost the Soviet threat. So many of these tactics and strategies of war-gaming are about maintaining the “we” in light of the lack of the “them”. So to that extent I’ll agree with your synopsis of the situation. That yes, there’s a weird disfunctional disjuncture of military planning; that it almost seems to be fishing for an enemy. Even to the extent to which, for instance, when I go and observe some war games, they make up these ludicrous enemies. They take them from Marx brothers movies; “Freedonia”, and so on. Here we are sitting on the Danube drinking our Ouzo and honoring the Turks who came up the Danube, and at the same time the 1st Armoured Division that crossed this river, up in Germany, is doing war games about invasions involving characters from a Marx brothers film. Either the war gamers have a remarkable sense of humor — which I doubt — or they’re really hard pressed to come up with a political, and politic, enemy at the moment.

What I find strange is that this cannot be any surprize to anybody. When Reagan stumped up the military budget and ripped America out of its possible economic slump, it was pretty clear that the end point was going to be the dissolution of the Soviet Union …
Well … first of all … the locution that you’ve chosen here reveals a tendency we should all avoid. When marxists say it is no surprize, what are they really saying? That we have the correct vision that allow us to interpret history in such a way that we can take pragmatic action. Now, that locution might have been effective, I think, against some of the material forces that they were up against at the turn of the century, that gave rise to this empire of the Soviet Union. Let’s face it: I think it’s always a surprize that change happens, and how it happens. And such we shouldn’t put a gloss on it, sort of ex-post facto, in this fashion. I think we’re living in a world in which our best hope is for contingency, for the contingency of surprise. And try to be flexible enough both of mind and of governance to not fear surprise, to not fear the unknown, not to fear the contingent, but to respond to it in a way that Ronald Reagan could not; which is flexibility, and if necessary dump the old paradigm. It took us years — we still haven’t gotten rid of the national security discourse of the Cold War. It went through several transmutations, be it the drug war, be it the attempt the create the Chinese as the next threat. What it means is getting rid of the pretext that we can get rid of surprise. Because, if anything, people took 1989 and turned what was a remarkably creative event into just one more — as Bob Keohane put in a famous conference at Cornell — as one more data-point. So who cares? It was one data-point among many; how could it be considered significant?

I guess what I had in mind though … Well … it seems to me — and this might be a naïve view — that the event of the collapse of the Soviet Union was predictable insofar as one takes a broad view of the trajectory of Western culture. We’re not just talking of a security discourse, but security in its broadest sense, which is to do with the internal constitution, regulation, reproduction of the state. It seems to me that the Cold war was a classic war of position within an overarching consensus; this being rationalized, scientific, disciplinary productivist state. Capitalist versus communist doesn’t really matter if the rational and disciplined basis of the state is broadly the same. Given this, the Cold war becomes merely a war of information over the means not the ends of a certain strategic outlook; that which is both necessary for — and a function of — the modern state. For sure one thing is certain: both the Soviet Union and the United States were modern states. One still is. What remains to be explained is the disappearance of the other. How it looks to me confirms your notion of the contingent, but at the same time seems clearly also to confirm the very nature of modern states in general; that above all they are accumulators not of resources and capital, or even people, but power. For by the early 1980s a window opens up: crisis sweeps across the economies of the world, and in order to retain power — both structural and relational — the United States did what it always did, which was to pump the military-industrial complex. But something new and unprecedented enters: the new idea that the Cold war could be won; or even more precisely, that it ought to be won. Until then people were happy with the balance; or least leaders were, for everyone else lived under the terrible threat of nuclear annihilation. The extremity of the now global economic situation produces such forces that all cards have to be cashed: Reagan upsets the whole cart, unwrites a whole decade of détente, and possibility of “winning” is thrown on the table as the cost of stablizing the American economy. My point is that it was clear — or I suggest it had to have been — from the moment the choice was made to save the American economy through a massive injection of Pentagon dollars that the result would be the disintegration of the Soviet Union. You see, what I’m suggesting is that the Cold war was a victim of globalization. It was a victim, but nobody killed it: the Americans didn’t win it — I’m not even sure they’d have wanted to. The extremity of economic slowdown — remember Marxists were talking everywhere of a structural crisis of capital—coupled with the ever more developed interconnection of economies — both from North to South, but also from South to North — produced a situation in which something had to give. America choose. It choose the death of the Soviet Union. It did so because it is an advanced democracy, and everyone there was complaining about gas prices. Democracy and globalization killed the Soviet Union. But the real winner was the universal state.
I could agree with much of the analysis … but the flaw, in my view, is that you attribute too much intelligence to the state. Raison d’etat, reason of state, is the great myth. I think that Meinecke did a wonderful job at looking at how raison d’etat changes in historical periods. You have the raison d’etat of the absolute monarch . You have the raison d’etat of democracy. And many people have slammed Meinecke for being too harsh on his interpretation of raison d’etat and democracies: he’s very critical of it, people call him an elitist, it’s too amorphous and too diffuse to be even called reason. But I think he’s on to something here. Part of the reason why its very difficult to build resistance against the very effects which you have just described, is that it’s a remarkably diffuse, amorphous body which produces these effects. You, a couple of times, said ‘the United States caused this’, ‘the military caused that’, ‘Reagan did this’. I can’t help being reminded of that Saturday Night Live sketch — as someone from outside the US your probably never saw it. I think it was Phil Hartman, who died recently, playing Reagan. Reagan has got all these girl scouts around him and he’s saying, ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you representing the best of America. Please here accept this tribute’. And so then the aides usher out the girl scouts. As soon as the girl scouts go he’s snapping out orders to all his aides, ‘What’s the value of the yen? We have to immediately bolster the dollar. Okay, what’s going on in Yemen? I want you to send two thousand troops there tomorrow.’ It’s this idea of Reagan as excusing his senile-ridden state as a means of pulling the wool over the eyes of America. Well, since Reagan in his last press conference he ever gave argued that the only way you could ever have this global governance you’ve been describing is if aliens invaded, I get the effect of Reagan as more the latter view, that this was a pre-senile presidency. That in some ways they got lucky. Some places they created egregious human rights violations, in Latin America. It’s not to avoid responsibility for these actions, or to give credit. But you should do both. Did they concoct Star Wars to beggar the Soviet Union? — Yeah, to be sure there are dark ideologues within the Reagan administration who did, but there were also some rationalists who said, no, it won’t work—who were wrong, of course. And then there were others who thought it was a bad idea within the CIA. So it’s not quite a monolith — and I know you know this — and finding agents is probably the greatest task of any social critic, but it does make our work harder, and I think we should recognize that.

By way of a quick response, I think one of the last positions I would take would be that Reagan, or “the government”, or whoever was on the National Security Council, had a monopoly of information. In a sense, I think this is the revolution that was enacted by Napoleon, in that precisely what becomes important is a power over life operated at the level of — indeed springing up from — the mundane. It seems to me that the strategy that was used was not first and first a “military” — I mean in the way that typically scholars of international relations conceive the term — but “strategic” in a broader way; as I say, to do with securing the American economy in a context of transnational turbulence. It was the test given to the (American) commercial economy which called it to account, tested it’s resolve, and made necessary a kind of win or lose contest between two models of essentially the same ends. These two models being the commercial, or consumer economy on the one hand, and the command, or planned economy on the other. As I say, they were not opposites; as the mere existence of the “military-industrial complex” is testament. If that wasn’t a planned, or command economy I’m not sure what is. And beyond that similarity, the forms of the two power systems of which these economic models were part — the Soviet Union and the United States — were not fundamentally different in the essence of their make-up. Or at least the differences (democratic, autocratic, etc., depending on the critic and the ideology at stake) were weighed against all kinds of fundamental similarities: the both exhibited attributes of exclusionary practices (prisons, asylums, etc.); they both exhibited attributes of training and welfare (schools, hospitals, universities, etc.); they both exhibited attributes of a concern with security and defense (police forces, militaries, complex systems of surveillance and correction, etc.). That one was “communist” and the other “capitalist” is incidental to the fundamental similarities I’m trying to highlight. But that aside, the turbulence of the late 1970s put these two “means models” in a death grip with each other. It happens that historically the United States was in a better position to deflect the turbulence that was the Soviet Union — most probably because in being instrumental in the opening up of the capital markets, especially the Euromarkets, it had been largely responsible for the unleashed turbulence. But no matter that, it was in a position to win, and whether it was a difficult decision or not — a decision to lose, or let go, the comfortable structure of bipolarity—the fact is the United States choose to dissolve the bipolar system.
I think it’s indisputable that Reagan’s election, and what followed, resulted in a military Keynesianism—the whole priming of the pump through massive government spending which because of his ideology, could never have been done for social programs. So there was a coincidence of the ideology of the hollow army, the need to pump up the economy, and his pretty die hard anti-communist beliefs that produced the meta-paradigm for the Reagan revolution. So I agree with you. I think military Keynesianism was definitely operating on a rational level, amongst many of his policymakers.

If they were and they gave away bipolarity for multipolarity, what kind of deterrence against war has replaced the bipolar nuclear one? Is the atomic bomb being replaced by an informational one? Are telematics being used to keep people — and other states — in line, in the same way nuclear dissuasion did? Is the future of cybernetics to be seen in a kind of “cyber-deterrence” to be employed by the state?
It’s not only deterrence. I think it’s quite possible to use infowar in a kind of ju-jitzu way, or as a method of resistance. But the requires you to be as mobile, as flexible, and certainly as media-savvy as the state has become, as the government has become, as the White House has become. And unfortunately, just like generals fight the last war, a lot of the social movements with which we identify with tend to be like these old generals fighting the last war. This is a war of maneuver unlike what Gramsci meant. It’s a war where you have to be willing to concede that you’re not going to have time to develop a story about the truth of the matter, a la Norm Chomsky. Instead, you’re going to have to develop a counter-simulation to the simulations that are surfeit, that are in super-abundance at time’s crisis.

Is it possible to do that without becoming a state machine?
(Laughing) … Yeah! Certainly you have to have some access to alternative media, or even be able to get on and get a counter-narrative going. I think Edward Said has been very effective at this. In his own way, Christopher Hitchens. But it has to be done more at a local, molecular level. So far it’s be done pretty much primetime. And there the choke-points are too narrow and really too arbitrary to allow a mass message to ever get out. And we could go into the whole idea of what the web means, what new media means for disseminating information, or information warfare. But just like Third World tyrants have learned from the Gulf War certain lessons, like ‘get your hands on a nuclear bomb, or a chemical weapon’, I think people who want to resist war have to learn those lessons as well, and be ready to apply new techniques and new technologies with what Paul Virilio called ‘pure dromology’.

Is our aim to resist war? You know, when I read through Paul Virilio’s work, or I listen to the words of writers like Michel Foucault, I tend to conclude that it’s not actually about resisting war per se, but making war a personal thing, insofar as it becomes a negotiation — constantly — of your individual existence. I become more skeptical of universal peace than of life lived as war. Is it possible to reject the state discourse and use of war without at the same time resigning oneself to a state constituted and useful practice of peace? Afterall, what does the state want but a happy peaceful populace?
Yeah, that’s a sham. Besides what Foucault identified as the greatest truth about power — that every form of power creates its own resistance, every form of resistance presupposes power — in the actual doing of it, this is where the greatest requirement is probably taxing our most atrophied aspect of our being. Which is our ability to be creative and poetic when it comes to the ever predictable forms of oppression; be it the repressions that take place on a mental level — a decline in wages, an increase in the hours we all have to work, etc — or many others. What it means is you have to resist not on an event by event, but a day by day encounter with others and the world.

 

Permission to speak!
— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

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

First voice

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

Toward a knowledge of individuals

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

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

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

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

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

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

The state that says “yes”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Security, tranquillity, occupation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “discovery of society”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eye of conscience

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

‘The major effect,’ Foucault continues,

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

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

The birth of the author

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

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

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

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

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

Final voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Governance and the power to govern

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

For Foucault this ascendance marked the threshold of modernity and what he termed the ‘age of bio-power’. Two poles of political intervention emerged; a ‘great bipolar technology’ of power over life. The first centred on the ‘body as a machine’; an ‘anatomo-politics’ aimed to extort forces and optimize capabilities. The second centred on the ‘adjustment of the phenomena of population’; a ‘bio-politics’ focused on demography (distribution, longevity, procreation), economy (the synchronization of resources and citizens), and social security (the social constitution of contracts and interests), wherein the health and well-being of the civitas became a ‘general objective of policy’ and domain of investment.

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

This theme dominated Foucault’s lecture and seminar series at the Collège de France between the years 1976 and 1980. Although no comprehensive study emerged from Foucault’s researches, we have — as well as transcripts of his lectures — several short essays and papers (Foucault, 1988, 1989, 1991). These writings are particularly significant in that they entailed a refocusing of Foucault’s own historical gaze. Rather than be satisfied with the archaeology of the ‘dark, but firm web of our experience’ (Foucault, 1973, p. 199), Foucault increasingly turned his attention to the question of order; its historical politics, techniques and practices. Still concerned with ‘bio-power’, Foucault sought to uncover the inscribed history of the birth of modern society; the ‘absolutely conscious strategy’ attested in both political texts and the ‘mass of unknown documents’ constitutive of the ‘effective discourse of a political action’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 149). This ordering was to be found — argued Foucault — in,

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

Epitomized in the writings of Seckendorff (1656), Wolff (1719), Dithmar (1731), Darjes (1749, 1756, 1776), Zinke (1751), Moser (1758), Bergius (1767-74), and Mueller (1790), among others, the aim of this new technology of population — known to contemporaries as ‘cameralistics’, polizeiwissenschaft, or ‘police science’ — was to make individuals ‘useful for the world’ in such a way that ‘their development also fosters the strength of the state’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 252).³ This strength of the state was conceived in two ways: on the one hand, as the material result of the harnessing and channeling of energies (industry) into the productive economy, and on the other, as the securitization of governance through workfare, occupation and the incentive to profit (enrichment). Productivity, diligence and happiness emerged as the objectives of the mode of government that dominated the classical age; simultaneously differentiated (in the classification and organization of bodies) and aggregated (in the policing of rhythms and processes of populations). Freedom, inner strength and security emerged as dominant principles in the discursive constitution of civic order; conditioning the historical development of practical and political government from the 18th century onward.

What Foucault’s historical studies describe in essence, is the simultaneous spatialization and deterritorialization of political government throughout the course of modernity. In the first instance, government widens its reach (and gaze); intervening in an ever greater number of spaces (psychology, pathology, sexuality, education, etc.), and locations (the asylum, the clinic, the prison, the school, the factory, the boulevard, the playground, and so on). On the other hand, government becomes integral; diffused at the level of the social body as a whole (in law, morality, customs, habits and social knowledge), and assumed within an individual code or structure of command (in disposition, humor, temperament). For heuristic purposes this double movement corresponds to Foucault’s identification of ‘specific governmental practices’ on the one hand, and ‘a whole complex of savoirs’ on the other, with spatialization constituting the former, and deterritorialization the latter.

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

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

Let us begin by revisiting the Commission on Global Governance.

Our global neighbourhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discovery of motion

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

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

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

The result, as Foucault described (and also in Discipline and Punish) was the gradual emergence of a ‘science of time’ mediating man’s relation to motion within the confines of acceptable limits to reason and order defined in the movements of the natural world and celestial heavens. The condemnation of idleness as the ‘source of all disorders’, culminating in the obligation to work (Huizinga, 1927, Foucault, 1967, 1973) is perhaps the most conspicuous indication of the links newly forged between motion, good order and the individual. As Mumford describes, ‘Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie, time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as a heinous waste’ (Mumford, 1934, p. 197). Ever more, ‘the “power” of the soul gave way to a sequence of mechanical movements .. the silent forces of springs, wheels, and cogs, operating as a contrived whole’. As Sawday continues, ‘The modern body had emerged: a body which worked rather than existed’ (Sawday, 1995, p. 32).

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

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

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

And before these men could be commanded to run at the enemy they had first to be taught to stand firm in space and time. The neostoic revival in military discipline and drill embodied in the practices and procedures of Lipsius, Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus and Montecuccoli, and passed through to Eugene, Marlborough, Guibert and the French Revolutionaries, also helped set the technical parameters of government.⁵ Practiced first on the military courtyard, and then in the field, the hospital, the workhouse, the almshouse, the prison, the birth of a new age of military logistics is inseparable from the episteme of organized motion emerging as a political technology of civic order.⁶ The image of society was one of a complex of relays; each to be synchronised, made efficient and effective. In the remarkable words of Johann von Justi, ‘A properly constituted state must be exactly analogous to a machine, in which all the wheels and gears are precisely adjusted to one another; and the ruler must be the foreman, and the main-spring, or the soul .. which sets everything in motion’ (Justi, quoted in Parry, 1963, p. 182).

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

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

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

Yet if Frederick was the foreman of this newly constituted machine-in-motion, Napoleon would surely become it’s soul. More than anyone prior, he would embody the next phase of history, defined not so much by the ‘art of governing’, as what we might describe — with rightful misgiving — as the ‘art of motorizing’.⁷ Again, the crucial link is the birth of bio-politics, and the transformation of the power to govern. In the words of Carl von Clausewitz (1968, p. 384), ‘War had suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen of the State’. Under the Committee of Public Safety the levée en masse is established providing the first clear model of modern conscription. Perfected by the hand of Bonaparte, the energy thrown into the conduct of war was ‘immensely increased’, with whole populations ‘mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 137).

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

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

Prolegomenon to global governance

It is this moment in history that serves as urbanist Paul Virilio’s point of departure. Like Foucault, Mumford and Sennett, Virilio is also concerned with the birth of a new technical, geometric, chronographic imagination of men and things. What Virilio adds to the story is a more focused description of the 19th and 20th century experience of moving, and its correspondence with political technology and the genealogy of governance. Virilio also serves as the link to my main argument: that this experience of motion, and its greater facilitation and extension throughout every level of society, is the hidden history of globalism and global governance. Though Virilio has only recently turned his attention to the discourses of globalization (1995b), his writings — I suggest — provide the political and historical reading so lacking in our present discussions. For lack of space let me pick out its main themes.

‘Up until the nineteenth century’, Virilio writes, ‘society was founded on the brake’ (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983, pp. 44-5). Agrarian society then gives way to industrial or transportational society (or what Virilio calls, ‘dromocratic society’).⁸ This society is built upon the possibility of ‘fabricating speed’. ‘And so they can pass from the age of the brakes to the age of the accelerator. In other words, power will be invested in acceleration itself’ (Virilio, in Virilio and Lotringer, 1983, pp. 44-5). An ‘unrecognised order of political circulation’ was emerging, crystallised in the French Revolution. The events of 1789, he writes,

The stage was set for Bonaparte. ‘With Napoleon’, write the Durants, ‘the ecstasy of liberty yielded to the dictatorship of order’ (Durant, 1975, p. 240).

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

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

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

Let us imagine the flagpoints of this history in summary form: in early modernity we find a rabble populace, poorly disciplined, wandering, and blighted by the spectres of unreason, idleness and environmental destitution. The aim of political reason — in the context of broader societal transformations (the discovery of order through production, the rise of the money economy, commercialism and early mercantilism⁹ … ) — is to navigate a course between the extremes of revolution and stagnancy. Having recognised that (in the words of Botero) the ‘true strength of a ruler consists in his people’, political rationality aims also to ‘multiply’ the citizenry as a productive force. A new politics of order, both of detail (looking into men’s souls), and of generality (the new concern with the biology of populations) becomes a technical necessity. Working together, these techniques of intervention (‘anatomo-power’ and ‘bio-power’) produced at the heart of the classical age an initial stasis; seen best in the military courtyard, the hospital, the prison and the school. The power of movement was subject to a territorial codification (in the city, in the workhouse, in the asylum, in the manufactory).

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

Speed was to be taught as a virtue because it had in itself emerged as a discipline.

Discourses and practices of contemporary political reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rethinking globalization as governance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pathology of global governance

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

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

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

We must keep open the debate on globalization and governance.

I am not a moralist
— Paul Virilio

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

I

4 propositions, 4 accusations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discovery of motion

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

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

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

Foucault’s genealogy begins with the birth of statistics (the mathematics of state).³ It was this domain of knowledge that first attempted to tabulate the unpredictable nature of the body’s forces in order that they be made probable. For Foucault this science finds its zenith in the notion of ‘reason of state’ (in the writings of among others, Botero, Rosello, Piccolomini, and Segni); the Italian revolution in the language and practice of politics, where the greatness of cities and states is linked to the strength and productivity of the population.⁴ The ‘great eighteenth-century demographic upswing in Western Europe’ — no doubt in part a consequence of this new concern with the collective power of people — adds only urgency to already established necessity for co-ordinating and integrating bodies into the apparatuses of production and adequate power mechanisms, whereby,

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

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

This ‘strength of the state’ was (importantly) conceived in two ways: one the one hand, as the material result of the harnessing and channelling of energies and trajectories (industry) into the productive economy, and on the other, as the securitization of governance through workfare, occupation and the incentive to profit (enrichment). Productivity, diligence and happiness emerged as the objectives of the mode of government that came to dominate the classical age and inscript itself into the utilitarianism of modern liberalism. This new mode of governing — simultaneously differentiated (in the classification and organization of bodies) and aggregated (in the policing of rhythms and processes of populations) — is a true innovation of quite incredible proportion; a kind of kinetic arithmetic, or constitution of useable forces. A universal power of engendering; at least in ambition.

Kinetic arithmetic

‘The breeding of human beings’ as Martin Heidegger reminds us, ‘is not a taming in the sense of a suppression and hobbling of sensuality; rather, breeding is the accumulation and purification of energies in the univocity of the strictly controllable ‘automatism’ of every activity’. Not least the most important innovation of the classical age was the emergence of a comprehensive practical reason that would take as its focus the knowledge and facilitation of this automatism. Police science was among the foremost in this aim. Finding inspiration in a whole array of ‘advances’, from Leonardo’s anatomical notes and drawings, Versalius’ first public autopsy and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), Descartes’ declaration that the body is no more than an ensemble of ‘moving machines’, Hobbes’ assertion that the universe is ‘corporeal’ (and indeed his own fascination with motion⁶ … ), this practical reason heralds nothing less than a new spatio-temporal imagination of human existence: the appropriation of the world of men and things built upon the geometrical classification that had dominated the pre-classical/post-Renaissance age, known to everyone universally as ‘mechanics’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we find then is the gradual emergence of a ‘science of time’ mediating man’s relation to motion within the confines of acceptable limits to reason and order defined in the movements of the natural world and celestial heavens and inscripted into the day–to-day realities of the commercial and industrial economy. The condemnation of idleness as the ‘source of all disorders’, culminating in the obligation to work (madness as ‘the absence of work’⁸ … ) is surely the most conspicuous indication of the links newly forged between motion, good order and the individual. As Mumford describes, ‘Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie, time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as a heinous waste’. In this, as described by Jonathan Sawday, ‘the “power” of the soul gave way to a sequence of mechanical movements .. the silent forces of springs, wheels, and cogs, operating as a contrived whole .. The modern body had emerged: a body which worked rather than existed’.

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

The regularisation of cleanliness and sanitation, and the removal of madmen, beggars and idlers from the highway can all be related to the question of the efficiency of movement that dominated the historical imaginary of the classical age. As Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1748) would remark, only organized matter was endowed with the principle of motion. We may also add that matter endowed with the principle of motion was increasingly regarded as ‘ordered’. Expressed with perfection in the words of Guillaute (a French police officer writing in 1749), ‘Public order will reign if we are careful to distribute our human time and space by a severe regulation of transit; if we are attentive to schedules as well as to alignments and signal systems; if by environmental standardization the entire city is made transparent.’⁹ When transparency and transport come together in Guillaute’s words; when mnemo-technics joins mnemo-kinetics in the constitution of order; this is when we reach the threshold of the world of which we are still prisoners; the world brought to being on the back of the classical dream of the tranquil society — achieved, despite its violence, in the universalization of societies founded on the dual daemonic principle: ‘facilitate life, facilitate speed’. Forget about post-modernity: let’s excavate the birth of biokinetic society.

The birth of biokinetic society

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

Under the Committee of Public Safety the levée en masse is established providing the first clear model of modern conscription. Perfected by the hand of Bonaparte, the energy tapped from the newly mobile populations was unmatched in history. And not only in warfare did the principle of kinetic force come to dominate, but also in his Civil Code — the Code Napoléon — of which he claimed the, ‘most compact government with the most rapid circulation and the most energetic movement that ever existed’. All of this was unthinkable without the elaborate ensemble of powers in which the new kinetic state was anchored; the disciplinary codes that would come to define modern governance; its permissions and illegalities, nature and future. Prefigured perfectly in the words of French military reformer Comte de Guilbert,

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

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

The illusion of liberation

Let us imagine before concluding the flagpoints of this history — this geometrical plague of political order — in summary form. In early modernity we find a rabble populace, poorly disciplined, wandering and blighted by the spectres of unreason, idleness and environmental destitution. The aim of political reason — in the context of broader societal transformations (the discovery of order through production, the rise of the money economy, commercialism and early mercantilism¹¹ … ) — is to navigate a course between the extremes of revolution and stagnancy. Having recognised that (in the words of Botero) the ‘true strength of a ruler consists in his people’, political rationality aims also to ‘multiply’ the citizenry as a productive force. A new politics of order, both of detail (looking into men’s souls), and of generality (the new concern with the biology of populations) becomes a technical necessity. Working together, these techniques of intervention (‘anatomo-power’ and ‘bio-power’) produced at the heart of the classical age an initial stasis; seen best in the military courtyard, the hospital, the prison and the school. The power of movement was subject to a territorial codification (in the city, in the workhouse, in the asylum, in the manufactory).

By the beginnings of the 19thC the place of the state and political reason in constituting spaces for existence had been secured, and a second ‘reordering’ could now be effected, heralding perhaps less the age of bio-politics as the age of bio-kinesis. Rather than charting the middle ground between rapidity and stasis, power would aim to ‘release’ the full productive, dynamic efficiency of the (national) population in and through time. ‘Motion’ (or more precisely, motorization¹² … ) had emerged as the destiny and law of a new politics of order. The full equivalence of Virilio’s ‘metabolic vehicles’ to Foucault’s ‘bearers of order’ becomes clear. ‘Dromological power’ — or in Foucault, ‘capillary power’ — had emerged as the practical basis and first principle of capitalist modernity established simultaneously with the apparatus of modern governance. Mobility, in other words, had become simultaneously the means to an illusionary liberation and the means to an all-too-real domination; the accumulation of men running hand-in-hand with the accumulation of movement. Speed was to be taught as a virtue because it has in itself become an incarcerating discipline.

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

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

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

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

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

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