Re: [-empyre-] Re: sedition and nationalism

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

I found a long and incredibly useful article by Paul 
Passavant that adds something important to the relation that 
Claire Pentecost drew between the new sedition and/or 
terrorist laws and the neoliberal mode of governance. Claire 
says: "as capital becomes more flexible, the state 
administers a compensating rigidity in order to govern the 
human dimension of wealth production and concentration, 
specifically that part of the labor pool that needs to be 
kept dammed in large reserves and managed through precise 
valves." What Passavant does is to show how the whole 
post-Fordist or neoliberal conception of society justifies 
the use of arrest and imprisonment by developing a 
conception of the abnormal individual, not as someone sick 
who should be cared for (that was the old psychiatric 
paradigm) but instead as a monster who should be put away, 
in the name of consumer security. The potential threat of 
the unpredictable individual becomes a focus of governance, 
determining the objects of suspicion, the kinds of policing 
procedures that are used and the way force is applied. Given 
the common associations between artistic activity and 
dissent, subversion, the abnormal and indeed the monstrous, 
this just might apply to the empyre discussion! Even if it 
is, once again, a study of current conditions in the USA.

I'll excerpt the basic ideas, then offer a few comments. 
Here goes:

"The Strong Neo-Liberal State: Crime, Consumption, Governance"
by Paul Passavant, in Theory & Event 8:3 (2005

....
Scholars have described a shift -- we can usefully if not 
somewhat arbitrarily date this shift to 1973 -- in the U.S. 
state from a Keynesian welfare state to a neo-liberal, 
post-Fordist state.... Fordism's state formation has a 
dominant political and legal mentality of social security 
and a politics of risk.  The risk mentality as it is 
configured under welfare state conditions is importantly 
different from thinking in terms of good versus evil or the 
notions of legal responsibility prevalent in the 19th 
century.  Rather than individualizing guilt for traffic or 
work-related accidents, or blaming the individual's morality 
for unemployment when the business cycle means that a 
percentage of the population will lose their jobs at certain 
points, these risk societies recognize a certain statistical 
probability within given populations for accidents or 
misfortune....
A condition of possibility for these risk societies is 
solidarity.  Hence the significance that solidaristic risk 
societies place upon disciplinary institutions like the 
school, prison or helping professions.  These institutions, 
as Michel Foucault has taught us, seek to normalize their 
subjects.  Even with prisons, the emphasis is on corrections 
and reform in order to reintegrate the subject as a 
productive member of society....
During the era of the welfare state, imprisonment rates in 
the U.S. decreased in relation both to the number of crimes 
recorded and offenders convicted.  In the period between 
1973 and the late 1990s, however, the number of inmates 
incarcerated increased by more than 500 percent, the rate of 
incarceration per 1000 index crimes nearly quadrupled, and 
the prison population has become significantly racially 
disproportionate.  In the U.S., we have witnessed, 
particularly in the 1990s, a period of falling crime rates 
and rising imprisonment rates.  David Garland describes 
these trends by contending that the "prison has once again 
transformed itself," meaning that the prison fulfills a 
different function under post-Fordist economic conditions 
than it did under Fordist conditions. Rather than being 
understood as a correctional institution to reform 
individuals and to prepare them to return as productive 
members of society to the production line, the prison is 
seen now as an institution to incapacitate and to contain 
monsters....
As contemporary society has rejected a social welfare 
orientation to the governance of poverty, Fordist economic 
premises, a correctionalist approach to penology, and the 
solidaristic risk mentality of social insurance, different 
fragments of the state are now seen as more relevant to 
governance than during the mid-twentieth century.  It also 
means that the status of different professions and 
institutions are reconfigured from their former positions 
within solidaristic risk societies that rested upon the 
disciplines.  Under these conditions, scholars note that the 
increasingly dominant political mentality in American 
society is to "govern through crime."  That is, crime and 
punishment are prioritized contexts and mechanisms for 
governance....
Moreover, within the post-Fordist state, security has become 
identified with consumption.  Privatized spaces for 
consumption like shopping malls are secured spaces, while 
those zoned from such spaces secured for consumption or the 
spaces beyond the walls of the gated community (the feeling 
of security commodified) are viewed increasingly with 
apprehension by those with purchasing power.  In other 
words, under conditions of neo-liberalism, there is a 
consumer-criminal double.  Not only do we see this double at 
work in U.S. domestic policy, but we also see it projected 
outwards in U.S. security policy by the Bush 
administration's 2002 National Security Policy Strategy.

Securing the Homeland Against Danger Post-September 11

With the end of the Cold War, we have seen the reemergence 
of the racial discourse of Western civilization versus the 
savage or barbarian as the predominant mode for mapping the 
world and America's place within it.  The Bush National 
Security Strategy makes clear a twist to this racial 
discourse that has become particularly prominent since 
September 11th.  As this document indicates, the enemy of 
"civilized nations" -- and the American "homeland" -- is 
"terrorism."  This document borrows from the racial 
discourse that underwrote 19th century colonialism and 
imperialism, but with an important difference.  Now, the 
other is no longer represented merely as racially inferior 
but also as a criminal.  The Bush National Security Strategy 
articulates together two strands of the present -- consumer 
capitalism and fear of crime.  As William Finnegan has 
noted, it is both interesting and odd that a national 
security strategy would devote as much space as the Bush 
Strategy does to discussing economic policy.  As is clear 
from the section entitled "Ignite a New Era of Global 
Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade," 
however, it is in fact official U.S. policy to promote -- 
presumably through military means since this has been 
identified as a vital U.S. national security interest by its 
placement in the Bush National Security Strategy -- a 
neo-liberal global economic regime.  Freedom to be a 
consumer is the form of freedom that U.S. policy seeks to 
make enduring through U.S. military operations as the 
strategy represents political difference -- those who oppose 
the promotion of the neo-liberal capitalist enterprise -- as 
criminal: the terrorists.  This only makes clear what had 
been prefigured in the immediate aftermath of September 11th 
by The New Republic's Peter Beinart who also represented 
anti-global capital protesters as equivalent to terrorists 
in an article published in the September 24, 2001 issue of 
that magazine.  Thus, U.S. national security policy is an 
external projection of the consumer-criminal double....

******

The text goes on to point out a lot of details about the way 
commercial databanks are now used by government security 
agencies to profile so-called risky individuals. Thus the 
consumer-criminal knot becomes even tighter. What Passavant 
doesn't do is to point out the usefulness for labor-force 
control that can be derived from this profiling and 
repression of the often racialized "potential terrorists". I 
think that's one of the key points, just as Claire said. 
What you do get from this text, though, is a very strong 
explanation for the way that a society foregrounding the 
right to unlimited consumer desire can also produce such a 
willingness to persecute people and lock them up. We're 
talking not just about a single law or policy, but about a 
political rationality of neoliberal societies which both 
reconfigures the objective forms of the state, and affects 
the way that people are subjectively encouraged to see the 
world. The transformation is expressed in the very 
architecture of consumption: malls, tourist complexes, 
Disnified city-centers, what I call "the urbanization of 
blindness." You don't even have to look at the immigrants 
who do the work - because in a good neoliberal society, you 
know that if they get out of line they'll go into jail, 
forever. And if a few artists or intellectuals go with them, 
that may be the price we are asked to pay for keeping the 
fundamentals of neoliberal society invisible.

Not a pretty picture but I believe it contains a grain of 
truth...

best, Brian