ABSTRACT
With increasing deployment of a Foucauldian framework of governmentality to various aspects of contemporary political organization (Sachs, 1992; Escobar, 1995; Dillon, 1996; Duffield, 2001a) and historical theorizations of nineteenth-century liberal empires (Mehta, 1999) or contemporary considerations of liberal global governance (Duffield, 2001a; Wilkinson and Hughes, 2002), there is increasing scope to treat empire as a form of governance. In the 1980s, Michael Doyle gave a definition, inspired mostly by classical interpretations of international relations, that empire, as distinct from hegemony, is the ability to control both the foreign and domestic policy of a given state or territory. Also in the 1980s, V. Y. Mudime, pre-empting current applications of Foucault to empire and development, noted that colonization, derived from the Latin colere, means design, organization and arrangement, the precondition (Mudimbe, 1988, p. 1) for which is of necessity, power and control of territories and their inhabitants. Given the irreducible relationship between the control and mobilization of peoples and the reshaping of the terrestrial illustrated by much of the critical scholarship on the making of the ‘Third World’ (Cowen and Shenton, 1996; Badie, 2000; Harrison, 2004), what is apparent is that empires need subjects, and part and parcel of the processes of both colonization and development is the mobilization of people, both at home and abroad. This was as true in the nineteenth century as it is today. Much recent work in international political economy adds to this understanding of the mobilization of a new global subjectivity by looking at twentieth-century shifts in global labour relations, highlighting the increasing marketization of education as an emerging global services sector (Robertson et al., 2002) which is consonant with an emerging revolution in skills and labour productivity hitched to individual states’ policies to remain competitive in the global labour market. Hardt and Negri describe the international division of the new post-Fordist qualities of labour as occurring within the realm of ‘affective’ or immaterial labour, by which they mean labour befitting a new mode of production relevant to a service and knowledge economy (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 286). For Hardt and Negri, empire heralds the dawn of a ‘new human condition’ or a new mode of subjectivity in which labour comprises the affective skills of communication and the ‘exchange of information and knowledges’ (ibid., p. 290). ‘What affective labour produces are social networks, forms of community and biopower’ (ibid., p. 293); skills inherent to this new mode of production are co-operation and social interaction (ibid., p. 294). Members of this labour force, according to Hardt and Negri, are both highly mobile and individuated and networked, requiring ‘no territorial or physical centre’. Recent critical work on development deploying a Foucauldian framework of governmentality (Ferguson, 1990; Escobar, 1995; Duffield, 2001b) describe the emerging post-Fordist architecture of development as a bio-political structure designed to effect both the right kind of governance – liberal democratic – able to produce, protect and manage the right kinds of citizen populations – resilient, and entrepreneurial. Much of the work of postcolonial theory emerging out of the transformations of the 1970s and 1980s also focus their analysis on the production of imperial subjectivities. The three theoretical figures deployed by this book, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, are all explempary of this. In 1992 Homi Bhabha theorized how colonial policies attempted to make remote governance more efficient through the production of ‘mimic men’, and he described how the always/already transcultural nature of empire produced in its ‘conviviality’ (to borrow a term from Achille Mbembe) all manner of hybrid subjects, who were mobile and networked, although Bhabha doesn't use these now fashionable terms.
