Veneering Government with Charles DIckens

     In her Mapping the Victorian Social Body, Pamela Gilbert claims that Dickens' Our Mutual Friend displaces the novelist's more famous satire of specific governing institutions onto the all-pervasive, immersive environment of London. Instead of a single, localizable parasitic government figure like Chancery or the Circumlocution Office, we get a metropole of permeable, porous, leaky bodies. This pervasive, uncontainable social ailment radiates from the Thames through its unsanitary tidal flows of sewage and muddy banks. According to Gilbert, such metaphorics exploit a prevalent feature of sanitary discourse: subterranean flows of sewage formed a circulatory system of disease whose heart was the Thames. This vision of the urban social body compelled the construction of the Thames river embankments during the late 1850's and early 1860's.
    Something is missing from Gilbert's account. Any Londoner from that period would wonder, where is the Metropolitan Board of Works? Depending upon one's political inclinations, Gilbert's omission would read like a liberal utopia or dystopia. Or rather, it would read just like Dickens' novel perused rattling about within an omnibus, distracted, preoccupied, and intermittent.
    Not that Gilbert's formal assertions aren't intriguing, especially her claim that Our Mutual Friend is at once hyper-realistic about places while Gothic in its atmospheric placelessness, a tension giving rise to pleasurable disorientation. But what if in this disorientation a grotesque face of government lurks? What if Dickens' once-bellicose satire of institutional authority became so extreme that it vanished into thin air?
    Our Mutual Friend comprises two narrative perspectives, one a past- and one a present-tense third person omniscience. As with Bleak House, the present-tense narration performs much of the novel's satire. Rather than another Chancery or Circumlocution Office, in the satirical narration we get the Veneerings, the epitome of speculative finance's nouveau riche. Ceaseless social climbers, the Vaneerings are Uriah Heep sans "umbleness" ensconced in the nation's ruling classes.
   Dickens introduces us to these social climbers as they throw a dinner party. Of the couple's many guests, "a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the National Debt" form the center of attention. Typical of this novel's satirical de-individualization of the ruling classes, these figures appear as mere titles, mere occupations – an M.P., an civil engineer, and a Capitalist. Or: the constituents comprising the M.B.W., the very institution building the Thames river embankments.
     So what if the powers at the top of the Thames River Embankment project are sitting at Veneering's table? What matters is how they sit at the table. Reduced to occupations, to their positions within overlapping hierarchical professions, these governing figures are just that, figures not individuals. They are caricatures taken to the a veneered extreme. As mere titles, these figures' power and authority disappears from view. They are, in essence, black boxed. All that matters is their input and output – their eating and their, well, shitting.
    While Gilbert misses this detail, she does because of an instructive reason. Gilbert's omission of the M.B.W. and her subsequent claim that Dickens diffuses mis-goverance across the urban social body results from taking the Veneerings at face value. Veneered into "a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the National Debt," the novel's governing institution slips from view. Dickens enacts formally the practice of governance performed by the M.B.W.: infrastructure. Infrastructure when working appears as merely input and output, as pipes, sewers, and embankments. Infrastructure in this guise comprises a black box. Like their sewer pipes and river embankments, the agents of the M.B.W. – politicians, engineers, and capitalists – appear in Dickens' novel as infrastructure, as black boxes –– "a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the National Debt."
   At the Veneerings' table in chapter two, Dickens introduces his readers to a new form of immanent satire, one that turns the obscure, routinized, black-boxing power of infrastructural governance against itself. Yes Our Mutual Friend pursues a trenchant critique of unlocalizable social ills. But it does so by appropriating its routinized form. The threats once posed by Chancery or the Civil Service now pervade the everyday, routine, habitual lives of all Londoners because they have become infrastructure. They have become "a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the National Debt." Our Mutual Friend depicts government not as absent, but rather as everywhere. But being everywhere as infrastructure it evaporates into veneer.
 
 

Walter Pater's Theory of the Dispositif: Countering Liberal Pastorship with the Aesthetic Object

In this paper, recently given at the "Phases of Thought" scholar symposium at UCD, I attempted to provide a sketch of an emerging larger (dissertation) project and then a possible segment of that project.

Overall, I am concerned with how in late-Victorian England the conduct of the groups or populations was conducted through localized configurations of liberal pastorship or governmentality – that is, how the conduct of purportedly “free” subjects was (potentially) conducted in certain locations. The lack of attention to the space of pastorship has limited other approaches to nineteenth-century British liberalism, pastorship, conduct, and counter-conduct such as those of Lauren Goodlad, Amanda Anderson, and Elaine Hadley. I argue that “milieu” provides one way of historicizing specific, localized struggles over liberal pastorship. The milieu, Foucault tells us in Security, Territory, Population, consists of a configuration of artificial elements and natural givens – a potential model for reading the composition and operation of pastorship and counter-pastorship, conduct and counter-conduct in spaces as disparate as Walter Pater’s Brasenose College (Oxford), the virtual middle-class home of Mary Haweis’ interior decoration guides, or the socialist utopia of William Morris’ News from Nowhere. The milieu’s artificial elements are those “objects” constructed by a regime of pastorship, while the natural givens are everything present in a location but not constructed by that regime. According to this understanding multiple milieux can operate and contest each other within a single location. The milieu’s conducting artificial elements are what Foucault and later Agamben define as the “dispositif” (apparatus): anything coupling living beings with a larger field by orienting, intercepting, or securing their behaviors, thoughts, or discourses. Although only one node through which conduct is conducted and by which that desired conduct is resisted, the dispositif is useful for understanding localized liberal pastorship because it is a medium for “free” contact, exchange, and circulation between individual bodies and regimes of power. Walter Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry offers not only what I argue is a late-Victorian theory of the dispositif, but also a program of counter-conduct: Hellenic subjectivity. 

Pater’s aesthetic criticism 1) locates the aesthetic object’s medium-specific “sensual element” and 2) estimates “the degree to which a given work of art fulfills its responsibilities to its special material.” Rather than focusing on art’s intellectual content as does Ruskin (great art provides the greatest number of great ideas, therein orienting the proper conduct/morality they imply – think reading “The Definition of Greatness in Art” coupled with “Of Queen’s Gardens”), instead Pater’s aesthetic critic focuses on a work’s sensual element in order to understand its operations upon the individual at a sensual and affective level – “How is my nature modified by its presence.” Art, Pater argues, operates through its proper materiality in order to reach the viewer’s “imaginative reason” via the senses. The gap between art’s materiality and imaginative reason’s immateriality is bridged by the sensuous element, the artist’s “mode of handling” proper a given medium. Although rooted in art’s materiality, the sensuous element is irreducible to materiality and is instead a sort of spectrality hovering between the two. According to Pater, an aesthetic object’s sensuous element delights the senses in part to “become the vehicle of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond the intention of the composer.” Pater locates in the sensuous element the medium through which an individual comes into “contact” with a regime of liberal pastorship – again, think Ruskin’s criticism its attendant conduct: the sensuous element is that medium or condition of possibility for art’s greatness, its ability to conduct “free” conduct.

            Yet, this contact with liberal pastorship worries Pater, who wishes to theorize the ideal aesthetic object, which should be an end in itself: “Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception.” That is: if the aesthetic object via its sensuous element threatens to place the viewer into relation with some regime of liberal pastorship, it becomes more efficacious the more independent of that pastorship it can get.

Of course this tendency is an idealization. As Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey tells us, all aesthetic objects partake in a milieu and therefore serve to conduct conduct for better or worse. Nevertheless, we see in Pater’s schematization of the aesthetic object’s operations a model of the dispositif as a one mechanism of pastorship. Insofar as it tends towards autonomy, the aesthetic object serves as the node with which a certain counter-conduct, Hellenic subjectivity, orients itself. The proper comportment demanded by the pure aesthetic object is one of suspension of content/pastoral baggage and attunement with the autopoietic sensuous element – a two step counter conduct (im)famously promoted in The Renaissance’s conclusion, one that renounces the hallmark “disinterestedness” of the classic liberal subject. Supine reflection “suspends” one’s comportment to the “cohesive forces” and “the action of those forces extending beyond us” in order to experience the ecstatic “weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The Hellenic subject, constituted by its blithe repose and its concentrating breadth/attunement, names the counter-conduct seeking only “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy” – opened by the suspending or profaning dispositif, the aesthetic object indifferent to everything but its own sensuous element.

            The intersection of dispositif, Hellenic subjectivity, and pastorship offers an opportunity for a series of “strategic” displacements: from object of analysis to field of truth engulfing it, from institution to general order, from function to general economy of power – all ways to consider the class, race, and gender exclusions making Hellenic subjectivity possible. 

Failed State Syndrome and Two Struggles over Governmentality

            Stockton, California’s slow spiral into insolvency reveals a potentially widespread threat to public government: neoliberal failed state syndrome.

            Typically used to describe and justify Western military occupations in purported “third world” countries, failed state syndrome is, basically, a operative logic (a practice of jurisdiction) that runs: an aggressor invades and disrupts a country’s infrastructure (economic, governmental, material) to the point of near collapse and then uses that near-collapse as justification for further international involvement with the claim, “if we end our occupation now, country X will fail.” Such is America and the United Nation’s practice of jurisdiction in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such was the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish operative logic about Sub-Saharan Africa during the height of the slave trade.

Despite a separation of over two hundred years, such iterations of the failed state syndrome share a common denominator, one that isn’t simply West-on-Orient imperialism. Rather, these historically diverse failed state syndromes are underwritten by the expansion and maintenance of global capitalism. The first iteration occurs during the reconfiguration of governmental power shifting from Mercantilism (an internal police state whose cohesion is assured by a European balance of power) to Liberalism (an internally diffuse governmentality that can ensure its efficacy by promoting “less” governance only because it is offset by a proliferation of international markets). The second occurs during the reconfiguring apex of between Liberal and Neoliberal governmentality (the radical “lessening” of governance whose efficacy is ensured by the proliferation of internal markets and third-world resource appropriation). In each case, the common denominator is a reconfiguration of the global topology of governance driven first by the expansion of capitalist modes of wealth production and then driven by the structuring of “world” as a closed system of wealth production.

This is not to say that wealth production (or capitalism) is the common denominator. Capitalism is the common denominator only after the settlement of action of reconfiguration – that is it is the result of reconfiguration not the cause or even a operation within reconfiguration. Rather, the common denominator is Liberalism – the governmentality that proceeds from the question: how to conduct the conduct of the population and men more productively by governing less. The constitutive tension of Liberalism – expansive-contraction – serves as a dominant model of thought structuring the governmentalities employing (or inventing) the failed state syndrome as a means of strengthening themselves, of reconfiguring men in their relations such that they control more sets of relations.

With the first case, failed state syndrome served as the means through which not only pro-slavery advocates defended their expansion into Africa (“sure we destroyed the sub-Saharan socius by introducing slavery, but Africans have always bought and sold their own slaves. Therefore they cannot be responsible to govern themselves and we must govern for them”), but also how anti-slavery advocates defended a reformed slave economy (“so yes, we destroyed the African socius, but Africans never discovered the Christian god or developed a capitalist economy because they are racial recidivists. We will save them spiritually and economically”).

This much is to say that the English struggle over governmentality – the struggle over which model would become dominant, i.e. which one would serve as the operative logic or practice of jurisdiction of an increasingly international network of markets – is actually the struggle the long slavery debate (1770’s until 1833) covers over. Or rather, following Althusser, one can read the slavery debate as an ideological proposition: false in what it claims to designate, it is nevertheless a symptom of a reality other than that which is designated. That is: “slavery” within the slavery debate does not exist because it is a false designation obscuring another reality of which it is nevertheless a symptom or problem.

While we can say in the context of this struggle over governmentality, “slavery does not exist,” that does not mean it is nothing. Slavery, predicated on the shared employment of failed state syndrome, is a placeholder of sorts through which the struggle over governmentality is carried out such that the actual grounds of the struggle are covered over. The failed state syndrome and its product “slavery” allow contestants in this struggle between Mercantilism and Liberalism to say, “we are not concerned with the strengthening of our governmentality but rather with this other thing, slavery.” As an ideological proposition, slavery functions according to the logic of Pynchon’s third proverb for paranoids: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” That Imperial England abolished the slave trade (1807) and eventually emancipated all its slaves (1833) does not indicate the triumph of free trade over protectionism or even humanitarian values over crass economic calculation; rather these movements (abolitionism and emancipationism) did the work of Liberalism’s expanding over, and reconfiguring of, men in more of their relations. The abolition of slavery or the establishment of free-trade capitalism are not the causes of Liberalism (such being the Marxist line that the superstructure is in the last instance determined by the base), but rather the problemizations through which Liberalism determined itself and its efficacy.

            Failed state syndrome’s global and domestic reascendancy points to a similar struggle of governmentality, this time between, perhaps, Liberalism and Neoliberalism. Only the reconfigurations failed state syndrome is the symptom of are vastly different. Globally, such reconfigurations do not operate as an expansion of markets, but rather two interrelated assumptions: first that the “world” is an enclosure limiting the scope of expansion, and second that expansion must occur at all relations between men and their milieu. The first assumption closes off the outward expansion of governance while in response, the second multiplies markets internally. Rather than serving to open up new international markets (as Liberalism sought), neoliberal failed state syndrome serves to establish the third-world solely as resource in order to open new markets within the state infinitely. Failed state syndrome in Iraq thus underwrites failed state syndrome in Stockton. A constriction of market expansion globally (vast regions of the “world” reduced to resources) corresponds with a domestic proliferation of markets. 

            Yet, the failed state syndrome is, again, a symptom of a reality other than that which it designates. The proliferation of markets is not the struggle at hand in Stockton. Rather it is the desired result of a struggle over governmentality and its dominant practice of jurisdiction. Neoliberalism seeks the expansion of markets, or rather, productive sources of wealth generation by means of its own governmentality: the radically lessening of governance. This is not to say that neoliberals suffer from false consciousness or possess a dishonest soul. They are neither stupid nor immoral because, for this analysis, they don’t function as actants in this struggle at all. The struggle occurs at a level removed from the actions and decisions of individuals, although it does operate through those actions and decisions. Neoliberalism is always about the conducting the conduct of the population and men. It just does so according to the radicalization of Liberalism constitutive principle: govern more by governing less. Even under Liberalism, governing more by governing less has been a practice of jurisdiction operating upon men in the relations, men in their milieus. One does not govern men, Foucault claims about Liberalism; one governs men in their relations. You don’t conduct the moral conduct of the population by negative law (thou shalt not X), but rather by constructing the milieu within which individuals are given the freedom to choose as they ought. At this level of analysis, Liberalism and Neoliberalism are nearly identical. The different mobilizations of failed state syndrome, however, indicate the operational differences at another, more “global” level, that is, at the level of the internal-external state threshold. The formation of a new model of governmentality is in both cases (the slavery debate and the Iraq/Stockton nexus) concerned with the expansion and reconfigurations of markets. However, the configurations of those markets’ domains (where they are located and how they are imbricated into a system) are vastly different. While in one struggle failed state syndrome as used to justify the reformation of the mode of market expansion (slavery) on a liberal model, in the other failed state syndrome is used to justify the reconfiguration of domestic markets on an expansive model.

            Yet with governmentality we are not concerned with rationalizations detached from lived reality, from the conducts those rationalizations seek to conduct. Rather, governmentality is an analytic gird with which we can examine a zone of problemazation (the employment of failed state syndrome) and a site of practice (the conducting of conduct). In other words: governmentality may not exist (as a rationalization) but that does not mean it is nothing (as “concrete” power).

            The Stockton failed state iteration shows precisely this ontological doubling. My argument is concerned not with the non-existence of the failed state but rather the claim that the failed state syndrome provides a recasting of the production and use of the failed state within larger, or rather, displaced struggle (in these historical cases a struggle over governmentality). Failed states were and are both produced and used by dispositifs for ends external to the failed states themselves. Failed states are, in my analysis, a privileged form of tool being. Accordingly, failed state syndrome expresses apophatically the ends for and to which the failed state is produced and put. Failed state syndrome represents a displacement of the struggle into another domain entirely – it gets us to ask the wrong questions so it doesn’t have to worry about its answers.

            What other ends does the Stockton failed state syndrome give expression to? First, the symptoms: neoliberal tax policy has slashed possible tax revenues for the city, whose fixed or even declining finances left it unable to pay for essential public services. Thus an aggressor external to the internal operations of a “state” inserted itself into the inner workings of that state (private, hyper-capitalism undermining the solvency of public government). What results is a failed state or bankrupt city. The next step is only too clear. Unable to pay for essential public services, Stockton will more than likely be forced to privatize those services, just as Denver privatized part of its police operations or the University of California system has turned to capital investments (underwritten by rising tuition) to fund itself.

These symptoms point to a systemic, State-level (i.e. the more-or-less entirety of American governmental infrastructure – all the dispositifs conducting the conduct of men and the population) paradigm shift and a reconfiguration of the material operations of governmentality. The public state increasingly cannot afford to support itself in its mission to provide for the health and wellbeing of its population. In turn and bit-by-bit it turns essential services over to private companies. At a local level, we are apt to think, “hey, this isn’t that bad as long as we still have a fire department or police department.” But at a systemic level “we” have nothing. Whereas the police were once tacitly in the employ of the population or citizenry (although as The Secret Agent’s Winnie Verloc perceptively points out, “They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have”), under neoliberal governmentality they will be exclusively in the employ of private companies and a private governmental regime whose primary goal is not the health and wellbeing of the population, but the ever-expansive production of wealth, which is consolidated in the hands of very few persons and corporations. The enforcement of laws designed to protect the health and wellbeing of the population will then be enforced for the assured expansion and production of wealth. Yet such an end is not what is at stake in the failed state. Rather, the failed state is the means through which a larger struggle over governmentality plays out in order to accomplish a given goal. With Stockton this end is the proliferation of domestic markets, or rather, sources of wealth production. Quite literally, once publically provided services become new markets capable of producing wealth according to Marx’s formula of capital: M-C-M’.

            With Stockton the failed state syndrome completes itself in a Robocop like conclusion: neoliberal tax policy hawks bankrupt public government and then blame it for that bankruptcy in order to justify its indefinite occupation. Unchecked, the drive to establish new profits and new markets will expand into all sectors of public government, leaving no public redress or possibility of resistance. Such a threat is more pervasive than calls for the end of the “welfare” state – nothing more than the crude logic of “efficient” capitalism – in that the systemic erosion of social, medical, and economic security provided by public government will be in large part carried out and enforced via the appropriated dispositifs (police in particular) that once upheld that very security.

            The Stockton failed state syndrome points to this dystopian conclusion: the operations of neoliberal governmentality – the radical lessening of governance as a means of governing more – are being constructed such that the field of governmental power is turned into an immanence of micro-markets out of which maximum profits and maximum strength (understood as the number of power relations being controlled) are consolidated in the hands of a new and limited center of control, which the designations “Wall Street” and the “1%” inadequately apply. We are not dealing simply with capitalism or privatization, but rather the production of capitalism or privatization through a radical reconfiguration of governmental relations, of the conducting of men in their relations.

Robocop isn’t a 1980’s dystopian fantasy. It is an increasingly prevalent reality.

Catholic Bio-Governmentality vs. Post-Biopolitical Form-Of-Life

  Some brief musings. 

     If one formation of Catholic governmentality (how the Catholic church seeks to conduct the conduct of humans 1. through any means possible, 2. throughout the largest possible population, 3. and by the most efficient means) takes shape much as Foucault discusses in History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (through the dispositif "sexuality" as propped upon the "pervert's" body and the hysterical female body -- and which current conservative biopolitical legislation redeploys across the homosexual body [anti-gay marriage], sexually active female body [contraception]) is another formation of Catholic governmentality possible? 

   The dominant form of Catholic governmentality it radically biopolitical in its structure, logic, and deployment. That is:

• ·      The Catholic Church operates through sacraments
• ·      Because a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace it requires not simply "manifestation" in signs, but surface upon which it operates
• ·      Being in history, these surfaces are contingent (they can not be) and therefore shift over time
• ·      The dominant surface through upon which the current formation of the sacrament of marriage operates is a certain modality of "sexuality" (a marriage is only a marriage with sexual activity that aims at procreation)
• ·      The Church then employs this modality of sacrament as a dispositif of governmentality. Hence the American Church's furor over contraception, which is the attempted use of legislation to ensure a model of Catholic governmentality.

Yet, this being all contingent, what if there were another sacramental modality, one that was not biopolitical? My hunch is that Walter Pater and other aesthetic movement writers' conversions (Oscar Wilde) indicate the possibility of such a possible sacrament. Further, the Church at one point held the potential to offer a politically and ethically efficacious space outside of biopolitics and modern bio-governmentality, but it instead deployed/deploys its power through the same medium of biopolitics, etc. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” is as misguided an attempt to forge a lived ethical “program” resistant to biopolitics as Foucault’s (im)famous call for a new economy of bodies and pleasures as the anodyne for biopolitics. Both take the “body” – a biopolitical construct – as their post-biopolitical surface of deployment. 

What Pater’s Hellenic subjectivity (a comportment of centeredness and blitheness which proceeds through the profanation of apparatic relations) offers is a possible alternative to biopolitics that remains deeply invested in material reality. It is, perhaps, a sacramental form-of-life (a life at grace with its Umwelt, or a zoe that is its own bios) that escapes the traps of biopolitics and a transcendental renunciations of this thing we designate “life.”