Globalization as Governmentality

Globalization as GovernmentalityAuthor(s): Wendy Larner and William WaltersSource: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 29, No. 5, Governing Society Today (Nov.-Dec. 2004), pp. 495-514Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40645138 .

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Alternatives 29 (2004), 495-514

Globalization as Governmentality

Wendy Larner and William Walters*

To repeat: don't think, but look! - Ludwig Wittgenstein

At the 2002 International Sociological Association meeting, globalization was described in one session as "the story we all know." It was suggested that whereas economists tend to develop empiricist accounts of globalization focused on outcomes, scholars of international relations and international political economy were to be commended for their move toward feminist and postpositivist accounts focused on ideas, identities, and culture. Yet in the discussion that ensued it became apparent that, despite such theoretical innovations, the story of globalization itself remained remark- ably unaltered. The shared collective conception was one of epochal macrolevel change. The intellectual challenge was to specify more clearly the content of this change, to develop more rigorous accounts of hegemonic projects and institutions, to examine the consequences for different places and people, and to identify how globalization was being resisted.

Our argument is that while there is considerable diversity in the way that globalization is understood, above and beyond this, the major international relations and international political economy theories are linked by a certain sociological and political realism. Put simply, globalization is treated as a transformation in the very structure of the world. This is true not just of mainstream accounts, but even many of those employing critical perspectives. The task of the researcher is to capture the substance of change along axes such as speed, space, time, territoriality, sovereignty, and identity. We suggest a useful alternative is to consider globalization as a "governmentality," that is, as a governmental rationality.1 More specifically, we are interested in what we call elsewhere "global governmentality."2 This article demonstrates the value of this approach in terms of four key

♦Larner: School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UKBS8 1TH; Williams: Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6

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496 Globalization as Governmentality

questions regularly posed or implied by analysts of globalization: What is globalization? When is globalization? Where is globalization? and What are the politics of globalization?

Our purpose is not to venture another, truer or more complete, definition of globalization or a typology of competing theories. What we seek is a less substantialized account of globalization. With their search for the hidden processes animating global change, studies of globalization have been too deep. Tully argues there has been a "general reorientation in Western thinking in the twentieth century ... a move away from the search for an essence hidden behind human activities to the surface aspects that give them mean- ing."3 We think it is high time that studies of globalization also attended more closely to surfaces, practices, and routines. We argue for greater "superficiality" in studies of globalization, an "empiri- cism of the surface,"4 and aim to demonstrate how this approach might promote different ways of understanding the present.

The term "governmentality" has been employed in two distinct ways in the literature.5 Used in a specific sense, it denotes a particular way of thinking about and exercising power, whose historical emergence Foucault dates to the eighteenth century in Europe. Here "governmentality" names a form of power whose logic is not the defense of territory or the aggrandizement of the sovereign but the optimization of the health and welfare of the population.

But governmentality is also used in a second, more general, sense. This is as an approach that explores how governing always involves particular representations, knowledges, and expertise regarding that which is to be governed. This second understanding draws attention to the complex relationship between thought and government. Whether it is the government of an enterprise, a state, or one's own health, the practice of government involves the production of particular "truths" about these entities. Seeking out the history of these truths affords us critical insights concerning the constitution of our societies and ourselves. It is governmentality in this second sense that we invoke in this article.

What Is Globalization?

Whether theorized as structure, process, or epoch, globalization is understood to involve a profound transformation in our social condition. Influential accounts portray globalization as "time-space compression"6 or as the increasing predominance of "transconti- nental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interactions and the exercise of power."7 Others emphasize human aspects: "the



Wendy Lamer and William Walters 497

widespread recognition of a worldwide human commonality or of world society as a whole as the framework of human action."8 Some Marxist accounts stress its neoliberal character. "The main historical thrust of neoliberal economic globalization is to bring about a situation in which private capital and 'the market' alone determine the restructuring of economic, political and cultural life, making alternative values or institutions subordinate."9 Then there are those who focus on "globalization of production" and who are concerned to show how firms, networks, and institutions are being reorganized across global space.10

Seeking to expand the terms of the debate, many postpositivist and feminist accounts exercise caution in their engagement with globalization. Nevertheless, they often echo the claims of their mainstream colleagues. For example, in their survey of "second wave" international political economy literatures, Marchand and Runyan11 claim there is agreement that capitalism is the defining feature of globalization; that firms and financial actors are its main driving forces; that technology is a key enabling and contributing factor; that neoliberal ideology has played a key role in determin- ing the direction of globalization; and that globalization has implications for social organization. Their preference is for the term global restructuring, implying that globalization involves a set of multi- dimensional, multispeed, and disjunctured processes. They identify shifting boundaries and meanings, then emphasize that dominant readings of globalization conceal familiar patterns of economic, racial, and sexual exploitation.

Thus, despite important differences of emphasis and theoretical focus, there seems to be a general consensus on the key themes and analytical questions associated with globalization. One example is the theme of "deterritorialization." The idea is that as economic activity has become more digital, production more fluid, communication more instantaneous, and people more mobile, so, too, has economic, political, and social activity become less bounded. The global is located outside physical or geographic spaces: it somehow escapes territory. We would argue that this equation of globalization and deterritorialization reflects a particular, usually state-centric, definition of territory. As Amin stresses, spatial ontologies based on such bounded territorial logics tend to assume that geographical units somehow preexist ways of thinking about and acting upon them.12

Globalization as (Re)Territorialization

Rose suggests a more fluid understanding of territory. Governmen- tal thought, he argues, inevitably involves territorialization.




[Territorialization] is a matter of marking out a territory in thought and inscribing it in the real, topographizing it, investing it with powers, bounding it by exclusions, defining who or what can rightfully enter. Central to modern governmental thought has been a territorialization of national spaces: states, countries, populations, societies.13

Clearly the geographical territory of the state, the space contained by its frontiers, is only one form of territorialization. Deleuze and Guattari also insist that "deterritorialization on a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterritorialization."14 We suggest it might be useful to analyze globalization in terms of this double movement. This would counteract the tendency to reify globalization as the virtual, the flow, and the spaceless - that which escapes the fixed world of territory "down here." Rather, globalization presupposes (re) territorialization. An important contribution governmentality can make to the globalization debate is to chart these global territorializations.

Some have already taken up the challenge of mapping global territories. Hindess investigates how classical economic thought pre- supposed a specifically national economic space.15 He compares this national space with new forms of calculation that not only pre- suppose a "global economy" but make it calculable and effective. In the context of European Union countries, Bigo examines the blurring of boundaries that previously separated fields of domestic and international security, pointing toward the emergence of a transnational security field that he likens to a Mobius strip.16 More generally, the work of Taylor, Agnew, Dalby, OTuathail, and others within critical geopolitics offers a wealth of insight and compara- tive opportunities as to previous historical ways of dividing, coding, and territorializing the world. But these are only the beginning of possible explorations of the many (re) territorializations entailed by globalization.

Globalization as Individuation

When international studies first asked "What is globalization?" the tendency was to construe it as a singular presence. More recent accounts of globalization are critical of such totalizations. For example, Jessop argues that "far from globalization being a unitary causal mechanism, it should be understood as the complex, emer- gent product of many different forces operating on many scales."17 But what does this pluralization - from globalization to globaliza- tions - actually tell us? While we agree that globalization involves




diverse phenomena, we think it is important to consider the con- stitutive and creative function of attributing proper names.

The name . . . individuates an assemblage that may have been in existence for a long time before it was named, and which may outlive its naming. But nonetheless, the naming is itself a creative act: it assembles a new individuation of concepts, symptoms, moralities, languages; it confers a kind of mobile and transferable character upon a multiplicity.18

Naming is important then, but not just for the reasons that IR social con s truc ti vis ts suppose; that is, as an ideational and legiti- matory force. Naming also involves assembling singularities out of heterogeneous and diverse phenomena.

Another way of putting this is that globalization might be con- sidered the site of a "dispositif."19 This focuses attention on the conditions of truth and practice under which the phenomena of globalization acquired its positivity. Many of the elements now stud- ied as globalization were previously known otherwise: as the "new international division of labor," the "restructuring of the welfare state," "transnational interdependence," "deregulation of international finance," and so on.

We suggest a shift from a concern with the substance of globalization to an account of it in terms of its dispositif. Strangely absent from most answers to the "what is globalization?" question is any reference to these intellectual and epistemological systems that make it visible. But the ceaseless work of conferences, books, speeches, commissions, measurements, the founding of research centers, and much else plays an active, not merely reflective, role in fixing globalization, speaking in its name, giving it presence and durability. It is through these "curves of visibility" and "of enuncia- tion"20 that globalization comes into existence.

Again, there are studies that indicate the directions such work might take. Nigel Thrift tracks the movement of discourses through networks of academics, professionals, and technocrats, showing how the invention of the so-called "new economy" can be understood as an "insti tutional-cum-ideological calculus."21 This work exemplifies the empirical tracing of dispositifs, of power/knowledge networks. Or consider the work of Salskov-Iverson et al.,22 following the movement of new public management ideas and techniques through networks and their assimilation into the practice of local government in different countries.

But we should not forget how the dispositif produces invisibil- ity as well. "Each apparatus has its way of structuring light, the way




in which it falls, blurs and disperses, distributing the visible and the invisible, giving birth to objects which are dependent on it for their existence, and causing them to disappear."23 To focus solely on the transformed territories of globalization is to neglect the question of what it "in-visibilizes." Are there not other realities, other objects that we might help to force into existence, but that a focus on globalization would preclude? It is with the question of disclosing other spaces that we turn to a third aspect of "what is globalization?"

Globalization as Geopolitical Rationality As a literature that foregrounds the discursivity and historicity of world order, critical geopolitics represents a valuable intellectual resource for studying globalization as territorialization. To think of globalization in this way is to place it within a genealogy of ways of imagining the world. For example, Agnew advances the concept of "civilizational geopolitics" to convey the dominant mode among Western powers of imagining world space in the nineteenth century.24 It would be useful to compare globalization with this nineteenth-century understanding. This would relativize globalization.

The master-narrative of "civilization" was ultimately displaced by ideas like "development" and "modernization." For much of the twentieth century, these concepts took on the work of depicting world population and social change. Discussing globalization along- side these other imaginings of world space would encourage us to stop taking globalization at face value. Rather than being the contemporary condition that determines and envelopes us, or the epoch in which we live, we would see it as what we might call a "particular-universal.

" This move would also emphasize the power relations embedded

in the notion of globalization. Civilization was the site of a power relation between colonizers and subject peoples. It was also a truth regime in that imperial politics was conducted in its name. The "standard of civilization"25 determined whether a people would be formally recognized by the Western powers as "sovereign" and admissible to the world society of states.26 Globalization is also a site of politics. For example, commitment to and preparedness for the global economy is sometimes regarded as a measure of a state's fit- ness - its citizenship within the world community. Who speaks in the name of globalization? Who can pronounce upon its truth?

Civilization is, of course, not the only geopolitical rationality with which we might compare globalization. For instance, Pember- ton shows how the theme of scientific and industrial "rationalization" was central to debates within the League of Nations from the mid-1920s to early in the 1930s.27 In a context of international




depression and rising nationalism, she finds that electric power was vested with all manner of hopes and desires for a new and pacific world order. This fascination with electricity might strike us today as quaint. But that is precisely the point: it places in perspective some of the more breathless claims made about new communication technologies today. In certain respects, technologies have always been "new," and we are by no means the first people to believe that they lived in a time of profound change and instability.

But it is not just about identifying how globalization has taken over some of the work performed by civilization or rationalization: it is also about getting at the specificity of globalization in ways external to its own account of itself. Typically, globalization discourse tells a story about the transformation of the state system or the growing interconnection of economic activities. It has its mo- ments of rupture - 1973 or 1989 - but it is still a profoundly devel- opmental logic. By placing the global within the history of geopolitical thought, we might unsettle such evolutionary accounts. We need to construct analytical series and lines that work diagonally28 across these settled planes.

Why not compare "global governance" with the Concert of Europe? Why not compare the space of "new regionalism" with the spaces of imperialism and developmentalism?29 These analytical ploys would push to the surface the distinctiveness of the rationalities of globalization.

When Is Globalization?

When did globalization begin? This is another question that vexes commentators. Indeed, accounts of the what of globalization are bound up with the when. Is this a novel period of world history associated with the contemporary crisis of capitalism? Or is globalization simply a new iteration of a much longer process that can be traced back to the colonial expansions of the seventeenth century? Or even the rise of a world system in the 1500s?

Certainly, an important critique of globalization comes from those who argue that this is an old story that is only now receiving attention because it is being done to "us" as well as "them." Massey, for example, suggests that globalization is actually a story about Europe and North America that privileges time over space.30 Glob- alization, like civilization, embodies a claim as to the true or ulti- mate direction of history, the promise of progress.

Crude accounts of globalization commit a form of teleology, often technologically determined. They find the antecedents of globalization in an ever-receding past and argue that our world is




the outcome of processes bringing human society ever closer together. Other commentaries are alive to the dangers of this teleo- logical reasoning. For instance, Held et al. identify "historical forms of globalization" to argue that globalization is not particularly novel and they seek to avoid the impression of an eventual realization of a singular, integrated world.31 However, while they avoid teleology, their relationship to history is still anachronistic.32 They take contemporary categories and use them as a lens to view the past. Con- sider the variables that their study employs: "extensity of global networks," "velocity of global flows," and so on.33 The past is narrated in terms of changing social and political forms of globalization.

The problem with this approach is that it immunizes us to the particularity of globalization. While their project of qualifying the epochal view that "everything has changed" is a valuable one, it nevertheless makes the present too continuous with the past. Pre- vious ages did not employ the language of globalization to under- stand themselves. The mentalities of earlier societies and cultures are effaced by this approach. Rather than reading past formations as antecedents of the present, a genealogy of globalization would seek to grasp regimes of practices in their own terms.34 It would endeavor to recover the languages that were used to map, organize, and order world space. We should take seriously both past and present ways of describing the world.

Genealogies of Globalization

Genealogy implies a different way of answering the when question. Rather than seeking its origins in a particular set of circumstances or in its distant antecedents, we can be quite empirical and trace the emergence of globalization at the level of forms of knowledge and practice. At what point does the global emerge as a way of knowing and acting on and in the world?

Globalization did not exist in a strong sense until governments, international agencies, corporate actors, scholars, and activists began to name globalization and develop ways to measure its extent and its effects. Even a cursory survey suggests it was not until the early 1990s that the term "globalization" began to gain widespread currency. Schölte, for example, observes that the number of entries for "globalization" in the U.S. Library of Congress multi- plied from 34 in 1994 to 693 in 1999.35

How did it become possible to think in terms of the global? What techniques were required? How are these ideas and techniques transferred in and between organizations? Embodied in what forms of expertise? Answering these questions might involve a genealogy of international indicators, beginning with area-studies




typologies that allowed countries to be clustered together in particular ways36; or it might involve looking at how the indicators produced by international organizations such as the OECD or IMF made it possible to think of a space beyond the nation-state. Simi- larly, how did trade, investment, and migration, once understood as transactions between discrete nation-states, come to be understood as measurements of global mobility, flows, and networks? How did accountancy come to be rearticulated as a mechanism of global standardization?37 Interrogating these reconfigurations of knowledge, technique, and space is likely to reveal much about contemporary conceptions of the global.

As we noted above, discussions of globalization are largely silent concerning the relationship of academics and the social sciences to this object. The type of inquiry we have in mind would challenge the position of the social sciences with respect to globalization. Social scientists are not detached observers here, but active in territorializing the global. Just as Machiavelli's and Montes- quieu's fledgling sciences of politics provided a vocabulary and a set of concepts that did not simply reflect but helped to constitute the political, and as early sociology helped to map the territory of "society," so, too, we need to know much more about the role of experts and techniques in knowing globalization.

Nor should we neglect the role of the antiglobalization and altermondialization movements. Have these countermovements created a new beast in their efforts to "resist" globalization? Or is globalization a necessary fiction, a strategic essentialism? Is resistance always the best metaphor? What about creation?

Counternarratives of Globalization

It is not enough merely to problematize how we come to under- stand ourselves and our time in terms of globalization. To debate globalization - however critically - is still to engage in a game that keeps it at the center of academic and public debate and leaves other objects beyond the lines of visibility. Is it possible to do without globalization? What stories - or counternarratives - might displace and dethrone globalization? Rather than emphasizing interconnection, why not a history of ways of dividing, segregating, disciplining, and allocating territories and population? What ends might be accomplished by making such divisions not supplements or qualifications added on to an already globalized world but pri- mary features in our descriptions?38 Placing these at the center of the narrative immediately places the present in a different light. The key feature becomes not its continuity with previous systems of political community or ever-increasing levels of communication




and connection, but the particular forms of division and distribu- tion that it has invented. As we suggested above, comparing the discourse of globalization with that of civilization would be one way of doing this.

But one could also unsettle "globalization" by remembering the concepts it has either displaced or subsumed. How has globalization redescribed and rearticulated a field that was previously mapped as "post" - postmodern, post-Fordist, postcolonial, post- national, post-Cold War, post-Communist? Globalization seems to affirm that we are not merely "after" the past, but more fully caught up in a forward-moving process. Indeed, perhaps one rea- son for the success of globalization as a concept is that it is more definite and positive than its competitors.

To take a longer-term view, a genealogy of globalization could also relate it to other concepts that may have contained it or, con- versely, that it has displaced and reinscribed - modernization, lib- eralization, and interdependence. That would not only generate a greater understanding of how and why globalization has the shape that it has, but it would also allow us to appreciate the contingency present in this particular conception of politics.39 Which concepts have traveled? How were these concepts translated? What were the dead-end concepts?

We also need to consider what is left out or suppressed. Here we might examine the recent past. Narratives of globalization now move smoothly from the collapse of Bretton Woods or the end of Communism to the present. They tend to gloss over the pessimistic narratives of the 1980s and early 1990s. What happened to the rise of Japan/Southeast Asia, the gloom of those who anticipated the decline of U.S. hegemony, or the confident prediction of a trilat- eral world order based on three great regions? The point of such counternarratives is not to challenge the truth of globalization so much as reveal the partiality, inadequacy, and provisionality of such overarching grand theories.

Discourses of globalization are more recent, more contingent, and more multiple than often portrayed. In this respect, our sug- gestions of counternarratives are not alternative candidates for a better or truer theory of global change; on the contrary, they speak to the limits of any such endeavors.

Where Is Globalization?

Much of the discussion of globalization has concentrated on the pressure of "outside" globalization on states. Changes in the organization




of capitalism give rise to transnational economic networks linking spatially discrete organizations and individuals. In turn, this challenges nation-state forms of politics that assume a unified center from which politics could occur, and give rise to the shift from government to governance. Now there is sustained speculation about how new forms of the social can be sustained in a globalized, net- worked, multiscalar world.

However, a number of studies have challenged the notion that globalization is truly "global." Hirst and Thompson highlight the profoundly limited and regional nature of transnational connections.40 Mann has qualified talk of globalization with his idea of "ostracizing imperialism," pointing out that "economic globalization' is mostly Northernization, integrating the advanced countries but excluding much of the world's poor; and thus widening inequalities."41 OTuathail points to the uneven access to information and communications technologies as a "functional global apartheid that separates and segregates certain affluent and wired neighborhoods from other deprived and disconnected zones and neighborhoods."42 These interventions point up the social and political unevenness of the phenomena associated with globalization. But it is possible to go further and question not just the uni- versality or comprehensiveness of globalization but its place. Here we highlight studies that challenge the idea that globalization is external, out there, up there, above us.

Globalization as Situated

Most immediately, and perhaps most familiarly, there are those who have focused on how the global is produced nationally. According to Sassen,

to a large extent, global processes materialize in national territories. . . . [M]any transactions that are a key part of the global economy do not cross borders, or do not do so in ways that investment and trade do, but are located inside national economies. . . . [E]ven the most digitized global financial market is grounded in a set of very material resources and spaces largely embedded in national territories.43

This is an argument that many states, or elements of them, are reoriented to guaranteeing the "rights" of global capital. Other studies consider the production and circulation of discourse of globalization in different national settings44 to show how globalization is far from being a monolithic exterior force; for one thing, it means different things in different places. They challenge the view




of globalization as an outside pressure forcing itself upon polities. Instead, we see how it is mobilized to legitimate particular domestic policies - some of which were previously justified for other reasons.

Our argument is that these efforts to explore the "situatedness" of globalization are an important development. Yet they still assume an underlying common process that manifests itself differ- ently in different contexts. We think there is scope to move beyond the idea that policies are justified by certain ideas of globalization. Actor network approaches, for example, consider globalization in terms of sociotechnical networks.45 This takes understandings of globalization from those óf universal processes to a situated per- formance/practice.46

This concern with the sociotechnical suggests a significant modification to the familiar notion of globalization as "placeless" space. The latter view effaces the complex manipulations of space, of inscription, knowledge, and time, the multitude of sociotechnics that have to be configured - and constantly maintained, for they are always threatening to break down - if this space is to exist. In other words, we need to recognize that globalization is an effect of practices located in time and place. This holds as much for new spaces of power (financial markets, offshore banking centers, elec- tronic transactions, and bond-rating agencies) as it did for the old (national currencies, trading posts, telegraphs, banks).

This approach and science and technology studies more generally hold out great potential for a more material analysis of globalization. It is an approach that challenges the tendency to take globalization at face value, as weightless, or deterritorialized. For it insists that global relations do not proliferate effortlessly. Our attention is drawn to the ways in which knowing on a global scale depends upon diverse and heterogeneous materialities, the arrangements of things and bodies - offices, spreadsheets, power supplies, secretaries, man- agers, and so on - that are always located in a space somewhere but that always have spatial effects. Moreover, these materials are not idle: they are performative. They participate in the "generation of information, of power relations, of subjectivities and objectivities."47

Globalization as Embodied

Feminist analysts take accounts of the situatedness of globalization a step further. For them, the global constitutes its own domains, not only at the level of the governmental and sociotechnical but also at the level of the body. "How does the global get within?" ask Franklin, Lury, and Stacey in their analysis of globalization as a set of effects, entities, and embodiments.48 Similarly, Gibson-Graham is concerned to explore how global subjectivities are constituted,




not as identities that are formed in response to macrolevel struc- tural processes but, rather, as a set of practices that connect particular subjectivities to different versions of globality.49 For these scholars, globalization is understood to involve both subject effects and modes of embodiment.

Who are the subjects of globalization? Emblematic figures such as cosmopolitans, investors, international students, and entrepre- neurs, as well as migrant workers, refugees, and asylum seekers can be understood not as self-evident categories but, rather, as perfor- mances of the global. In this context, globalization can be understood as a complex of practices that foster multiple forms of subjec- tification. Globalization also has many varied effects. Not only is it an economic process, it can also be a rallying cry, a site of community. Globalization sometimes implies a monolithic force or cause. But it is also an idiom of action, creation, change. In this regard, the question of freedom as the modality of liberal power is central.

We discussed earlier how one might study globalization as a metanarrative, a way of marking our present. It is a spatialized and temporalized understanding of who we are. Yet, rather than heed calls that globalization points to a need for a "new ontology,"50 we might observe how globalization is itself a dispositif that ontolo- gizes.51 Globalization can be understood in terms of a historical ontology - a reflexive moment in the discursive construction of ourselves where a knowledge of the subject is produced in terms of its interConnectivity, mobility, sovereignty. We are produced as global subjects, emerging from a past of nation-state-focused political struggles. Globalization discourse could thus be seen as a moment of reflexivity, a "fold" in which another dimension of human existence is opened up. Less a force that impinges upon subjects; more a site in the production of particular kinds of sub- jectivity and experience: "be global!"; "think globally!"

Our argument, then, is that globalization is not necessarily global and not simply "out there." Rather, globalization is usefully understood as a situated process that involves diverse subjects and objects, including nation-states and sociotechnical networks and bodies. We are suggesting that globalization is not so much a new epoch as it is a way of imagining human life. It is a "world in the making,"52 but this "making" is being done through very specific imaginaries, processes, and practices.

What Are the Politics of Globalization?

The temporality of most accounts of globalization comes to the fore over the question of the future of the nation-state. International




institutions and organizations are seen as challenging national sovereignty, as is the rise of marketization and nonstate actors. For left politics, this is seen as profoundly challenging. Many are still obsessed with the question of the state, now under global conditions. They seem to want a new theory of it. For example, Sassen rightly seeks to advance the globalization debate beyond the nega- tive conception implied by deregulation, privatization, and liberal- ization. But she does this in a way that keeps the state central as a concept. She wants to capture "all the ways in which the state par- ticipates in setting up the new frameworks through which globalization is furthered" as well as transformations "inside" the state.53

For scholars engaged in international studies, the question appears to be: What role will nation-states play in a global world? In these accounts, nation-states remain preconstituted political actors. Indeed, the nation-state is often reified, sometimes even personi- fied. For us, the question of the future of the nation-state is not one of continued relevance or otherwise; rather, it is a question of how what counts as self-evident and categorical has shifted. More- over, to answer this question it is important to avoid projecting familiar conceptual forms onto a different scale (from national civil society to global civil society; from nation-states to global governance). Instead, careful attention needs to be paid to the discourses and practices through which organizations and actors rep- resent themselves and their relations with each other.

We are prompted to ask: what sort of space is the global? It might be argued that globalization is geo-economic, rather than geopolitical.54 Rather than the spatial assumptions of nested scales in which city, region, national, and international sit inside of each other, this is a space of multiple flows, networks, and partner- ships.55 It is imagined as a smooth, interconnected space, made up of connections, flows, and hypermobility. But it is also a space of turbulence and self-organization. Such terms are more than florid language. They are idioms in the exercise of (geo) political and (geo-) economic power. They suggest particular styles and arts of governing.

The Politics of Globalization

Jessop is right to observe that the idea of a zero-sum opposition between globalization and the state is not helpful. He argues that "states help to constitute the economy as an object of regulation and the extent to which even economic globalization continues to depend on politics."56 But it is not states that do this. To frame it in this way is to imply they would never destroy themselves. Rather,




attention should be paid to the discourses and techniques through which disparate and qualitatively different assemblages are made into commensurable entities such as the "economy." Most immediately then, the technical is political.57 Policy debates within international organizations and the redeployment of techniques and measurements are part of the means by which global objects and subjects are being constituted. So, too, are the flows of knowledge embodied in the activities of management consultants and others.58

These claims underline the point that globalization is governmental. Globalization assumes particular "macrosubjects" (indus- tries, states, regions, firms, networks) with particular attributes and capacities. These entities are exhorted to enter into the pursuit for international competitiveness through notions such as export ori- entation, self-management, good governance, and policy dialogue. They are encouraged to work on themselves to recreate themselves in very specific forms with particular capacities. Significantly, and in strong contrast to earlier formulations, embeddedness in the global order is not imposed from above but is to be sought volun- tarily. Both people and places are encouraged to apply financial disciplines, demonstrate entrepreneurial capacities, and seek out new opportunities. Moreover, the response to global uncertainty is not to withdraw but rather to engage more deeply, to adapt, and become more compatible with the new global terrain. In this regard, we can see how globalization is both a description and a nor- mative account.

Governmentality encourages us to ask questions such as: Through what techniques are such global entities known? How are the relationships between them understood? Once attention is paid to such questions, it becomes possible to better distinguish between concepts like civilization, modernization, and globalization. How does each of these formulations imagine places and populations? How do they divide and rule? And what of other series? Religions, nation-states, networks? Finally, we could think about how the governmentalities of globalization are articulated with other forms of rule (for example, authoritarianism) .59

Global Politics

Finally, there is the question of how globalization sets the terms of political debates. We are told that globalization is unprecedented, novel, unique in human history. It is the dawning of a new epoch. We suggest that governmentality should dedramatize globalization. This should encourage us to ask new questions about the realm of the political.




One problem is that too often the political is understood as local resistance, whereas globalization is transplanetary connectiv- ity, both disembodied and reified. Oppositional voices are those of women's groups, labor, environmental movements, and indigenous peoples. Similarly, new nationalisms and/or fundamentalisms are seen as responses to globalization. Subversive acts, nonconform- ism, or dissent are seen as resistance to globalization because they happen in a global era. For example, Chin and Mittelman do not seek to discriminate between resistance to globalization and resistance to other issues.60 Our first point is that we need to get past generalized notions of politics.

More generally, the problem with this formulation of politics is that it always places "social forces" as reactive and capital as taking the initiative. We are always running to keep up. Hardt and Negri reverse this assumption, insisting on the active role that counter- cultures played in making the present.61 At stake is nothing less than the production of "new subjectivities"; "the indexes of the value of the movements - mobility, flexibility, knowledge, communication, cooperation, the affective - would define the transformation of capitalist production in the subsequent decades." In their view, capitalism is not that which creates from scratch but a movement of appropriation of cultural forms. It plays off the inventive- ness of social and cultural forces in tactics of recuperation. For these reasons we would want to insist on the creative, inventive acts of social movements. To map them as always reacting to globalization, capitalism, and so on is to miss what they may be doing that is new: their lines of flight, their escape attempts.

* * *

Despite their efforts to identify what is novel about globalization as a phenomenon and the search for new analytical inspiration, analysts of globalization, along with many other scholars of international relations and international political economy, remain caught in the categories and concepts of their disciplines. Our claim is that while globalization is certainly a phenomenon that is broadly recognizable, rather than a unified process, it is more usefully understood as a complex of effects that have shifted the spatial and social imaginaries through which we think consolidation and dispersion.62 In this regard, we have suggested globalization can be usefully understood as a "global governmentality." This encourages us to ask questions such as: How did this problemati- zation emerge? How was it operationalized/technized? With what implications for certain forms of self?




We have made a case for greater historicity when examining globalization. This would allow a better grasp of this particular rationality, encourage us to explore facts rather than aspirations, and examine how global effects are often driven by very specific concerns.63 While such an approach would be empirical, this is not for the realist purposes of comparing the extent of globality or interdependence over time.64 It would focus on a particular stratum of reality - the problematizations and representations of, and actions upon reality. We can afford to be more nominalist about globalization - to consider it as an irreducible moment of naming that individuates a set of forces, institutions, desires, fears.

Finally, our aspiration is to identify how globalization involves processes that overwhelm and disrupt each other. By placing the emphasis on difference, disjuncture, and unintended consequences, we aspire to make the universal particular. We aspire to dedramatize globalization. To set it within series. To make the familiar look strange. To relativize our present. The need is to confront globalization and its network of terms - global governance, new regionalism, complexity, networks, flows - with dissonance. To make it stutter. We think this is important since globalization is sublime, awe-inspiring, enchanting, and terrifying; altogether too big.

Notes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Studies Association Congress, Brisbane, Australia, July 2002. We acknowledge the conference participants and the editors of this special issue for their com- ments. The epigraph is from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investiga- tions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), para 66.

1. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

2. Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds., Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004) .

3. James Tully, "The Agonic Freedom of Citizens, Economy and Society 28, no. 2 (1999): 161-182.

4. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 57.

5. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), p. 16.

6. David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 7. David Held, A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt, and J. Perraton, eds., Global

Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Stanford: Stanford Univer- sity Press, 1999), p. 27.

8. Martin Shaw, Historical Sociology and Global Transformation, in Ronan Palan, ed., Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories (London: New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 230.




9. Barry Gills, introduction to "Globalization and the Politics of Resistance," in Gills, ed., Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (New York: Palgrave, 2000).

10. J. Henderson, P. Dicken, M. Hess, N. Coe, and H. W.-C. Yeung, Global Production Networks and the Analysis of Economic Development, Working Paper No. 433, Manchester Business School, 2001.

11. Marianne Marchand and Anne Runyan, eds., Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, and Resistances (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 4-7.

12. Ash Amin, "Spatialities of Globalization," Environment and Plan- ning A 34 (2002): 385-399.

13. Rose, note 4, p. 34. 14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press 1987), p. 54. 15. Barry Hindess, "Neo-Liberalism and the National Economy," in

Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess, eds., Governing Australia: Studies of Con- temporary Rationalities of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 210-226. On the place of calculative techniques such as benchmarking in constituting globalizing economic spaces, see W. Larner and R. Le Heron, "The Spaces and Subjects of a Globalizing Economy: Towards a Situated Method," Environment and Planning D: Sodety and Space 20 (2002): 753-774.

lb. Didier Bigo, When Iwo Become One: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe," in Morten Kelstrup and Michael C. Williams, eds., International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000).

17. Bobjessop, "On the Spatio-Temporal Logics of Capital's Globaliza- tion and the Manifold Implications for State Power," Department of Soci- ology, Lancaster University, 2001, available at http^/comp.lancs.ac.uk/ sociology/papers/jessop-spatio-temporal-logics.pdf, accessed Novermber 29, 2004.

18. Rose, note 4, p. 24. Rose relates this point to the discussion in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (London: Athlone, 1987), pp. 120-123.

19. Gilles Deleuze, "What Is a Dispositif?" in T. J. Armstrong, ed., Michel Foucault, Philosopher (New York: Routledge, 1992).

20. Ibid., p. 160. 21. Nigel Thrift, "It's the Romance, Not the Finance, that Makes Busi-

ness Worth Pursuing: Disclosing a New Market Culture," Economy and Soci- ety 30, no. 4 (2001): 412-432.

22. D . Salskov-Iverson et al., "Governmentality, Globalization, and Local Practice," Alternatives 25, no. 2 (2000): 183-222.

23. Deleuze, note 19. 24. John Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics (London: Rout-

ledge, 1998). 25. Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of "Civilization" in International Soci-

ety (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 26. D. Strang, Contested Sovereignty: The Social Construction of

Colonial Imperialism," in Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

27. Jo-Anne Pemberton, "New Worlds for Old: The League of Nations in the Age of Electricity," Review of International Studies 28, no. 2 (2002):




311-336. On the place of technoscientific metaphors in the political imag- ination of the European Union, see Andrew Barry and William Walters, "From EURATOM to 'Complex Systems': Technology and European Gov- ernment," Alternatives 28, no. 3 (2003): 305-329.

28. Deleuze, note 19, p. 159. 29. Wendy Larner and William Walters, "The Political Rationality of

the 'New Regionalism': Toward a Genealogy of the 'Region,'" Theory and Society 31, no. 3 (2002,): 391-432.

30. Doreen Massey, "Imagining Globalization: Power-Geometries of Time-Space," in A. Brah, M. Hickman, and M. Macan Ghaill, eds., Global Futures: Migration, Environment, and Globalization (Basingstoke, UK: St. Mar- tin's Press, 1999).

31. Held et al., note 7. 32. Conal Condren, "Political Theory and the Problem of Anachro-

nism," in A. Vincent, ed., Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Stephen Hobden, "Historical Sociol- ogy: Back to the Future of International Relations?" in S. Hobden andj. Hobson, eds., Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2002).

33. Held et al., note 7, p. 17. 34. Mitchell Dean, "A Genealogy of the Government of Poverty," Econ-

omy and Society 21, no. 3 (1992): 219. 35. Jan A. Schölte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (London: Mac-

millan, 2000). 36. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1995). 37. Michael Shapiro, "Globalization and the Politics of Discourse,"

Social Text 17, no. 3 (1999): 111-129. 38. Recent explorations of the camp as a figure for understanding

the twentieth century illustrate the kind of counterdescription we have in mind. See Giorgio Agamben, 'What Is a Camp?' in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Zygmunt Bauman, "A Century of Camps," in Peter Beilharz, ed., The Bauman Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

39. Dean, note 5, p. 3. 40. Paul Hirst and Graham Thompson, eds., Globalization in Question:

The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1996).

41. Michael Mann, "Globalization and September 11," New Left Review 12, 2nd ser. (2002): 54.

42. G. O'Tuathail, "Borderless Worlds: Problematizing Discourses of Deterritorialization," 1999: www.majbill.vt.edu/geog/faculty. toal/papers/ Borderless.

43. Saskia bassen, Embedding the Global in the National, in D. A. Smith, D. J. Solinger, and S. Topik, eds., State and Sovereignty in the Global Economy (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 159.

44. Colin Hay and Ben Rosamond, "Globalization, European Integra- tion, and the Discursive Construction of Economic Imperatives," paper presented to the International Studies Association 43rd annual conven- tion, New Orleans, March 24-27, 2002; V. Schmidt, "Discourse and Legiti- mation of Economic and Social Policy Change in Europe," in S. Weber, ed., Globalization and the European Political Economy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).




45. J. Law and A. Mol, "Situating Technoscience: An Inquiry into Spa- tialities," Environment and Planning D : Society and Space 19 (2001): 609-621.

46. Bruno Latour, "Drawing Things Together," in M. Lynch and S. Woolgar, eds., Representations of Scientific Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); Bruno Latour, "On Recalling ANT," in J. Law and J. Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (London: Blackwell, 1999); J. Law, "Transi- tivities," Environment and Planning D: Sodety and Space 18 (2000): 133-148.

47. J. Law and K. Hetherington, "Materialities, Spatialities, Globali- ties," in J. Bryson, P. Daniels, N. Henry, and J. Pollard, eds., Knowledge, Space, Economy (Routledge: London, 2000).

48. S. Franklin, C. Lury, andj. Stacey, eds., Global Nature, Global Cul- ture (London: Sage, 2000).

49. J.-K. Gibson-Graham, "An Ethics of the Local," Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 1 (2003): 49-74.

50. T. Sinclair, "Synchronie Global Governance and International Political Economy," in M. Hewson and T. Sinclair, eds., Approaches to Global Governance Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Schölte, note 35.

51. M. Somers and G. Gibson, Reclaiming the Epistemological 'Other': Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity," in Craig Cal- houn, ed., Sodai Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

52. Franklin, Lury, and Stacey, note 48. 53. Sassen, note 43, p. 158. 54. Matt Sparke, Hyphen-Nation-States: Critical Geographies of Displace-

ment and Disjuncture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) . 55. Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Spaces (London:

Sage, 1994); Amin, note 12; John Urry, Sodology Beyond Sodeties: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century (London: Routledge, 2000).

56. lessop, note 17. 57. Andrew Barry, "The Anti-Political Economy," Economy and Society

31, no. 2 (2002): 268-284. Do. J. Bryson, spreading the Message: Management Consultants and

the Shaping of Economic Geographies in Space and Time," inj. Bryson, P. Daniels, N. Henry, and J. Pollard, eds., Knowledge, Space, Economy (Lon- don: Routledge, 2000) .

59. Mitchell Dean, Liberal Government and Authoritarianism, Econ- omy and Sodety 31, no. 1 (2002): 37-61; Barry Hindess, "Divide and Govern," in Richard Ericson and Nico Stehr, eds., Governing Modern Sodeties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

60. C. Chin and J. Mittelman, "Conceptualizing Resistance to Global- ization," in Barry Gills, ed., Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (New York: Pakrave, 2000), pp. 43-44.

61. M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 275.

62. John Agnew, Spatial Assemblages of Power: From Domination to Empowerment," in D. Massey, J. Allen, and P. Sarre, eds., Human Geography Today (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999); M. Shapiro, note 37.

63. Marilyn Strathern, ed., Audit Culture: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy, (London: Routledge, 2000).

64. Hirst and Thompson, note 40; Held et al., note 7.



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Globalization as Governmentality

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