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DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 243
in a disciplinary society, the entire society, with all its productive
and reproductive articulations, is subsumed under the command of
capital and the state, and that the society tends, gradually but with
unstoppable continuity, to be ruled solely by criteria of capitalist
production. A disciplinary society is thus a factory-society.
7
Disciplinarity
is at once a form of production and a form of government such
that disciplinary production and disciplinary society tend to coincide
completely. In this new factory-society, productive subjectivities
are forged as one-dimensional functions of economic development.
The figures, structures, and hierarchies of the division of social labor
become ever more widespread and minutely defined as civil society
is increasingly absorbed into the state: the new rules of subordination
and the disciplinary capitalist regimes are extended across the entire
social terrain.
8
It is precisely when the disciplinary regime is pushed
to its highest level and most complete application that it is revealed
as the extreme limit of a social arrangement, a society in the process
of being overcome. This is certainly due in large part to the motor
behind the process, the subjective dynamics of resistance and revolt,
which we will return to in the next section.
The New Deal model, then, was first of all a development
proper to U.S. politics, a response to the domestic economic crisis,
but it also became a flag that the U.S. Army raised throughout the
course of the Second World War. Several explanations were given
for why the United States entered the war. Roosevelt always claimed
to have been dragged in unwillingly by the dynamics of international
politics. Keynes and the economists thought instead that the needs
of the New Dealconfronted as it was in 1937 by a new type of
crisis, challenged by the political pressure of workers’ demandshad
obliged the U.S. government to choose the path of war. Facing an
international struggle for the new repartition of the world market,
the United States could not avoid the war, in particular because
with the New Deal, the U.S. economy had entered into another
expansive phase. In either case, the U.S. entry into World War II
tied the New Deal indissolubly to the crisis of European imperialisms
and projected the New Deal on the scene of world government as
244 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION
an alternative, successor model. From that point on, the effects of
the New Deal reforms would be felt over the entire global terrain.
In the aftermath of the war, many viewed the New Deal
model as the only path to global recovery (under the pacific powers
of U.S. hegemony). As one U.S. commentator wrote, ‘Only a
New Deal for the world, more far reaching and consistent than
our faltering New Deal, can prevent the coming of World War
III.’
9
The economic reconstruction projects launched after the
Second World War did in fact impose on all the dominant capitalist
countries, both the victorious Allies and the defeated powers, adhe-
sion to the expansive model of disciplinary society according to the
model constructed by the New Deal. The previous European and
Japanese forms of state-based public assistance and the development
of the corporativist state (in both its liberal and national-socialist
forms) were thus substantially transformed. The ‘social state’ was
born, or really the global disciplinary state, which took into account
more widely and deeply the life cycles of populations, ordering
their production and reproduction within a scheme of collective
bargaining fixed by a stable monetary regime. With the extension
of U.S. hegemony, the dollar became king. The initiative of the
dollar (through the Marshall Plan in Europe and the economic
reconstruction in Japan) was the ineluctable path to postwar recon-
struction; the establishment of the dollar’s hegemony (through the
Bretton Woods accords) was tied to the stability of all the standards
of value; and U.S. military power determined the ultimate exercise
of sovereignty with respect to each of the dominant and subordinate
capitalist countries. All the way up to the 1960s this model was
expanded and perfected. It was the Golden Age of the New Deal
reform of capitalism on the world stage.
10
Decolonization, Decentering, and Discipline
As a result of the project of economic and social reform under
U.S. hegemony, the imperialist politics of the dominant capitalist
countries was transformed in the postwar period. The new global
scene was defined and organized primarily around three mechanisms
DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 245
or apparatuses: (1) the process of decolonization that gradually re-
composed the world market along hierarchical lines branching out
from the United States; (2) the gradual decentralization of produc-
tion; and (3) the construction of a framework of international rela-
tions that spread across the globe the disciplinary productive regime
and disciplinary society in its successive evolutions. Each of these
aspects constitutes a step in the evolution from imperialism to-
ward Empire.
Decolonization, the first mechanism, was certainly a bitter and
ferocious process. We have already dealt with it briefly in Section
2.3, and we have seen its convulsive movements from the point
of view of the colonized in struggle. Here we must historicize the
process from the standpoint of the dominant powers. The colonial
territories of defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan, of course, were
completely dissolved or absorbed by the other powers. By this time,
however, the colonial projects of the victors, too (Britain, France,
Belgium, and Holland), had come to a standstill.
11
In addition to
facing growing liberation movements in the colonies, they also
found themselves stymied by the bipolar divide between the United
States and the Soviet Union. The decolonization movements too
were seized immediately in the jaws of this cold war vise, and the
movements that had been focused on their independence were
forced to negotiate between the two camps.
12
What Truman said
in 1947 during the Greek crisis remained true for the decolonizing
and postcolonial forces throughout the cold war: ‘At the present
moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between
alternative ways of life.’
13
The linear trajectory of decolonization was thus interrupted
by the necessity of selecting a global adversary and lining up behind
one of the two models of international order. The United States,
which was by and large favorable to decolonization, was forced by
the necessities of the cold war and the defeat of the old imperialisms
to assume the primary role as international guardian of capitalism
and hence ambiguous heir of the old colonizers. From both the
side of the anticolonial subjects and the side of the United States,
246 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION
decolonization was thus distorted and diverted. The United States
inherited a global order, but one whose forms of rule conflicted
with its own constitutional project, its imperial form of sovereignty.
The Vietnam War was the final episode of the United States’
ambiguous inheritance of the old imperialist mantle, and it ran the
risk of blocking any possible opening of an imperial ‘new frontier’
(see Section 2.5). This phase was the final obstacle to the maturation
of the new imperial design, which would eventually be built on
the ashes of the old imperialisms. Little by little, after the Vietnam
War the new world market was organized: a world market that
destroyed the fixed boundaries and hierarchical procedures of Euro-
pean imperialisms. In other words, the completion of the decoloni-
zation process signaled the point of arrival of a new world hierarchi-
zation of the relations of dominationand the keys were firmly
in the hands of the United States. The bitter and ferocious history
of the first period of decolonization opened onto a second phase
in which the army of command wielded its power less through
military hardware and more through the dollar. This was an enor-
mous step forward toward the construction of Empire.
The second mechanism is defined by a process of decentering
the sites and flows of production.
14
Here, as in decolonization, two
phases divide the postwar period. A first, neocolonial phase involved
the continuity of the old hierarchical imperialist procedures and
the maintenance if not deepening of the mechanisms of unequal
exchange between subordinated regions and dominant nation-states.
This first period, however, was a brief transitional phase, and, in
effect, in the arc of twenty years the scene changed radically. By
the end of the 1970s, or really by the end of the Vietnam War,
transnational corporations began to establish their activities firmly
across the globe, in every corner of the planet. The transnationals
became the fundamental motor of the economic and political trans-
formation of postcolonial countries and subordinated regions. In
the first place, they served to transfer the technology that was
essential for constructing the new productive axis of the subordinate
countries; second, they mobilized the labor force and local produc-
DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 247
tive capacities in these countries; and finally, the transnationals
collected the flows of wealth that began to circulate on an enlarged
base across the globe. These multiple flows began to converge
essentially toward the United States, which guaranteed and coordi-
nated, when it did not directly command, the movement and
operation of the transnationals. This was a decisive constituent phase
of Empire. Through the activities of the transnational corporations,
the mediation and equalization of the rates of profit were unhinged
from the power of the dominant nation-states. Furthermore, the
constitution of capitalist interests tied to the new postcolonial
nation-states, far from opposing the intervention of transnationals,
developed on the terrain of the transnationals themselves and tended
to be formed under their control. Through the decentering of
productive flows, new regional economies and a new global division
of labor began to be determined.
15
There was no global order yet,
but an order was being formed.
Along with the decolonization process and the decentering
of flows, a third mechanism involved the spread of disciplinary
forms of production and government across the world. This process
was highly ambiguous. In the postcolonial countries, discipline
required first of all transforming the massive popular mobilization
for liberation into a mobilization for production. Peasants through-
out the world were uprooted from their fields and villages and
thrown into the burning forge of world production.
16
The ideologi-
cal model that was projected from the dominant countries (particu-
larly from the United States) consisted of Fordist wage regimes,
Taylorist methods of the organization of labor, and a welfare state
that would be modernizing, paternalistic, and protective. From the
standpoint of capital, the dream of this model was that eventually
every worker in the world, sufficiently disciplined, would be inter-
changeable in the global productive processa global factory-
society and a global Fordism. The high wages of a Fordist regime
and the accompanying state assistance were posed as the workers’
rewards for accepting disciplinarity, for entering the global factory.
We should be careful to point out, however, that these specific
248 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION
relations of production, which were developed in the dominant
countries, were never realized in the same forms in the subordinated
regions of the global economy. The regime of high wages that
characterizes Fordism and the broad social assistance that character-
izes the welfare state were realized only in fragmentary forms and
for limited populations in the subordinated capitalist countries. All
this, however, did not really have to be realized; its promise served
rather as the ideological carrot to ensure sufficient consensus for
the modernizing project. The real substance of the effort, the real
take-off toward modernity, which was in fact achieved, was the
spread of the disciplinary regime throughout the social spheres of
production and reproduction.
The leaders of the socialist states agreed in substance on this
disciplinary project. Lenin’s renowned enthusiasm for Taylorism
was later outdone by Mao’s modernization projects.
17
The official
socialist recipe for decolonization also followed the essential logic
dictated by the capitalist transnationals and the international agen-
cies: each postcolonial government had to create a labor force
adequate to the disciplinary regime. Numerous socialist economists
(especially those who were in the position to plan the economies
of countries recently liberated from colonialism) claimed that indus-
trialization was the ineluctable path to development
18
and enumer-
ated the benefits of the extension of ‘peripheral Fordist’ econo-
mies.
19
The benefits were really an illusion, and the illusion did not
last long, but that could not significantly alter the course of these
postcolonial countries along the path of modernization and discipli-
narization. This seemed to be the only path open to them.
20
Disci-
plinarity was everywhere the rule.
These three mechanismsdecolonization, decentering of
production, and disciplinaritycharacterize the imperial power of
the New Deal, and demonstrate how far it moved beyond the old
practices of imperialism. Certainly the original formulators of the
New Deal policies in the United States in the 1930s never imagined
such a wide application of their ideas, but already in the 1940s, in
the midst of war, world leaders began to recognize its role and
DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 249
power in the establishment of global economic and political order.
By the time of Harry Truman’s inauguration, he understood that
finally the old European-style imperialism could have no part in
their plans. No, the new era had something new in store.
Into and Out of Modernity
The cold war was the dominant figure on the global scene during
the period of decolonization and decentralization, but from today’s
vantage point we have the impression that its role was really second-
ary. Although the specular oppositions of the cold war strangled
both the U.S. imperial project and the Stalinist project of socialist
modernization, these were really minor elements of the entire pro-
cess. The truly important element, whose significance goes well
beyond the history of the cold war, was the gigantic postcolonial
transformation of the Third World under the guise of modernization
and development. In the final analysis, that project was relatively
independent of the dynamics and constraints of the cold war, and
one could almost claim, post factum, that in the Third World the
competition between the two world power blocs merely accelerated
the processes of liberation.
It is certainly true that the Third World elites who led the
anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles during this period were
ideologically tied to one or the other side of the cold war divide,
and in both cases they defined the mass project of liberation in
terms of modernization and development. For us, however, poised
as we are at the far border of modernity, it is not difficult to
recognize the tragic lack of perspective involved in the translation
of liberation into modernization. The myth of modernityand
thus of sovereignty, the nation, the disciplinary model, and so
forthwas virtually the exclusive ideology of the elites, but this is
not the most important factor here.
The revolutionary processes of liberation determined by the
multitude actually pushed beyond the ideology of modernization,
and in the process revealed an enormous new production of subjec-
tivity. This subjectivity could not be contained in the bipolar U.S.-
250 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION
USSR relationship, nor in the two competing regimes, which both
merely reproduced modernity’s modalities of domination. When
Nehru, Sukarno, and Chou En-lai came together at the Bandung
Conference in 1955 or when the nonalignment movement first
formed in the 1960s, what was expressed was not so much the
enormity of their nations’ misery nor the hope of repeating the
glories of modernity but rather the enormous potential for liberation
that the subaltern populations themselves produced.
21
This non-
aligned perspective gave a first glimpse of a new and generalized
desire.
The question what to do after liberation so as not to fall under
the domination of one camp or the other remained unanswered.
What were clear and full of potential, by contrast, were the subjectiv-
ities that pushed beyond modernity. The utopian image of the
Soviet and Chinese revolutions as alternatives for development
vanished when those revolutions could no longer go forward, or
rather when they failed to find a way to go beyond modernity.
The U.S. model of development appeared equally closed, since
throughout the postwar period the United States presented itself
more as the police force of the old imperialisms than the agent of
a new hope. The struggle of subaltern populations for their liberation
remained an explosive and uncontainable mixture. By the end of
the 1960s the liberation struggles, whose influence had come to be
felt in every interstice of world space, assumed a force, a mobility,
and a plasticity of form that drove the project of capitalist moderniza-
tion (in both its liberal and its socialist guises) out into an open sea,
where it lost its bearings. Behind the fac
¸
ade of the bipolar U.S.-
Soviet divide they could discern a single disciplinary model, and
against this model the enormous movements struggled, in forms
that were more or less ambiguous, more or less mystified, but
nonetheless real. This enormous new subjectivity alluded to and
made necessary a paradigm shift.
The inadequacy of the theory and practice of modern sover-
eignty became evident at this point. By the 1960s and 1970s, even
though the model of disciplinary modernization had been imposed
DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 251
across the world, even though the welfarist policies set in motion by
the dominant countries had become unstoppable and were naively
championed by leaders in the subordinated countries, and even
in this new world of communicative media and networks, the
mechanisms of modern sovereignty were no longer sufficient to
rule the new subjectivities. We should point out here that as the
paradigm of modern sovereignty lost its effectiveness, so too the
classical theories of imperialism and anti-imperialism lost whatever
explanatory powers they had. In general, when these theories con-
ceived the surpassing of imperialism, they saw it as a process that
would be in perfect continuity with the paradigm of modernization
and modern sovereignty. What happened, however, was exactly
the opposite. Massified subjectivities, populations, oppressed classes,
in the very moment when they entered the processes of moderniza-
tion, began to transform them and go beyond them. The struggles
for liberation, in the very moment when they were situated and
subordinated in the world market, recognized insufficient and tragic
keystone of modern sovereignty. Exploitation and domination
could no longer be imposed in their modern forms. As these enor-
mous new subjective forces emerged from colonization and reached
modernity, they recognized that the primary task is not getting into
but getting out of modernity.
Toward a New Global Paradigm
A paradigm shift in the world economic and political order was
taking place. One important element of this passage was the fact
that the world market as a structure of hierarchy and command
became more important and decisive in all the zones and regions
in which the old imperialisms had previously operated. The world
market began to appear as the centerpiece of an apparatus that could
regulate global networks of circulation. This unification was still
posed only at a formal level. The processes that arose on the conflic-
tual terrain of liberation struggles and expanding capitalist circulation
were not necessarily or immediately compatible with the new struc-
tures of the world market. Integration proceeded unevenly and at
252 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION
different speeds. In different regions and often within the same
region, diverse forms of labor and production coexisted, as did also
different regimes of social reproduction. What might have seemed
like a coherent central axis of the restructuring of global production
was shattered into a thousand particular fragments and the unifying
process was experienced everywhere singularly. Far from being
unidimensional, the process of restructuring and unifying command
over production was actually an explosion of innumerable different
productive systems. The processes of the unification of the world
market operated paradoxically through diversity and diversification,
but its tendency was nonetheless real.
Several important effects follow from the tendency toward
the unification of the world market. On the one hand, the wide
spread of the disciplinary model of the organization of labor and
society outward from the dominant regions produced in the rest
of the world a strange effect of proximity, simultaneously pulling
it closer and isolating it away in a ghetto. That is, liberation struggles
found themselves ‘victorious’ but nonetheless consigned to the
ghetto of the world marketa vast ghetto with indeterminate
borders, a shantytown, a favela. On the other hand, huge populations
underwent what might be called wage emancipation as a result of
these processes. Wage emancipation meant the entrance of great
masses of workers into the disciplinary regime of modern capitalist
production, whether it be in the factory, the fields, or some other
site of social production, and hence these populations were liberated
from the semi-servitude that imperialism had perpetuated. Entry
into the wage system can be bloody (and it has been); it can repro-
duce systems of ferocious repression (and it has done so); but even
in the shacks of the new shantytowns and favelas, the wage relation
does determine the constitution of new needs, desires, and demands.
For example, the peasants who become wage workers and who are
subjected to the discipline of the new organization of labor in many
cases suffer worse living conditions, and one cannot say that they
are more free than the traditional territorialized laborer, but they
do become infused with a new desire for liberation. When the new