Part 4
46 As valuable as this work is for thinking about processes of subjectivation as the ‛enfolding of authority,‛ it rests on a somewhat selective and partial reading of Deleuze, one which
has the effect of obscuring from view the enfolding of ‛emotionalities of rule.‛ It is a surprising
oversight given that most commentators acknowledge the complementarity of Foucault’s
machinic theory of power, and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s machinic theory of desire.
47
In Deleuze
and Guattari, desire is regarded as the productive motor force of social relations. In AntiOedipus, they assert:
We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically
determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation,
any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive
forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing
else.
Elena: The more I read, it becomes increasingly clear that I must read the authors. I have the anti-eodipus book now, I’ll get to it shortly. Nevertheless let me try to reinterpret this paragraph from the point of view of The System or as I understand the System.
I could agree with the idea of desire regarded as the productive motor force of social relations if desire comprises will. I believe Steiner affirms that desire is will in the instinctive center so looked from that perspective this affirmation would take place when speaking about the individual in a phase of instinctive consciousness and what we traditionally call ‘will’ is indeed the effort to accomplish ‘desired’ aims but the affirmation “that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation”, would be difficult to confirm. There are different ‘desires’ coming from each center. Another word we could use for desires in this context would be identifications. So yes, if what Deleuze and Guattari mean by desire in their language is what I mean by identifications in the System’s language, we would definitely agree. I believe it would be necessary to talk about inner “mythical” structures to be able to understand the root of desires or identifications but I’ll go on with this text and take that on when possible. _______________
48
From within this schema, affects are conceptualised as forces of desire, continuously flowing as
‛intensities of movement, rhythm, gesture and energy.‛
49 Affects follow ‛lines of flight,‛ escaping ‛planes of consistency,‛ such as centred subjectivity and habitual routines, moving in
unpredictable directions as a deterritorialising and productive wave of libidinal energy. As
Patton summarises, ‛the feeling of power is an affect which is associated with a process of
becoming-other than what one was before.‛
50
It is this notion of ‛becoming-other‛ as an ‛enfolding‛ of ‛emotionalities of rule‛ that I
want to unpack in the remainder of this paper.
Elena: It’s interesting how they talk about identifications or desires. It makes a lot of sense particularly when the “feeling of power is an effect which is associated with a process of becoming other than what one was before” because it implies Will. _______
51
Based on Foucault’s original framework set out
in The Use of Pleasure,
52 Deleuze outlines ‛four folds of subjectivation;‛
53
this frame of reference
has been applied to great effect by Dean54
to elaborate the ‛enfolding of authority,‛ and it is
being used here to structure and inform an exploration of the ‛enfolding of emotionality‛ using
the affective domains of confidence and respect as a case study. The analysis develops four key
aspects for thinking about the ‛emotional self‛ as a problem of government; this involves, as
46 Mitchell Dean, ‚Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority,‛ in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne
& Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 222.
47 See, for example, Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989). Paul Patton, Deleuze and the
Political (London: Routledge, 2000). Maria Tamboukou, ‚Interrogating the ‘Emotional Turn:’ Making Connections with Foucault and Deleuze,‛ European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health, 6, 3 (2003), 209-223.
48
Deleuze and Guattari, 29.
49 Brian Massumi, ‚The Autonomy of Affect,‛ in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1996).
50
Patton, Deleuze and the Political, 74-75, Emphasis added.
51 See also, Elaine Campbell, ‚Narcissism as ethical practice? Foucault, askesis and an ethics of becoming,‛
Cultural Sociology, 4, 1 (2010), 23-44.
52 See, Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 26-28. Foucault, The Care of the Self, 238-239. Foucault, ‚On the Genealogy
of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,‛ 352-357.
53 Deleuze, 323.
54 Dean, ‚Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority.‛Campbell: The Emotional Life
44
Dean puts it, posing ‛questions of asceetics (the governing work)< ones of ontology (the
governed material), deontology (the governable subject) and teleology (the telos of government).‛
55
3. Protecting Our Freedom
For me, building a foundation of security, public order and stability is the basis for the trust
and confidence which individuals, families and communities need to fulfil their potential.
We can only drive lasting and sustained change by empowering people to take greater
responsibility for the strength and well-being of their own lives and communities in a way
that establishes a different relationship between Government and the governed.
Elena: It’s good to hear Elaine’s voice here and yes, I would definitely agree with this statement._____________
56
In this foreword, the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, neatly articulates the normative
conditions for neo-liberal subjects to fulfil their potential – security, public order, stability,
empowerment and responsibility for self and community. What appears to be ‛different‛ about
the governmental relationships iterated here is the emphasis placed on their anchorage in an
affective relationship of trust and confidence. It is nothing new for liberal democratic societies
to value, if not sanctify such affectivities as necessary conditions of governmental legitimacy,
authority and consent, most especially in terms of the political institutions which embody,
uphold and protect the rule of law. However, in this document and elsewhere in speeches,
launches, press conferences, media interviews, consultation papers and policy statements, it is
the absence of trust and confidence and the presence of fear, insecurity and uncertainty, which is
routinely foregrounded as a problem of government.
Elena: Like in cults, governments wish to IMPOSE “security, public order, stability,” without actually setting the foundations for them. They want THAT to come from the people, demand it from them and send out the troops if the people protest and destabilize the status quo. The want to impose those aspects of society while at the same time monitor the enslaving of people through the process of mass production in which only a few benefit. __________
A telos of negative freedom
In a speech to DEMOS in 2006, the Home Secretary (now John Reid) proclaimed that ‛we now
live in a world where insecurity is a phenomenon that crosses the economic and the social, the
domestic and the foreign, the psychological and physical, the individual and the collective.‛
57
Such assertions reinforce Giddens’ somewhat overworked notion of ‛ontological insecurity‛
58
as
a general descriptor of our common experience in late modernity. While there is much to
support this gloomy outlook, the rhetoric of a runaway world and its accompanying narratives
of disembeddedness, suspicion, precariousness, risk, threat and fear, serves as an ‛organising
disposition,‛ an ‛affective register‛ or an ‛emotionality of rule‛ for re-imagining the kind of
government which can be fashioned in the name of freedom. When the boundaries of the state
of nature and the state of civil society are blurred, a self-interested citizenry will not only be
receptive to emphatic (and oft-repeated) banner headlines, such as ‛Our citizens should not live
55
Ibid., 226.
56 Home Office, Confident Communities in a Secure Britain: The Home Office Strategic Plan 2004-2008, Cmnd. 6287,
(London: Home Office, 2004), 7-8.
57
John Reid, Security, Freedom and the Protection of Our Values, Speech given by the Home Secretary to DEMOS,
London, UK (August 9, 2006) http://press.homeoffice.gov.uk/Speeches/sp-hs-DEMOS-090806?version=1 (accessed
January 9, 2007).
58 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.
45
in fear;‛
59 but they will also be open to governmental techniques and modalities which promise
to realise the utopian telos of order, safety and stability. Such an eventuality is made possible by
a negative formula of freedom grounded in an ontology of (self-) protection. As Blair put it:
this is not a debate between those who value liberty and those who do not. It is an...
argument about the types of liberties that need to be protected... and it is an attempt to
protect the most fundamental liberty of all – freedom from harm by others.
Elena: Yes, yes, yes! In relation to the ontological insecurity I think it would be wise to observe not only this aspect of that insecurity but the aspect of ontological ‘depression’ and its maddening consequences in society. The fact that anyone can go mad and start killing other people anywhere has now become a FACT. People are afraid of course but the problem is not only protecting the people from those much harmed individuals who didn’t FIT, but re-structuring society so that it doesn’t continue producing ‘misfits’. In ‘misfits’ we could include everyone in society who for no matter what reason does not participate in the status quo. An enormous percentage of the third world to begin with, all the suicides and ramdom killers and intentional suicides and intentional deaths. Those would be the misfits in relation to the status quo but in relation to a more human society, those trying to hold the status quo with their hands and teeth are the real misfits. They are the ones in power using the military to sustain the status quo, killing people everywhere indiscriminately for questioning it or openly challenging it.
60
This begs a number of questions, not least the matter of who are ‛the others‛ from whom we
must be protected, and what kinds of harms can ‛these others‛ inflict which inhibit and threaten
our freedom to govern ourselves and be governed as confident and secure individuals. I want
to suggest that an oppositional relation between self and ‛harmful others‛ is currently, and
primarily mobilised through the inculcation of certain affective states of being in the world;
these, in turn, encourage a receptivity to alternative governmental realities and forms of (self-)
government – an ontology which Bennett theorises as ‛a mood with ethical potential.‛
61
More or less government?
In the late spring of 2006, the UK experienced what might best be described as an emotional
rollercoaster of existential angst.
62
Scandals, crises, fiascos, incompetencies, controversial sentencing, murders, abductions, rapes, ministerial sackings, prison abscondings, clandestine employment and a call from the former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Lord Ramsbotham, for the
Prime Minister to ‛shut up,‛
63
created the conditions for a very public, and highly mediated
debate on the scope and ambition of government, and its ability to meet ‛its core purpose of
protecting the public.‛
64
59 Tony Blair, ‚Our Citizens Should Not Live In Fear‛, The Observer (December 11, 2005),
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1664591,00.html (accessed May 17, 2007).
60
Ibid.
61
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 131.
62
I am not suggesting that the UK experience is, or was unique. Indeed, the UK government’s responses to the
risks and threats posed by terrorism, crime and disorder, as well as the (assumed) public receptivity to them,
are fairly typical of liberal democratic governance in the name of security. See, for example, the series of essays
published by the US Social Science Research Council - Seyla Benhabib, ‚Unholy Politics,‛ After September 11:
Terrorism and Democratic Virtues (SSRC, 2002), www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/benhabib.htm (accessed 12 April
2010). Didier Bigo, ‚To Reassure and Protect After September 11,‛ After September 11: Terrorism and Democratic
Virtues (SSRC, 2002), www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/bigo.htm (accessed 12 April 2010). Kansishka Jayasuriya,
‚9/11 and the New ‚Anti-politics‛ of ‚Security,‛‛ After September 11: Terrorism and Democratic Virtues (SSRC,
2002), www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/jayasuriya.htm (accessed 1 May 2009). Peter A. Meyers, ‚Defend Politics
Against Terrorism,‛ After September 11: Terrorism and Democratic Virtues (SSRC, 2002), found at
www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/meyers.htm (accessed 12 April 2010). See also, Chris Sparks, ‚Liberalism, Terrorism and the Politics of Fear,‛ Politics, 23, 3 (2003): 200-206.
63
Nigel Morris, ‚Blair Told to ‘Shut Up’ About Prison Sentencing,‛ The Independent (June 16, 2006), 4
64 Home Office, From Improvement to Transformation: An Action Plan to Reform the Home Office So It Meets Public
Expectations and Delivers Its Core Purpose of Protecting the Public (London: Home Office, 2006), 2.Campbell: The Emotional Life
46
In the United Kingdom in 2006, over the course of a few months, there was scarcely a
governmental constituency which did not in some way constitute a ‛harmful other.‛
Amongst
these, the usual suspects of terrorists, criminals and the ‛permanently delinquent‛
65 did not so
much loom large as form a backdrop of prevailing terror, suspicion, fear and intimidation upon
which a range of different emotions came to be refracted. The passions stirred by the ‛most
harmful‛ are nothing new and form the kernel of primordial affectivities that sustain the need
for government of any kind. What was novel about 2006 was how a series of ‛unfortunate
events‛ triggered a range of emotional dispositions that called into question what it means to
govern and be governed; and as the year progressed, different emotional harms not only
exposed the self as vulnerable, unprotected and ontologically precarious, but also came to
invest, inspire and produce an affective formation of uncertainty. In April 2006, the ‛foreign
prisoners scandal‛ focused attention on the Home Office; whether it and the Home Secretary
were ‛fit for purpose‛ was a question which persisted long after Charles Clarke’s dismissal in
the following month, and continued under the incoming stewardship of John Reid. The scandal
centred on the revelation that an estimated 1,023 foreign prisoners had been released from
prison between 1999 and March 2006 and had not subsequently been deported. It further
emerged that there was an unknown number of serious offenders (murderers and rapists)
among those released, but the actual number was never determined and was variably reported
as anything from 5 to 179.
66 Perhaps the most honest report came from David Roberts at the
Immigration and Nationality Directorate who admitted that he had not got the ‛faintest idea‛ as
to how many illegal immigrants there were in the United Kingdom. Later that same week,
attention turned to the revelation that more than twenty convicted murderers had absconded
from Leyhill Open Prison in the past five years; but this figure was to be quickly revised
upwards following a BBC investigation which found that more than three hundred inmates had
absconded from the prison in the previous three years.
67
In the meantime, the head of the Prison
Service, Phil Wheatley, was compiling his own statistics, and two days later admitted that
around seven hundred prisoners had absconded from the open prison estate in the previous
year alone.
68 Not to be excluded from what was rapidly becoming a spectator sport, the
spotlight belatedly fell on the Criminal Records Bureau when it made public that 2,700
‛innocent people‛ had been wrongly screened as having criminal records, with some being
turned down for jobs as a result.
69
It was little wonder that as this catalogue of errors began to
unfold, the Prime Minister ‛stumbled over answers when he gave them, and his mood appeared
something between depressed and fed up. The authoritative, commanding, dismissive Blair
was nowhere to be seen.‛
70
3,822 comments were contributed to the online discussion, Should
65 Mitchell Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism,‛ Economy and Society, 31, 1 (2002), 48.
68 BBC News, ‚At-a-Glance: Home Office Woes,‛ BBC News (May 22, 2006)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4946460.stm (accessed December 14, 2006).
67 Chris Kelly, ‚Inmates Walk Out Weekly From Jail,‛ BBC News (May 19, 2006)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/4998306.stm (accessed December 14, 2006).
68 BBC News, ‚At-a-Glance: Home Office Woes.‛
69
Ibid.
70 Nick Assinder, ‚Clarke Starting to Look isolated,‛ BBC News (April 26, 2006)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4946460.stm (accessed December 14, 2006).Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.
47
Charles Clarke Resign?
71 with ‛shocking,‛ scandalous,‛ ‛sickening,‛ ‛dismayed,‛ ‛annoying‛ and
‛stunned‛ featuring prominently as emotional harms caused by the saga of Home Office and
ministerial blunders.
If the ‛foreign prisoners scandal‛ and its aftermath had not already shaken confidence in
the capacity of the state to protect the public, further revelations continued to expose the
fragility of government in uncertain times. A series of high-profile murders which culminated
in court trials and sentencing in the spring of 2006, raised serious concerns about the
effectiveness of offender management within the community. For example, on November 2005,
Mary-Ann Leneghan was kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered by six youths, four of
whom were under the supervision of the Probation Service at the time. Quite predictably, and
responding to a wave of public criticism and negative press coverage, the incoming Home
Secretary, John Reid, was swift to pledge a review and overhaul of the Probation Service
admitting that there were ‛shortcomings< to be frank, the probation system is not working as
well as it should.‛
72 By the end of the year, the Home Office had published figures which
confirmed that more than five hundred serious, violent and sexual offences (including rape),
and ninety-eight murders had been committed by offenders under probation supervision in the
previous two years (The Scotsman, December 6, 2006). Even though the politicians restated the
issue as one of organisational and operational failures that could be addressed by reform, a
bystanding public grew ever anxious but in a much more diffuse sense. In desperation, a
contributor to the online discussion, Do we need a Probation Service review? pleaded ‛for God’s
sake protect us!‛
73
In the same discussion, Ian from Whitwick asked:
How many more innocent people have to be murdered before the public are protected. I
am really so angry that the Courts, Police and Probation services have failed to achieve their
prime directive: TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC FROM DANGEROUS PEOPLE! (sorry for
shouting). (Uppercase in original).
74
From this perspective, which was shared by many other discussants, the failures of one
statutory service was taken as symptomatic of a wider malaise of institutional government that
was rapidly losing its protective appeal. In an article which was cautious of punitive remedies
and sceptical of the ‛good sense‛ of organisational overhaul, Mary Riddell argued of the MaryAnn Leneghan case, that:
71 BBC News, ‚Should Charles Clarke Resign?‛ Have Your Say, BBC News (Discussion opened April 25, 2006,
and closed May 2, 2006).
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/no1/thread.jspa?threadID=1570&&&edition=1&tt1=20061219180037
(accessed December 19, 2006).
72
BBC News, ‚Reid proposes Probation Overhaul,‛ BBC News (November 7, 2006).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6123966.stm (accessed December 19, 2006).
73 Lend a Hand, ‚Do We Need a Probation Service Review?‛Have Your Say, BBC News (Discussion opened and
closed March 20, 2006).
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?sortBy=i&threadID=1374&start=0&tstart=0&edition=1
(accessed December 19, 2006).
74
Ibid.Campbell: The Emotional Life
48
The Probation Service is the wrong target here. If Michael Johnson and his five co-torturers
were really all ‚psychopaths‛ that would not be so frightening. Johnson himself sounds a
particularly brutal character. But some of his gang sound chillingly normal – young men
who tangled with drugs and relatively minor offences before somehow bonding together to
form a death squad.
75
Here, Riddell hints at the collapse of the binary which separates ‛Us‛ and ‛Them,‛ the ‛normal‛
and the ‛pathological,‛ the ‛fearful‛ and the ‛feared.‛ Such a collapse evokes a Gothic sensibility, triggering emotional displacements about our being in the world and amplifying deep seated concerns and anxieties associated with a specific socio-political and historical moment. In
short, things are never quite what they seem.
76 A different kind of expressive logic was articulated in the online discussion. Nick from Warwickshire, UK wrote:
The most frightening thing about the gang that killed that teenager is that they didn’t care;
care about abducting the girls, care about torturing and raping them, care about killing
them, care about being caught or care about going to prison. How are we going to deal
with individuals like this is anyone’s guess. We have a whole generation coming up that
doesn’t give a second thought about using extreme violence as a daily event.
Elena: People don’t seem to understand that WE are a generations that grew up with television in which violence is a daily meal. People learn not to feel the suffering that violence causes from the moment they are told that it is only ‘fiction’. That is now even more powerful with the violent games children are playing. They are actually acting them out. It is not that television or games induce to violence, it is that they normalize it, legitimize it and governments allow it because they are themselves holding their position through the military not through legitimate authority. They need violence to justify their own status quo. The violence is in the indifference to the suffering in which the children grow up and the violence that those same children indulge in, is simple the automatic reflex from that suffering. They cannot help it. People suicide or commit crime and why they do one or the other is one of the things that needs to be explored. Those that commit suicide are no less in a process of crime than those who kill others even if people prefer the former because at least they hurt only themselves, which is not actually true for those who survive them: children, parents, brothers, sisters and friends who will inevitably be equally marked by the experience. ________________
77
For Nick, the greatest fear was the apparent loss of an ethics of care and the absence of
mutuality; in prospect was the advent of a Hobbesian state of nature, and a future which was in
the hands of a generation that, having already normalised violence, were sounding the death
knell for sociality.
Even without a prevailing meta-narrative of insecurity, these several events conspire to
further undermine trust and confidence in the capacity of governmental authorities, techniques
and forms of expertise to police the boundary between order and chaos leaving the self exposed,
vulnerable and seeking its own protection. Mead suggests that when the conditions for stability
and certainty are not met, people will gravitate to more authoritarian forms of government – he
notes that ‛(p)eople are not interested in ‛freedom‛ if they are< in any fundamental way
insecure. They will want more government not less.‛
Elena: This is very important because it reveals the vicious cycle in which the government maintains the status quo in which a few profit while many suffer and inevitably steal, kill, rape, and ‘out’ their inner condition. Then the government justifies its presence as controlling the ‘caos’ and ‘crime’ but THAT is not a government, it is simply a police force meant to keep the status quo. The legitimacy of sovereignty resides in the empowerment of the people who are then mature enough to elect administrators that can guarantee the protection of that empowerment. What we have today is puppets at the service of money: the instinctive imposing its realm on the human being. Puppets of corporations allowing for the enslaving of people everywhere. Are we not in the lowest, most decadent moment of history? How much further down can we reach before we actually turn our selves upside upwards and forward?
78 This view may account for the emergence of an ‛authoritarian liberalism‛
79
and the ‛ratcheting up (of) one of the undisputed core
functions of government – the maintenance of order and security – creating more and more
efficient police, and promoting more punishments.‛
80
It also goes some way to accounting for
75 Mary Riddell, ‚Savage Truth?‛ Comment Is Free, Guardian Unlimited (March 23, 2006).
http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree>mary_riddell (accessed May 17, 2007).
76 See, for example, Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996).
77 BBC News, ‚Do We Need a Probation Service Review?‛
78 Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Press, 1986), 6, cited in
Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism,‛ 38.
79 See, for example, Marianne Valverde, ‚’Despotism’ and Ethical Governance,‛ Economy and Society, 25, 3
(1996), 357-372. Barry Hindess ‚The Liberal Government of Unfreedom,‛ Alternatives: Social Transformation and
Humane Governance, 26, 1 (2001), 93-111. Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism.‛ Mitchell Dean,
‚Powers of Life and Death Beyond Governmentality,‛ Cultural Values, 6, 1&2 (2002), 119-138.
80 Malcolm Feely, ‚Crime, Social order and the Rise of neo-Conservative Politics,‛ Theoretical Criminology, 7, 1
(2003), 124.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.
49
the advent of the ‛new punitiveness‛ driven by a virulent ‛punitive populism‛ and its
concomitant clamour for retributive, incapacitative and deterrent forms of justice.
81 The punitivity/authoritarian thesis has a certain prima facie appeal, but in much the same way as Žižek’s
notion of the ‛unconscious supplement‛ it rests on some dubious and contradictory assumptions about both the strength and direction of the relationship between ‛structures of feeling‛
and authoritarian forms of rule.
82 Moreover, and again following Žižek, it tends to regard
‛collective sentiments‛ as the expression of a monolithic public in a universally punitive mood.
Put another way, ‛punitive passions‛ do not exhaust the range of sensibilities that an affectivity
of insecurity and uncertainty might involve – for example, feelings of disappointment,
frustration, bewilderment, sorrow, despair, anger, shock, insult and confusion all feature in the
public discourse detailed above.
Consequently, we would need to ask how an ontology of
confidence and trust in the work of government – especially its sovereign and disciplinary forms
– is conjured out of an aesthetic of these negative dispositions; how is a state of confidence
rendered technical, governmental and political and what kinds of ethical commitments are
inspired by it; what are the techniques of self-government which enfold insecure subjectivities
and reproduce them as confident, assured citizens?
Elena: Give the world back to the people and allow them to empower themselves. Trust in the human being and let each community become responsible for its resources. It is not that people are violent because it is in their nature, it is that people become violent when they are violently disempowered through indifference and neglect. __________________
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