911: The after-life of colonial governmentality1

1. Thanks to Deborah Kessler, Sanjay Seth and Prasenjit Duara for comments.

Abstract

In dialling 911, the US emergency number, the paper connects the terrorism of New York to the backstreet infections of Mong Kok, Hong Kong. New York and Hong Kong lead back to the binary political forms of Carl Schmitt and also the complications added by Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality. In a highly condensed argument, Dutton outlines the contours of power that govern this two-sided contemporary Western notion of the political. He argues that it is characterised less by a shift, in the language of Foucault, from sovereign to disciplinary power than to a wedding of the two and it is on a bed of colonial governmentality that this was consummated. Here is a form of government and power that combines notions of ‘betterment’ (registered through concerns about the health, wealth and education of the ‘native’ population) with brute force. It is a sign of the rifle lying hidden by the side of the ‘force of the better argument’ and herein lies the political form that the number 911 reveals.

Notes

1. Thanks to Deborah Kessler, Sanjay Seth and Prasenjit Duara for comments.

2. 911 became the sequence of numbers constituting the emergency number throughout the United States from 16 February 1968 onwards. It was on that day that the first trial of 911 took place in Haleyville, Alabama. As a result, the local switch manager, Bill Frey, became known as ‘the father of 911’ until Bin Laden came along and stole the moniker. Perhaps because of Frey's protestations that he did not father this number, there is still some debate as to its origins and the reasons behind the choice of this sequence of numbers. Most sources I have read suggest that the idea of three digits came from the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement in 1967. Some of these suggest that the choice of the number 9 to begin the sequence stems from its association with 999, the British emergency number. They also suggest that the following sequence of 1-1 was selected because of the ease of dialling it on the old rotary dial-up phones. For further details and complications see http://lcso.leonfl.org/911hist.htm (accessed 24 January 2005); http://www.911dispatch.com/911_file/history/alt_history.html; www.privateline.com

3. Under the code of lapsus liguae, Freud studied the way a linguistic lapse creates an association between two unlikely events. Indeed, for Freud, the importance of the link is evidenced by the merriment and derision caused by the linguistic error. This, he argues, speaks ‘conclusively against the generally accepted convention that such a speech blunder is a lapsus liguae and psychologically of no importance’. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, in Sigmund Freud, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A A Brill, The Modern Library, New York: Random House, 1966, pp 35–552, p 84.

4. And because such ‘exceptional events’ produce the need for juridical ‘exceptionalism’ they are, for him, the secularised equivalent of the religious miracle. Indeed, he famously states that: ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts …’. He then goes on to add that: ‘the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology’. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005, p 36.

5. Here, I merely echo the point Schmitt makes about liberal constitutionalism as it attempts to spell out the conditions under which laws can be suspended in certain cases. ‘From where does the law obtain this force, and how is it logically possible that a norm is valid except for one concrete case that it cannot factually determine in a definitive manner?’ Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, p 14.

6. On the various aspects of governmentality see Michel Foucault, ‘On Governmentality’, Ideology and Consciousness 6, 1979, pp 5–21.

7. Foucault, ‘On Governmentality’, pp 5–21.

8. Schmitt insists that the political rests on its own ‘ultimate distinction’ and ‘the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy’. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p 26.

9. See Edward W Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin Books, 1978, pp 2–3.

10. This reading of Hegel is based on Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. James H Nichols, Jr, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969, pp 3–30. Schmitt notes the way this Hegelian definition of the enemy is one evaded by contemporary philosophy. He notes that it offers a form of negated otherness. See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p 63.

11. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. This book is an elaboration of an argument first articulated in Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry 26(4), 2000, pp 821–865.

12. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey, London: Picador, 2003, pp 60–61.

13. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p 17.

14. I am thinking of those readings of governmentality that were, perhaps, inaugurated by the early work of Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose. For what is arguably the beginnings of this extensive and ongoing examination of the relation of governmentality to liberal governance, see Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’, Economy and Society 19(1), 1990, pp 1–31.

15. On the new concept of the people as part of a state rhetoric of science and reason see Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp 30–31. On the rendering of people as non-people at the very moment the category of ‘the people’ is invoked see Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p 54.

16. For a detailed articulation of the way race comes to be constituted as an object of scientific scrutiny and the effects of this on colonial policy see the excellent study by Vanita Seth, The Indians of Europe: European Representations of the New World and India, 1500–1900, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming.

17. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, p 6.

18. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, p 12, italics original.

19. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p 13.

20. Minute recorded by Thomas Babington Macaulay, law member of theGovernor-General's Council, 2 February 1835, reprinted in L Zastoupil andM Moir (eds), The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating tothe Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843, London: Curzon, 1999.

21. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, London: Faber, 1990. On the epistemic violence against indigenous methodologies such as rote and their replacement by a more ‘enlightened’ training system based on new forms of governmentality see the fascinating discussions in Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, pp 109–127.

22. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p 5.

23. Prakash, Another Reason, p 126.

24. Prakash, Another Reason, p 126.

25. Theodor W Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p 10.