911, The After-life of Colonial Governmentality_Michael Dutton

7/30/2019 911, The After-life of Colonial Governmentality_Michael Dutton

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911: The after-life of colonial

governmentality1

MICHAEL DUTTON

On 23 June 2003, the following item appeared in the pages of the South ChinaMorning Post: ‘The ninth floor of the Metropole Hotel in Mongkok *groundzero of Hong Kong’s SARS epidemic *will be turned into a museum if the

management can figure out the best way to ‘‘package it’’.’ The ninth floor,ground zero of Hong Kong’s SARS epidemic, as the report put it, was whereGuangzhou medical professor Liu Jianlun had stayed during his brief sojournin Hong Kong. From there, ‘super-spreader Liu’, as he became known to thepress, passed the SARS virus from mainland China to the rest of the world.And the room number at the epicentre of this new ‘ground zero’? It was, of course, 911! Level nine, room eleven.

What tricks are the gods playing upon us such that this minor footnote inthe story of the SARS pandemic directs our minds back to that other crucialevent that has come to define the early part of this century? SARS and Hong

Kong, tied to the terror of mammon and to New York by this chanceencounter around the emergency number 911.2 Like a parody on Freud’slapsus liguae *in which the chance association between words reveals deeperunconscious psychological connections3 * this chance association of SARS,terror and 911 reveals something central to an understanding of politics andpower in the contemporary era.

Both SARS and 911 called forth from government, albeit in almostopposite ways, something that, in the language and temper of Carl Schmitt,we have come to call ‘decisionism’. Decisionism constitutes one of those raremoments in government when, over and above any existing law, constitution

or elected body, the sovereign exercises the right to decide. This overrides theeveryday bureaucratic and instrumentalist rationality of the state, producing,with passionate intensity, what Schmitt calls a state of the exception.4

Because of potentially destructive consequences to an existing polity, eventssuch as SARS and 911 more or less demand that governments reach beyondthemselves, declare their own laws and regulations void, and act decisivelyand unilaterally. Such is the nature of these crises that they more or lessdemand of government firm and rapid action that overrides all their ownlegal procedures and norms. In such moments of crisis neither the niceties of law, the rights of citizens or constitutional guarantees limit government

action. All such legal limitations are brushed aside in moments when thesovereign’s right to decide is exercised. To overcome a major crisis, resolve alife threatening dilemma re establish a norm of governance or deal with a

Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 303 Á 314, 2009



disaster, sovereign decisionism, which is an overt form of political interven-tion, interrupts and overrides the everyday rationality of government. NewYork’s 911 makes the political nature of such interventions abundantly clear,

for the response to terror was political decisionism that turned the globalpolitical moment into an icon of that primordial political form of friend andenemy. The responses to SARS, however, are more complicated in that thisform of decisionism *while pitted as a war against nature *rejects the code of the political and claims, instead, to be part of a ‘rational’ bio-technical andmedical response.5

Rather than being part of the world of reason, however, decisionism of thiskind alerts us to the way in which liberal forms of governance attempt toerase signs of political decisionism. In being forced to rely upon thedeployment of sovereign decisionism, the politicalness of such an act is

brought into relief. Recognition of this last observation throws into questionthose who would speak in terms of a new rational mentality of government.

This is a form of government logic that at once claims to move beyonddyadic forms of (sovereign) politics, yet simultaneously reintroduces thishighly political form through sovereign decisionism. And it is in relation tothis that the paradox of contemporary forms of governmentality comes intoview. Governmentality, despite its deployment of disciplinary power, its focusupon the bio-political and its techniques to ascertain the ‘correct dispositionof people and things’, is still haunted by an ever-present spectre of sovereignpower exercised through decisionism.6

In the language of Foucault, one might say that the sovereign exceptionreveals the way in which disciplinary power never ‘flies solo’. Rather, it takeswing only by merging into a unique constellation of power that claims to bepost-political, yet survives only through colonising the binary form of political power that Foucault sometimes termed sovereign power. Whilethis continued colonisation of sovereign political power by its disciplinarycousin is rendered almost invisible today, in an early era, when colonisationwas still a concrete practice, this paradox was all too clearly evident.

It is in the operation of colonial governmentality that one discoverssovereign power and disciplinary power first merging into a discourse thatattempted to occlude the political yet brought it to light through history’s

redrawing of the figure of the colonial overlord. Anti-colonial discourserevealed the binary quality of power in the colony that would eventually cometo discredit Western colonial claims about their enlightened almost philan-thropic rule. Both discourses, in fact, offer a window into how colonialgovernmental power worked.

Colonial governmentality reveals the way in which disciplinary andsovereign power worked in tandem; the way in which the bio-political andthe binary of the political were never separate despite outward appearances tothe contrary. As a concept, colonial governmentality helps reveal historicalaspects of contemporary forms of power that move beyond the question of

the colony to shed light on the contemporary metropolitan heartland. And itis there, clustered around the emergency number 911, that our two events helpus tie this unique form of power together

MICHAEL DUTTON



One of these instances speaks of the revenge of nature (be that AIDS,SARS, tsunami, bird flu or now, most recently, swine flu), while the otherrelates to the revenge of mammon (be it in relation, for example, to Osama

bin Laden, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein or, earlier, perhaps, even SlobodanMilosevic). The first of these two exceptions can be easily recognised fromwithin the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, for the SARS pandemicturned on the figure of the hygienist, on notions of population and eugenicsand on the correct disposition of people and things.7 The other form, theso-called revenge of mammon, has a propensity to produce within us alanguage and an emotion of political binary opposites; of friends and enemy.This particular binary opposition is central, of course, to the Schmittianconcept of the political just as it proved pivotal to the Saidian concept of Orientalism.8

Indeed, the Schmittian political binary of friend and enemy is but a warlikeversion of Said’s notion of Orientalism, based, as it is, on the dyadicformulation, ‘Europe and its Other’. One must remember that this binaryform was, for Said, not just an empirical observation, but, more importantly,an epistemological and ontological relation. ‘Orientalism is a style of thoughtbased upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between‘‘the Orient’’ and (most of the time) ‘‘the Occident’’’, he would say. Slightlylater, he added that it is ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, andhaving authority over the Orient’.9 Fundamentally, Europe and its Other is ageographic specification of the Hegelian/Kojevian Master/Slave relation in

which, in risking one’s life in the struggle for recognition, the master finallyasserts mastery over the slave and thus creates the conditions for history.10

There is, in fact, a more direct empirical basis for tying this Hegelianphilosophical position to this Saidian politics of racial difference.

According to Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel’s Master/Slave relation wasinspired not, as is commonly suggested, by the guns of Jura but by thetales of slave rebellion in Haiti.11 If this Hegelian work of first philosophywas based on race it shares a ‘family resemblance’ with the foundationalontology of the Schmittian political. Here, it is Foucault who points to thelink.

In a series of lectures at the College de France, Foucault outlined how the

question of racial difference established a set of foundational events aroundwhich a binary understanding of politics (and power) began to emerge in theWest. The question of racial difference, he suggested, grounds that ineluctablebinary that Schmitt claims as the first philosophy of the political.12 Thequestion of race founds a discourse of power that Foucault would come tocall sovereign power and which his slightly later notion of governmentalitywould set out to complicate and ultimately problematise.

Sovereign power would later be critiqued as the Nietzschian hypothesis or,more descriptively, as the struggle-repression schema. No matter how it wasnamed, it always displayed a particular ‘will to power’ that was, in essence, no

more than an elaboration of that ‘warlike relation’ Foucault had previouslyclaimed was still ‘rumbling away . . . beneath political power’ in ourcontemporary mind’s eye 13 Yet wasn’t it just this rumbling form of power

911: THE AFTER-LIFE OF COLONIAL GOVERNMENTALITY



that Foucault took aim at when he formulated the notion of governmentality?This, at least, seems to be the dominant approach of those who took upgovernmentality and ‘applied’ it to liberal forms of governance.14

Yet before we too readily dismiss this binary notion of power as outmodedperhaps we need to recall that it begins life as a conceptual formulation,according to Foucault at least, clustered around a set of questions relating torace as the formation of a binary political discourse. This lives on into thecategory of empire and into Orientalism through the category of race.‘Europe and its Other’ founds colonial governmentality and introduces aparadox into the question of government.

Governmentality was, in many ways, an attempt to complicate this binaryformulation. Drawing inspiration from the scientisation, rationalisation andspecialisation that were taking place in early modern Europe, Foucault’s idea

was to suggest that a new set of concerns heralded new foci of power *clustered not around the binary of us and them but around a more

complicated set of concerns about life based on statistical probabilities andrational normative discourses. Governmentality extended the question of governance beyond the realm of the political proper and into the bio-politicaladministration of populations.

As the political question of sovereignty and its inversion, ‘the people’, werereplaced by the question of population, a series of questions come to the foreabout its wealth, its health, its distribution and its bio-technical existence.Under such conditions, macro-level binary mappings of society appear

nothing if not simplistic. The idea of a science and reason of population,rather than an appeal to the emotionally charged and violent notion of ‘thepeople’, comes to dominate. It forges a mentality of government15 and, as itdoes, the ‘war-like’ binary of friend and enemy tends to be superseded.

With colonial governmentality, however, the binary came to be reconsti-tuted as a (pseudo-) science of race. Here was a science to legitimate thecolonialisation process; a science of race that would lead the Westsimultaneously back to the conditions for a politically charged binary of usand also into a new mentality of government.16 With legitimation from thisracial-based pseudoscience, the reason of ‘colonial governmentality’ opensonto a paradox. The indelible marks of the binary of the colonial (Europe

and its Other) are tied to a notion (governmentality) that is claimed toproblematise that binary, but leads instead to a leavening of a new form of bio-technical power; that is, in Foucauldian terms, part disciplinary and partsovereign. This, then, constantly destabilises the claims that a new mentalityof government is free of the political binaries that found it.

Governmental responses to both SARS and the attack of 911 emerge fromessentially that same paradoxical mixing of two very different discursiveregisters of power. If the actions of those who hijacked the planes and flewthem into the WTC fall directly within the logic of the struggle-repressionschema, they do so only because those willing to risk their lives for a cause are

sustained by a belief system that takes them well beyond everyday moralityand reason and into a political theology tied to a life and death struggle forrecognition This is a form of political theology existing as we have seen

MICHAEL DUTTON



almost in opposition to the political power undergirding the notion of governmentality. With the government actions around SARS, we recognisethe latter but fail to recognise sovereign decisionism as a political act. But it is

an act that never fully disappears even when we start to speak of a newmentality of government. Indeed, just when we think we have gone beyondthe binary by complicating its life with bureaucratic procedures, instrumentalrationality and the reason of science; just when we have drawn a picture thatshows the shallowness, superficiality and inadequacy of this binary discursiveform, it all too often returns from the shadows and re-asserts itself. . . . Andwhen it does, it always does so with a thud!

Governmental power tries to will it away or bury it in detail. In the mainand for the most part, it attempts to articulate a different logic of power and adifferent ordering of concerns. Operating from an almost opposite logic to the

political intensity of the suicide bomber, liberal governance attempts to bringsuch events back to earth by imposing a Reason of power upon them . . . andwhen they do this, they carry within them their own form of cold shudder.

The form of power brought to the surface by the SARS crisis is one inwhich we can see liberal governance pushed to an illiberal extreme. Yet evenin this extreme state, this form of liberal government action is predicatedupon the cold hard calculating logic of utility. It is, therefore, still adeployment of force that is based upon the idea of a ‘science’ of governmentand a concern for the health of the population. We can see this clearly in theway that it is almost entirely based upon calculations organized around the

question of populations and bodies, their distribution, their flows, their goodhealth and their utility.Under such conditions of crisis, governments may very well act quickly and

decisively but, in undertaking such action, they also almost always fall backon some form of political exceptionalism. That they simultaneously andinvariably deny that there is anything political in their quick and decisiveactions is, one might say, a very political way of being apolitical. Such a post-political stance is political in that it reveals the underlying utopian dream-desire of all liberal democratic forms of governance. Reason, not politics, itargues, is what drives its actions.

In medicalising and militarising the emergency, governmental action

pursues what appears to be a purely technical approach to questions bornof utility and necessity. Millions of lives are at stake and, to save these lives,measures are undertaken that will, albeit momentarily, reduce existence towhat Giorgio Agamben has called a bare life existence. What Agambenmeans by this term ‘bare life’ is life reduced to its barest essentials; to thatwhich the ancient Greeks once called zoe or the simple act of living. This,then, is a state of being in which one can be killed but cannot be sacrificed.Road carnage, life in a concentration camp and the life support systems of contemporary hospitals all become the sites of its articulation and we, in theWest, have increasingly become ‘normalised’ into this form of governmental

operation, claims Agamben. This, in fact, led Agamben toward thesuggestion that any question of biopower in the modern Western world isan issue of how biological life ‘has become central to the calculations of the




modern state’. In this respect, he concludes, ‘It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original acti vity of sovereign power. Inthis sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. ’17

The governmental response to the emergence of SARS, then, is to enact astate of emergency as a supply line in which every other consideration otherthan those clustered around the bio-political body as a ‘bare life’ concern isswept away. The articulation of politics proper becomes one of the very firstcasualties of any natural disaster. And this we know empirically. To give butone, quite dramatic example. Was it not one of the key charges of moraltorpidity levelled against the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ in China that theydemanded of workers involved in the 1976 Taishan earthquake rescueoperations that they continue to energetically pursue the political campaignagainst Deng Xiaoping when these same workers faced an earthquake of such

devastation that the entire city was levelled and nearly a quarter of a millionof its inhabitants killed? And have we not seen the same thing happeningmore recently in the claims and counter-claims that have accompanied relief operations in Sri Lanka following the devastating tsunami?

Natural disasters, then, work to de-politicise the world by transforming thequestion of salvation into a set of ‘bare life’ concerns centring upon themedico-logistical. What one witnesses in these claims is a logic of evisceratingpolitics as part of an ongoing need to present rescue operations as well-planned, efficient and utterly utilitarian. This, in turn, requires, like all formsof planning, the limitation of variables. Yet in this particular instance, the

limitation of variables is the limiting of life itself. It is this logic that hasspread, like the virus it sets out to combat, from the plague-ridden city of Foucault’s disciplinary blockade to the entire body politique of the Westernworld. Moreover, it is a logic that has, to continue this biological metaphor,now jumped species!

It is this logic that, in a dramatically modified form, we now find spreadinginto those arenas of life that are, quite properly and directly, the concerns of politics. I am thinking here, in particular, of what Hardt and Negri in Empirehave said about the nature of contemporary wars. With one eye on theinterventions in Kosovo and another on the first Gulf War, they claimed thatthe justification of contemporary wars has changed profoundly. War, they say,

has, on the one hand, been ‘reduced to the status of police actions’ and on theother, it is ‘sacralized’ by the ethical claims made around these actions.18 Inother words, we have a banal-ized war, such that it is rendered as nothingmore than a routine policing action, while simultaneously making it‘absolute’ by arguing that it confronts an enemy that, like any virus, mustbe completely eliminated.19

Such allegedly rational responses again, like the responses to pandemicsand tsunamis, attempt to feign a non-political stance, but this time, they do soin the very heart of what we conventionally think of as ‘the political’. And it ishere that we are brought full circle back to the medico-logistic logic of the

disaster. It is a logic that is hard to escape and therefore hard to find faultwith. Indeed, it is a logic that runs from the Clinton regime of old through toObama into the Blair/Brown regime of today’s Britain until it finally touches

MICHAEL DUTTON



the logic that undergirds Medecins Sans Frontiers, Oxfam or AmnestyInternational. It is a logic held in place by a notion of cure, improvement,civility and good governance: a need to overcome misery by eradicating the

barbaric and the uncivilised. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri conclude, it is alogic that justifies once again, albeit in a highly modified and faux non-political way, the reappearance of the just war thesis. If this is the mentality of contemporary government, it is also its duplicity, for it flows almost directlyout of the paradox that has its clearest expression in earlier forms of colonialgovernmentality. How so?

Here, I think, we need look no further back than Macaulay’s infamous1835 Minute on Indian Education. While earlier forms of Orientalism andcolonialism had been dominated by an extractive logic that Weber onceidentified with mercantilism and ‘booty capitalism’, Macaulay’s Minute flags

a different logic that points toward, if not summarizes, what became knownas the colonial ‘civilising mission’. Thus, notwithstanding the continued belief in the intractability of racial difference, Macaulay’s Minute gives narrativeform to the suggestion that, through science and education, through thecorrect ‘dispositioning’ of ‘native’ bodies, one could, in fact, civilise. Let mequote Macaulay on just this point:

It is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars,and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed. It is impossible for us, withour limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must atpresent do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the

millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, butEnglish in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we mayleave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialectswith terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to renderthem by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.20

As Gauri Viswanathan so perceptively noted in relation to this Minute, it wasdesigned under the ‘guise of liberal education’ essentially to prevent the riskof native insubordination. Sanjay Seth goes further suggesting that ‘native’education takes place only after the total destruction and discrediting of older

indigenous systems of knowledge. Only then, could ‘natives’ be trained withmodern scientific methods where emotions could be tempered and, with thisnew knowledge in hand, lifted into the cradle of civilisation.21 ‘To dominatein order to liberate’ is how Gyan Prakash has succinctly described thisprocess.22 This feature, he claimed, made colonial governmentality pro-foundly different from that which was being enacted in the West. As twodifferent renditions of a science of government they may well have sharedinterests in gaining mastery over the outbreak of epidemics, over limitingdeaths and preventing famines; they may also have both targeted the bodyand population to ensure the development of public health systems and, as

Macaulay’s Minute makes clear, the cultivation of human resources, but racemakes them operate in a profoundly different way when it comes to politicalenactment




For Prakash, what set colonial governmentality apart from its Europeancousin was its absolute need for domination. As he points out, utilitariantheorists from Bentham, through to Fitzjames Stephen and even including

James and John Stuart Mill, all emphasised the need to violate thatfundamental metropolitan liberal norm requiring Demos. In the colonies,the Leviathan replaced Demos as the model of rule. Yet, as he concludes, thisproved to be a ‘productive breach of the metropolitan norm’,23 for what it setin motion was ‘a powerful process of bureaucratic expansion and rationaliza-tion under which the population’s economic, demographic and epidemiolo-gical properties were surveyed, enumerated, measured, and reconstituted soas to bring into existence a colonial complex of men and things’.24 Andcentral to this whole process, he concludes, was science and medicine. Buteven in this regard, Prakash is quick to insist that colonialisation made a

difference.Unlike the West where self-knowledge and self-realisation supposedlyoffered the key to Western medical therapeutics, colonial rule demanded thecolonisation of the native body in order to train that body in the art of scientific care. Hence the need for Macaulay’s Minute. In other words, withcolonial governmentality we come full circle, back to the questions thrown uparound SARS and the pandemic, back to the state of emergency that requirespolitical decisionism. Colonial governmentality, in other words, has becomethe working norm of power in the matrix of power undergirding our modernworld. And it is in this mode that Western armies, whether dispatched to save

lives during disasters or to extinguish them during ‘interventions’, operate. Atits extreme, this form of governmentality operates in the shadows of adisciplinary blockade and has, as its political nightmare, the facelessnumeration of bodies that is the concentration camp. In contemporary times,it comes closest to the reason of discipline that is, if not Guantanamo Bay,then certainly the refugee camp.

Given this, it may seem paradoxical to claim that, in its more liberalmoments, it can still speak softly and in a more moderate tone about thecorrect and proper disposition of people and things. Indeed, if its nightmare isthe concentration camp, its dream state is the abolition of politics altogether.Reason, not politics, must set agendas, and reason, of course, always speaks

in the language of the post-political.Here, we find this dream of the post-political power/reason thesis being

nailed to the philosophical heart of liberal democracy in Francis Fukuyama’swork. The end of history is the end of that Hegelian/Kojevian struggle forrecognition and this process begins when thymos or spiritedness and reasonfind themselves dreaming as one in a liberal democratic state. With aneconomic heart pumping out technologically induced material plenty, thymosis seduced . . . at least for the moment. In fact, the entire economic order of commodity-based capitalism depends on the momentariness of each andevery seduction of the thymotic. Capitalism has come to thrive on the fact

that we must combine the reason of manufacture, which always asserts anapoliticalness, with the continual (and momentary) seductions offered to usby the commodity form It is in relation to the commodity form that we

MICHAEL DUTTON



discover the ‘always the same quality’, constantly (re)presenting itself assomething new, different and essential to the enjoyment and prosperity of ourlives. We must learn to live in the short term and learn to remember only as

far back as the last fad or fashion. Even in states of emergency, when life itself is threatened, we can notice the effects of what might be called, the logic of the short term.

The media that advertises the products we consume also commodifies thenews we read about or watch on television. And like last season’s ‘big sale’,today’s terror of nature quickly gives way to tomorrow’s new horror story.Whether it is a story of the war, of SARS or of tsunami and swine flu, the‘shock effect’ of horrific events is always short-lived. We grow accustomed tothe horror and, as we do, we grow complacent. Yet even before suchcomplacency sets in, when we are still, momentarily, trapped in the panic of a

‘that could be us‘ form of recognition, we have learned to evoke only limitedand specific expressions of concern.

We give money to relief agencies because it will go to victims, we protestagainst the war in Iraq, because we believe governments will listen, but allalong we secretly know that our actions are mere tokens of concern. We knowthat the real story lies elsewhere. It is this elsewhereness of the struggle thatslowly comes to dominate our world and our thinking. We cope bytransforming the horror of these events into a form we all feel comfortableand at home with. That is why the binary form always appears elsewhere,while at home, we live in the intestacies of power that has no ‘outside’.

‘We might turn the whole floor, or just room 911 where Professor Liustayed, into a museum. It’s a very creative suggestion. But it is also historic.We have to see how to package it’, said Metropole resident manager KaivinNg. We package it and, in wrapping it up in the form of a museum, wecommodify it. Such commodification of the horror puts the horror behindglass. We limit its effects by transforming it into a form of distraction. Wethereby regain control over the event and therefore turn that which isunpredictable, excessive and unstable into something we can look at, butalways safely keep a distance from. Moreover, we might even be able to makeprofit out of it!

In the end, the Metropole Hotel was never able to come up with a suitable

angle and so it disappeared, like the room did when they renumbered or likethe Metropole itself did when they rebranded, refurbished and relaunched itas the Metropark. Rebranded so that it remains hidden *this is the fate alsoof the contemporary political binary. We live in a world that constantlyattempts to repackage things either to make sense of them or to limit theirprofundity upon our lives. Yet we also know that the lived event that was theSARS social panic and the later attempts to historicise, commercialise andcontrol the image of SARS are not of the same order. We know experientially,an encounter beyond Reason, commodification or historicisation.

Caught in a pincer movement between the calculated reason of post-

political policies and the dream desires of a material life promised on thehoardings of the advertising industry, such experiences are seduced. Thedream of recognition is tied to those sponsored by the advertising industry




Recognition lies tantalisingly close, but it always remains a purchase or twoaway. Such consumerism requires the reason of utility to operate. In order tohold down costs, products must be mass-produced. As greater and greater

numbers of people are interpolated into the desires of the consumer world,these desires inevitably become mechanical. Yet in this process, the thymoticelement that drove the desire, is lost. Theodor Adorno is of course thetheorist of this point.

‘Those that have run out of holy spirit’, he says, ‘speak with mechanicaltongues’,25 and as the mechanical moves from tongues in our mouths to thehands on the work-bench and finally into purchases in the marketplace, itstamps its mark on thymos. Reason leads away from enchantment and intoutility and as it does we are faced with a passionless existence. When facingfuture extremes (be they ecological, theological, gender, class or ethnically

based), we may momentarily desire a passionless existence because we thinkthat we will therefore be cocooned from the fear of the binary’s return. Yet aseach disaster strikes, we become increasingly aware that this lack of passionoffers no real relief from terror. Pushed to extremes, our ‘homecoming’ inreason leads not into the philosophy of Hegelian reconciliation but back intothe cells of Guantanamo Bay, back into the refugee camp.

That is what the 911 of SARS reveals to us but, in its revelation, what itcannot speak of is the world we have lost. To glimpse at that world, we need tomove to that other, more famous event that is evoked when we speak thenumber 911. This other 911 throws up a world built around the very things

that arguments about utility and the seductions of the material world cannever really recognise, much less understand. This is a world that takes usbeyond material reason, a world in which passion and commitment lead usinto a belief or understanding that evokes a very different form of enchantment. This other world features the very best and the very worst of us. It is a world that is utterly political and little else. It is this world that isopened to us by the date 911 and the actions of Osama bin Laden. And it isthis world of politics that throws up the possibilities of resisting the mundane,depoliticising claims that the idea of governmentality (without the colonial)would have us believe in. Colonial governmentality reaches out from historyto once again force our minds and our lives to realise that we, in the West atleast, have not freed ourselves from the logic of the binary but only attemptedto will it away. We live, then, within a paradoxical state of being. No longer,however, is it, as Gyan Prakash once said, designed to ‘dominate in order toliberate’. Now it dominates in order to satiate. Satiate consumer desire, satiatethe need to register the power of our science and reason and dull that emotivesurge which leads to the re-emergence of a warlike state of being. And it is inthe satiation of that spirit of rebelling that we discover ‘the after-life’ of colonial governmentality.

MICHAEL DUTTON



Notes

1Thanks 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.com3 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 Á 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 Á 21.7 Foucault, ‘On Governmentality’, pp 5 Á 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 Á 3.10

This reading of Hegel is based on Alexandre Kojeve, 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 Á 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 Uni versal 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 Á 865.12 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Coll e ge de France, 1975 Á 1976 , trans. David

Macey, London: Picador, 2003, pp 60 Á 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 Á 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 Á 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 Á

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 Á 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 Á

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.

MICHAEL DUTTON

