Creates an us/them exclusion gradient?

It is not a question of asserting that these dispositifs produce subjectivities in a purely top–down manner. These new modes of government are all the more effective in that they are adjusted to the needs felt by populations in contexts of “anomie” fostered by the neoliberalism. These strategies respond to a widespread feeling of isolation and the destruction of social ties to the detriment of the values of solidarity and cooperation. In other words, these public policies, even though they do not break with neoliberalism, seek to occupy a legitimacy vacuum created by neoliberalism. Thus, in the 2000s, in the midst of budgetary austerity, France experimented with a participatory security policy called “Voisins Vigilants” (Vigilant Neighbours), inspired by the American and British Neighbourhood Watch model (). In conjunction with municipal authorities, this involves organizing a network of volunteer neighbors who are willing to warn the authorities when criminal acts are committed in their neighborhood (). Sociability is thus mobilized to generate inter-surveillance aimed at discriminating against enemies from outside the community (). As  shows, this strategy intends to create “meaning” and “connection.” Through moments of exchange, the authorities try to give the inhabitants a sense of responsibility linked to their belonging to the territory. They also seek to stimulate solidarity practices in order to implement a safe public policy (). The state thus co-manages a particularly coercive sovereign-juridical field by promoting the myth of a citizen committed to the common good.

The redeployment of the State thus sees the reaffirmation of civic and moral duties. The term proactivity is indicative of a new type of subordination. Indeed, NMP necessitates investing and enlisting new agents, whose voluntary work is to be supervised like any salaried work. Thus, the guarantee of full citizenship implies that the individual, through their civic-mindedness, demonstrates their profitability. From the absorption of a positive anthropology initially external to neoliberal economicism, a utilitarianism emerges that is even more attuned to social functioning. In this context, communities and individuals are forced to mobilize the governmental agenda to ensure their survival. The policies of “doing better with less” draw a Sisyphean citizenship that imposes additional procedures punctuated by the culture of the project—strategies of visibilization and appropriation of a reasonable discourse are the obvious elements of this culture of proactivity. However, behind the tale of initiative-taking lies an “injunctive power” that attempts to stimulate the disposition of individuals to retroact (). Such a mode of government, destined to be enriched by contact with cyber-technologies and digital intelligence—whose functionalities are constantly increasing the hold and dispersion of the holoptic model—could quickly reveal its democratic limits. While some have seen in digital sharing systems, such as peer to peer, as the hope of a “new civilizational model” (), that is participatory and a-hierarchical, the emergence of rating systems evaluating the morality of Chinese citizens () shows, for example, that the cult of the proactive autonomous agent is a broad church of practices.

The new cycle of holoptic governmentality is particularly insidious because it conceals the antagonism between the governed and the governing in a context of political crisis. For the former, localism and community inspire the re-humanization of social relations and the renegotiation of power relations. For the latter, decentralization and community co-management mean, on the contrary, the further reduction of the public sphere and the dispersion of social control mechanisms. The same signifiers can thus be used without designating the same signified. Also, through this other liberal genealogy of the redeployment of the State, we can make apparent what the participatory mantra—now invoked by a multitude of administrations around the world—“says and what it does not say”; “what it explores and what it does not explore.” By analyzing the regularity of these exclusions, we make intelligible the strategies of power that structure them. The fact that the dominant configuration of participation privileges the bottom over the top, the community over the State, the norm over the law, the local over the universal, reasonableness over rationality, and the reduction of moral gaps over social gaps, effectively indicates to us the shadowy zones that need to be illuminated. We believe that research into holopticism offers new perspectives to international political sociology, by proposing an architecture of power marked by the increasing imbrication and dilution of the different levels of government.