Policy leads to violent correction

Now hope is an orientation toward this participation in change, this participation as change. This is the hope policy rolls like tear gas into the undercommons. Policy not only tries to impose this hope, but also enacts it. Those who dwell in policy do so not just by invoking contingency but by riding it, and so, in a sense, proving it. Those who dwell in policy are prepared. They are legible to change, liable to change, lendable to change. Policy is not so much a position as a disposition, a disposition toward display. This is why policy’s chief manifestation is governance. Governance should not be confused with government or governmentality. Governance is most importantly a new form of expropriation. It is the provocation of a certain kind of display, a display of interests as disinterestedness, a display of convertibility, a display of legibility. Governance is an instrumentalisation of policy, a set of protocols of deputisation, where one simultaneously auctions and bids on oneself, where the public and the private submit themselves to post-fordist production. Governance is the harvesting of the means of social reproduction but it appears as the acts of will, and therefore as the death drive, of the harvested. As capital cannot know directly the affect, thought, sociality, and imagination that make up the undercommon means of social reproduction, it must instead prospect for these in order to extract and abstract them as labor. That prospecting, which is the real bio-prospecting, seeks to break an integrity that has been militantly preserved. Governance, the voluntary but dissociative offering up of interests, willing participation in the general privacy and public privation, grants capital this knowledge, this wealth-making capacity. Policy emits this offering, violently manifest as a moral provocation. The ones who would correct and the ones who would be corrected converge around this imperative of submission that is played out constantly not only in that range of correctional facilities that Foucault analysed – the prisons, the hospitals, the asylums – but also in corporations, universities and NGOs. That convergence is given not only in the structures and affects of endless war but also in the brutal processes and perpetual processing of peace. Governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, is for the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people. In the mean time, policy must still pursue the quotidian sphere of open secret plans. Policy posits curriculum against study, child development against play, human capital against work. It posits having a voice against hearing voices, networked friending against contactual friendship. Policy posits the public sphere, or the counter-public sphere, or the black public sphere, against the illegal occupation of the illegitimately privatized. Policy is not the one against the many, the cynical against the romantic, or the pragmatic against the principled. It is simply baseless vision, woven into settler’s fabric. It is against all conservation, all rest, all gathering, cooking, drinking and smoking if they lead to marronage. Policy’s vision is to break it up then fix it, move it along by fixing it, manufacture ambition and give it to your children. Policy’s hope is that there will be more policy, more participation, more change. But there is also a danger in all this participation, a danger of crisis. When those who plan together start to participate without first being fixed, this leads to crisis. Participation without fully entering the blinding light of this dim enlightenment, without fully functioning families and financial responsibility, without respect for the rule of law, without distance and irony, without submission to the rule of expertise; participation that is too loud, too fat, too loving, too full, too flowing, too dread; this leads to crisis. People are in crisis. Economies are in crisis. We are facing an unprecedented crisis, a crisis of participation, a crisis of faith. Is there any hope? Yes, there is, say the deputies, if we can pull together, if we can share a vision of change. For policy, any crisis in the productivity of radical contingency is a crisis in participation, which is to say, a crisis provoked by the wrong participation of the wrong(ed). This is the third rule of policy. The crisis of the credit crunch caused by sub-prime debtors, the crisis of race in the 2008 US elections produced by Reverend Wright and Bernie Mac, the crisis in the Middle East produced by Hamas, the crisis of obesity produced by unhealthy eaters, the crisis of the environment produced by Chinese and Indians, are all instances of incorrect and uncorrected participation. The constant materialisation of planning in such participation is simply the inevitability of crisis, according to the deputised, who prescribe, as a corrective, hope for and hopefulness in correction. They say that participation must be hopeful, must have vision, must embrace change; that participants must be fashioned, in a general imposition of self-fashioning, as hopeful, visionary, change agents. Celebrating their freedom on lockdown in the enterprise zone, guarding that held contingency where the fashioning and correction of selves and others is always on automatic, the participant is the deputy’s mirror image. Deputies will lead the way toward concrete changes in the face of crisis. Be smart, they say. Believe in change. This is what we have been waiting for. Stop criticising and offer solutions. Set up roadblocks and offer workshops. Check ID’s and give advice. Distinguish between the desire to correct and the desire to plan with others. Ruthlessly seek out and fearfully beware militant preservation, in an undercommons of means without ends, of love among things. Now’s the time to declare and, in so doing, correctly fashion yourself as the one who is deputised to correct others. Now’s the time, before its night again. Before you start singing another half-illiterate fantasy. Before you resound that ongoing amplification of the bottom, the operations on the edge of normal rhythm’s soft center. Before someone says let’s get together and get some land. But we’re not smart. We plan. We plan to stay, to stick and move. We plan to be communist about communism, to be unreconstructed about reconstruction, to be absolute about abolition, here, in that other, undercommon place, as that other, undercommon thing, that we preserve by inhabiting. Policy can’t see it, policy can’t read it, but it’s intelligible if you got a plan.