Undoing the Demos: Political Rationality and Governance

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LAW 328 Green Legal Theory Governance

Notes

neoliberalism comes to govern as a normative form of reason.

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power always brings into being the subjects and orders that it may be seen only to organize or to rule. Political reason, on the other hand, is not timeless or universal, but always comes in a particular form, secures and circulates specific norms, and posits particular subjects and relations.

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Political rationality is thus the term Foucault uses to capture the conditions, legitimacy, and dissemination of a particular regime of power-knowledge that centers on the truths organizing it and the world it brings into being.

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governmentality represents a shift away from the power of command and punishment targeting particular subjects and toward the power of conducting and compelling populations “at a distance.”

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Political rationality does not originate or emanate from the state, although it circulates through the state, organizes it, and conditions its actions.

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Political rationality could be said to signify the becoming actual of a specific normative form of reason

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instrumentally rational action may serve an end selected through value rationality, but instrumentally rational action itself does not carry the value, and in this important respect, the means are distinct from the end.

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Instrumental rationality is efficient and powerful, more so than any other kind of rationality, Weber says, precisely because it is not freighted or constrained by anything apart from obtaining an end.

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only the beginning of rationalization, which does not really get underway until instrumental rationality takes over everything, displacing even value-rational action.

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capitalism and bureaucracy are each examples of this. Each system begins as a means — for wealth generation and for administration — but both break out of harness to become unprecedented systems of domination and automatic reproduction, placing humanity in “an iron cage.”

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“Technological rationality has become political rationality” and produces “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom . . . in advanced industrial civilization.” This rationality comprises a technological, instrumental, and above all positivist form of reason that extends from advertising to analytic philosophy, from the methods of the social sciences to psychology, leisure, and consumption.

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Governance

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governance has become neoliberalism’s primary administrative form

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convergence of the ascendance of governance and neoliberal reason as intertwined and synergistic, yet short of inevitable and unified.

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at least six distinct uses of governance: “As the minimal state, as corporate governance, as the new public management, as ‘good governance’, as a socio- cybernetic system, as self-organizing networks.”

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governance signifies […] governing that is networked, integrated, coopera- tive, partnered, disseminated, and at least partly self-organized.

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important fusion of political and business practices, both at the level of administration and at the level of providing goods and services.

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significantly altered orientations and identities of each as everything comes to comport increasingly with a business model and business metrics

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transfer private-sector management methods to public services and to employ economic techniques such as incentivization, entrepreneurialism, outsourcing, and competition for public goods and services.

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relationship between power and its constituencies and, in the case of politics, a specific relation- ship between the state, civil society, and markets.

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“Governance” signi- fies a specific mode of governing that is evacuated of agents and insti- tutionalized in processes, norms, and practices.

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shift in the analytical and theoretical focus from institutions to processes of rule.

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“governance” signifies the decentering of the state and other centers of rule and tracks in its place the specifically modern dispersal of socially organizing powers throughout the order and of powers “conducting” and not only constraining or overtly regulating

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Governance differs from governing, according to Meehan, in that it arises from “a lack of capacity by governments, acting alone, to effect desired changes” today.

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tools or instruments for achieving ends, rather than preoccupation with specific agencies or programs

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replaces the opposition or tension between govern- ment and the private sector (sovereign and market relations) with collaboration and complementarity

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replaces hierarchical, top-down mandates and enforce- ment with horizontal networks

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replaces “command and control” with negotiation and persuasion.

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governance reconceives the political as a field of management or administration

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a hostility to politics becomes palpable.

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political life is emptied of what theorists such as Machiavelli took to be its heart and the index of its health: robust expressions of different political positions and desires.

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transforms political struggles over national purposes and resources into local administrative practices that receive as given both the resource constraints and the aims they are handed.

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Inclusion and participation as indices of democracy have been separated off from the powers and the unbounded field of deliberation that would make them meaningful as terms of shared rule.

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democracy as distinct or divorced from politics and economics

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Democracy defined as inclusion, participation, partnership, and teamwork in problem solving is also absent all concern with justice and the designation of purposes, along with pluralistic struggles over these things.

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Civic participation is reduced to “buy-in.”

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while governance analytically describes decentered and devolved power, as a policy term, governance aims to substitute consensus-oriented policy formation and implementation for the overt exercise of authority and power through law and policing

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such integration and consensus does not collectivize responsibility.

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cooperation without collectivization — neoliberal governance is a supreme instance of omnus et singulatim, the gathering and separating, amassing and isolating that Foucault identified as the signature of modern governmentality.

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As it promulgates a market emphasis on “what works,” it eliminates from discussion politically, ethically, or other- wise normatively inflected dimensions of policy, aiming to supersede politics with practical, technical approaches to problems.

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emerges from a postideological claim — “the end of history” — to be pragmatic and solutions oriented

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devolved power and responsibility are not equivalent to thoroughgoing decentralization and local empowerment.

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large-scale problems […] are sent down the pipeline to small and weak units unable to cope with them technically, politically, or financially.

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devolution also sets in motion certain neoliberal reforms via incentivization, rather than mandate.

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Thus does a flexibilized, unprotected and poorly paid labor force come to replace one enjoying modest security of employment, along with provisions for health, disability, and retirement. Nowhere was this intention decreed or mandated. Rather, when devolution of authority to ever smaller and weaker units is combined with seeding competition among them and aimed at “entrepreneurializing” them,

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Responsibilization, on the other hand, especially as a social policy, is the moral burden- ing of the entity at the end of the pipeline.

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responsibilized individuals are required to provide for them- selves in the context of powers and contingencies radically limiting their ability to do so.

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Best practices can be effectively contested only by postulating better practices, not by objecting to what they promulgate.

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best practices can be exported from one industry or sector to another

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the employment of benchmarking and best practices themselves challenge or simply wither other aims in nonprofit institutions by marketizing their cultures.

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best practices stand for value-free technical knowledge validated by experience and consensus, where the alternative is not only tradition or mandate, but partisanship and contestation over purposes, values, and ends.

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best practices represent not merely the intimacy, but the consolidation of government, business, and knowledge endeavors into a market episteme that subtly banishes nonmarket values and aims.

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For millennia, Fertile Crescent farmers informally shared and traded seeds at harvest and planting time. In the twentieth century, they shifted to storing and retrieving seed from a national seed bank, located, alas, in Abu Ghraib, where the entire bank vanished after the bombings and occupation.

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Today, Iraqi farmers generate profits for Monsanto by supplying pasta to Texas school cafeterias, while Iraq has become an importer of staples formerly grown on its own soil.

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Casting itself as the opposite of regulation, this order launched the practices that would integrate Iraqi farming and farmers into the global order

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the orders fostering economic deregulation, privatization, and the structuring of competition preceded the building of democratic institutions; orders first, then constitutions, parliaments, councils

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Neoliberal governance facilitates a more open-handed and effective fusion of political and economic power, one that largely eliminates the scandal of corruption as it erases differences in goals and governance between states and capital

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