Читать книгу The Ungovernable Society - Grégoire Chamayou - Страница 6

Governable. Adjective (neologism): that can be governed.

Example: ‘This people is not governable’.

Supplement to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1839)¹

This type of period is familiar. The signs never lie; the same omens had been observed on the eve of the Protestant Reformation or the Russian Revolution. So says the Californian engineer and ‘futurologist’ Willis W. Harman, for whom all the indicators of a major earthquake are now flashing red. They include: ‘Increased rate of mental disorders. Increased rate of violent crime, social disruptions, use of police to control behavior. Increased public acceptance of hedonistic behavior (particularly sexual). […] Signs of anxiety about the future […], decreased trust in institutions of business and government. Growing sense that old answers no longer work.’² In short, it is ‘the legitimacy of the present social system of the industrialized world’ that is crumbling, as he warned us in 1975.

And indeed, widespread rebelliousness was in the air. No relationship of domination was left untouched: insubordination in the hierarchy between sexes and genders, in the colonial and racial orders, in the hierarchies of class and labour, in families, on campuses, in the armed forces, on the shop floor, in offices and on the street. According to Michel Foucault, we were witnessing ‘the birth of a crisis in government’ in the sense that ‘all the processes by which men govern each other were being challenged’.³ What happened at the beginning of the 1970s, as people have since remarked, was a ‘crisis of governability that preceded the economic crisis’,⁴ a ‘crisis of governability’ at the levels of society and business,⁵ a crisis of ‘disciplinary governability’⁶ that foreshadowed major changes in the technologies of power.

Before being taken up by critical theory, however, this idea had already been put forward by conservative intellectuals. It was their way of interpreting current events, of problematizing the situation. Democracy, as Samuel Huntington stated in 1975, in a famous Trilateral Commission report to which we will return in detail, was affected by a ‘problem of governability’: a universal surge of popular feeling was undermining authority, overburdening the state with its boundless demands.

The word ‘governability’ was not a recent invention. In French, gouverner can mean both ‘to govern’ and ‘to steer’; gouvernabilité had already been used in the nineteenth century to refer, for example, to the ‘properties of governability or steerability’ of a ship or the ‘conditions of stability and governability’ of an airship, but also the governability of a horse, an individual or a people. In this sense, the term refers to a disposition within the object to be led, its propensity to be guided, the docility or the ductility of the governed. Ungovernability is therefore conceived as its polar opposite: as a restive counter-disposition, a spirit of insubordination, a refusal to be governed, at least ‘not like that, not for that, not by them’.⁷ But that’s just one facet of the concept, just one of the dimensions of the problem.

Governability is indeed a compound capacity, one which presupposes, on the side of the object, a disposition to be governed but also, on the other side, on the subject’s side, an aptitude to govern. Mutiny is just one hypothetical instance. A situation of ungovernability can also be the result of a malfunction or failure in the governmental apparatus, even when the governed are perfectly docile. A phenomenon of institutional paralysis, for example, may result from something other than a movement of civil disobedience.

Schematically speaking, a crisis of governability can have two great polarities: at the bottom, among the governed, or at the top, among the governors, and two great modalities, revolt or breakdown: the rebellious governed or the powerless governors (the two aspects can of course be combined). As Lenin theorized, it is only when ‘the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way’ that a ‘governmental crisis’ is likely to turn into a revolutionary crisis.⁸

In the 1970s, conservative theories of the crisis of governability also linked these two aspects. Without imagining they were on the eve of a revolution, these writers were worried about the current political dynamic that seemed to be leading to disaster. The problem was not only that people were growing rebellious, nor just that the apparatuses of government were congested, but that these failures and revolts overdetermined each other, weighing down on the system to the point of bringing it close to collapse.

Foucault, who knew the Trilateral Commission’s report on ‘the governability of democracies’, mentioned it to illustrate what he preferred to call a ‘crisis of the apparatus of governmentality’:⁹ not a mere movement of ‘revolts of conduct’,¹⁰ but a blockage in the ‘general system of governmentality’.¹¹ There were endogenous reasons for this, irreducible to the economic crises of capitalism, although connected with them. What he thought was starting to seize up was the ‘liberal art of government’.¹² We must not anachronistically take this to mean the dominant neoliberalism, but rather what has since been called ‘embedded liberalism’, an unstable compromise between a market economy and Keynesian interventionism. Having studied other similar crises in history, Foucault made the prognosis that, from this blockage, something else was about to emerge, starting with major redevelopments in the arts of governing.

If society is ungovernable, it is not so in itself, but, in the words of the Saint-Simonian engineer Michel Chevalier, ‘ungovernable in the way that people want to govern it at present’.¹³ This is a traditional theme in this kind of discourse: ungovernability is never absolute, only relative. And it is in this gap that we find the raison d’être, the real object, and the constitutive challenge of any art of governing.

In this book, I study this crisis as it was perceived and theorized in the 1970s by those who strove to defend the interests of ‘business’. This is therefore the opposite of a ‘history from below’; instead, it is a history ‘from above’, written from the point of view of the ruling classes, mainly in the United States, at that time the epicentre of a far-reaching intellectual and political movement.

Karl Polanyi explained that the rise of the ‘free market’, with all its destructive effects, had historically triggered a vast countermovement of self-protection on the part of society – a countermovement which, he warned, ‘was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself’.¹⁴ But this was just the kind of conclusion that the organic intellectuals of the business world in the 1970s were coming to: things were going too far and, if current trends continued, they would entail the destruction of the ‘free enterprise system’. What was starting to gather pace in this decade was a third movement, a great reaction from which we have not yet emerged.

I will here be studying the formation of this countermovement from a philosophical point of view, by tracing the genealogy of the concepts and modes of problematization that underlay it rather than setting out the factual details of its institutional, social, economic or political history. The unity of my object, however, is not the unity of a doctrine (this book is not a new intellectual history of neoliberalism), but the unity of a situation: starting out from identifiable points of tension, from the conflicts which broke out, I shall seek to examine how they were thematized, and what solutions were considered. I will try to examine the ideas that were put to work, their endeavours and the intentions behind them, but also the dissensions, contradictions and aporias they encountered.

The challenge of the new thinking was not just to produce new discourses of legitimation for a capitalism under scrutiny, but also to formulate programmatic theories and ideas for action aimed at reconfiguring the current order. These new arts of government whose genesis I propose to relate are still active today. If it is important to carry out this investigation, it is because it may help us understand our present.

This third movement is not reducible to its doctrinaire neoliberal component – far from it. Many procedures and dispositifs that have become central to contemporary governance did not figure in the texts of the founding fathers of neoliberalism, unless they were introduced and defended in complete opposition to their theses. Our era is admittedly neoliberal, but with a bastard neoliberalism, eclectic and in many ways contradictory; its strange syntheses can be explained only by the history of the conflicts that marked its formation.

This crisis of governability has had as many facets as there are power relationships. They were met, in each field, with specific backlashes. I here focus on the crisis that affected business insofar as it was a form of private government.

In addition to the issues that are still with us and that will emerge over the course of this book, my choice of topic was motivated by a more specific preoccupation. At the very time when big business is one of the dominant institutions of the contemporary world, philosophy remains under-equipped to understand it. From its traditional corpus, it has mostly inherited theories of state power and sovereignty dating back to the seventeenth century. It has long had its treatises on theologico-political authorities – but nothing of the kind for what we might call ‘corporato-political’ authorities.

When philosophy finally approaches this subject, for example by belatedly incorporating it into its teaching, this often happens in the worst possible way, by regurgitating a naive discourse on business ethics or corporate social responsibility, of the kind produced in business schools. Philosophy these days is no longer the handmaid of theology, but of management.

It is now time to develop critical philosophies of business corporations. This book is just a preparatory work in this direction, a historico-philosophical inquiry into some of the central categories of dominant economic and managerial thought – categories that are now prospering, while the conflicts and objectives that led to their development, and continue to guide their meaning, remain forgotten.

This book is organized along the various axes which, in their interaction, comprised the crisis of governability in business as it was thematized at the time. For the defenders of the business world, each axis corresponded to a new difficulty, a new front on which to mobilize.

1. A corporation, first and foremost, governs workers. At the beginning of the 1970s, management faced massive indiscipline from the workers. How could it square up to these? How could it restore the former discipline? If the old procedures were obsolete, what form could a new art of governing take? Various strategies were envisaged and debated. (Part I.)

2. But if we go higher up the vertical axis of subordination, a second crisis appears, this time in the relation between shareholders and managers. Noting that, in companies run by shareholders, managers simply become the managers of other people’s business, and do not have the same interest as the former bosses and proprietors in maximizing profits, some people worried about a possible lack of zeal on the managers’ part, or even worse, a ‘managerial revolution’. How were managers to be disciplined? How could they be brought back into line with the shareholders’ values? (Part II.)

3. At the same time, on the horizontal axis, in the firm’s social and political environment, unprecedented threats were emerging. Against a growing cultural and political rejection of capitalism, new movements directly attacked the way major business groups were led. How were people to react to what appeared as ‘an attack on the free enterprise system’? They were torn as to the strategy to adopt. (Part III.)

4. These ‘attacks’ intensified and spread from country to country, especially with the first big boycotts launched against multinationals; firms now turned to new consultants. How were they to manage not only their employees, but protestors from outside their firms, and, beyond them, a ‘social environment’ that had become so turbulent? New approaches and new concepts were invented. (Part IV.)

5. At the behest of the emerging environmental movements in particular, new social and environmental regulations became necessary. As well as the horizontal pressure of social movements there was now, in addition, the vertical expansion of new forms of public intervention. How could these regulatory projects be defeated? How could they be opposed, in theory and in practice? (Part V.)

6. What, more fundamentally, did this twofold phenomenon of generalized protest and growing government intervention stem from? One answer was the flaws of welfare democracy which, far from ensuring consent, was digging its own grave. In the eyes of neoconservatives as much as neoliberals, it was the state itself that was becoming ungovernable. Hence these questions: how could politics be dethroned? How could democracy be limited? (Part VI.)

For my investigation, I have gathered various heterogeneous sources from different disciplines; I have taken the decision to intertwine ‘noble’ and ‘vulgar’ sources when they have the same object – thus a Nobel Prize-winning economist may rub shoulders with a specialist in ‘busting’ trade unions. Their writings are all strategic texts in a struggle, and they all provide answers to the question ‘What should be done?’ They are texts that set out procedures, techniques and tactics – either very concretely, for example in practical guides or manuals for managers, or more programmatically, through reflections on discursive strategies or overall practices. This corpus comprises mainly English-language sources: as far as managerial thinking and economic theories of the firm are concerned, the United States has been the birthplace of new notions that have quickly spread worldwide.

I often keep myself in the background in this book, so as to reconstitute, by cutting and editing quotations, a composite text whose assembled fragments are often worth less individually, through their attribution to a singular author, than as characteristic utterances of the different positions to which I strive to give a voice.