Foucault once described governmentalityin the sense of power not only in terms of hierarchical, top-down power of the state. He widens our understanding of power to also include the forms of social control in disciplinary institutions (schools, hospitals, psychiatric institutions, etc.), as well as the forms of knowledge. Power can manifest itself positively by producing knowledge and certain discourses that get internalised by individuals and guide the behaviour of populations. This leads to more efficient forms of social control, as knowledge enables individuals to govern themselves. In recent years this sense has extended into the global arena.

Global governance as a term has been bandied about by academics and policy makers in think tanks across the world for years. Global Governance or world governance is a movement towards political integration of transnational actors aimed at negotiating responses to problems that affect more than one state or region. It tends to…

One does not need to look far to find critical appraisals of the Enlightenment Project of progressive reason. There is along tradition of critiques that either support returns to religious ideologies and practice, or who would return us to even older forms of cultural diagnosis. In the last century two well known critiques from the Left and Right sides of the spectrum stand out: that of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment from leftist stance, and on the right the work of fascist scholar Carl Schmidt. Both agreed that what they saw in the Enlightenment project was not itself Reason, but a complex of ideas associated under what has come down to us as the Liberal Tradition or Progressivism in thought, politics, and economics. Both sides would also agree that foremost in this strange twist of commonality was the agreement that modernity was leading humans not toward enlightenment but rather…

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
… [Boris] is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
… It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

– Henry Miller,  Tropic of…

Luis Suarez-Villa. Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism: Critical Extracts and Notes

Corporatism is the power of business corporations over society. The corporate colonization of our social relations, of our identity as humans, and of life itself is an ongoing enterprise: it colonizes human society, nature, and the planet, corporatism degrades us, turning our most precious human qualities into commodities. This degradation of human values is not grounded in technology, in and of itself. It is grounded in the character of a new kind of corporatism and its authoritarian control over technology. It is a new kind of corporatism that is more clever, rapacious, and invasive than any previous form and that is imperial in its quest for power and profit as it tries to control any and all aspects of the public domain.1

Technocapitalism is defined as a new form of capitalism that is heavily grounded…

What we hold against psychoanalysis is that it resorts to a pious conception, based on lack and castration, a sort of negative theology that involves infinite resignation. It is against this that we propose a positive conception of desire, desire that produces, not desire that is lacking in something.

– Deleuze & Guattari, Chaosophy

“Leaders betray, that’s obvious. But why do those who are led continue to listen to them,” says Felix Guattari.1

How many times I’ve asked myself that question. Too many times and the answers seem to be perplexing and mysterious. Guattari himself will answer it this way, with another question: “Wouldn’t that be the result of an unconscious complicity, of an interiorization of the repression, operating on several levels, from power to bureaucratic, from bureaucrats to militants, and from militants to the masses themselves?” (p. 70) Unconscious complicity? Willing slaves of our own thwarted desires? Unaware of…