it lives!

nik, matt, i'm sorry, i've gone home and thought about it, i've slept on it, but i refuse to believe in the "death of the social" (from: Economy and Society. August 1996 (25:3). pp. 327-356). your assertion that, under a pervasive system of neo-liberalism, the social has ceased to be a functional object (and thus subject), i feel is, if not completely false, let's say, to be kind, a gross exaggeration. nay, perhaps even an over-exaggeration. allow me to explain:

lets start with what i understand from you/agree with:

i accept that neo-liberalism, far beyond being a mere organization of the "economy" (in the narrow sense of the word), is an ideology and a structure of (can't avoid it) society as a whole. it pervades every aspect of our lives, creating us as subjects, as individuals, and most importantly, as citizens, which of course entails rights and responsibilities, in the proper old liberal sense. i understand that this "command to make live" implies that we must make ourselves live, that we understand that it is our responsibility to stay healthy, to manage our own finances, to raise our own children, to govern our own behavior. i completely agree that this then creates us as individuals, and thus makes the individual the privileged subject/object of power, in the sense that we know and accept that we must govern ourselves and that if we get poor and fat and our kids hate us and we end up in jail, its our own damn fault. yes, of course, "government" these days is more about how we can get ourselves to govern ourselves as individuals better. no, government doesn't force us to. yes, government does construct us so that we want to. and blablabla knowledge is power etc. yes, i get it.

ok, now that we've gotten that straight. besides not believing that any of that can't be found in Discipline and punish if you look hard enough, i don't believe that any of that implies the destruction of the social as a grand idea that we actively and occasionally (or constantly) inadvertently create and even act upon. the object of the state in its most raw form is to organize and manipulate (and yes, i know that this can be a positive thing, stop reminding me) society. it doesn't give a shit about what you or i do, we're simply numbers, blips on the radar, ripples in the pond, drops in the bucket, literally one of millions. see, just as statistics and the social sciences bring us to the forefront, it does the same for everyone else. they exalt us as the "one indivisible", and they debase us as "just another". we're constantly studied, analyzed, observed, and put back on the shelf, classified and put in our place. in both the taxonomic and the bitch-slap sense.

the point is, i guess, that power paradoxically is constantly creating what it destroys. or that these powers are constantly creating what they destroy. an example that you brought up, matt, was about how social (social! you said social! ha i win!) change actually comes about: by destroying, othering, excluding, rendering voiceless and unimportant, it creates communities of those to whom it has applied the labels, it energizes, it very, very literally tells people what they are and points them in the direction of other people that they should identify with and tells them to all sit together at lunch, and eventually the table's gonna fill up and they're gonna start taking spots at other peoples' tables, and eventually they're gonna catch on that there's no special reason that they have to all sit together, especially now that they're all sitting at a bunch of tables, and they're gonna start demanding to sit with everyone else just like everyone else. or something like that, that was a very long metaphor. so, where i was going...was that in creating these groups, these labels, this power actively creates the groups that will challenge its hegemony. it creates by destroying and is thus destroyed by creating. brilliant.

it acts slightly differently in creating/destroying community. neo-liberal power, and generally any power that could possibly fall under the rubric of "governmentality", is completely dependent on the existence of society for its own perpetuation. we've been going on in class for a couple of weeks now how suddenly there's this "innovation" that, instead of seeking to promote its own power, power justifies itself as being "for the good of everyone". which is measured precisely through reference to a "whole" (society) constituted by the "parts" (individuals). yes, the social is destroyed as the object upon which power acts so that it may be reconstituted as the sum and goal of the new objects of power.

moreover (and now i remember why i made that argument a paragraph ago), those who dream of a coherent society, who see individuals as being created by a society and not creating it (among whom i would assume foucault to be, of all people), by being excluded by the neo-liberal workings of governmentality, are not destroyed, are not made to disappear, they are forced together, energized, organized, motivated, inspired. anyone yelling about structural violence, the poverty trap, fuck, those applying critical theory in developmentalism, they call themselves postdevelopmentalists (sometimes), they're yelling exactly about this, that neo-liberalism's got the focus wrong, its working on the wrong level (or at least not working on all the right levels). there's a very strong push in postdevelopmentalism to "encourage" (and the terminology is already in a minefield) government involvement, promote government initiatives that, instead of "empowering" the individual to suffer the consequences of the global economy, seek to rectify the negative effects power on the individual through society-wide initiatives.