Timothy W. Luke

Governmentality and contragovernmentality: rethinking sovereignty and territoriality after the Cold War

Abstract This paper speculates about the origins and effects of global disorder after the end of the Cold War. It challenges the categories used by political realists to interpret governmentality as an ensemble of state sovereignty, territoriality and power in an international anarchic system, suggesting that new subnational and supranational anarchies now permit agents of contragovernmentality, or un-stated sovran potentates, to contest the rules of in-stated sovereign powers. These alternative categories, in turn, provide a new conceptual register to assess how and why new anti-statal, transnational, and extraterritorial social forces begin to proliferate after the Cold War.

Discourses of Disintegration, Texts of Transformation: Re-Reading Realism in the New World Order

Writing is reading. Reading is writing. Not everyone agrees with this implosive subversion of author-reader relations, but no one escapes i t I write it. You read it. We already have begun our co-invention of meaning, our collaboration at interpretation. On the one hand, as an original reader “writing on” international events, global processes, and transnational structures, I am first author. Yet, on the other hand, as a copy writer “reading over” my questions, doubts, and criticisms, you are second, third, fourth, fifth, Nth author. Arid academic adjudications over labeling this author as being very “writerly” or sentencing that text for being too “readerly” serve no important purpose. This text, that text, every text is a plural/multivocal/contradictory project Not everyone will agree, but no one can evade these guidelines. Every work is “by Author d al.” Normal science-if indeed any part of our entire discursive or disciplinary enterprise merits this description-is often produced by normalized scientists, twisting and turning in the carceral clutches of their often ill-conceived methodologies. Realists working the fields of international relations theory are not an exception to this rule. Caught in the grip of such disciplinary normalizations, they see their language as neutral, their concepts as clear, their rhetoric as objectivity. This troubles me. When analysis is done in machine language, its intellectual appraisals work in circles around robotic rhetorics of mechanical talk. The vital differences and suggestive aporias jumbled within all thought

Placing Power/Siting Space: The Politics of Global and Local in the New World Order

The logic of drawing political borders and defining national territory in space as it has been articulated by the theory of political realism is questioned in this paper. At the same time, the dynamics of globalization operating in high-technology informational production systems as well as media-intensive mass consumption systems are reexamined in order to reconsider their impact on local cultural and social environments. It is concluded that new understandings of territoriality are developing in such informationalized spaces, posing new challenges to those providing security, identity, and stability to contemporary communities experiencing the impact of globalization.

Sustainable development as a power/knowledge system: the problem of ‘governmentality’

This chapter questions the ideas and actions of one of the most unquestioned environmental movements now operating all over the world, namely, groups supporting the goal of ‘sustainable development’. One must wonder about concepts like sustainable development. Some will take sustainable development to mean ecologically sustainable.1 Others can just as rightly see it as economically sustainable, technologically sustainable or politically sustainable.2 Consequently, chambers of commerce and ministries of industry in the 1990s glibly appropriate sustainable development discourse as their own: this dam, that factory, these highways, those powerlines must be built to sustain, not nature, but job creation, population growth, industrial output or service delivery, because such elements improve human life and enhance its ecosystems’ carrying capacities. This construction, however, clashes with more ecological interpretations of sustainability in which humans allegedly are seeking ‘social and material progress within the constraints of sustainable resource use and environmental management’ and, as a result, renewable resources (plants, trees, animals and soil) will be used no faster than they are generated; non-renewable resources (such as fossil fuels and metals) will be used no faster than acceptable substitutes can be found; and pollutants will be generated no faster than can be absorbed and neutralized by the environment.3

Education, Environment and Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done?

This paper contests the conventional understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ in today’s debates about the environment and sustainability. Typically, environmentalists take their stand ‘at the end of the pipe’ when and where horrendous ecological destruction, pollution or toxic events occur in ‘nature’. Yet, they rarely go back up those pipes into the realm of ‘society’ during those times when there are no obvious environmental disasters. This reactive approach to environmental destruction has, in effect, created a conceptual zoning code that keeps most environmentalists from investigating how society is organised, how industrial metabolisms are fabricated and where ecological efficiencies might be realised before end of the pipe disasters occur. This paper argues in favour of new types of environmental education that would begin their struggle for a better environment in society’s factories, economies and technologies. For better or worse, we now mostly live in a processed world. Even wilderness is a place left wild by larger forces in the processed world letting it be. While the quest to stop ecological destruction through direct action out in the wild should not cease, other battles along another front must question how housing is built to reduce timbering, how food is grown to reduce agrochemical use, how labour is performed to lower pollution, and how ownership is defined to increase collective responsibility. These interventions in social and economic processes would have a goal of changing work and social relations, and they offer another approach to the environmental crisis that needs to be popularised at all levels of education. Environmental education is vitally important. This is true, because, in and of itself, nature is essentially meaningless until particular human beings find significance in it by interpreting its ambivalent signs as meaningful to them. Once this activity begins in the sciences, humanities and social sciences, however, environmental educators play a critical role inasmuch as they often are the authorities that help to decode which signs are read, when they are scanned and how they are interpreted. Because various human beings will observe natural patterns differently, choose to accentuate some, while deciding to ignore others, nature’s meanings always will be multiple and unfixed.’ Even before scientific disciplines or industrial technologies turn its matter and energy into products, nature already is being

The Politics of True Convenience or Inconvenient Truth: Struggles over How to Sustain Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology in the 21st Century

This critique of inherent flaws in todays growth-driven natural capitalism argues its key contradictions and basic conflicts can be typified by the cultural politics and political economy found in the environmental advocacy of Al Gore Jr, especially in his Nobel Prize winning activities on global climate change in works like An Inconvenient Truth. In such criticism he aims neither to dismiss the dangers of global climate change nor to derogate the findings of ongoing scientific research, like that done by the co-awardees of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, namely, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Rather, it is meant to begin a more pointed reassessment of how todays global climate-change debates are too entwined in the reproduction of most existing power relations and global market exchange. At best, Gores work seems essentially to ‘greenwash’ existing networks of corporate organization and expert technocracy with renewed institutional legitimacy that only rinses todays unsustainable economic status quo in the refreshing, but not fully cleansing, waters of sustainable development ideology. While there is a need for systemic reforms in economic production, government regulation, technological innovation, and social distribution to mitigate climate change, Gores many engagements with big business, venture capital, and global media do not appear to offer such a radical transformation. Instead, his basic project of decarbonizing the commodity chain mainly would appear to be a new program for further economic development that might not even retard, much less fully reverse, current climate-change trends.

The System of Sustainable Degradation

It is a suitable moment to review the realities of the contemporary idea of “sustainable development.” In the final analysis, sustainable development may be neither sustainable nor development. Furthermore, its widespread popularization is propounding something more significant: a system of sustainable degradation that can be related directly to O’Connor’s critique of capital’s “second contradiction.” Three operational strategies have been formulated to administer sustainable degradation in the U.S.: ecomanagerialism, ecojudicialism, and ecocommercialism.

The Discipline of Security Studies and the Codes of Containment: Learning from Kuwait

For nearly five decades, the various disciplines of national security studies have been dedicated to defining and applying the complex codes of containment at the various economic, military, political, social, and strategic fronts of the struggle between, as these rhetorics of power framed it, capitalism and communism, the West and the East, democracy and totalitarianism, the United States and the Soviet Union. From Yalta to Malta, the frozen tundras of bloc politics provided a peculiarly fixed terrain, which the disciplinary readings of national security studies could somewhat reliably map with their anti-Communist/ antitotalitarian codes of containment. During 1989-1991, however, tremendous changes, working from above and from below, have upended the fields of reference and zones of difference that once anchored the disci-

The Death of Environmentalism or the Advent of Public Ecology

In this response to a widely circulated essay by environmental activists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, the author provides a critique of some of their key points, including their assertion that “third wave environmentalism” must emphasize investments in public-private partnerships. Contrary to the positions advocated by Shellenberger and Nordhaus, an argument is made that the environment is a public space and collective good and that it is best understood through the lens of a truly public ecology. This approach offers the best chance to reconstruct environmentalism as a vital space for addressing global warming and other major problems. It provides a framework for gathering together new progressive movements aimed at achieving equity from the economy and ecology of the Earth. Further discussion is invited.

Liberal Society and Cyborg Subjectivity: The Politics of Environments, Bodies, and Nature

This discussion playfully rereads liberalism as perversely as possible. Unless one takes this interpretative stance, the strange narratives and bizarre propositions of ordinary liberal reasoning play their usual tricks. In languages of objective value neutrality, liberal precepts begin lulling us into solemn acceptance of their alleged self-evidence; we are cast into the nebulous fogs of rational self-interest and left with little to say about their actual, proven, worth. A straight-up reading - meaning an interpretative stance acceptable perhaps to faithful readers of arcane scientific literatures in the American Politi