First, freedom of mobility is a ruse

Links

TI = biopolitics

___ Transportation infrastructure is part of a larger apparatus of police power

Foucault (1980a) claimed that the concept of population as a distinct¶ object of inquiry and administration emerged in the eighteenth century in¶ relation to the apparatuses of police:¶ The great eighteenth-century demographic upswing in Western Europe,¶ the necessity for coordinating and integrating it into the apparatus of¶ production and the urgency of controlling it with finer and more adequate¶ power mechanisms caused 'population,' with its numerical variables¶ of spaces and chronology, longevity and health, to emerge not only¶ as a problem but as an object of surveillance, analysis, intervention,¶ modification, etc. The project of a technology begins to be sketched:¶ demographic estimates, the calculation of the pyramid of ages, different¶ life expectations and Levels of mortality, studies of the reciprocal relations¶ of growth of wealth and growth of population .... (p. 171)¶ Police power addressed problems of order and security and was exercised¶ through detailed regulations by authorities attempting to redress specific,¶ concrete circumstances (Valverde, 2003). Public health and transportation¶ were historically important problem arises for police power.

____ Transportation infrastructure is a just a way for the state to securitize the transactions of the market through normalizing the social body.

From Foucault's perspective, liberalism birthed the idea of the autonomous¶ market as a critique of state sovereignty. Foucault (1997c) remarked in "The¶ Birth of Biopolitics" that the "market as a reality and political economy as¶ a theory played an important role in the liberal critique," although " liberalism¶ is neither the consequence nor the development of these" (p. 76).¶ For Foucault, the market played "the role of a ' test'" for excessive governmentality¶ (p. 76). He observed that the market's relevance as test stemmed¶ from the " basic incompatibility between the optimal development of its¶ economic process and a maximization of governmental procedures" (p.¶ 76). Thus, the liberal critique of excessive government settled on the market¶ freeing " reflection on economic practices from the hegemony of the ' reason¶ of the state'" (p. 76).¶ By focusing on the market, the liberal philosophers hoped to dislocate¶ the mercantile formulation of the sovereign as the seat of power and economic¶ administration, freeing the circulation of goods and control from¶ the sovereign reins of power. Accordingly, seventeenth-century merchants¶ and financers heeded the call of individuals such as Sir Dudley North, who¶ advocated " Peace, Industry and Freedom that bring Trade and Wealth and¶ nothing else" (cited in Davies, 1952, p. 284). These aspirations would be¶ fully articulated in eighteenth-century political economy, which articulated¶ rights within a semantic context of individual ownership. The emerging¶ philosophy of liberalism critiqued sovereign authority over market transactions¶ but, simultaneously, called upon the state to securitize those transactions¶ through legal and transportation infrastructures. The state was also¶ called upon to police the poor, to govern those who were viewed as ungovernable¶ or as requiring government (Dean, 1990; Driver, 1993).

TI = governmentality

____ Mobility and governmentality are inseparable - the construction of transportation infrastructure is simultaneously the construction of the ideal American subject.

Conley 2010 (Donovan, Ph.D., University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, “Grid and Swerve,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 27, No. 1, http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcsm20.)

The federal government’s presence in the development of the West emerged through scattered, low-level thrusts of state exertion: through the military that accompanied surveyor and settlement parties; through trading and/or forced removal of Native Indians; through economic policies and infrastructural projects; through Congressional Statutes and Supreme Court decisions; and, most profoundly, through the distribution and regulation of public lands. The West thus became a political lever, the terrain through which the American nation-state became ‘‘governmentalized’’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 103). No longer a vast ‘‘empty’’ region, the western territory quickly became a striated space of nationalistic determination. To merely traverse this space was to announce oneself as a national subject. Increasingly through the thirties and forties, territorial mobility carried with it the imprimatur of the state. To move about was therefore to navigate one’s relation to the grid of governance that was conquering space in the name of the nation. The clearest expression of this fact remains the geo-political grid of roads, canals, and public lands that were patched together in the antebellum period under the shiny label ‘‘Internal Improvements.’’ These ‘‘Internal Improvements’’ established a grid of mobility as the ground of the nation-state. Together the ‘‘communications’’ network and the land grid consolidated, distributed, administered and mapped the spatiomaterial activities of the antebellum populace. This grand feat of national ‘‘improvement’’ thus became, in turn, a space of state-sponsored mobility. To borrow an observation from de Certeau, ‘‘the geometrical space of urbanists and architects seems to have the status of the ‘proper meaning’ constructed by grammarians and linguists in order to have a normal and normative level to which they can compare the drifting of ‘figurative’ language’’ (1988, p. 100). Let us add to urbanists and architects the normalizing role of civil engineers and surveyors, territorial legislatures and courts, administrative offices and military outposts (Lawson & Seidman, 2004). What must be appended to this observation, however, is the fact that such grids of normativity do not exert themselves as such in actually-existing social space. De Certeau thus adds, ‘‘In reality, this faceless ‘proper’ meaning . . . cannot be found in current use, whether verbal or pedestrian; it is merely the fiction produced by a use that is also particular, the metalinguistic use of science that distinguishes itself by that very distinction’’ (1988, p. 100). The grid as such, in other words, is an imperfect realization of the dream of social perfection; or, more to the point, a fractured expression of the dream of seamlessness*what Fisher calls ‘‘damaged social space’’ (1988, p. 75). In its imperfection, nevertheless, the grid shaped the terrain of national mobility, funneling the movements of bodies, goods and (before the telegraph) information through social space. It thus became a defacto grid of governance, a terrain of designed mobility. The ways of navigating this terrain in turn articulate the possible ways of traversing the political ground of the state itself. It is here that we turn to Margaret Fuller’s aleatory style of western travel.

Directory: files
files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2
files -> Integer programming and game theory
files -> 4 Integer Programming
files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective
files -> Pop Warner History
files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose
files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d
files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal
files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations

Download 1.14 Mb.

Share with your friends: