Forces and Forms: Governmentality and Bios in the Time of Global Capital

Abstract:Global capitalism seems to have swept away all spatial limits to its expansion, making a simple definition of terms such as inside and outside problematic, to say the least. One of the fundamental problems we face today is that critical thought needs to forge concepts that are able to grasp the emergence of the world as a completely material dimension in which increasingly the most local of our experiences are themselves located. As a large part of the literature on globalization is coming to recognize, it is a world that is at the same time increasingly unified and increasingly divided, in which the operation of vectors of homogenization and connection are determined by the continuous multiplication of the factors of “diversity” and the activation of logics of disconnection and fragmentation. It is far from a “smooth” world, and thus we cannot attempt to think it critically through “smooth” concepts. On the contrary, we need “wrinkled” concepts, concepts that are sufficiently flexible to be applied on different scales, capable of grasping simultaneously the elements of unification and division (homogeneity and heterogeneity). What we truly need are concepts that can be applied to the world.