Contrast III: An Instruction from Jullien to look at Politics

In Chapter 2, of The Propensity of Things, Jullien looks at how Chinese thought in late Antiquity conceptualized political efficacy.

In other words, here, Jullien has moved from the art of warfare to the art of ruling. He will go on to look at the art of writing, painting, and poetry.

So, as Jake Green has noted, Jullien instructs us to move away from general theories and toward the particular details in order to describe a given metaphysics. In Chapter 2, the particulars Jullien examines have to do with the powers of the sovereign (and therefore have implications for how we think about contemporary political theory--for instance, the state of exception).

So, for the Chinese thinkers of late Antiquity, Jullien says political effectiveness is viewed as stemming directly from the position, the arrangement, the supports surrounding the sovereign.

two aspects to any potential effectiveness stem from hierarchical positioning. First, it does not depend on the personal merit of the individual using it. ... Second, the individual may or may not use it but can never do without it entirely. (40)

and

Thus, the sovereign's position counted above all. (45)

 Chinese acrobatic touring company, The Golden Dragon Acrobats  

Jullien connects the sovereign's power through position to the sovereign's power through surveillance (56). This, Jullien notes, is similar to Bentham's panopticon that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish.

In both Bentham's and the Chinese system, the functional disymmetry is identical: on the one hand, the enforced transparency of those who are observed, on the other, the opacity of the observer, whether prince or guard. (56)

However, Jullien notes that Bentham's prison pales in comparison to the ways in which the Chinese had already "elaborated as early as late Antiquity ... [a theory of surveillance] on a scale that controlled the whole of humanity" (57).

So, Jullien is instructing us, then, that there are at least 2 productive places within politics for us to better understand how a metaphysics functions: 1) how the ruler obtains/maintains his power and 2) how surveillance operates.

It may be enough to say that we live in a surveillance state. It's been well documented that we are tracked, monitored--by the government, by corporations, our emails, our text messages, our telephone calls, our shopping habits, our movements in cities, in malls.

What I find most interesting, then, for thinking through an electrate metaphysics is how, today, the ruler obtains his power.

If, for the Chinese in late Antiquity, the ruler's power came from his position, and for the Greeks, we the ruler's power came from his personal qualities or his abilities, then today, I would suggest that we think of how the ruler's power comes from our emotional reactions.

Two examples might help to illustrate what I mean here: terror alerts during the second Bush administration and the Obama Hope image (with credit, here, to how Dr. Laurie Gries' work has affected my own thinking about this image).