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Article Excerpt
Abstract
This paper employs notions of mapping and governmentality to investigate practices of government under Chinese socialism. Projects of enumeration such as the household registration system and the National Census are presented as administrative maps and as technologies of government. Analysed in terms of their cartographic and schematic elements, such maps are shown to hold intimate relationships with the necessities of government under a planned economy. The movement of 'temporary' workers, and the fluid criteria determining 'urban' and 'non urban' status lead us to consider some paradoxical and contradictory elements within a proposed Chinese governmentality.
Introduction
In this paper I outline a number of theoretical arguments, which draw together the peculiarities of a modernist aesthetics of knowledge, practices of mapping and ways of governing. The framework developed is then applied to the context of Chinese socialism. The introductory section gives an analysis of the 'bird's-eye view' as the aesthetic/erotic object of desire within the epistemology of the modernist state. The Foucauldian notion of governmentality is then used to give depth to this analysis by focusing our attention on particular practices of government and particular ways of knowing the population. The second section develops an understanding of mapping and government in the context of socialist China and centralised economic planning. The Chinese National Census is presented as both an administrative map and as a technology of government. The contradictory tendencies towards completeness and exclusion in practices of economic planning lead us to develop a distinction between 'cartographic' and 'schematic' modes of mapping. In the final section I turn to the hukou (household registration system) to investigate two distinct but related phenomena: the fluidity of administrative criteria determining 'urban' and 'non urban' hukou status, and the fluidity of the movement of 'temporary' workers--both of which occur in an administratively ossified population. Analysed in terms of their cartographic and schematic elements, administrative maps of the population are shown to hold intimate relationships with the necessities of government under a planned economy. By pursuing practices of mapping as technologies of government, we are led to consider some paradoxical and contradictory elements within a proposed Chinese governmentality.
Mapping and Modernism
Applied to the notion of government, according to James Scott, the desire for the 'bird's-eye view' epitomises the mentality of 'high-modernism' (1). For the high-modernist, the bird's eye view allows the production of objective and exhaustive knowledge, which in turn prefigures the application of scientific principles to problems of government. The aerial view is hence fetishised as both a political and aesthetic ideal. Describing the view from the top floor of the (former) World Trade Centre in New York, Michel de Certeau writes of the erotics of knowledge that found the 'cartographic desire', the desire which inspires the movement towards this totalising viewpoint:
It transforms the bewitching world by which one was "possessed" into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. (2)
The knowledge inaugurated from this position 'makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text' (3). It allows one to take in the massive complexity of the city in a single frame. As part of a modernist (4) science of government, the 'aerial view resolved what might have seemed ground-level confusion into an apparently vaster order and symmetry' (5). The project of the modernist state, then, is to create a terrain and population that will be amenable to the operations of the bird's-eye view--to generalised cartographic social maps. It's primary goal is 'to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations' (6). Here we identify our first key point regarding the relation of mapping practices to practices of government. Such maps must not be understood as holding a simple relation of representation toward their object. High-modernist styles of government become operational precisely to the extent that the object of mapping knowledge conforms to the qualities of the map itself. Practices of registering, counting up and monitoring the population in China must hence be understood as embedded in bureaucratic structures, networks of power, and modes of governmental desire that tend to bring reality into line with the maps they produce.
However useful, Scott's analysis does not offer a sufficiently nuanced account of the actual processes whereby such operations are effected. In offering metis, or practical/local knowledge, as the other to state knowledge, Scott tends to drift towards a Manichean schema, often depicting a 'State' somehow hovering above society and acting upon it (7). This conceals an insufficiently problematised opposition between an (oppressive) State, and a (resistant) civil society. The roughly defined area of Foucauldian scholarship centring on the notion of 'governmentality' (8) proceeds with a critique of such 'State-theory' as a starting point, and therefore will be useful in our analysis.
Governmentality and China
According to Foucault, the state has no essence (9). It follows that the state, accordingly, is only one amongst many sites of the production and execution of 'government'. Multiple institutions and networks exert a controlling influence on social behaviour (through more or less coherent aims), and exist throughout society in varying forms and with varying degrees of organisation (10). Government as an activity involves not only the exercise of political sovereignty, but also the relation between self and self, private interpersonal relations and social relations within communities and institutions (11).
Government, as the 'the conduct of conduct' (12), is generally comprised of two major elements. First, a 'rationality of government' is a way of thinking about the nature of practices of government. Each such rationality is based upon a particular linguistic ontology--an accepted or enforced set of terms defining the limits to what political questions can be asked, appropriate solutions, and the types of knowledge that pertain to the formulation and evaluation of these solutions. Including the ideals or principles to which government should be directed, ideologies, ontological and epistemological appeals (13), a rationality of government makes particular political practices 'thinkable' and 'practicable' both to its practitioners and to the objects of such practices (14).
Attendant to governmental rationalities (15) are 'technologies of government'. By effecting a translation between (often obscure and abstract) political rationalities and concrete practices, they make these rationalities 'deployable' and 'operable'. Far from appearing as direct coercion, they operate to normalise and instrumentalise the conducts of individuals and groups through networks of mundane and humble mechanisms embedded in everyday life (16). Arising not out of an essentialised and unified State, but through dispersed bureaucratic and social networks, they are the 'always local and multiple, intertwining, coherent or contradictory forms of activating and managing a population' (17).
Just as technologies of government are made thinkable and practicable by governmental rationalities, these rationalities are in turn grounded in bodies of positive knowledge (about that which is to be governed) that these technologies produce (18). Insofar as arts of governing are inseparable from certain practices of knowing, the two mutually produce and support one another. Hence, detailed study of such knowledges and the rationalities from which they arise and to which they correspond will be essential to the understanding of government. The practices and methods of knowledge creation, collection, distribution, and uses will form the object of such study. It is the arrangement, form, scope and intensity of these knowledges, and the mechanics of their production that allow us to identify different modes of governing.
The 'avalanche' of printed numbers that accompanied the growth of the modern state, and its associated bureaucratic machinery, served not just to produce useful information, but itself formed an essential element of modern governmental power (19). Accordingly, the collection of statistics in socialist China on the number of people per village, county or province, on occupation and political tendencies did not simply produce the figures necessary to allow the administration of a centralised socialist state with a planned economy. As technologies of government, the creation, tabulation and distribution of this information simultaneously provided the necessary conditions for the idea of such a society to become thinkable. The notions developed thus far, with some extensions and adaptations to the Chinese context, will provide us with a useful strategy for analysing practices of mapping the population as technologies of government.
High-socialism, the economic plan and mapping the population
Following the revolution of 1949, the Communist Party was left facing the mammoth task of managing a country that, after years of civil war, was in social and economic turmoil. In accordance with the Marxist critique of capitalism, socialist transformation was to be achieved not by the operation of competitive free markets, but via a national economic plan. The calculated distribution of goods, jobs, education, housing, healthcare and other support would allow for the most efficient economic and industrial transformation, whilst simultaneously preventing the emergence of the class-based oppression of industrial capitalism.
As a 'masterpiece of total calculation' (20) the plan embodies the unassailable belief in the possibility of exact and scientific management of society, which identifies the rationality of 'high-modernism' described above. Correspondingly, it required a bird's-eye view that could provide a complete knowledge of its terrain. Such a viewpoint requires the collection, aggregation and presentation of a myriad of components in...
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