I arrived in the United States in 1977 to start a Ph.D. in Politics. Having read several convincing critiques of American positivist political science as an undergraduate in England, and otherwise largely ignorant about the discipline, I was surprised to discover that the Politics Department at Princeton was teaching the same old positivism. I was interested in the politics of the Arab world, having traveled there several times, so I evaded political science by taking courses in Middle Eastern history and Arabic language and spent three of the next six years studying and researching in Cairo. Meanwhile, Discipline and Punish had just appeared in English and Orientalism came out a year later. I read these against the Marx I had studied as an undergraduate, and moved on to Derrida and Heidegger, all of which informed the book I eventually produced, Colonising Egypt.
Colonising Egypt developed a Foucauldian analysis of colonial political power, but combined this with an attempt to deploy what I had learned from Derrida and Heidegger. The book analyzed the methods of colonial governmentality, but also explored how the practices of modern political power produced a world that seemed simplified in very novel ways into reality versus its representation, the world and its meaning, or things and their value. (My recent work on economic representations is a development of some aspects of this work.) In general I was interested not so much in the kinds of post-structuralist analysis that could show, in convincing ways, that these binarisms were unstable, but in analyzing the sorts of modern social practice that made these dualisms, despite their instability, appear self-evident.
Since Colonising Egypt my work has taken several directions. Having found a job, against the odds, in a department of politics, I published articles extending my work as a critique of conventional theories of the state, political power, and everyday forms of resistance. I was also increasingly involved in the field of Middle Eastern studies, which, despite the influence of Said, remained more resistant than other area-studies fields to the development of postcolonial theory. For several years I tried to address this problem by bringing together a group of Middle East scholars with some of the large cohort of postcolonial South Asian scholars, especially those of the Subaltern Studies school. The series of workshops we held resulted in an edited volume, Questions of Modernity, in which my own introduction and essay tried to sort out the difference between the various literatures labeled "postmodernism," most of it characterized by a remarkable silence about
the world outside the west, and the rather different questions posed by work in postcolonial theory, including some of the re-reading of Marx emerging from the latter field.
Meanwhile I was spending as much time as I could back in Egypt, but now living whenever possible in a village in the south, near Luxor. I began to learn how the small farming households I lived with were dealing with the imposition of a structural adjustment program and a series of neo-liberal agricultural reforms. I wrote about the way the logics of sugar cane production, the resources of household food production, and the dynamics of local politics all combined to divert and derail the plans of the economic reformers. I was fortunate during this period to come across Julie and Kathy's work on "The End of Capitalism", which along with the work of Ernesto Laclau and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, helped me think through the way Derrida and Heidegger could be employed towards a non-dialectical reading of Marx and the question of the role of the non-capitalist within capitalism. In rural Egypt I traced the ways in which the so-called development of capitalism was constantly
deformed, transposed, provoked into violence, or set back, not so much by coherent human resistance, as by the requirement that capital attempt to colonize bodies, communities, desires, reproductive mechanisms, ecological webs, hydraulic energies, and chemical processes that were caught up in a variety of other logics and networks.
Some of my more recent writing was influenced by reading the work going on in social studies of science--Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Donna Haraway, and others. What I found most useful in this work, for thinking about economics and the economic, was the insistence on focusing on what science does, not on what it says it does, and its skeptical attitude towards the way we naturalize the distinction between the human and the non-human.
While working in the Egyptian village I was also following the neo-liberal reform program taking shape at the national level, and wrote articles about the way the international development and financial institutions constructed a certain naturalized picture of Egypt as a country defined by limited resources and excessive population, and about the failure of their program of economic restructuring. This work on the development industry led me to think more widely about economic development as a political practice of the neocolonial period. I read my way through the history of development economics, and began to think about its relation to economics in general and the increasing influence of economics as the most powerful political language of the second half of the twentieth century. I was also drawn to think about the discipline of economics because my own Department of Politics at NYU was being rebuilt, in the later 1990s, around the work of game theorists and was succumbing to the imperialism of neo-classical economic theory.
Two years ago I began to assemble what I had learned from this work, and put together a book entitled Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, which California is publishing in September. The book's interrelated essays ask, in various ways, how one can understand the power of global capitalism without attributing to capital a logic and coherence it does not have, and how one can understand the universal history of the modern without reducing the third world to an incomplete or distorted modernity. It explores, among other topics, the way malaria, sugar cane, war, and nationalism interacted to produce the techno-politics of the modern Egyptian state; the forms of debt, discipline, law, and violence that founded the institution of private property; the methods of measurement, financial circulation, and economic exchange that produced the novel idea of an Aeconomy,@ yet made its accurate representation impossible; and the interaction of social logics, horticultural imperatives,
powers of desire, and political forces that turned programs of structural adjustment and economic reform in unanticipated directions.
In the course of this work on Egypt and the politics of development I discovered something I felt was critical to understanding the power of economics. Before the second quarter of the twentieth century, no economist (or nineteenth-century political economist) wrote about or believed in the existence of an object called "the economy." The term came into use in its modern sense only in the decade before World War II, and was firmly established only in the years just after the war. Economics gained its strength, it seemed to me, in part by establishing this object as a self-evident sphere of social life, about which economists could claim to have an exclusive and specialized knowledge. I published a brief paper outlining this argument several years ago, but am now trying and write about it in more detail. The argument has involved reading lots of mid-twentieth-century economics, but also an attempt to think through how one should reinterpret earlier economic theory to understand
the difference made by the subsequent making of the economy. This has involved going back to Walras and other figures in the marginalist revolution from the 1870s onward, but also re-reading the development of political economy from the late eighteenth century through to Marx. In the paper I will present for discussion at Bellagio, I argue that the birth of "the economy" in the mid-twentieth century is something more than a shift in "economic representations." In other words, it occurs not just as a new way or representing some pre-existing set of economic processes, processes that are assumed to exist in some form in all societies, whether or not they are labeled "the economy." Rather, I am interested in how the economy comes into being as part of the making of new forms of circulation, value, power, and truth. I also argue that the birth of the economy occurs as part of a crisis in forms of imperial power. The paper attempts to understand the genealogy
of the economic in relation to a forgotten history of the role of political economy as a science of empire.