The Circulation State: People, Energy, Data, Money

How the modern State governs and where it is leading us

‘The politics of the future will be concerned with the art of moving the masses.’

-Napoleon Bonaparte

The salient political issues of our day - inflation, the use of energy, the censorship of mis/disinformation, data protection and online privacy, immigration, public health, cryptocurrencies, the driving of cars, identity issues and equality - at face value seem to have little in common. But there is in fact a unifying theme: the State’s administration of movement, fluidity, flow.

Inflation and the money supply; the innovation of ‘Ultra Low Emissions Zones’ and low-traffic neighbourhoods; incoming and outgoing migration; regulation of the circulation of misinformation; the mingling of disease vectors and viral spread; the interoperability of the human being across immutable characteristics; everywhere one looks, the State is attempting to guide, prevent, or strengthen circulation, understood as the movement of some abstracted object or set of objects (people, power, data, money, identity, etc.) between physical locations or between different modalities, positions or statuses.

This is not an accident or coincidence, or some mere poetic symbol or neat metaphor. It is a core feature of modern government. And, once observed, it therefore allows us to make some predictions about the future trajectory of the project of governance in modernity.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Lecturing in the late 1970s on the subject of Security, Territory, Population,¹ Michel Foucault examined the, at first glance obscure, history of town planning in 18th century Nantes in order to illustrate something crucial about the distinction between the medieval and modern worlds, and which in turn tells us a great deal about the way in which we are governed.

At that time, on the cusp of the Enlightenment, the city fathers in Nantes had four main objectives (for reasons which we will come to). They wished to improve hygeine; to improve the economy; to allow the city to grow; and to improve security. They could of course have dreamed up all kinds of ways of achieving those objectives, at varying degrees of cost and effectiveness. But for Foucault it was highly significant that they ultimately hit upon the method of cutting a new road network through the town (a pattern repeated throughout France, and seemingly Europe).

By rationalising the road network and making wider, straighter streets, these early town planners managed in their own minds to kill four birds with one stone. They broke up pockets of overcrowding and hence areas where ‘miasmas’ would collect, and literally improved ventilation, which in their view helped limit the spread of disease. They allowed commerce to circulate better within the town, increasing the size of its internal market. They were able to link the town to external trade, thus helping it to grow. And they were able to improve lines of sight and surveillance, which was important in bringing about better security since the town was physically growing beyond its old city walls, which could no longer realistically offer protection from brigands and vagrants.

It seemed, then, to Foucault that modernity was characterised by an interest in encouraging and managing circulation or flow as a phenomenon in itself, and that modern governing would be in no small part:

a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad.

And the reason for this was straightforward. The medieval sovereign had no real interest in these matters, because his job was simply to rule through the making of ‘simple and intelligible laws’ in the same way that God ruled creation. The modern sovereign, by contrast, was compelled to ‘govern’ - that is, to do things - because it had to justify its status to the people it ruled. It therefore had, by necessity, to become interested in such matters as how to make the economy grow, how to make the population healthier and more secure, and so on.

But since one cannot very well make the economy grow or make the population healthier or more secure simply by command (‘Be healthier!’) one must instead act upon the underlying phenomena remotely and indirectly, through manipulating what Foucault called its ‘milieu’. Hence, indeed, cutting new roads through a town in order to achieve ‘good’ and eliminate ‘bad’ circulation, in such a way that one thinks will result in improved outcomes across the metrics one cares about.

We have, then, in the example of Nantes, something of a microcosm or nutshell that serves to illuminate the whole. Modern government is required by its philosophical predicates to indeed ‘govern’ and thereby improve things. But it is faced with what Foucault called the ‘thick natural phenomenon’ of the population and the fact that it cannot be improved by sheer edict. Therefore government instead turns its attention to the manipulation of factors which it thinks will have an effect on circulation/flow of various features within the population and thereby realise whatever changes are desired.

Foucault’s primary interest was in what later became called neoliberalism, and his intellectual descendants made much hay out of the fact that the economic liberalisation of the late 1970s and early 1980s neatly fit into this paradigm (with barriers to trade and freedom of movement being removed precisely so as to encourage circulation/flow of goods, services, people and payments across borders and thereby increase growth). It is an open question as to whether our current moment is simply an amplification of those trends or is motivated by a genuinely qualitatively different set of priorities; but in any event we by no means saw the end of government’s drive to regulate flow at the end of the neoliberal era.

Immigration is of course the primary example of this, in that it so starkly illustrates the way in which the modern State seeks to control the movement of people as though it is a tap which can be turned one way or another to strengthen or weaken the flow; the lockdowns and various other measures enacted during the Covid era would be another important instance, wherein people’s movements were not just restricted by law but made subject to all kinds of finely calibrated ‘nudges’ in order to achieve an (as it turns out, totally bogus) effect based on the predicted circulation of people (and hence the virus).

This tells us something important about the way we are likely to be governed into the future. It is not so simple as saying that we can assume that across time pressure will grow for the State to identify more and more fixed features of life that it can render fluid (although I think this is certainly happening with regard to certain identitarian issues, where fluidity between categories is increasingly encouraged). The example of lockdowns, indeed, demonstrates that there will remain cases in which government decides that its task is to restrict or prohibit flow through the use of actual, legal or conceptual barriers (as does the whole ULEZ concept, not to mention the notion of the 15-minute city).

Rather, what we can expect is that since the regulation of circulation/flow is so central to what the State percieves to be its task, it will seek to exercise ever more control over any and all factors it can identify which might have some relationship to such regulation.

Some of these I have written about before. One is the flow of energy, with mandated use of ‘energy smart appliances’ in households likely to be coming down the pipe fairly soon, allowing government-appointed license holders to limit and control energy consumption in the home. Another is the flow of money, with government increasingly acting so as to make money its own property, bestowed upon us like a gift, and permitted to circulate only as it sees fit.

Others, such as the flow of people and the flow of information, are obvious. I have already touched on the subject of immigration, where we will likely see increasing use made of the binary between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ circulation: legal immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers good; illegal migrants and small boats bad. With respect to information, we are already familiar with the contours of what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ circulation mean, particularly on ‘hot button’ subjects like the climate; these subjects will likely proliferate, and attempts to define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ circulation of information in respect of them (and to regulate accordingly) will intensify.

More generally, what is clear is that, whether it seeks to guide, strengthen or limit circulation/flow in a particular context, or even prevent it entirely, the State will at the very least continue in its quest to eliminate barriers to circulation that are independent of its own authority. It will seek to bring about a situation in which the only such barriers are those which it, in its wisdom, imposes. And this means that in particular it will increasingly seek to undermine or dismiss any legal, biological, or moral principle which would otherwise act as a hard limit on its capacity to regulate flow.

The most obvious of these are the limits presented by fundamental rights, such as those to property, liberty, freedom of association and so on. But there are of course much more fundamental barriers - offered by society, the family, nature, and morality - than these. Immutable differences between people with different characteristics, the distinction between adult and child, the natural borders around the married couple and the family unit, loyalty to religious and national identities; these all act as conceptual weirs or dykes that prevent unrestricted social flow, and in particular form obstacles to the drive towards interoperability of human beings which is the inevitable necessary culmination of the drive to govern circulation.

Whether or not these barriers will be entirely broken down, and how far, is yet to be determined. But we can be sure that the State will ever more forcefully and pervasively arrogate for itself the function of deciding when and where, and on what basis, they can remain. And it will do this not because of what they signify in themselves. It will do so rather because of what their presence or absence achieves in respect of the ‘maximisation of good circulation’.

1. The transcripts of these lectures, together with those collated in the collections Society Must Be Defended and The Birth of Biopolitics are absolutely crucial reading for anybody interested in understanding the world in which we live. Foucault is much maligned by the IDW/’Anti-Woke Coalition’ types, but his project is generally poorly understood.