Politics and the technological economy

This chapter began with a discussion of politics of a conventional kind: the politics of elections, political parties and governments. This form of politics relies on a careful framing of political actions and events.

The anti-political economy 95 of the array of devices and forms of knowledge that serve to contain and channel the space of politics. Political actions and events are framed, and they are kept separated, as far as is possible, from any contamination by the economic field. Although political actors are always entangled in more or less complex networks of economic relations and financial obligations and transactions, somehow miraculously, the vast technical apparatus of politics manages to keep these fields more or less distinct,³⁸ although the exceptions seem to be increasingly common.³⁹ A vote in an election or in parliament should bear no visible traces of economic interests any more than the money exchanged for a car bears any visible traces of political ideology.

The increasing importance of measurement and information in the economy might be thought to have anti-political effects. Governments have become less concerned with questions of distribution and public ownership, and more concerned with fostering a culture of regulation, monitoring, measurement, auditing, testing and compliance.⁴⁰ And all these activities - the whole government of qualities, to echo Gallon - can be delegated to experts. Metrology - in all its forms - becomes a secure relay between the political and the economic fields. It connects them, yet keeps them distinct and pure.

But this is not exactly what happens. On the one hand, the development and preservation of these new metrological regimes actually requires a lot of anti­political work. Measurement activities are much more vulnerable to interrogation than one might imagine. Metrology, in itself, does not have the resources to defend itself against interrogation. Institutions need either to be protected from external scrutiny, or external scrutiny must be managed in a way that does not provoke an excessive politicisation. Contracts need to be awarded to bodies that can be trusted. Reports and information must be released at the appropriate time to the appropriate audiences.⁴¹ The appropriate persons needed to be appointed to committees.⁴² In so far as external scrutiny does occur, it must be channelled and organised through the organisation of public enquiries and democratic forums. Measurement activities do not increase reflexivity in general. They intensify it in certain directions (Power 1997). On the other hand, measurement can have political effects. It can reveal objects and phenomena which cannot be merely explained away as expressions of political or economic interests. Far from creating a clean and secure connection between the world of politics and the world of the economy, measurement becomes a conduit for contamination. The organisation of economic activity becomes a political matter.