Extract from Chapter 1, “What is Control?”, Biopower, Psychopower, Neuropower: Control Beyond Guttari, Deleuze, and Foucault by Khushaan Ghosh (Verso Press: 2015)
The history of human society can be said to be the history of managing incentive structures. What others call the problem of organisation, I call the problem of control: How do you get someone to do something? When societies were largely hunter-gatherer affairs, incentive was easy to manage. You hunted and foraged to live and eat, and you stuck together because the many were stronger than the few. Yet as civilisation advances and becomes more complex, requiring more collaboration, specialisation, and time investment, the problem of incentive management commensurately becomes harder. How does one ask someone to help build a dam that will take years and service a completely different community?
Broadly, there are two kinds of incentive: carrot and stick. In the old patriarchal model, incentive was largely managed through the threat of violence and destruction, and society organised itself around hierarchies of oppression and domination (otherwise known as “carry a big stick” and its older brother “bigger army diplomacy”). The man who could command the most violence—the king—was the apex of the pyramid, his lords and knights i.e. his enforcers beneath him, and the peasants (little more than property) at the bottom. Yet this tended to produce resentment and friction from the oppressed groups, and could not compel complex forms of mental labour such as scholarship or worship by itself. It was also necessary for people on the same “rung” of the pyramid to trade and ask each other to perform labour without invoking the spectre of violence. The purpose of money as a technology, then, is to provide a possibility of “carrot-based” incentives—indeed, it is possible to describe money as reified incentive, positive compulsion made into a physical object.
What do I mean? Money, on its own, is worthless. It provides no function, cannot be used for any intrinsically useful purpose, and certainly provides no benefits when consumed. Its usage as a method of exchange is often described as a “store of value”, but that is itself misleading. This is because it implies that a warship’s worth of gold coins, having “stored” a certain amount of value, may be safely buried, dug up, and reused a thousand years later with no repercussions. As any economics student who has studied inflation can tell you, this is unfortunately untrue. A better description, then, is to say that money represents incentive, a compulsion to perform some activity or service. This impulse can be refused and does not imply violence in and of itself: rather, its compulsive power comes from the fact that, if you perform the action, you will receive money, and can then use that money to compel others to perform work you require completed. Because incentive is a psychological construct, the compulsive power (we again replace the word “value”) of any amount of money varies according to who you attempt to compel with it. A beggar on the street offered a hundred dollars may feel far more incentivised than a billionaire.
Inflation and deflation, under this schema, represent everyone having more or less compulsive power. Just as a body does not move in physics if it receives two forces that cancel out, if everyone has more incentives to hand out, but our capacity to perform work remains the same, then each incentive is worth relatively less—your incentive to perform a certain action for a certain party represents your evaluation of how much relative compulsive power that service will earn you, not how much absolute “value” you can receive. For this reason as well as many more most criticisms of “fiat” currency are ridiculous—all currency is fiat, insofar as money itself is a social construct.
All of this, of course, must also take into account that our psychological notions of incentive and compulsion are far from rational, and I have chosen those terms deliberately to indicate that money should be treated not as a stand-in for some special form of mental cognition but only as one out of many incentives. Understanding money as a psychological phenomenon rather than a mathematical one enables one to consider frauds, price gouging, and other economic phenomena in a far more realistic and intuitive manner. You must also take into account the fact that the carrot can so easily turn into the stick when, without compulsive power, one starves to death in our societies today. But enough about money.
Thus far, we have spoken of sticks and carrots as if they were doled out at the direction of a solemn dictator or some maniacal manager, little more than props in the king’s arsenal. However, any prolific manipulator knows that incentives can be internal as well as external; in this category we find honour, shame, love, and sacrifice (all of which are more potent in some sense than animalistic fear and greed). The art of control, therefore, is not to force someone to do something, but to make someone want to do something. And here is where our forms of power come in—They supersede raw incentive because they represent the shaping of the mind as well as the body, of the regulation of thoughts over impulses, and they turn our mental propinquities and proclivities against us. Biopower, psychopower, neuropower: these are the enemies you must know.