MODERN LAW AS MANAGERIAL RULERSHIP
It seems plausible to change the world by re-narrating the ‘context' because contemporary technocratic or managerial governance is so thoroughly rule by articulation.[110] To situate contextualization as a move of managerial rulership means placing it within this broader practice of elite articulation: making assertions about context is one way to do things with words.
People engaged in struggle assess the situation, interpret its meaning, forecast the import of doing this or that. As they do, they make assertions and arguments to one another about how things are and what should be done, about what has been decided, what it means and requires. Those articulations become effective when someone does something as a result, yielding to the assertion or claim or argument. In doing so, people often imagine themselves to be somehow outside the context. The facts of precedent, interest or history are behind them while the discretion of leaders, citizens, bosses or clients to make new facts lies ahead. It would be more accurate to think of context-making as performative: it works when it generates a ‘context effect', changing what is known in ways that alter who can do what. Right, that is how things are, how things were, who's who and what's what.We might think of the ‘knowledge' people bring to bear in their engagements as a stack of ideas: unconscious or semi-conscious material that is taken for granted, large ideological or theoretical positions used as justifications for opposing positions, technical differences of degree in the implementation of those positions and ideas about the outcomes, what will, might or ought to happen once a particular position in these layers of ideological conviction, technical know-how and common sense is accepted.
Context is certainly central to the way people think about outcomes: what will happen afterwards if their proposals, arguments or authority are accepted.
Context here is the space where effects occur and outcomes can be seen: the rock that articulative levers aim to move. But, of course, what moves is not a rock. It is a person. A person who acts or stands down, and who must interpret and accept or reject or ignore your assertion about how things ‘are'. There are many ways an assertion might lead a person to yield: mysticism, charisma, coercion and confusion are as much a part of the story as persuasion and means/ends rationality. However it occurs, the context for action - down there, where the rubber meets the road, where law in the books becomes law in action - is populated by people engaged in parallel and reciprocal knowledge work in which they too are expert. What ‘is' and its consequences are the social effects of this engagement: someone asserts and someone acquiesces.Context is most clearly part of the first layer: semiconscious ideas about how things are ‘out there' which frame more routine technical and ideological debates. This is the imaginary world people experience as real: the powers that do not need to be asserted and are not worth contesting, the framework of systems and institutions and actors among which distributive struggle is understood to be possible. Here, context seems to come before the work of articulation and decision.
And yet this frame must itself be established. To believe one lives in a ‘market economy' or ‘nation-state system' and to understand what that entails requires work. In places like Davos or Washington, just as in small-town coffee shops and living rooms around the television, people tell stories about what an economy is, what politics can accomplish, and the limits and potential of law. Their stories establish and reinforce what can be taken for granted, work that makes some problems visible, some actors central - and others invisible. Their stories can change: is ‘the economy' a space for a bracing individualism, for social interdependence or for careful, even austere, macroeconomic management?
It would be more accurate to picture the context that matters for the exercise of power as neither before nor after the processes of expert and public reason but within them.
In contemporary rulership, one cannot simply say one wants it and take it: there must be a reason. And reasons link one to facts, prior settlements, earlier decisions which must now be recognized. The dominant style is a verdictive tangle of ought and is: asserting what ought to happen as a fact or asserting a fact as a reason. This is where training comes in. To be trained for rulership today means learning the large visions shared among elites and becoming adept at linking broad ideological commitments to technical changes which might generate a favorable result within the frame of those visions. It also means inhabiting those contextual sensibilities flexibly, with vigilant skepticism about one another's assertions.[111] It means learning to inhabit elite conceptions of the world as well as the dark arts of disruption, whether these are termed ‘leadership' or ‘innovation' or ‘entrepreneurship' - or ‘resistance'.3.3
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