Oikopolitics, and Storms

Angela Mitropoulos*

ABSTRACT

In his 2009 Inaugural speech, US President Obama spoke of America’s

future by not only invoking We the People’s faith in founding ideals and
documents, but he did so–by this time, as his signature rhetoricity—by
evoking storms. Every “so often,” he remarked, “the oath is taken amidst
gathering clouds and raging storms.” He also spoke of an immeasurable
“sapping of confidence” in America’s futurity, alongside “indicators of
crisis, subject to data and statistics,” such as foreclosures, rising unem-
ployment, and a costly health care. The essay that follows was written
just prior to that speech, but it nevertheless attempts to understand how
the measurable acquaints itself with the immeasurable (desire and the
future) through a meshing of gender, race, sex, labour and desire in the
accounting of the household–and the oikos, in all its etymological tight-
ening. The question, in one sense, is how the coincidence of crises finan-
cial and climatic might unfold and recompose an oikopolitics. The
concept of an oikopolitics is offered here as something far more explana-
tory of the genealogical and familial than understandings of sovereignty
through a biopolitical lens have admitted, and something far less subjec-
tively universal than many accounts of affect and intimacy aspire to. It
does not simply point to a blurring of the classical distinction between
the public realm of politics and the private domain of the household in
the trammelling of arousal to labouring, and a socio-political horizon
whose possible forms of relation are those of the national state conceived
as home. It is also explanatory of the ways politics assumes the task of
securing an intimately normative disposition, the raising of a properly
political subject on the grounds of the at once familial and national. It is,
in another sense then, a post-autonomist contribution to discussions
that, thankfully, remain turbulent.

P romoting his forthcoming book Ecological Debt on Open Democracy in

2005, Andrew Simms argued that despite decades of political action around

66
the environment, “the green movement still struggles to find a story [ . . . ]
strong enough” to dislodge the attraction of fossil-fuelled economies. What
would be persuasive? At that time, Simms indicated that the story might be
borrowed from, in his words, the “homely wisdom” of Margaret Thatcher’s
government. “Good environmental stewardship [ . . . ] should be the same as
good household management,” he wrote; adding: “What could be simpler
than the notion of living within our means?” Simple, perhaps. Yet the simplic-
ity of the proposition that the environment should be understood as a house-
hold, along with—as Thatcher argued—the nation, requires that each of these
be accounted for in the same terms, which is to say: according to the same
values and measures, and therefore through a budget. A budget, minimally, is
a ledger of assets and expenditure projected into the future. Budgets presup-
pose quantitative measure, the reduction of everything to a monetary value,
and the assumption that what is significant to take account of can be measured
by money. In budgets, there are line items; the most curious of which is that of
contingencies (variously defined as unforeseen events, or conditions that might
void sale and contract). In accounting practices, contingencies are what of the
future cannot be predicted, but can nevertheless be measured. Yet, the argu-
ment that earth, nation and household are analogous functions not only inso-
far as there is a common unit of measure at work in each, but that each are (or
might be) structured according to the same (economic) principles, and might
become, therefore and through this, the object of management (i.e., steward-
ship). Seemingly indifferent to what is measured, it remains true that the
asymmetric logic of equivalency and contract inclines to what is productive,
what might be counted to have increased one’s assets. That nation and house-
hold present themselves not only as specific economic practices, relatively de-
tachable units of economic organization and labour, but also as the modular
horizon of politics implies an indistinction between economics and the very
sense of the political, between the precepts of calculation and those of deci-
sion. Here, it is productive bodies—and all that this phrase entails and as-
sumes about celestial, political, laboring, and corporeal bodies construed as
analogous—which comes to the fore in politics, or as political questions.
Nevertheless, what composed a household is no more continuous in his-
tory than is the idea that the nation (or the environment) and household are
the same, not to mention that nation-states are a strictly modern form of orga-
nization. For Aristotle, unlike for most of the world in the present moment,
the exemplary household perfectly mirrored the demographics of the city
(polis). As Jean-Luc Nancy suggested, “the polis subsists [for Aristotle] on in-
fra-political bases,” but in no sense was it considered the destiny of politics to
climax in the political administration of everything (2002:17). More signifi-
cantly, the household was no more the eminent space of intimacy than did
intimacy always culminates in genealogy, or genealogy in sovereignty. By con-

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 trast, the exemplary household invoked by Thatcher was that of a nuclear fam-
ily, conceived not only as a space of intimacy but also genealogy, in its most
minimal sense as the cohabitation of love, sex and procreation within a pro-
ductive unit. What remains of the Aristotelian understanding of the house-
hold is its description as a realm of necessity, of the production and reproduction
of life (as we know it), and its management, where each of its pertinent figures
(guards, women, slaves, animals and so on; or father, mother and children)
might be accounted for as line-items in the household budget. This is why the
oikos forms the root of both ecology and household (as well as economy),
though it might be noted that the former term was coined by the zoologist
Ernst Haeckel, as he searched around for a way to articulate a nascent behav-
iourism (that psychology is a branch of physiology) and biopolitics (his infa-
mous phrase: “politics is applied biology”). This intersection of household and
nation coincides with the rise of Fordism, and at a more visceral level, Taylor-
ism. It is a confluence marked by naturalization and dynamism at the same
time; an ergonomic vitalism that not only elevates household and nation as
political-economic subjects par excellence, but wraps sex, labour and intimacy
together with real estate both national and homely, just as it subsumes those
desires under the politico-biological nexus of race, gender and heterosexuality.
It might also be remarked that, as Elizabeth Povinelli calls it, the “dispersion
of the intimacy grid,” through which household appears as the proliferation
and democratization of sovereignty, also presupposes a history of colonization,
of the eclipse of forms of life and of worth that do not hang, as she puts it, “on
the more or less fragile branches of a family tree” (2002:234 and 216).
In any case, these ‘units’ of nation and household, and the relations between
them, what it is they do, who resides in what are taken to be exemplary of each,
and so on—all these and more pose themselves as questions only at the level of
their management, and only to the extent that that there are techniques of such
available. What brings it all together is accounting, the ledgering of value (and,
to the extent that something does not appear on the ledger, non-value, superflu-
ity). Budgets appear to be neutral instruments of measure, infinitely pliable, in-
different to content. Yet their principal statistical index—that of national
currencies and their relative standing—increasingly imposed itself, much like
the weather and alongside its presentation on the nightly news, as that which
must be taken account of but cannot be predicted with absolute certainty.
By 2008, Simms’ language had shifted from that of the household stan-
dard, albeit not so far as might be supposed. As policy director of the London-
based New Economics Foundation—who describe themselves as working “to
construct a new economy centered on people and the environment using tech-
niques such as social and environmental auditing” –, he rephrased their web-
site’s preamble in an op-ed piece for the BBC:

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 The UK and the global economies are entering uncharted waters, and the
weather forecast is not just bad, but appalling. The triple crisis of credit
collapse, oil prices and climate change is conjuring a perfect storm.

In the meantime, of course, what goes by the name of ‘Katrina’ had laid
politics bare in the United States, grimly exposed its preconditions and contin-
gencies, its determinations of value and superfluity. Then-President Bush, try-
ing hard to align Hurricane Katrina with Fortuna, insisted that “the devastation
resulted not from the malice of evil men, but from the fury of water and wind”
(President’s weekly radio address, September 10, 2005). Simms and Bush were
not alone in resorting to the motif of the storm after that hurricane. The ongo-
ing, and flailing, military interventions in the Middle East, ‘felt at the pump’
in the form of oil prices, combined with the collapse of the subprime markets
and the much-touted ‘toxicity’ of (as President Bush and others put it) “trou-
bled assets,” to make it seem as if the storm had amplified through coinci-
dence. In any case, the storm turned out, and in no way surprisingly, to be a
strong and bracing way of telling a story. It has been echoed in talk, among
other things, of a Green New Deal by the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-
moon and President-elect Obama.
Storms happen all the time. From Lucretius to Marx and well beyond,
storms—whether ironically rendered as ‘perfect’ in their simultaneity or con-
strued as more eventfully singular—have often characterised various attempts
to apprehend the encounter that contingency is. Political writings have been
replete with all manner of revolutionary storms, storms of war, desert storms,
financial storms. Storms, after all, disturb the earth’s surface, the geographies
and architectures of what is given. They challenge forgotten and buried histo-
ries of appropriation, their infrastructure and their limits. They are the ubiq-
uitous motif of that which is excessive in its violence, indistinct in its desires,
and unpredictable in its consequences. They can bring relief in the midst of
drought and heatwave, or they can portend disaster. Storms can, also, be un-
leashed. To invoke a storm is to raise questions about what presents itself,
simply and presumably without finite conditions and histories, as a Way of
Life; doing so in the dramatic (and oftentimes naturalising) language of me-
teorology, whether the effect is to underline—and perhaps embrace—the
volatility or to insist on the protection of this Way of Life. Let it be noted that
ways of life, in the twentieth century like no other, are thought in national
terms, as the Australian Way of Life, and so on. And so, if, as Maarten Hajer
put it (2005:4), “whether or not environmental problems appear as anomalies
to existing institutional arrangements depends first of all on the way they are
framed and defined,” it is also the case that these are enframed within the
nation-state superintending households. In the discourses of conservation and
protection, given both the composition of the problem and their framing,

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 there is the predictable appeal to a normal state to which things might be re-
turned or, at the very least, a call to preservation in the guise of the merely
technical or neutral; or, what is much the same thing, as an appeal to civic
virtue and the ostensibly empty figure of citizenship.
The storm is, to put it briefly, the occurrence of politics, however con-
cealed or expressive. It is the appearance of conflict over and about (as Arendt
understood politics) the infra-, being-with-others, the between and beyond of
relation (which is also to say, disconnection). Melinda Cooper puts it this way:
“Turbulence is the event emerging from an irresolvable relation between two
or more ‘flows’ that are themselves relations” (2008:7–8). In this sense, the
storm emphasises the ineliminable, incalculable plurality that politics is. In its
more conventional—i.e., teleological—presentations, the storm is politics as it
appears ‘before’ the decision and the calculus that founds the political, or what
is regarded as proper to politics and economics. It is, in any case, the condi-
tional of the political and yet, still, the condition of politics; the con- and the
tangere that is neither reducible to its specific articulations, nor swerves, nor
their mastering. Within the storm, contingency is in no way the not-yet, the
appeal that will necessarily culminate in decision or measure. To be sure, it can
serve as pretext or opportunity for mastery, its enjoyments and delusions, but
the storm nevertheless persists as trope precisely because the sensorium of
politics exceeds the borders and definitions of the political, even in those mo-
ments where what is at stake and what is asserted as inevitable are those
boundaries and the figures which inhabit them. One could point, here, to the
debates over globalization or precariousness, in which the catastrophe was per-
ceived as that of a purported decline of the nation-state in the midst of an ac-
tual fortification of its borders or in terms of the never-universal condition of
regular, full-time work. In some instances, the presentation of a storm can set
off a surge, or trip a panic alarm, where there are no longer questions, in the
ensuing terror or mild anxiety, about what is defended, why and how. It is the
sensory, indeed sensual, equivalent of the idea of the crisis, often likely to be
personified as Fortuna. It arouses. Though, while the storm seems to expose
foundations, brings down powerlines and tears apart buildings, or at least
threatens to, as with the notion of a crisis, it is when these are already shaking
that one is able to sense a crisis at all. It is not, foremost, a question of visibil-
ity—unless the sense here is akin to the visibility of a tip of an ice-berg, the
complex peak and irreducible coincidence of movements and histories. Which
is to say, Hurricane Katrina disclosed the crisis that is the norm in the United
States. Put another way: contingency is not reducible to something that might
be accounted for as contingencies, as unforeseen but nevertheless capable of
being measured, in due course. Contingency is not foremost a question of
freedom—or one that assumes a subject who is deprived of godlike foresight
but nevertheless capable of deciding, weighing, comparing, eventually; of en-

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tering into contracts and reckoning their conditions—but of touch, though
freedom remains at issue. Freedom, in its various incarnations, including fac-
tal freedom, presupposes an autonomous (if not entirely conscious) subject, a
figure that is—as Michael Dillon (2008) underlines—man. This figure of man
has its conditions and histories; is, therefore, contingent. It has its particular
affective and geopolitical map, a history from which it was raised up and situ-
ated within matrices of relations both intimate and public.
Famously, for Machiavelli, Fortuna was simultaneously storm, flood and
female. Both feared and seductive, Fortuna is to be embraced and channelled,
seized and secured by embankments, cuffs and whatever might be convenient.
In such narratives, the feminization of inclemency tends to be suggestive, the
presentation of a cliff-hanger moment that is as precariously inclined toward a
heteronormative plotting of the ensuing action as it is of the decision that gives
rise to the political. Which is to say: it is as canonically pornographic as it is,
more often, regarded as the text which inaugurates a particular sense of the
political as the mastering of contingency. In Machiavelli’s particular telling of
the story, the familial and the political are brought together through recogni-
tion or, more specifically, the ability of a man—that is: a would-be-prince—to
recognise tumult as opportunity and any peaceful time as one of pre-emptive
engineering works. Here, it is desire, and its subjective grids, that are com-
posed, deflected, and called up.
In the Discourses, Machiavelli wrote:
Though it may appear that the world has grown effeminate, and Heaven
has laid aside her arms, this without doubt comes chiefly from the worth-
lessness of men, who have interpreted our religion according to sloth and
not according to vigor [virtù]. For if they would consider that it allows us
the betterment and the defense of our country [patria], they would see
that it intends that we love and honor her and prepare ourselves to be
such that we defend her. (1965:330–31)

It is not simply that Machiavelli seeks to rouse a masculine subject on the basis
of the defence of a feminised country but that, in his quest for a nation-state-to-
come, the very sense of virtue becomes intimately acquainted with a moralising
injunction against indolence. Productivity and virtue coincide, just as they do in
anthropological accounts of labour in which, implicitly or not, potentiality (and
the future) becomes restricted to its productivist versions. The mobilization of a
gendered, nationalist affect is simultaneously a call to labour. Man might not be
omnipotent and omniscient, not quite a secularised version of god, but this fig-
ure can nevertheless be attributed with the capacity—not for (as Arendt defined
politics) “the infinitely improbable” but—for calculating probabilities and physi-
cal exertions that might keep contingencies in check or take advantage of them.
This is a figure that, as Georg Simmel remarked of a much later time, is con-

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 stantly preoccupied with “weighing, calculating, enumerating” and “the reduc-
tion of qualitative values to quantitative terms” (cited in Woodward, 1999:184).
By the twentieth century, Machiavelli’s sense of the political and its central fig-
ure of the productive, patriotic man internalised the practices of accounting.
The climactic, then, as a means for the contemplation or exposition of
contingency—but, also, in its non-meteorological definitions, as a narrative
form that might give shape to a sense of politics—is nothing new. What might
be new, given the current paradigmatic coincidence of environmental and fi-
nancial turbulence, is a tightening of the etymological slide between the eco-
logical and (to borrow another term from Arendt) the oikopolitical. As
something far more explanatory of the genealogical and familial than any un-
derstanding of sovereignty through a biopolitical lens has been able to admit,
and something far less subjectively universal than many accounts of affect and
intimacy aspire to, Arendt’s term does not simply point to a blurring of the
classical distinction between the public realm of politics and the private do-
main of the household—or, put otherwise, the indistinction between politics
and economics in the rise of the social, whose contours and versions of possible
forms of relation are remarkably and, almost without variance, those of the
national state conceived as home. It also invokes the sense in which politics
comes to assume the task of securing an intimately normative disposition, the
raising of a properly political (i.e., autonomous) subject on the grounds of the
at once familial and national as if this were the most natural—and therefore,
apolitical, eternal—thing on earth. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner—
writing of the modulations of public and private in the intersections of race,
border controls and sex—have already argued that “national heterosexuality”
is the means through which “a core national culture can be imagined as a sani-
tized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure
citizenship” (1998: 549).
The question, here, is similar, if more about how the familial form of the
national state and the heterosexually nationalist ledgering of intimate norms—
that is, a Way of Life—becomes reconfigured in light of the apprehension of a
storm simultaneously financial and climatic. Mick Smith suggests something
of what is happening in arguing that new discourses of environmental citizen-
ship seek to oblige, “in a largely ‘apolitical’ manner’ [ . . . ] behavioural norms
that facilitate the continuance of the current social/economic system” (2005:51).
As the social accompaniment to Taylorism, behaviourism is the application of
measure and working up of statistical norms. As Kathleen Woodward argues,
the increasing recourse to and circulation of statistics amounts to the amplifica-
tion of a “structure of feeling,” “the creation of the omnipresent discourse of
risk” that “has produced a calculus to avoid that very risk” (1999:196)—though
I would add, it is also the case that it is enough for the anecdotal to pass as the
statistical so long as it simultaneously incites a sexualised panic toward the

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normative (see the discussion on the “Intervention” in Mitropoulos, 2008a).
But if the recourse to state-sponsored behaviourism pivots around the familial
household as its basic unit of architecture, while assuming an individuated sub-
ject whose motions can be rewarded, punished, contracted and hedged, it is the
inducements offered to companies to include a set of indices regarding a finite
ecology within their accounting that provides the calculus to accompany the
normative. This auditing requires the rendering of ostensibly environmental
values as monetary ones. Moreover, according to Hajer (1995:26), “ecological
modernization frames environmental problems combining monetary units with
discursive elements derived from the natural sciences,” and the problems of the
environment become increasingly construed as “a management problem.”
Since the 1980s, those organizations purporting to represent the environ-
mental movement have increasingly shorn themselves of a critique of modern-
ization, of progress and technical rationality. Put another way: this is the point
from which the traces of anti-capitalism were stripped from official environ-
mental discourse. To be very clear, the suggestion here is in no way that this
critique, as it was articulated in various ways, was without its significant prob-
lems, depending on where and how it situated the moment at which a suppos-
edly pristine ecology was disturbed or crisis marked, and, critically, noticed to
be so. All ideas of a state of equilibrium incline toward a dialectics of the fall
and redemption, a temporalization and theologization of what continue to be
organized as geographic and spatial matters pertaining to the movements of
bodies. It is this temporalization which must locate a significant event, some
of the most well-known versions being: at the moment of colonization, or
globalization, or in the announcement of an imminent crisis of overpopulation
or the more recent concerns over (what is the same preoccupation with pro-
ductivity) declining birth rates and ageing populations, or the emergence of
capitalism as such, or in the shift to real subsumption, or the oil shock of the
early 1970s, or the moment of primitive accumulation, et cetera. The question,
better put—which is both temporal and spatial—is of the presentation of a
Way of Life as the only way of living there is or might be. One does not require
nostalgia to criticise the amplification of the actuarial, or to note the ways in
which the sense of the future becomes constrained to and by such. Neither
past nor future have to be marked as a loss or as the possibility of recompense,
but they do signify discontinuity and an incommensurable difference. And
yet, notions of progress can be quantifiable (the production of more and better
of the same), and so serve to eternalise what is. Or, more utopically, progress
can be another name for a deferral that is assuaged by idealising, and therefore
holding fast, to what is, in the hope that whatever it might be, it will become
better over time. In either case, present political and economic arrangements
are projected out into an infinite future, ironically in the name of a finite ecol-
ogy. And yet, the very idea of a finite ecology is an artefact of claims about the

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 scarcity of the means of a specific Way of Life, and not life as such. Indeed, it
is difficult not to locate the resurgence of claims about scarcity in intermingled
anxieties about peak oil and ‘reliance on foreign oil’ (Caffentzis, 2005), in the
revival of appeals to an autochthonous nation-state, or at least one that is
deemed to be so because it is capable of forgetting its conditions. But, what the
attempts to secure oil supply have long considered to be a question of national
security, of violence and diplomacy, the former imagines is a question of the
scarcity of a particular commodity to be solved (and apparently non-violently
so) by the extension of commodification. That the ecology might be touted as
finite, but money’s reach, it seems, as both universal and infinite, may be prog-
ress, of a kind. But the much-heralded turn to a soft form of power is, contrary
to its adherents, also a soft form of war.
In 1939, Walter Benjamin wrote bitterly of the storm blowing in from
“Paradise,” the wreckage of an ostensible progress toward that paradise piling
high all around (2003:392). Some sixteen years earlier, Carl Schmitt similarly,
albeit for divergent effect, noted the fragility of technical rationality in the face
of a “a new storm of historical life” breaking loose (1988:68). What Benjamin
noted, and Schmitt sought to make self-evident through his attachment to the
mythologeme of “a people,” are the presuppositions, conditions and contin-
gencies of any given Way of Life. In 1904, in a short article in Le Socialiste ti-
tled “In the Storm,” Rosa Luxemburg insisted that the storm of war, no less
than the destiny and zoning of Europe in the geopolitical distribution of war
and peace were being played out not “between the four walls of the European
concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial poli-
tics.” In each of these presentations of the oncoming storms of war, it was not
simply a question of refuting technological rationality and technical solutions,
for better or—in Schmitt’s case—for worse. Rather, the technical and the cal-
culable are posed as both the form of the question and its solution precisely
because this is the means by which supposed problems become visible without
posing questions about their conditions, without reference to histories, and as
a form of mastering contingency through the imposition of measure. Here, the
presupposition of the national budget and its forms of ledgering are not called
into question but, on the contrary, find their apparently indisputable grounds
for application and expansion. In this regard, it is not that, as with current
preoccupations, the questions of infrastructure or energy or climate become
politicised, making their way to the forefront of policy proposals, analyses and
the distributions of research funding, against the backdrop of privatization
and deregulation. On the contrary, this is the mark of a depoliticization that
proceeds only by assuming, as given, secured as that which is beyond conflict,
the meshing of genealogy and intimacy throughout, from the organization of
households to that of the nation (as household). Its depoliticization proceeds as
a consequence of eternalising the aforementioned where the only question that

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remains is budgetary and managerial. Furthermore, the oscillation of debate
between regulation and deregulation, as well as public and private ownership,
makes little sense without the presupposition of households organized in par-
ticular ways and within interlocking systems of the policing of global labour
movements. Privatization does not simply imply private ownership of infra-
structure and the means of circulation, or of the means and care of life. It
presupposes entire histories over unpaid labour situated within the household;
of migration policy and its organization of visas, illegality and race; of the
gendering of tasks and their distribution across, say, the private realm of the
house or the semi-public space of the hospital; of the role of personal and fa-
milial insurance in demarcating a proper (also domestic) working class. Priva-
tization no more suspends the inclination to measure and norm than has
deregulation implied the diminishing of state controls on how (some) people
live, or cannot, from the increasing delivery of welfare as ‘normfare’ to the
proliferation of border controls (see Mitropoulos, 2008a; 2008b). As Shu-Ju
Ada Cheng argues, writing of migrant domestic labour in Taiwan, “the priva-
tization of care provision illustrates the state’s appropriation of women’s labor
and the gendered nature of the national system of care” (2004:48), rather than
any contraction or withdrawal of the state. The controls are, then, more inti-
mate, more focussed on behaviours and the ostensibly private realm of the
household, and imbued with a sense of personal decision, responsibility and
obligation. Moreover, as with, the translation of ‘ecological values’—imagin-
ing for a moment they existed in those precise terms, prior to the project of
translation—into monetary ones, this implies the amplification not only of
quantitative measure but also its assumption of the national currency. Here,
politics becomes indistinguishable from and constrained by economics, a
question, for the most part, of national and household productivity and its ac-
counting. Family values are indistinguishable from property values—includ-
ing estimates of bodies as potential labour—and form the basis of authentic
citizenship. But, however much this nexus between labour, family and nation
might be accounted for, measured, regarded as eternal and natural, contin-
gency remains as its condition.
That is, the remarks by Benjamin, Schmitt and Arendt are pertinent not
only because they invoke storms—and war—as such, but because in doing so
they note the connection between the metaphorics of the storm and the invis-
ible, unassimilable variable that both serves as prompt for the recourse to the
nebulous motif of the storm, but also troubles all attempts to account for it in
advance. For Benjamin, as with Schmitt, there is no inscription of the civil
without barbarity and, it might be added, no citizen without the foreigner—
though they had very different ideas about each. But it is Luxemburg who
notes the way in which contingency is transformed into necessity, specifically
through a forgetting of its finite conditions in the encounter without which

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 neither appropriation nor property (nor its accounting or protection) would be
possible. The question that follows, as Althusser suggested, is how this en-
counter takes hold (2006). For Althusser, the epochal encounter was, of course,
that “between ‘the owners of money’ and the proletarian stripped of every-
thing but his labour-power” (2006:197). For Luxemburg, it was the processes
and relations of colonization and the emergence of the inter-national system.
But since these figures do not pre-exist that encounter—neither the “mass of
impoverished, expropriated human beings” (Althusser) nor the colonised ter-
ritories (Luxemburg) –, the question is far less one of identity than of the his-
tory through which identities and the relations that constitute them acquire a
facticity, the storms and norms that created them dissolved into a self-eviden-
tiary calculus and the technologies that accompany it.
When the Reverend Marquis, Director of Henry Ford’s Sociology De-
partment from 1915 to 1921, remarked that “Mr Ford’s business is the making
of men, and he manufactures automobiles on the side to defray the expenses of
his main business,” he was not merely, if wryly, pointing out the contingency
of line-production on certain masculine norms. Though that was true enough.
In its early stages, the touted efficiencies of the assembly line were hampered
by a pronounced indiscipline that, for the most part, took shape as disinterest
and avoidance. At the time, Ford’s car assembly plant had an annual turnover
rate of almost four times the total workforce. Levels of daily absenteeism hov-
ered around 10 per cent. The experience of ‘de-skilling’ that came about with
the distancing of managerial oversight from line-work, sometimes regarded by
floor-workers as tantamount to emasculation, produced an irregularity that,
prior to the austerity of the 1929 Depression and the total social mobilizations
of WWII, could not be made to harmonise with the routinized monotony of
the labor process. And so, in 1914, with the help of his Sociology Department,
Ford introduced, most notably, the family wage. Higher than average at the
time, paid only to men as a “breadwinner’s wage” and, so, functioning to expel
women from the factory, the family wage was also conditional upon remaining
in employ for longer than six months and the fulfilment of a moral code around
sex, alcohol and “thrifty habits” that extended beyond the factory.
While it is important to note that the family wage did not become genera-
lised for some time, and was hardly global in its reach, it nevertheless remains
noteworthy that, from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-20th, in
the United States it went from being denounced as a socialist measure to being
an article of faith among unions, employers and reformers alike. To be very
clear: the social wage that emerged here cannot be understood outside its con-
ditions as a family wage, one premised not only on the joint stock company, but
also on the inseparability of heterosexuality, race and nation. Which is to say:
it might well be thought outside this complex, but only on the terrain of a poli-
tics that seeks out an idealised hegemonial vantage. In any case, where the

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earliest version of the “breadwinner wage,” enshrined by the English Poor Law
of 1834, aimed to dissuade the poor from having children (Clark, 2000), Ford’s
family wage incited procreation in modes deemed to be both proper and pro-
prietal, gendered and racialized at the same time. Pointing to shifts in the
confluences of race and sex, turning around questions of reproduction and pro-
duction, this change signalled the amplification the oikopolitical in the prolif-
erating registers of domesticity, domestication and (a phrase that is still in use)
the domestic economy. From the 1834 Poor Law’s explicitly Malthusian insis-
tence that the impoverished were recalcitrant about improvement toward the
‘melting pot’ assimilationism that, in the Ford factory, was often hinged around
instruction in the mundane detail of an idealised familial life, the exemplary
Fordist worker was resolutely figured as the reliable citizen-husband. What
transported the family wage proposition from the outlandish to the common-
place, and from its exclusionary to assimilatory variants, was, precisely, the in-
tersection of normativity and labour process—which is to say: the reorganization
of at once racialized and gendered attachments through a complex redistribu-
tion of compensations, exclusions and hierarchies that were as libidinal as they
were spatial, monetary and semantic. Significantly however, it was the particu-
lar way in which Ford conceived the ledgering, disbursements and elements of
the wage that provided the decisive innovation that would recognise and trans-
form the delineations of public and private, economic and intimate, factory and
household, citizen and subject and, not least, labour and sex.
In My Life and Work, discussing the physical exertions of the socialised
man, he wrote:
If only the man himself were concerned, the cost of his maintenance and
the profit he ought to have would be a simple matter. But he is not just an
individual. He is a citizen, contributing to the welfare of the nation. He
is a householder. He is perhaps a father with children who must be reared
to usefulness on what he is able to earn. We must reckon with all these
facts. How are you going to figure the contribution of the home to the
day’s work? You pay the man for his work, but how much does that owe
to his home? How much to his position as citizen? How much to his
position as father? The man does the work in the shop, but his wife does
the work in the home. The shop must pay them both. On what system of
figuring is the home going to find its place in the cost sheets of the day’s
work? (1922:123)

Nation, factory and household would each have their column in the bal-
ance sheet, echoing Frederick Taylor’s eye for the detailed microphysics of
time and motion, but in this instance combining statistical norm with a frater-
nal, racialized heteronormativity—the “making of men”—as its ordering prin-
ciple. The male line-worker, in compensation for the alienation of managerial

Oikopolitics, and Storms / Angela Mitropoulos Vol. 3:1 77

 purview, was to be enticed to instead look upon the nation’s welfare as his
personal duty, just as the payment of the wage to him alone invited him to as-
sume a prudent proprietalism toward his wife and, not least, his children’s
upbringing as future workers. Yet, the exclusion of women from paid factory
work and their relegation to the unpaid work of the household—increasingly
defined as work and subject to its own versions of scientific management and
industrialization—was not entirely a matter of their expulsion from a strata of
higher paid work. Nor were the intersections formed between the “wages of
whiteness” and the family wage—where, for instance, non-citizens were paid
a percentage of the family wage (Benton-Cohen, 2003)—simply directed to-
ward the reiteration of the border in and at the gates of the factory. It was not
only, to put it briefly, a question of the gendered, racialized distribution of
economic dependency and property rights. As Lewchuk has suggested, the
recourse to the family wage came about because “it was unclear if time could
be converted into effort as efficiently in a mixed-gender workforce.” The ques-
tion being implicitly posed, then, was how to reorient affect, bodies and
arousal, toward the simultaneously heteronormative and productive in spheres
both demarcated and affiliated through accounting. Put another way: this par-
ticular form of ledgering coincided with the rise of statistical norm and and its
deviations, pattern and detail, demand management and the virtue of deferred
gratification, all swerving off the unassimilable perplexity of (in its Keynesian
renditions) unknown probabilities that could not be assigned to any column or
measured by them. But if the Fordist approach eventually faltered on bundles
of public debt as the fiscal, socialised trace of that epistemically “unknowable”
variable, the shift to post-Fordism might well be characterised as the traversal
of Ford’s initial separation of management and labour, leveraging the oikopo-
litical nexus of nation, family and labour around intimate calibrations of risk-
assessment, accountability, and desire.
In what follows, I would like to merely allude to what seems to have taken
hold but has yet to assume a facticity, namely: a stridently normative inclina-
tion toward the productive (household and nation) erected upon the seemingly
indisputable, and crucially transcendental, alibi of climate change. The most
pronounced aspect of this is, of course, the campaigns for “green jobs” that
underwrites talk of a Green New Deal. It is, however, important to note that
“green jobs” already have their precedent in, for instance, work-for-the-dole
schemes in Australia which suspend the contractual aspects of the wage,
among other things, under the rubric of the combined moral imperatives of
work ethic and environmental crisis. In one sense, this increasing recourse to
an environmentally ethical coerced labour presents itself as a kind of answer to
questions posed elsewhere about the normative unfolding of the precor (prayer)
in the midst of precariousness, the desire for a return to a purported (Fordist)
equilibrium and regularity that was neither generalised nor universal, and by

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no means without its conditions in violence and war, no matter how much it
continues to be mourned by some (Mitropoulos, 2004). In another respect,
this confluence of household and nation under the concerted pressures of in-
clemency both financial and climatic presupposes a history of the ledgering
not only of labour, but also of rights that flow from labour (i.e., productivism)
that has played itself out in cyberspace as much as landscape, and often through
the moral architecture of humanitarian interventions both abroad and inter-
nally that are as much sexualised and racialized as they are deemed to be solv-
able as matters of technology and the instruction in civic virtues (see
Mitropoulos, 2007 and 2008a).
In a speech on September 1st 2008, in Michigan, then-Presidential nomi-
nee Barack Obama remarked that “not all storms get on tv but they are there.”
Speaking a day later in Milwaukee, on the themes of “how to sustain the
middle class” and the “dignity of work,” he said: “there are some folks who are
going through their own quiet storms.” He added:
all across America, there are quiet storms taking place, there are lives of
quiet desperation, people in need of just a little bit of help. Now, Ameri-
cans are a self-reliant people [ . . . ] every once in a while somebody’s going
to go through some hard times [ . . . ] we rise and fall as one nation, the
values of family and community and neighbourhood and that express
themselves in our government, those are national values [ . . . ] the spirit
that we need in our own homes and the spirit that we need in our
Whitehouse.

Needless to say, the question being posed here was that which had been
precipitated by decades of what is usually referred to as neoliberalism (the
displacement of risk onto households) followed by the collapse of the subprime
mortgage industry and rising unemployment. But if Thatcher and Obama
seem to diverge on questions of the extent of, say, union involvement in the
procedures of government or their particular emphasis on the line of welfare-
warfare that is referred to as state “help,” they nevertheless both articulate the
problem as one of unemployment—which is, echoing Machiavelli, the notion
of unproductivity conceived as both a moral and political-economic problem—
and determine the solution in terms of productive and self-managed house-
holds (conceived as analogous to the nation-state). It is all a question of the
intimacy of risk-management. The International Monetary Fund stated the
question in these terms:
there has been a transfer of financial risk over a number of years, away from
the banking sector to non-banking sectors. [ . . . ] This dispersion of risk
has made the financial system more resilient, not least because the house-

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 hold sector is acting more and more as a ‘shock absorber of last resort.’
(2005:89)

If the modern financial system is premised on the historical emergence of na-

tional debt, the late twentieth witnessed the democratization of its risks through
the household. And yet, as it turns out, the dispersal of risk opened the door to
the cascading effects of subprime instability and default. The idealised house-
hold had not taken hold in any generalised sense, much as it imposed itself as
norm, and beyond any attempt to assume that all of those who defaulted could
not pay rather than had decided not to or, more broadly put, did not budget and
toil as they ought. That this cascade (or storm) has, almost without variance,
been read as the teleological urgency of a new New Deal that will raise Gross
Domestic Product, in the coupled language of post-storm reconstruction and a
progressive faith (that is, hope)—not to mention alongside renewed calls for the
euthanasia of the rentier, of the dangers of unproductive (fictitious or parasitic)
capital, and for the redemption of the US as a de facto global currency—indi-
cates the ubiquity of oikopolitics that is as nostalgic (in its recourse to the lan-
guage of the New Deal) as it is progressive (in its bid for social and environmental
auditing), as reactionary and moralising as it is calculating and hopeful. It also
suggests that the celebrated turn to soft power—to note Joseph Nye’s nomina-
tion of Obama as the exemplary, redemptive expression of such (2008)—does
not imply a turn away from violence, war, death; though it may well indicate
something of its redistribution. George Caffentzis, writing of claims about
peak oil, argues that:
there has been a capitalist critique of “rent-seeking” throughout the his-
tory of political economy. Rent is presumably the epitome of unproduc-
tive income. This critique still goes on today in the text-books and among
the ideologues of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism. However, for all
the critique of the rentier, rent still is a decisive form of income in a capi-
talist society [ . . . ] But the productivist ideology that has its roots in
John Locke’s defense of English colonialism in the late seventeenth cen-
tury is always waiting on the horizon to be brought in to justify attacks
on the rights of the rentier. If the rentier, though his/her right of exclu-
sion, disrupts the productive development of a profitable industry, then
there is a right of the “more productive” to lay claim to the right of exclu-
sion. [ . . . ] war is always on the wings of all rental claims. (2005: 172)

In other words, the apparently technical, non-violent appeal of soft power, not
to mention the social and environmental audit, remains contingent upon vio-
lence and exclusion, war and decrees of superfluity, even and especially where
what is secured—under the headings of an exit strategy, environmental citizen-
ship or the liquidation of toxic assets—are the boundaries inside which peace is

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said to reign and outside of which war continues to be unleashed. And yet, if
this century began, in the protests that went by the misnomer of anti-globaliza-
tion, with a call for the defaulting on (mostly, World Bank) debt, it bears some
further consideration that the financial crisis was precipitated by such, though
with little anticipation that it would, along with newer financial instruments of
derivatives and futures trading, be imported domestically into the US, and with
such effects. What is the encounter here if not the entanglement, and therefore
in a very real sense, the anachronism of any distinction between First and Third
Worlds? Very briefly put, and whatever else this signifies, the collapse of sub-
prime was a contingency that was neither widely expected nor, entirely, bud-
geted for, despite—or perhaps because of—the ostensibly auto-immunising
strategy of distributing risk and its management to households. Which is to
say: how people live, their inter-dependencies and its architectures, their forms
of arousal and attachment, exceeds its accounting and any norm, even as the
emerging lines of conflict are increasingly, it seems, around what might rouse
(or compel) them to a greater, virtuous productivity.

Notes

* With thanks to Melinda Cooper, Sarah Fearnley, the peculiar households of London and Sydney,
and the curious Business School of Queen Mary.

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