Re-fragmenting the 'political': Globalization, governmentality and Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor

Abstract

Work drawing upon Michel Foucault's analyses of governmental rationalities has extended understandings of the 'political'. The geography of this domain, however, has remained largely intact in the governmentality literature. In this paper, we contribute to work which unsettles conceptions of national scale society as a political unity across and within which government is territorialized. We examine Cyberjaya, an 'intelligent city' in Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor, as part of a distinct governmental zone oriented to the nurturing of 'intelligent' subjects for a globally-oriented information economy. What the anthropologist Aihwa Ong terms the 'cybercorridor' zone is one of a series of differentiated sites and spaces of government which reconfigure existing communal and spatial division in postcolonial Malaysia. As such, while exemplifying non-national territorializations of government, the Malaysian case also questions the extent to which these are novel to an era of globalization. Beyond the 'advanced liberal' contexts which have been the main focus of the governmentality literature - and from where the 'death of the social' has been diagnosed - governmental fragmentation often precedes the rise of languages and lenses of globalization. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.