I'm always surprised that people don't seem to get what's at stake in the arguments about inclusion/visibiity. It's not about Negri versus Foucault, although that is one way of marking out the debate, at least for those who like their politics marked by personnae and academic patronage. It's about, among other things, what 'autonomy' might mean, how it might be distinguished from the autonomy of bourgeois subjectivity (the capacity for responsible self-exploitation) and whether it might therefore be useful to continue talking about 'autonomy' and to what effect.

I'm in the process of writing up a review of Allaine Cerwonka's Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia, which deserves to be read more widely I think. There's lots to talk about.

But the more interesting part of the book is the discussion about Aboriginal subjectivity and governmentality, a discussion which relates to current debates about welfare, etc -- and a more general debate about whether at issue here is the operation of exclusion and invisiblity. Liberals (and those like Tute Bianche who pretend they're not liberals) have tended to talk about exclusion/invisibility as if misfortune springs from this, and therefore that the solution would be to include and make visible.

Cerwonka, otoh, insists that what happens here is the production of particular kinds of visibility and inclusion. The political/theoretical lineage here is, of course, Foucault.

A quote:"governmental policies for economic self-reliance in Aboriginal communities ironically require the production of an Aboriginal subjectivity in the mold of the bourgeois ideal [...] Colishaw argues: 'Recognising "the community" entailed the production of communities as suitable recipients of state funding. Certain kinds of subjects had to be produced who would take part in the procedures that the state demanded. The bourgeois ideal of autonomous, self-willed subjects took a particular form in this field of governing Aboriginality.' [...] self-determination programs are still grounded in a cosmology that priveliges history as progress, an epistemology that posits knowledge as technique, and an 'ontology premised on being apparent and visible'. [... What Colishaw] stops short of saying is that such forms of epistemology and ontology are the srtuctures that modern power takes [and] the means by which the modern state governs."

Cerwonka disagrees with Colishaw that government officials "ignore Aboriginal forms of meaning and communication." Rather, "Aboriginal groups are forced to make their knowledge 'apparent and visible' if they are to receive government resources. [...] this mandate to make meanings and knowledge visible to the government is an important process by which settler Australians have responded to the challenges that Aboriginal land rights pose to the territorialization of the Australian settler state."

As postscript: The same questions about the injunction to visibility and inclusion/exclusion are at work in the areas of 'refugee determination' and border policing. That's a debate I've written about elsewhere and for some time. But I'm always surprised that some people imagine that what's at stake in those debates is some factional dispute or abstract theoretical question. But I'm thinking that those who continue to imagine that the stakes in such an argument are either factional or theoretical has more to do with the fact that this is what is at stake for them.