The Biopolitical Infrastructure of Comparison

In the face of the heightened uncertainty about the future that defines our era, indelibly associating it with the dual themes of crisis and transition (both transitional crisis and critical transition), we are often compelled to recognize that what is at stake is nothing less than an underlying rupture in the grounds of comparison. It is not simply that a process reductively known as globalization seems to have exposed the limits of national standards, making everybody everywhere painfully aware (once again) that this could be done like that. In that sense globalization is merely an expression of the essentially transitional and transferential character of modernity. Yet neither transfer nor transition would make sense without an implicit model of comparison. Today, however, even as the calls for transition from both the left and right reach deafening proportions, the problematic basis of comparison has received only limited attention. Meantime, the introduction of new technologies and new forms of social production continue to radically alter some of the conventional foundations, such as the unit of labor time, on which economic processes of valorization and socio-cultural conventions of evaluation have been conducted and justified throughout the modern era. As a result, many of today's political movements, on both the left and the right and not simply of the "populist" variety, share the attempt to re-establish the grounds of value on the basis of organizational forms, identities, and language inherited from the colonial imperial modernity. Perhaps, if we were to pay more attention to the grounds of comparison, other alternatives would not only appear more feasible but also eminently necessary.