Lustrum

[This is a guest post by Brett Neilson, from Life During Wartime.]

In ancient Rome the completion of the census every five years was marked by a ceremony known as the lustrum. Three animals (a bull, a sheep and a pig) were led around a group of assembled citizens by people with luck-bringing names such as Felix or Dives. After this, the animals were sacrificed to Mars. Overseen by one of the two censors, magistrates responsible not only for the census but also for the upkeep of public morality, the occasion marked a renewal of public affairs and the ritual purification of the state.

It is tempting to understand the modern census as a similar exercise of state purification. The rendering of flesh and blood as statistical construct, the casting of individuals as undifferentiated atoms distributed through abstract space and time, the reduction of complex lived relations to cycles, curves and pyramids: all suggest the cleansing of social and cultural messiness in the name of regularity and probability. But it would be a mistake to claim that quantitative knowledge, any more than its qualitative counterpart, necessarily serves as an instrument of domination. Whether one enumerates or whether one qualifies is surely not the issue, particularly when it comes to assessing the links between demography and democracy. At stake is rather how these processes combine to circumscribe the demos, at a time when this bordering is becoming ever more militarised and violent.

It is unlikely that after the administration of the fifteenth Australian census on 8 August 2006, the Australian Statistician will, like his Roman precedent, slaughter a bull, a sheep and a pig to celebrate the cleanliness of his results. There can be little doubt, however, that the results will be clean. This is because the Statistician, by virtue of the Census and Statistics Act of 1905, is vested with disciplinary powers that allow him to demand of any person present in Australia or its territories on census night to furnish the information requested. The penalty for refusing to do so is AUD110 per day.

Whether or not the Statistician will exercise this power is a concern for a group of civil disobedients calling themselves Con-Census 2006, who are planning not to fill out the census document both as a symbolic action against the Australian Government (for its role in Iraq and treatment of undocumented migrants) and to protest the fact that this year, for the first time, some census data will be kept, linked with names and addresses, and correlated with information stored in other databases.

While I share the concern of Con-Census 2006 about increased powers of surveillance, this is not an action in which I will be participating. This is partly because I find the politics of privacy so ambiguous. More importantly, it is because I think that in the current society of control, where mobile information is collected and correlated across any number of previously discrete databases, the attempt to evade or boycott one particular surveillance system can distract from understanding and devising strategies to resist the complex processes of concatenation at hand.

To begin to understand how the powers of the census articulate to other powers, it is first necessary to identify to whom they apply. The website of the Australian Bureau of Statistics provides this information about those who must fill out the form. Let me compare this with another list, this time from the Australian Electoral Commission, which specifies who can vote in the national elections.

There is a notable discrepancy between these lists, marked above all by the fact that those interned in detention centres are enumerated in the census but violently excluded from the polity and the citizenry. To put the matter briefly, the demos of demography is not the demos of democracy, or, in other words, the population is not coincident with the people. There is here a discrepancy between demography and democracy which introduces an internal caesura into the very notion of the demos, and it is on this boundary, I want to suggest, that the borders of the political are drawn.

Following Giorgio Agamben, who describes the camp as the site in which sovereign power reduces human existence to bare life, it is possible to adduce that this provides a limit case that makes apparent what it is that obligates any census participant to take part, including citizens and residents. All members of the so-called human species present on Australian territories (or not having undergone immigration procedures to leave them), with the exception of foreign diplomats and their families, are required to participate in the census by virtue of their mere biological existences. What is enumerated in the census is thus the apolitical body of the population as opposed to the political body of the people, which is, in this case and in accordance with the tenets of democracy, imbued with the capacity to decide.

As Foucault writes in ‘Security, Territory, Population,’ the concept of the population does not designate ‘a collection of subjects of right’ but ‘a mass of elements which, on the one hand, belongs to the general administration of living beings (population then depended on the “human species” …) and, on the other hand, may provide for concerted interventions.’ Yet, insofar as the discovery of the population in the 18th-century provided, for Foucault, the pivot on which turned the transition from rule based on sovereign authority to a ‘governmentalised’ rule which decentres the state under liberalism, his analysis misses the point I want to make, which concerns precisely the relation of the demos of demography to that political body that democracy designates as sovereign: the people.

The non-coincidence of population and people might be understood in terms of the ways in which the suffix –graphy modifies the demos as opposed to the suffix -cracy. Why is it that when we hear terms like geo-cracy or ethno-cracy (as opposed to geography or ethnography), we are rightly suspicious? But when we hear the term democracy, we are accustomed to take it as a universal sign of political good and openness? As Mario Tronti comments, democracy is no longer understood as the best of a bad bunch of political systems but as the sole horizon of politics. This is despite the fact that the actually-existing conditions of democracy leave something wanting—what is repeatedly labelled the ‘democratic deficit’ as if the solution to democracy’s problems is that we need more of it.

According to Tronti, democracy is now, as it has always been, what the doctrine says it is: the kratos of the demos. It posits an identity between sovereign and people, both of which are, however diversified or diffused, fundamentally univocal notions, undivided and indivisible. In this sense, democracy is its own limit. It is what it is. And it is not something else, the ‘counting of the uncounted’ or ‘qualification of the unqualified,’ as Ranciere would have it. These may be laudable ideals. But they are not democracy in any sense in which it has actually existed – that is, the auto-representative and mystical union of people and sovereign.

Ranciere’s paradoxical formulations seem rather to describe the potentialities of demography as opposed to democracy, at least insofar as demography may include those differences excluded by democracy’s exceptions. If, as Ida Dominjanni writes, ‘difference is not an element that can be included expansively in democracy but rather its explosive and unhinging element,’ it may be the case to heed the ­–graphy in demography. This is not to embrace the powers of the census. It is, however, to heed a differentiating power that works at cross-purposes to the univocity of the demos, carrying the potential to break the democratic bordering of the political. Such a demography would have to be a demography without the demos.