Michael J. Shapiro

Eventocracy, or rule by event, describes the strategic manipulation of media events to gain political advantage. This essay examines the eventocratic rise of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi from 2002 to 2014. It describes and analyzes four key events in this time period that served to establish Modi’s popular base while cultivating an expanding political subjectivity around the ideologies of Hindu nationalism and economic globalization. Modi’s story demonstrates how contemporary subjectivation works through the mediation of such critical events. I conclude with the question of what this link between media events and subjectivation portends in times of rising fascisms around the world.

This dissertation offers a new theoretical paradigm for understanding the political subjectivity of children in Occidental society. Whereas much of the contemporary research on children by political scientists employs a liberal legalist framework that is organized around the rights of parents and children, this dissertation instead turns to the work of Michel Foucault. It does so for two reasons. First, it uses a Foucauldian lens to analyze the ways in which childhood is problematized within Western culture. While the notion of the child at first appears to have a stable, unchanging meaning, its meaning is instead fluid and defined by certain political processes that co-opt the child to pursue a strategic goal. Second, this dissertation employs Foucault’s work to assert that the politicization of children operates by managing children at the level of the population indicative of a regime of power that Foucault refers to as biopolitics. To this end, it explores several case studies that show, in different ways, how children are used within Western politics as a means of either preserving, or producing, a particular vision of society and its subjects. Such an analysis recasts the intersection of politics and childhood as being anchored in domination, rather than liberal notions of freedom and equality. However, this dissertation also examines moments wherein children resist attempts by biopolitical apparatuses to force them to submit to such desires for the population, revealing the possibility for overturning this oppressive order. It argues that such forms of resistance, rather than the remedies provided by liberal legalism, are the only ways that the oppression of children can ever be overcome.

This essay attempts to develop the idea of heterotopia in relation to museums in order to extend and adapt Shapiro’s concept of cinematic geopolitics. Shapiro’s concept refuses a singular temporality to cinema as well as to ideas of the nation. This sense of ‘other times’ corresponds for Shapiro with a sense of cinema as producing heterotopias – other spaces – of its own.1 These creative disjunctures of space and time can also be called heterochronias, as Foucault (1998: 182) named them.

The purpose of this exercise is to challenge the evolutionary time of the museum as it is now embodied in the political economy of ‘global cities’ and their networks. This time is especially insidious in its ‘cosmopolitan’ guise of proclaiming imperatives to secure economic/cultural futures. To begin to challenge this imperative sensibility, the essay looks at a case study: the Guggenheim Foundation’s proposal for a museum in Helsinki.