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THEORY ON DEMAND
and ‘policing’ itself. That is to say, the whole self-elaborating set of constraints and blockages, including assemblages of police, that neither prohibit nor prescribe but let things happen over and above any perceived notion of territory. Generally speaking, what police has to govern, its fundamental object, is all the forms of, let’s say, men’s coexistence with each other. I mean by this that police must ensure that men live, and live in large numbers; it must ensure that they have the wherewithal to live and so do not die in excessive numbers, but at the same time, it must also ensure that everything in their activity that may go beyond this pure and simple subsistence will in fact be produced, distributed, divided up, and put in circulation in such a way that the state really can draw its strength from it.86 Early information technologies, the accumulation of massive data, statistics, and list technologies are the hinges of the technological assemblage of police, and indeed these further correlations of power of the state – the redeployment of juridical-disciplinary mechanisms in the installation of milieus of circulation – are what allowed assemblages of police, like the Nazi Gestapo, to ensure that the forces and resources of the state – populations and their distributed elements – were put to good use in the protection and evolution of the Volk under Nazi governmentality. Now that we have seen how early information technologies, the accumulation of massive data, statistics, risk assessment, assemblages of police, and lists served Nazi governmentality, let us turn our attention to how juridical-disciplinary mechanisms underpinned by list technologies were redeployed in this modern art of governmentality, characterized by practices surrounding census and registration.
Juridical-legal and Disciplinary Mechanisms in Nazi Governmentality Precisely in the light of historical experience, censuses, with their seemingly objective data and usefulness for policymaking, constitute an assault on the social imagination. Humanity is in danger of being run over by a steamroller of data. The continuous counting and singling out of the weakest and those who are isolated by sociological constellations only serves to deepen inequality and break up social existence, rendering it into splinters and particles.87 Germany had a long history of census-taking prior to the decisive 1933 census including early counts in states like Prussia all the way back to 1816. It was the Imperial Office of Statistics that conducted the first general, all-German census in 1871, and subsequently censuses were held in 1875 and for every five years up until 1915. Like the ones held in the United States in this era, these censuses were little more than basic head counts. Such counts were conducted in Germany during and post-WWI, in 1916, 1917, and 1919, all specifically geared toward the maintenance of post-war society, focusing on basic questions of food rations and vocational 86 Foucault, ‘29 March 1978’, p. 326. 87 Aly, Roth, Black, and Oksiloff, The Nazi Census, p. 7.