Power has changed shape again.
It used to govern real life — life as given, in its present and its past, the whole thing. Now it's after something else: the probable futures of the human species.
Multi-planetary trajectories, generated worlds, anthropic reasoning, probabilized language, counterfactual catastrophes (what if...) — these are the new apparatuses. They need to be named. This is what the new power invests in, to redefine what it means to be human and wrap us in its fresh set of determinations.
Foucault sketched three big forms of power:
- Sovereignty forbids, decides, punishes.
- Discipline shapes bodies — watches them, corrects them.
- Biopower goes after populations: birth rates, mortality, health, security, circulation.
Cosmopower governs the probable futures of the human species. It sets up a brand new regime of truth — one that makes itself possible while also reinforcing itself: essentially, the discourse targets the odds of future human expansion, and the speed of that expansion has become the main variable cosmopolitics is trying to move. These discourses already surround us. They're quietly redrawing the conditions under which we can constitute ourselves as subjects and figure out how to live in the world.
Until pretty recently, power ran through institutions — institutions that produced discourse, claimed scientific method, and on that basis earned their legitimacy to organize how men and women live together. That is to say: to make politics.
Cosmopower doesn't work like that anymore. Truth can't govern the probable. It can't govern generated worlds. Institutions can't scale infinitely, and scientific method — with its anchor in what's real — has no grip over multi-reality, counterfactual worlds, probabilized language.
Power used to be somewhere. Right there: the sovereign on his throne, the institution in its building, science in its books — and undeniable truth was being written into the grand arc of History.
You could slip out of it. Play dumb, ask mathematicians to define the very first concept they posit, make meaning shimmer through combinations of language nobody had tried before.
But cosmopower isn't localized anymore. It's everywhere. It doesn't surveil the subject — it has annexed it. Down to the word associations each of us comes up with, whose relevance cosmopower, by weighting their probability, has already claimed as its own.