Wal-Mart: The panopticon of time (original) (raw)

At a moment when the future of global capitalism seems altogether uncertain, we want to take another look at Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation. Despite its importance to the American and global economy, surprisingly little critical scholarship has emerged on the “Beast from Bentonville.” In this working-paper we suggest that we can understand Wal-Mart as both a unique instance as well as a telling example of tendencies within the process of planetary social transformation that has come to be known as globalization. In particular, Wal-Mart strives to become what we will call a “panopticon of time”: a particularly acute and emblematic crystallization of social, economic and technological forces which express a new constellation of power under globalizing capitalism. Wal- Mart represents among the most advanced consolidations of corporate, financial, technological and managerial technologies which employees afford it unprecedented control over consumers, employees, sub-contractors, communities and even nations, as well as unprecedented profit. We argue its power stems in part from its ability to hinge various modes of power: the local and the global, spectacle and surveillance, the private and the public, the everyday and the exceptional. And it is driven as much by the need to intervene in the production of subjects and the shaping of networks as the need to generate profit; indeed, these two imperatives have become inseparable. Wal-Mart is a symptom and an agent of the depotentiation of time under corporate globalization, the confinement or incarceration of temporality within the neoliberal webs of technology, commerce and management. We begin by reviewing the case of Wal-Mart’s financial, managerial and logistic power. Next, we take up extant criticisms of Wal-Mart which we argue tend to fail to fully apprehend and sufficiently contend the qualitatively new form of global power the firm represents. In order to better chart this new power, we then turn to some less commented-on aspects of the dispositif or assemblage of historically specific power relations Wal-Mart represents including its informatics empire, its network ontology, and its mobilization of finance, health, spectacle and security to become a pivotal intervention in both global flows and everyday life. It is for this reason that, finally, we advance an argument that Wal-Mart is a panopticon of time which brings together multiple technologies of power to define a new architecture of control over temporality, a complex machine whose purpose is to imprison human potential in multiple overlapping ways.