Butler's constrained account of law is linked to her general avoidance of the economy and the ways the nonstate bureaucracies and arrangements crucial to governmentality are private sector, corporate, financial, and market enterprises. She abstracts the actions of the Bush administration from the legal and economic settings that enable them. Paul A Passavant attends to these settings, explicating changes in governance from the Keynesian welfare state to the contemporarypost-Fordist state.9 He writes: "Consumer capitalism has made extensive and intensive systems of surveillance, which, through a process of articulation, have vastly extended state surveillance powers. We are also governed by the state through a logic of consumerism whereby the state zones subjects as security risks for diferential treatment based on one's consumer profile compiled from commercial data bases. And we are governed by a homeland security regime that is becoming increasingly resistant to change as more and more elements become financially invested in this state's projects and projections:' 10 Pas savant situates the policies of so-called preventative detention within criminology's "zero tolerance" approach to crime, imprisonment, . nd security. He emphasizes the legal precedents for the U?A Patriot Act, particularly the Anti-Terrorism and Efective Death Penalty Act of 1996. And he draws out the economic dimensions of the current "strong neoliberal state;' the way that the combination of consumerism and communicative capitalism produces new opportunities for extensions of state power via the emergence of massive commercial databases, the securitization of places of consumption, and the commodifcation of security.
Like Passavant, Saskia Sassen emphasizes the fundamental importance of the global capitalist economy in understanding changes to the institutions and practices of sovereignty. She theorizes sovereignty as decentered, its elements "unbundled" from earlier constellations, displaced from national to international territories and reconstituted for the benefit of financial capital.11 Both scholars thus alert us to the emergence of a new legal regime that strengthens the power and reach of the state by securing and protecting corporate, financial, and market interests. For example, contracting for services, outsourcing, and competitive bidding are practices through which public agencies make use of private enterprises legally to extend their reach and sidestep the regulations and oversight that typically govern public projects. To describe these developments in terms of the resurgence of sovereignty, as Butler does, condenses the larger economic setting into singular loci of decisions, displacing attention from the state's imbrications in the globalized neoliberalism of communicative capitalism. Law is not suspended. Laws are introduced, changed, and applied in ways that alter and extend state power in some directions (surveillance, detention, military force) rather than others (education, health, social welfare) .
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