Economentality: How the Future Entered Government

Abstract

In 1947, an Egyptian entrepreneur named Adriano Daninos published a proposal in a scientific journal in Cairo to build a new dam across the Nile. Placed upstream of a smaller masonry barrage built fifty years earlier by the British at Aswan, the new rock-filled structure would be so large that the reservoir it created would stretch more than five hundred kilometers to the south. “Daninos is a man with a mission,” reported an official at the World Bank in Washington, where Daninos later went to pitch his plan. The official noted that the scheme concerned not just the building of the dam but “land reclamation and irrigation connected therewith, production of power, and construction of plants to use that power in mining, making fertilizers, other manufacturing, and possibly iron and steel.”1 Before publishing his plan, Daninos had visited the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US and similar integrated hydroelectric, river control, irrigation, and industrialization projects in the Limousin in southwest France. These gargantuan schemes for reorganizing forces of nature, systems of agriculture,