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Not only had Thailand’s current-account deficit risen to an alarming 8 pct of GDP”, Eichengreen observes, “but its export performance was disappointing” (ibid). A key problem for Thailand was, Eichengreen argues, its “pegging the baht to a basket with a heavy weight on the US dollar” (ibid). “While the currency-pegging was not limited to Thailand”, he continues, “only there did the leading investment analysts expect a sustained slowdown in exports”: Reflecting these problems, Thai equity prices trended downward and the real estate bubble burst.

This endeavour is particularly important, Gilles Deleuze noted, because the constitution of problems determines what solutions are available. 4 Canguilheim and Foucault both stressed that the role of their studies was “not to legislate the sciences but to hold open the constant possibility of new problematizations” (Osborne 2003:12). Thus, Foucault’s analysis of liberalism was not “a kind of sociology” but an “effort to investigate and make problematic—against the very obviousness of liberalism—the novelty and contingency of liberalism as a peculiar technology of freedom and problematic of government”, thereby showing that there was “a positive governmental logic to that political rationality we call liberalism” (Osborne 2003:13).

Such analysis inevitably identifies presumptions otherwise not explicated—and this is indeed a major objective in and of itself. In pursuing this goal of problematization, I am not committed to any political position, ideology or the like. With regard to the question of ‘political classification’, I share Foucault’s attitude: I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares of the political checkerboard, one after another, and sometimes simultaneously: as an anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, and so forth … None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something.