Cathy
In the Introduction the authors give a call to action for the examination in the sites of everyday practices and representations that reproduce and reinforce the State’s power. What would be the logical conclusion of such a project? Or asked differently, what might the next step entail?
Nathalie
What other everyday practices bring to light how the state is recognized and reproduced? Also, what everyday practices can be looked at to bring to light how the state disolves sometimes ?
Dannah
"The anthropological project attempts to understand the conditions in which the state successfully represents itself as coherent and singular" (10). This reminds me of one of the questions that we've been asking for a while now, but haven't fully answered: how does the state get people to imagine it as a coherent whole, especially when those people are cut off (for whatever reason) from the print media that Anderson posits as instrumental to state formation?
Alison
Are NGOs, in a sense, a ‘nation?’
Weber
Cathy
Do certain failing “rational bureaucracies” such as our current Social Security and Welfare systems signal anything about state of the nation?
Alison
Weber describes bureaucracy as a machine and workers as cogs in that machine, diligently following instruction. Each person had a fixed role (including those higher in position) and carried out their specific duties and the “concentration of the power” was “in a single pair of hands” (64). Is this theory still relevant to a modern conceptualization of bureaucracy? How would labor unions have factored into Weber’s conceptualization of bureaucracy?
Lucas
Ultimately, who exercises power in the nation-state?
Gramsci
Lauren
Gramsci discusses the individuals of the state including bureaucrats, monarchs, economists, the bourgeoisie in concrete terms of their roles, positions, and behaviors. However, his discussion of the state as policeman, of the surveillance power of the state, remains comparatively abstract. What is the experience of the individual contract to enforce the repressive power of the state?
Grace
Gramsci proposes that only a social group that poses the end of the state and its own end in the process can create a truly ethical state which aims to end internal divisions. Can a ruling class exist without being hegemonic?
Nathalie
If civil society leads a revolution that is "unsuccesful" is it still considered a revolution according to Gramsci? (Keeping in mind what is happening in Egypt right now)
Dannah
Isn't "interventionist State" (p. 80) a redundancy? Also, I'm not quite sure what he means by "civil society." Is it something separate from the State, an extension of the State, a check on the authority of the State?
Alison
Is it useful to think of civil society as existing within the political structure? How relevant or useful is the concept of civil society in general?
Josh
Why does Gramsci downplay the coercive nature of social facts and place coercion in the political domain?
Althusser
Lauren
Are either the repressive forces of the state or the ideological apparatuses of the state more powerful in controlling state populations in their roles in the system of production? Or is the point that the two systems work together to continually mask the influence of the other, thus making the study of the state so elusive in the first place?
Cathy
Can Althusser’s musing on ideology help use understand Anderson’s conception of imagined communities?
Nathalie
Ideology for Althusser seems to consist of imaginary relations through which the ruling class can rule. If we become goverened by the ideology of the ruling class unkowingly, how can we compare that to what Benedict says about the nation being imagined, and where does ideology come into the equation for Benedict then?
Grace
Abrams paints the image of the state-idea as a “triumph of concealment,” as the mask through which we are prevented from seeing things as they are: the legitimation of the illegitimate. How does this intersect with our previous discussion of imagination as a ideological mechanism?
Dannah
Abrams makes the point that, by studying the state (which is more or less a fiction), we are to an extent reifying it. Fair enough. But in anthropology, it's pretty much a truism that all of the things we study are social constructs- we study them because we want to find out what's "in it" (in terms of meaningfulness, usually) for the people who construct them. So in that sense, why should the "state" be analyzed any differently from all the other social constructs that anthropology studies?
Josh
What is the distinction Althusser makes between "actions" and "practices"?
Foucault
Cathy
Foucault locates a shift from family as the locus of government’s object to population, wherein the “family becomes an instrument rather than a model” (140) How does “age of mechanical reproduction” foster and encourage this shift?
Grace
How is Foucault’s idea that the existence and survival of the state relies on the tactics of governmentality different or similar to Althusser’s concept of far-reaching Ideological State Apparatuses as reinforcing the idea of the state?
Dannah
More than any of the other authors we've read so far, Foucault makes the link between the family and the state, arguing that with the emergence of large state populations, the family has become "the privileged instrument for the government of the population and not the chimerical model of good government" (140). How does this concept of the family as an instrument of state governmentality disrupt the idea of the family as a "naturally" occurring social unit? How does this shed light on the ways in which the state is concerned with regulating family life?
Abrams
Lauren
Abrams writes that, “The state is the unified symbol of an actual disunity (124).” This calls to my mind some of the things we discussed with the Gupta and Ferguson article around the reality of difference, discontinuity, and the confusion of borders. As difference seems to assert itself as a more commonplace anthropological reality, is it arguable that the seeming recession of the state apparatus and the porous reality of national borders is the deconstruction of Abrams’ unified symbol, and what are the possible implications of this?
Cathy
In regards to the State, Abrams proclaims “It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is” (125). In what way is he suggesting that this concealment makes illusionary the state itself?
Nathalie
If the state is an illusion, a "mask" that conceals power relationships, what happens to the nation-state? That is, if we look at the state idea then how can we also look at the nation idea? Are there parallels between how the two manifest themselves?
Alison
Abrams proposes that the state is non-existent and refers to is as a “mask” throughout this chapter. How can one follow through on his proposition to study an idea without believing it exists (124)? Masks themselves can ceremonially transform perceptions of reality in both the mind of the observer and wearer. The physical mask is an actual object. As a metaphor for the state, how does this show it is an illusion? Does it work?
Josh
Abrams writes "The state is the unified symbol of an actual disunity" (124). But, as Althusser pointed out, aren't the fragmented apparatuses unified by ideology, the state-system unified by the state-idea?
Lucas
If the state is always concealing itself because it is a system of legitimating the illegitimate, why it prevails as a model?
Rose
Lauren
On page 157 Rose discusses the de-governmentalization of the state and the de-statization of the government, thus the increased responsibility on the self-governing potential of the individual. How does this conception of individualization map onto Althusser’s discussion of ideological state apparatuses? How do ISAs compare or contrast to the agencies of social welfare and “advanced” liberalism described by Rose?
Grace
Freedom, projected as a natural state that we must protect and nurture, turns out to be constructed through regulation and political strategy. How do ideas of the state as obstacle to freedom (e.g. freedom of the market, freedom to bear arms,etc.) contrast with ideas of freedom as something to be protected through further legislative restriction (e.g. gay marriage, voters rights, etc.)?
Nathalie
How can "practices of freedom" can be looked at if we assume that these practices are imagined?
Josh
Is there any form of resistance that does not reinforce the dominant position of that which is being resisted?
Mary
I wonder to what extent we can create a unified vision of the state from these readings? Should we?
Mary
In several of the readings, I have had trouble accepting the idea that “economy” is a new concept, or a concept divorced from the state. I keep thinking about the United States: in the Constitution, one of the enumerated rights of the federal government is the right to regulate commerce (via the “Commerce Clause,” allowing the federal government to regulate commerce between the several states, foreign nations, and the Indian tribes). Commerce was the term used, but, as least in legal historical scholarship and theory, it has been considered largely equivalent to what we call the “economy” today, and it was immediately placed in the domain of the state. (This is a simplistic analysis, I know, but for the purposes of this question). Am I not understanding the ways in which economy is used (when used in a monetary context) in this literature?
Mitchell
Grace
Mitchell approaches the subject of the state as agent or actor, and writes of this perception as an effect of the apparent "separateness" of the state from society and economy. He seeks instead to explain how this vision of state as "ghost in the machine" has become possible. Do his methods and approach help solve the problem of state as conspirator as discussed in the last class (particularly with regard to Abrams)?
Nathalie
What are examples of state effects? They also seem to be there but not there.
Dannah
Mitchell is intent on dismantling the false separations between society, economy, and state in his attempt to investigate how the "effect" of the state is created and maintained. However, if we dismantle the distinction between society, economy, and state, are we to see everything as the state, a la 1984? I'm not sure whether this would be a helpful analytic move.
Josh
If state and economy should be conflated, then why do they produce different concretizations from the "common process of abstraction" i.e. exchange-value and state? How might these be conflated, and are there more concretizations to join them?
Alison
How are local power mechanisms related to larger structual forms?
Cathy
Mitchell writes “we must nevertheless take seriously the distinction between state and society or state and economy” (184) can such a distinction be made and is locating a distinction useful, if so how?
Lolan
Mitchell writes that state practice is incoherent and yet argues that the state system object of analysis “ refers to the state as a system of institutionalized practice. If the system is indeed one of institutionalized practice, how is it incoherent?
Brown
Lauren
On page 201 Brown cites Kathy Ferguson’s discussion of masculinism in bureaucratic power as partially a product of bureaucratic discourse bearing “…male values of abstract rationality, formal proceduralism, rights orientation, and hierarchy, while opposing or colonizing socially female values of substantive rationality, need-based decision making, relationality, and responsibility.” In most of the theoretical texts we’ve examined about the apparatus of the state, have not the directives of discourse focused on principally these male values? Is the struggle to understand and analyze the state in and of itself a male oriented concept? I am reminded of the quote from Tuesday that we cannot break our chains using the master’s tools…to take Brown’s analysis from the masculine inherent in the state to strategies for subverting that hidden reality, along what avenues might a female (and not necessarily “feminist”) analysis of the state apparatus proceed?
Grace
Brown describes the weakening state as simultaneously strengthening its control over women's lives in ways previously done by men. How is this shift to reliance on the state for protection and support in spite of the inability to survive on state support alone able to reproduce itself?
Nathalie
Brown shows how "masculinist" power reproduces itself, but she gives the impression that it is static. How can use her model keeping in mind that patriarchies are also shifting and reconstituted?
Dannah
One of the problems that Brown points to is that the family has historically been considered a separate domain from civil society (leading to many restrictions on women's civil rights). Many feminists have worked to overcome this separation and get people to recognize that "the personal is political"; however, has this "backfired" in any way by subjecting women to increased state control? I'm thinking particularly of low-income head-of-household women who are forced to rely on and interact with the state for a variety of resources. Also, I'd be curious to know how Brown would comment on women who work in government, especially Sarah Palin types who seem invested on reinforcing gendered stereotypes even as their highly visible presence within government seems to (somewhat?) contradict those stereotypes and assumptions.
Alison
How would a "female" state look?
Josh
Why does Brown suggest accepting the masculinist state power at the end of her article (in the form of "deeply comprehending in order to strategically outmaneuver") after arguing that it is pervasively oppressive and offers no opportunity for legitimately eliminating this oppression?
Gupta
Lauren
On page 299 Gupta discusses the problem with “the reification inherent in unitary descriptions of ‘the state,’” explaining that in daily interactions with informants the “decentralized” and “disaggregated” reality of the experience of the state becomes clear. In terms of critically comprehending the worldview of our informants, to what point must we wonder if they are also subject to the conflation of the state as a unified entity? Yes, they engage with it in daily interactions that are revealing for the reasons Gupta explains, but anthropologist and theorists do as well, yet find themselves trapped in a dialogue of struggling to identify the ubiquitous nature of the state. We may believe that our informants provide insight into concrete state functioning, but how would we or could we know if those experiences were subject to a similarly, if possibly unconscious, subjugation to the state as elusively omniscient apparatus?
Grace
Since state-like power in a neoliberal regime emanates from various places (local, regional, national, supra-national), organizations, centers and on many levels, what do we mean when we talk about a unified state? To echo Gupta, what are the conditions under which a state acts like a state?
Dannah
Regarding Gupta's comment that "at the local level it becomes difficult to experience the state as an ontically coherent entity" but it is "through the practices of such local institutions that a translocal institution such as the state comes to be imagined" (220). I'm wondering whether the people described in his study actually do imagine the state as a single translocal entity or not. For instance, one of his informants (Ram Singh) made a distinction between "the government" (good, benevolent) and local administration (corrupt). Is the state really being imagined as a unitary thing here?
Josh
Gupta urges the importance of public culture in creating a narrative to translocalize lived experiences and suggests that a "war of position" has at statke "nothing less than a transformation in the manner in which the state comes to be constructed" (231). How might we oppose or combine this with Mitchell's model in which the state emerges more than is constructed?
Mary
I wonder how we can tie or parallel this sort of state planning (state mapping or people mapping) with the ideas of physical or geographic mapping discussed in Anderson or Gupta/Ferguson?
Cathy
What role might the state have in facilitating this notion, in this instance with the people of Alipur, that the state is accountable for the people? Or asked differently where might we locate the genesis of such a notion, can we locate it outside of representational mediums such as the newspaper?
Scott
Nathalie
What happens if we bring agency and resistance into the equation? Would Scott's argument still hold, or would it be altered in some way?
Alison
How are the various means of rendering a society "legible" enacted on a global scale and by whom? Societies must be delineated in order for the legibility and planning he outlines to take place. What are some methods that this might be done on a transnational scale and by whom? To what end?
Cathy
Scott writes about the state’s desire to grid cities so that they become easy to patrol and for outsiders to move around, he also uses this concept of mapping when discussing the distribution of surnames similarly so that people to become easily locatable and thus easier to patrol. How does such strategic mapping onto special entities as well as marking one’s name shift how inhabits move in a literal and figurative sense through their milieu?
Ferguson
Lauren
Does Ferguson’s discussion of “intentionality” on page 283, in both “planning” and “conspiratorial” manners, help to ameliorate our pervading sense of an evil, conspiratorial state that we discussed last session? If, as Fergusion suggests, many of the successes and failures of interventions and development projects are more or less independent of the intentions of those constructing them, what power would the theoretically evil and conspiratorial state necessarily have to carry out its agenda given the difficult reality of implanting any degree of policy in a concrete daily reality?
Mary
I wonder how the aid agencies and NGOs would respond to this article? How would they respond to the claims that their secondary effects are largely beneficial to the state? I know that many of the organizations pride themselves on being non-national and working for the people, and not the state. I wonder how this piece would change the entire way aid organizations view or characterize themselves?
Cathy
Ferguson offers up the idea that development projects, even one’s that fail become a gateway to “reinforcing and expanding the exercise of bureaucratic state power” (273) how, or by what mechanism are development projects able to successfully mask their true nature?
Mbembe
Nathalie
How can we use the concept of "banality of power" in other places?
Alison
Mbembe describes tyranny as intimate and says that "people are always being trapped in a net of rituals that reaffirm tyranny" (391). What might he say about various celebrations of Carneval in which master and slave scenes are jubilantly reenacted, accompanied by music, dance, and costume?
Cathy
Mbembe offers a bleak outlook of postcolonial times, as the masses internalize the state’s power. What can we make of the new vulgarity of the people that he puts forth?
