term paper and ethics clarification

Dear All,

I have uploaded the term paper on the drive as doc and pdf both. It would be great if we could spare a few minutes to discuss the ethics in maintaining anonymity of sources. The paper is based on on-going fieldwork and I have some doubts over how I have represented certain people / organisations (the scored through bits in the paper).

If not tomorrow, any other convenient time to discuss this is also ok.

Thanks
Krupa

Session 12: State Violence and Biopower

In order to understand state violence and biopower, the position of a sovereign state and how it marks a niche for itself to justify its actions and reinforce its presence for the same is the theme.

The Greeks segregated life into - Bios which is a form of living proper to an individual or group and Zoe a simple fact of living. Simple life is excluded from the polis and is confined only to home, oikos.

In the modern era, as Foucault has defined how natural life began to be included in the calculations of the state power and politics as biopolitics (Agamben, 1995).  Foucault’s study looked at the study of the political techniques and the technologies of the self. Agamben’s Homo Sacer states that the two analyses – juridico institutional and biopolitical models of power cannot be separated because the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original nucleus of sovereign power. With the dissolution of the state structures occurring, the problem of the originary structure and limits of the form of the state needs to be studied in a new light.  The primary actor of his book is bare life and whose essential function in the modern politics is explored. Modern democracy is based on the liberation from bare life and convert the bare life into a way of life (bios of zoe). But Western politics has failed to remove this diversion between bios and zoe.

Agamben (Agamben, 1995) looked at sacratio as an autonomous figure and use it to assess the presence of a political structure prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, hence comparing sovereignty and homo sacer (bare life). The ambivalence of the sacred was the backdrop used to interpret sovereignty until the first decades of the twentieth century. The structural analogy between sovereign exception and sacratio shows that the sovereign and the homo sacer have the same structure and are correlated. Sovereign is defined as he who decides on the state of exception and as long as state is strongly embedded in all communal life the most extreme sphere cannot come into light. And with respect to homo sacer a person is excluded from human as well as divine. The paradox of sovereignty is defined as being both inside and outside the juridical structure at the same time. The sovereign has monopoly over the final decision and this fact reveals the strength of state authority. Nugent states Corrigan and Sayer from “The Great Arch: English state formation as a Cultural Revolution” about the iterative productions of the state in order to create for a vantage point which is claimed to be uninfluenced. The resurgence of APRA in Peru after the government had declared them as dead no longer put the state at the vantage point where it supposed itself to be (Nugent, 2010).

The law is hollow without the inclusive exclusion of the exception. The usage of brutal repression against the people who went against the state and the justification using the grounds of disturbance to the functioning of the government functions. State activities in a covert or overt ways push for certain activities while marginalizing certain others (Nugent, 2010). The survivors of the Amparo massacre were termed as the accused which showed the power of the state.  Exception and example are the two modes by which a set tries to found and maintain its coherence. If exception is the structure of sovereignty then sovereignty is the originary structure where law refers to life and includes in itself by suspending it.

Another study which looks at an altered way to look at state power and violence is by Nugent (Nugent, 2010). Here APRA which was a political organization functioning underground due to their ban by the state in Peru is said to have the properties for “stateness”. This affected the way the state is looked at  and the examination of state formation by examining state crisis (here power/knowledge and performance/representation) (Nugent, 2010). The importance of the invisible in state formation and its relation with the visible is necessary to understand the counter-state. The interpretation of the conflicts in Venezuela led to the change in the way democracy was looked at. The discourse of Democracy in Venezuela is driven from memories of autocratic rule and economic stagnation. The threats to this discourse are linked to the threats to national sovereignty. (Coronil & Skurski, 1991)

The performance/representation crisis in Peru put strict limits on people and also over media to establish a public sphere which would be supportive of the military regime. This was extended to include signed and notarized oaths and open letters in support of General Odria (The usage of documents as a way to confirm support to the state, showing the relationship between the state and the citizen). This kind of trials at representation was also created in Venezuela when the government tried to create a picture of how liberalization was the way forward for modernity. The position of the president played a dual role as a defender of democracy and as someone who was feared by the public. (Coronil & Skurski, 1991)

The civilizing process supported by the free market ideas where the civilized where the ones who supported free market and the barbarians who fought for state protection (Coronil & Skurski, 1991). Barbarism was used as a justification for the deployment of massive state violence as the masses were deemed irrational and the government was the one who reasoned. This also created marginalization which increased the chances of such people being attacked (Inclusive exception).  State with the power to plot and create realities through performance and the tweaking of powers.

Session 13: Affective state and body talk

The readings for this session deal with state as it is thought of in biological and sexual terms that render the abstract state into a physical reality easier to connect with. Thinking about state in bodily terms offers us a theoretical allowance to ascribe desires, feelings and other biological states to the otherwise lifeless political machinery. Readings take us away from the world of dry political theory to the world of feelings, desires and passions which state evokes in its everyday social life and in its representation by the media. 

Inspired by the work of Marx and later Marxist scholars such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Michael Taussig is of the opinion that state fetishism is not as much talked about as commodity fetishism though state is reified similarly. Alluding to A.R. Brown’s anarchical thoughts on the nonexistence and fictional quality of state, he puts forth the question of the ‘reality of the political power’ of the fiction of the state in the form of state fetishism. He counterposes Philip Abrams critical insights to Brown’s fictionalization stating that state is not the reality that stands behind the fiction, but it is the mask or façade that blocks our vision to comprehend the reality of the political practice and the exercise of power. He enquires into the processes by which state becomes associated with the repressive powers and is symbolically recognized by the people over whom it exercises power. True to the poststructuralist treatment of reality and representation, state is seen as a representation that occludes the reality behind it, rather than being the reality that hides itself behind the mask. He uses the analogy of nervous system to describe the state phenomenon. Like the nervous system, the functioning of which we are capable of conceiving as an idea but not in its tangible materiality, the idea of the state must be believed but its existence as an abstract formal object disputed. In its magic like quality, state resembles God. State for him is like impure sacred (very much like black magic forces) which though evokes horror commands respect.

Taussig reiterates the contradictory nature of the idea of the state which exercises monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and is at the same time an ‘embodiment of reason’ in its everyday functioning through bureaucracy (this insight is not new following our discussions on Weber and others throughout this seminar). He holds that a keen understanding of the cultural practice of statecraft is required to make sense of how these two contradictory forces combine together. Further he adds it is essential to look at the confluence of violence and reason to unmask the violence that always hides behind the reason and reduces reason to just a mask, a power-effect making the modern state legitimized by rational and legal authority a fetish that commands obedience while threatening to wield violence at any moment. Throughout the discussion, he uses very powerful sexual metaphors to unravel the mystic, horrific nature of state fetishism. For instance, speaking of violence-reason combine, he uses the phrase “institutional penetration of reason by violence”.  

Elaborating on the idea of maleficium (an evil magical force), he refers to various anthropological and sociological insights (mainly Durkheim) on magic and mystery and traces a genealogy of totem and its working to illuminate on the fetishistic quality of state. He likens the idea of state to the idea of God that often is a proxy for the superseding authority of the society (particularly Durkheim’s description on the constitution and working of sacred within a society) and engages with the theories of representation and signification to tell us how fetish is a signifier that “depends upon signification, yet erases it” resulting in the ‘worship of the objectness’ itself. State likewise is a totem – an empty signifier bereft of signification beyond its symbolic existence, an effect produced by a hollow core. His own work on sorcery, magical objects helps him to understand the mysterious authority of the state as a force that elicits both reverence and trepidation, like any sacred object. He alludes to literary works of Jean Genet and Sartre to elaborate on the mystical, the saintly and the criminal side of the state. In this postmodern treatment of state – representation becomes more important than the represented, and in the last analysis one should realize the nonexistence of the represented. Taussig also argues that social scientists of all kinds have consistently ignored this fetishistic quality of state and often their epistemological endeavours are already subsumed and afflicted by the same kind of state fetishism. He urges all scholars to overcome the thralldom of the state and enquire its fetishistic influence.  

Aretxaga’s article on strip search of women prisoners in an Irish prison also engages partly with the magical authority that is attributed to the state which can be examined only during excesses when the authority exercised cannot be justified by those who wield power in the name of the state. The prison location where the bodies are subject to total state control seems like an ideal location to understand the ultimate weapon of the state – violence. She builds her arguments on Abrams (reification of state), Taussig and Foucault. She examines state in the excesses it can’t reason out much along the lines of Taussig’s discussion of violence and reason. The significance of her analysis is in bringing the gender factor to the dynamics of power relations exercised in the name of the state. Extending Foucault’s observations on technologies of discipline that act on the bodies of subjects, she underlines the gender difference when the same kind of discipline is exercised over female subjects. Making the power of the state symbolic of male power, the intimate power dynamics as seen through strip searches becomes a performance of violence tantamount to rape on its female subjects. The way power operates on female subjects, she argues is fundamentally different from the way it does on male subjects, thus visibilising the sexual selves of the female prisoners. Violence against the integrity of personhood in the private space of each of their prison cells a realization of sexual fantasy. Aretxaga in recounting the narratives of women prisoners and reporting the after effects of the strip search on prisoners repeatedly emphasizes the unjustified arbitrariness of state power and the fear it induces among the victims of strip search. She uses Deleuzian theoretical framework and discusses technologies of control, fascination with them, ‘fantasies animating them’ and ‘fictions that legitimize them’. She shows how state violence is gendered and sexualized.

Weiss’ article on Israeli nation and the discursive construction of nation, its semiotic significance when associated with the concept of body discusses the process of gendering the political body of the state. It particularly focuses on the role of media in the formation of public opinion especially with regard to terrorism against Israeli state. It discusses the active part played by media in the setting the political agenda of the state. Doing a content analysis of media content of the coverage of terrorist attack on Israeli state it shows how it takes the form of a certain kind of ‘bodyTalk’ and explains the processes through which nations are inscribed onto bodies.  

For class on April 22

Dear all,

Please see the updated syllabus on the Drive folder.

Carol

Session 10- Globalisation, transnationalism and the state

These papers mainly propose that a new way of studying and analysing the state is needed in the contemporary globalised and neoliberal world where state functioning is not only influenced by atmosphere within the nation but also by translational institutions. In attempting to do so, the papers highlight the challenges of such an analysis and how the earlier theories on state need to be rethought to encompass these transnational dynamics at work today.

Ferguson (2005) provides the critique to James Scott's analysis of state in his book ‘Seeing like a State’ by providing the case from recent capital investment in Africa mainly for resource extraction. In this particular paper, Ferguson is contesting Scott’s claim that the dynamics of standardisation, homogenization and grid making which were integral to state functioning and making of the state can be applied equally well to the contemporary world of globalisation with downsized states. However, Ferguson argues that instead of homogenising and universalising, global corporations have created secured enclaves in places across the globe, which are economically viable with little or no economic benefit to the wider society. Thus, in Angola one can see that the benefits of oil exports (which run into billions of dollars) hardly reaches the wider population of the country. Thus such globalisation has created these pockets of well-functioning and well equipped enclaves without creating any need to homogenise them on the national grid. The decapacitatation and hollowing out African government due to the introduction of nongovernmental organisations, which attract better work force from government agencies and is performing more and more state functions, also shows that these have not led to homogenisation within the national grid but the abandonment of the idea of national grid altogether.

Another interesting observation that Ferguson makes is that the ‘global’ capital is not truly global since there is no 'flow' of capital from one country to other but rather 'skip' or 'hop' as the capital does not does not encompass or cover contiguous geographic space but connects the discrete points on it. With the examples of usable and unusable Africa, Ferguson further presses on the point that these enclaves (usable Africa/secured enclaves) are not connected in the continuous, territorial national grid but in a translation network connected in point to point fashion.

This argument of non-homogenisation in a transnational economy is also furthered by Sharma and Gupta (2006) who use the case of call-centre industry and point out that globalisation is not homogenising but rather creating capitalist enclaves with relative autonomy. The case of outsourcing from north to south is further made to make the argument about the transformation of territoriality, sovereignty, citizenship and nation-state. People in North who pushed for neoliberalisation and globalisation are now in danger and fighting against the same force since it has also led to the shift in labour populace. It is transforming the relationship between citizenship, national identity and the state where people in north are now asking and putting pressure on the state to bring the jobs back to them. It is interesting to see that those who advocated for the lesser role of state, higher control by economic nationalist and transnational capitalism are now seeking state support to put an end to outsourcing which is a result of such transnational capital investment. The spread of globalisation in that sense has also heightened the arguments for national belonging, citizenship, state control, state territoriality, sovereignty of the nation.

In such transforming times, Sharma and Gupta prescribe that analysis of state should be to understand what is state in this neoliberal, transnational world? How does it exist and function? What effects does it have? In trying to understand these questions, they argue that new insights into the state could be obtained by thinking about states as cultural artefacts and analysed two crucial aspects of state - everyday and representation of state. Like Gupta’s other works, this book also tries to further our understandings of the state as a multilayered, contradictory and translocal which is an ensemble of institutions, practices, and people in a globalized context. The state functioning is influenced by globalisation and pressure from translation institutions but globalisation has also led to translational coalition of local and international institutions which finally act at the local level thus there is a constant flow of information and ideas where such networks think at the global level but be effective at the local level.

The question is also to see how state becomes this central apex vertical power and super coordinator of the governance of social and individual conduct of other institutions. The repetitive everyday practices of the state not only reproduce state as an institution across space and time but they also reproduce the primacy and supremacy of the state over other social institutions. The arguments about theorising the state is same as Gupta has made elsewhere where state is not seen as a pre-existing and pre-constituted institution but it is produced through everyday practice and encounters and through representations of state through certain forms.

Where such analysis was earlier suggested within the frame of nation-state, Sharma and Gupta ask for unhinging it and conducting such a cultural analysis in the transnational frame. Another important aspect that needs to be studied is the cultural outcomes of transnational governmentality. In a world where hegemonic meanings (derived from North and part of transnational vocabulary) of health, poverty, education, good-governance and dominant techniques to address these are put into practice in highly localised places, it becomes important to see the effects of these practices and the meaning they produce which are contingent on the place, time and historical memory of the people.

Ferguson and Gupta (2002), in their article analyse the spatialisation of the state and how does such spatialistion takes shape in a neoliberal world. Two key features of spatializing of state, they argue, are ‘verticality’ and ‘encompassment’. Verticality implies the directionality that is associated in the state-society binary where state is seen as above and society below. The encompassment refers to location of state which spreads from the unit of family to local community and ends with nation states. This vertical encompassment is produced through everyday routine, mundane and ritualised bureaucratic practices which are crucial for such spatialisation. They also argue how the transnational organisations have questioned this vertical encompassment of the state.

Ferguson and Gupta elaborate the metaphors, practices, representations, images through which states come to be seen as reified entities, concrete and spatially encompassing. However, such analysis if the state comes into question in transnational political economy. By citing the case of Africa, they argue that such conventional understanding of the state spatiality needs rethinking where transnational NGOs play increasingly important role and states were or are becoming weaker in their hold over the nation.

What becomes evident from these three papers is how African nations make us to let go of the already established theories of state and rethink state, nation, citizenship, governmentality, globalisation and transnationalism. They seem to present a very complex and sometimes contradictory analysis to what is commonly theorised about states and nation. In all the above articles, all the popular theories about state have been nullified, in some sense, for African States.

Session 11: Territory, Borders, Mobilities

The set of readings in this session engage with how states attempt to regulate the flow of people across boundaries, and the ways in which populations are rendered legible or illegible through such attempts at regulation.  In “Immobilizing mobility”, the authors argue that state efforts to regulate mobility in the context of “refugees” in Hungary result in “more radical forms of mobility”. The authors argue that state agencies and humanitarian volunteer groups emphasize a vertical form of mobility with a clear binary established between citizen and foreigner, politics and humanitarianism, and most crucially, “groups to be acted upon and institutions doing the acting”. As against such vertical imaginations of mobility, horizontal mobility becomes possible when migrant groups’ forms alliances with other non-migrants, and act in ways that are agential, and not simply as "suffering subjects". When a group of refugees decide to walk towards Austria, when the state continuously refuses transport, is for instance, a radical move, where the distinctions between humanitarianism and politics collapse. When several people collapse in the process of walking, the state is forced to arrange buses. In another instance worth recalling, migrants refuse to move to “safe homes” that Hungarian volunteers offer, preferring to stay in the railway station which holds the possibility of movement. 

Dines et al, in thinking about the lives of migrants in Lampedusa, engage with Agamben’s notion of “bare life”. Personified by the Homo Sacer( sacred man), "bare life" did not have protection of law, and could be killed with impunity. Excluded from the category of the citizen, the figure could still be subject to biopolitical interventions. The notion of bare life is drawn upon to suggest lack of culpability for the loss of lives in border crossings- “provides a ‘moral alibi’ that allows authorities to deny any responsibilities for casualties”. While some scholars have argued that the notion of "bare life" denies political resistance, others have argued for “the need to move beyond the binary scheme between bare life and political resistance to draw attention to more mundane instances of recalcitrance that…can potentially rewrite the hegemonic cultural script of liberal citizenship”. Two Eritreans, who after receiving documents, not only returned to Lampedusa, but went to greet compatriots arriving at the port, is presented as an episode of transgression that attempted to challenge the hegemonic cultural script of citizenship .

The ways in which the complimentary and contradictory discourses of humanitarianism  and securitization are invoked in relation to migrant bodies is discussed. The authors argue that “the harnessing of the migrant as both a threat and a victim has effects that extend far beyond Lampedusa”. The authors suggest that while the notion of “bare life” is problematic in not accounting for factors such as ineffective migration policies, institutional racism and complexities of migrant experiences, it does prove useful in explaining processes that govern migration.  

In a review article, Fassin argues that anthropological literature about borders and on boundaries have been kept largely separate. While borders were viewed as territorial limits defining political entities and legal subjects, boundaries were seen as social constructs establishing symbolic differences and producing identities. The authors argue that understanding how immigration is governed and experienced requires a combination of the concepts of boundaries and borders. “Linking borders and boundaries”, they argue “inscribes politics and the state-rather than culture or the market- into the question of immigration”. 

In a somewhat different register, and yet engaged with similar questions, Comaroffs trace the linkages between “Zombies, Immigrants and Millenial Capitalism”. Locating the reports of "zombies" as half- alive figures, under the control of “witches” who take away productive work available within the experiential contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, the authors attempt to make sense of the nature of myth-making in northern South Africa. The central argument being made is that the contradictions and frustrations of advanced capitalism, where wealth seems attainable and yet out of reach, is symbolically represented through “spectral labour”, which takes away possibilities for the creation of value. The linkage between “zombies” and discourses around migrants lie in the common grouse against them- as agents who take away the possibility of generating value, from legitimate workers in northern South Africa. The most interesting point lies in the conclusion, where the authors say they would like to keep an “open mind about the pragmatic possibilities of the living dead”. That is to say, it is the stories of zombies and witchcraft that has generated discussion about unemployment and disgruntled young people, and forced the state to take note. 

Some questions that emerge from the set of readings for class discussion are as follows:

1.       The distinction between vertical and horizontal mobility could be thought through more closely. Is it always possible for horizontal mobility, exercised by agential migrants to force politics into humanitarian efforts? Are historical contingencies crucial in determining such possibilities?

2.       There are various ways in which states attempt to control the movement of people, even as the movement of goods is sought to be facilitated, in advanced capitalism, as indicated by several readings. Does the state as an entity appear most clearly in these regulatory apparatuses? Given that people who seek to move between boundaries find ways to subvert regulatory mechanisms, is the state, yet again, rendered fluid? Or is it to be located in these acts of subversion that pit themselves against the state?

3.       What potentiality does myth hold to make legible to the state forms of inequality that are otherwise glossed over? As Comaroffs suggest towards the end of their piece, how must we think about the “pragmatic possibilities of the living dead”? The attention of the state towards episodes such as witch burning might be primarily through policing- mechanisms. Could it, possibly, draw attention to the structural conditions that are hinted at by linking witchcraft to capitalist exploitation?