Louis Althusser is perhaps most well-known for his concept of ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs). However, Althusser is not clear about what role, if any, ISAs play in a post-capitalist society. At times, Althusser talks about ISAs (and the state) withering; at other times, they are merely reformed. Sometimes, ISAs are described as having an inescapable repressive dimension; on other occasions, they are a perfectly acceptable tool for the reproduction of socialism. In this paper, I offer a way of (...) thinking through this confusion that draws on the thought of the Daoist philosopher, Zhuangzi. I argue that Zhuangzian friendship represents a kind of radical equality that is reproducible without the traditional kind of ideological interpellation of ISAs, thereby allowing Althusser explain post-capitalist ideological reproduction. It is worth noting that in this paper, I am not engaging in a textual exegesis of the Zhuangzi. My primary interest is in using the contemporary literature on the Zhuangzi to think through a problem in Althusser’s philosophical system. (shrink)

The global economy has an impact on female beauty today, regardless of the multicultural and historical factors in its formation and construction, resulting in monolithic crazes in women's fashion and appearance. but female beauty in china has been greatly contested with China's turbulent modern history, and this contestation deserves serious consideration, together with the politics by which the Chinese state apparatus has promoted and regulated female beauty. I argue that certain factors have been constant in contemporary discourses of (...) female beauty. Ideal bodies, in all their specifics, are defined by physical standards very few women can attain. These standards are accompanied by demeaning characterizations of women who fail to achieve them, and who are therefore destined to be discontent. It is now necessary for feminist theorists to examine the social and cultural roles of the body in terms of gender, power, the established patriarchy, and its oppression of women. (shrink)

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, the article discusses Roma Pentecostalism as nomad self-governance or self-ministry and political affirmation, in a dialectical conversation with stable apparatuses of power such as state and transnational polities advancing a neoliberal program of social integration as semiological apparatus of capture. The latter is upheld by expert social sciences as royal sciences, which translate alternative forms of self-governance into the conceptual apparatus of the state and transnational polities. On the other hand, Pentecostal (...) self-ministry works as disaffected power undoing the architecture of the state subject, authorizing new hermeneutics of the self to take control over semiological acts of translation, and engenders a political resubjectivation of the governed. The article identifies Roma Pentecostalism as a source of political reawakening of Romani civil society, a creative line of flight with an immense power of deterritorialization of the main domains of subjection. (shrink)

Louis Althusser is perhaps most well-known for his concept of ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs). However, Althusser is not clear about what role, if any, ISAs play in a post-capitalist society. At times, Althusser talks about ISAs (and the state) withering; at other times, they are merely reformed. Sometimes, ISAs are described as having an inescapable repressive dimension; on other occasions, they are a perfectly acceptable tool for the reproduction of socialism. In this paper, I offer a way of (...) thinking through this confusion that draws on the thought of the Daoist philosopher, Zhuangzi. I argue that Zhuangzian friendship represents a kind of radical equality that is reproducible without the traditional kind of ideological interpellation of ISAs, thereby allowing Althusser explain post-capitalist ideological reproduction. It is worth noting that in this paper, I am not engaging in a textual exegesis of the Zhuangzi. My primary interest is in using the contemporary literature on the Zhuangzi to think through a problem in Althusser’s philosophical system. (shrink)

In a recently proposed quantum measurement theory the definiteness of quantum measurements is achieved by means of “special” states. The recovery of the usual quantum probabilities is related to the relative abundance of particular classes of “special” states. In the present article we consider two-state discrimination, and model the apparatus modes that could provide the “special” states. We find that there are structural features which, if generally present in apparatus, will provide universal recovery of standard probabilities. These (...) structural features relate to the distribution of certain Hamiltonian matrix elements or interaction times. In particular, those quantities must be asymptotically (x → ∞) distributed according to the Cauchy law, Ca(x)=a/π(x 2 +a 2 ). (shrink)

If we are looking for an Ur-explanation for the persistence of the Ur-myth, or any other myth, in our literature, could we not more directly find it in the structure of a mind which does not have to remember in order to imitate? The occasion of both myth and literature is the social life of the species which, in Starobinski's sense, is a history of continual eviction; but as regards the apparatus of thought by which this social life is (...) reflected in art it is more a history of assimilation and repetition. "The work of the brain," to cite a recent article in Scientific American, "is to create a model of a possible world rather than to record and transmit to the mind a world that is metaphysically true…Different worlds are presumably constructed by similar species."1 And, presumably, similar worlds are constructed by similar species. Weisinger hints briefly at something like this in his essay "The Mythic Origins of the Creative Process," but one has the clear impression, as his title suggests, that he would like to have the [myth/ritual] cart before the creative horse.2 However much this may satisfy our longing to crown our literature, if not creativity itself, with a mythic genealogy, it seems a wistful hypothesis. One might just as well look upon the remains of early man's shelters, marvel that they too had roofs, just like ours, and conclude that therefore our roofs have their origin in theirs.· 1. Harry J. Jerison, "Paleoneurology and the Evolution of Mind," Scientific American, January 1976, p. 99.· 2. Herbert Weisinger, The Agony and the Triumph: Papers on the Use and Abuse of Myth , p. 250.Bert O. States, professor of dramatic arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is the author of Irony and Drama: A Poetics and The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on "Waiting for Godot.". (shrink)

This paper opens with first‐hand accounts of critical care medical interventions in which detainees, in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are brought to the emergency department for treatment. This case dramatizes the extent to which the provision of ethical and acceptable nursing care is jeopardized by federal law enforcement paradigms. Drawing on the scholarship of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this paper offers a theoretical account of the power dynamics that inform the health care of patients (...) who find themselves caught in the custodial scaffolding of a vast immigration and detention apparatus. It offers an analysis of the display of sovereign and biopolitical power over the lives (and deaths) of detainees (Foucault), as well as the ways these individuals are reduced to “bare life” under the political pretext of an emergency or “state of exception” (Agamben). Our purpose here is both theoretical and practical: to better understand the often hidden agency or impersonal “will” exercised by the immigrant detention system, but also to equip clinicians in these and cognate facilities (e.g., prisons) with the critical tools by which they might better navigate incommensurable paradigms (i.e., care vs. custody) in order to deliver the best care while upholding their ethical duties as a care provider. This is all the more pressing because hospitals are not sanctuaries and given the incursion of federal law enforcement agents, nurses may find themselves conscripted as de facto agents of the state. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to paraphrase Theda Skocpol’s theory of social revolutions with the use of the conceptual apparatus of non-Marxian historical materialism. In the successive sections of this paper, the concepts of modernization, the nature of state power, an agrarian bureaucracy, and the mechanism of a victorious revolution are paraphrased. This paraphrase makes it possible to distinguish two kinds of agrarian bureaucracies, each resulting in social revolutions with different outcomes. A victorious revolution led to successful (...) modernization in the case of an economic agrarian bureaucracy, but not in the case of a political agrarian bureaucracy. (shrink)

We investigate the information provided about a specified distributed apparatus of n units in the measurement of a quantum state. It is shown that, in contrast to such measurement of a classical state, which is bounded by log(n + 1) bits, the information in a quantum measurement is bounded by 3.7 × n 1/2 bits. This means that the use of quantum apparatus offers an exponential advantage over classical apparatus.

Deleuze and Guattari's work opens theoretical and political possibilities for us by demonstrating that the boundary between ‘the West’ and the ‘non-West’ is itself a historically unstable epistemological inscription on the surface of the earth, but one that nevertheless retraces itself over and over again. They show us that our political possibilities exist precisely in the ‘non-West’, so long as we understand this term not in the sense of an existing supposedly ‘non-Western’ territory or ‘substance’, but rather as a ‘line (...) of flight’ beyond the nation-state, the form in which the ‘original division’ and creation of the social relation called ‘the West’ continues to produce itself. They thus demonstrate that the way out of the Eurocentric epistemological order lies precisely in clarifying how ‘the West’ was created as an effect of the capitalist axiomatic and maintained by the repetition of this paradoxical ‘commencement’ in the form of the ‘anthropological difference’, congealed into the modern nation-state. In the pursuit of this moment, we will investigate the question of how the social surface is territorialised and enclosed for capitalist accumulation, how the purely heterogeneous topology of the social comes to be inscribed with the traces of the apparatus of capture. (shrink)

The standard interpretation of quantum physics (QP) and some recent generalizations of this theory rest on the adoption of a rerificationist theory of truth and meaning, while most proposals for modifying and interpreting QP in a “realistic” way attribute an ontological status to theoretical physical entities (ontological realism). Both terms of this dichotomy are criticizable, and many quantum paradoxes can be attributed to it. We discuss a new viewpoint in this paper (semantic realism, or briefly SR), which applies both to (...) classical physics (CP) and to QP. and is characterized by the attempt of giving up verificationism without adopting ontological realism. As a first step, we construct a formalized observative language L endowed with a correspondence truth theory. Then, we state a set of axioms by means of L which hold both in CP and in QP. and construct a further language Lv which can express bothtestable andtheoretical properties of a given physical system. The concepts ofmeaning andtestability do not collapse in L and Le hence we can distinguish between semantic and pragmatic compatibility of physical properties and define the concepts of testability and conjoint testability of statements of L and Le. In this context a new metatheoretical principle (MGP) is stated, which limits the validity of empirical physical laws. By applying SR (in particular. MGP) to QP, one can interpret quantum logic as a theory of testability in QP, show that QP is semantically incomplete, and invalidate the widespread claim that contextuality is unavoidable in QP. Furthermore. SR introduces some changes in the conventional interpretation of ideal measurements and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. (shrink)

Leading members of the Slavophile circle shared a commonWeltanschauung, fostered by a complex reaction to thesocial and political changes taking place in mid-nineteenth-centuryRussia. There was, however, considerable diversity in their views aboutthe character and value of the Russian state apparatus. While theyall criticised the bureaucratic ethos of the tsarist state,a number of them recognised that it played a critical role in stabilising deep-seated social tensions in Russian society. Inthe late 1850s, some members of the Slavophile circle also (...) cameto recognise that the state apparatus could play a positiverole in eliminating serfdom. Nevertheless, in the wake ofthe Emancipation Edict of 1861, conflict over the roleof the Russian state became the most divisive issuefor surviving members of the Slavophile circle. (shrink)

In the essay “Police Power: The Biopolitical State Apparatus and Differential Interpellations,” Banu Bargu developed the notion of the Biopolitical State Apparatus (BSA). This essay deploys Bargu’s notion of the BSA within what it claims is a militarized police power in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Illustrating how the functioning of militarized police power underpins the implementation of public-health policy and the enforcement of laws that complement such power, the essay will further demonstrate through the (...) BSA concept what police power says about the state under the Duterte regime, how this regime relates to the state of exception and posttruth politics, and how its policing operates in contrast to other states. (shrink)

This article analyzes the evolution of state capacity in Peru during the recent commodity boom. Peru’s economic growth happened in a context in which inclusive democratic institutions were at play for the longest period ever registered in the country and at a time when political elites decided to invest considerable resources in developing state capacity. This case illustrates how boom-led economic growth can lead to the institutional strengthening of a weak state. However, state capacity continues to (...) be low in Peru. The causal mechanism that yields such continuity differs from those entertained in classic path-dependent explanations of state capacity in Latin America. The article identifies a novel mechanism that helped reproduce the Peruvian path intertemporally. This relational mechanism suggests that state capacity remains low because of the relatively enhanced capacities of state challengers to locally fend off and contest an otherwise much stronger state apparatus. The article argues, on that basis, the need to employ a relational analysis that gauges net state strength with respect to the power acquired by relevant non-state actors who might challenge state authority across different local arenas. Classic conceptualizations of state capacity are indeed relational, but conventional applications are predominantly unilateral and, thus, misleading. Unilateral notions of state capacity are those that focus on either state efforts and investments to assert state capacity or, alternatively, on the presence of challenges that curtail the levels of actually observed state capacity. (shrink)

"The thesis is radical," writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text in anthropology and political science. "We conventionally define the state as the regulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres's thesis is that economic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character of tribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history."Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state (...) apparatuses? In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair of Religion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is the translator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

Citizenship is the right to be a citizen of a social, political, or national community. Aristotle was the philosopher who has been talking about citizenship since ancient times. His thoughts are still historical lessons for the operation of states today. In this article, the author focuses on analyzing basic thoughts on Aristotle's citizenship; which are shown in essential points such as (i) Citizenship is clearly shown in the role of the State, (ii) Right to education, (iii) The right to (...) participate in political affairs, (iv) Citizenship is associated with civic obligations. Thereby, the article draws its historical lesson for the current building of law-governed State in Vietnam in the following aspects: (i) Building a solid-state apparatus with a coherent and unified legal system; (ii) All the State's policies must originate from the Vietnamese practice, ensure the people's mastery and protect the people's legitimate interests; (iii) Consolidating and strengthening the relationship between the State and the people. (shrink)

European absolute monarchy was the model for all subsequent versions of statism. The rise of the centralized state apparatus that claimed a monopoly of the (legitimate) use of force within a given territory went hand in hand with the intellectual pursuit of describing it. America, both during colonial times and even more so at the founding of the republic, was relatively free from absolutism. The US, born without a sovereign, could not know the peculiar development of a fundamental (...) state category such as sovereignty, first defined by Jean Bodin in the 16th century. Sovereignty, in American political discourse, was…. (shrink)

"The thesis is radical," writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text in anthropology and political science. "We conventionally define the state as the regulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres's thesis is that economic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character of tribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history."Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state (...) apparatuses? In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair of Religion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is the translator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

This paper is a philosophical inquiry about the state of man during the pandemic. By philosophy, I mean a rational investigation of profound and critical questions that seeks to address fundamental issues pertaining to the meaning of life. This study attempts to understand how the sovereign rule of the state is controlling the population in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. It argues that political power, through fear, has isolated human beings away from each other in the name (...) of public health protocols. State power plays on the vulnerabilities of the people to take advantage of the situation. The state apparatus is exercising full and unprecedented disciplinary measures as an extreme form of bio-power purportedly meant to mitigate the crisis. However, what is not seen is the reality that unjust structures and the unequal situations of individuals in human society have resulted to more hardships on the part of the poor, thereby diminishing their sense of self-worth. The most profound question when it comes to the pandemic, this paper argues, is existential – the reality of death. (shrink)

In-depth study of the enduring impact of the 1970s debate between state theorists Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas. We have recently lived through the turmoil of a global financial crisis that originated in the United States and, despite the platitudes of neo-liberal ideology, nation-states were deeply involved in managing this crisis. If “the state” is again a preeminent actor in the global economy, then state theory and the problem of the state should also return to the (...) forefront of political theory. Toward a Critical Theory of States is an intensive analysis of the 1970s debate between state theorists Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas, including its wider impact on Marxist theories of the state in subsequent decades. Clyde W. Barrow makes unique arguments and contributions to this continuing discussion in state theory and lays the foundation for more theoretically informed empirical and historical research on the state in the age of globalization. He argues that by merely moving past the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, as some have recommended, scholars have abandoned much that is valuable in understanding the state, particularly the need to comprehend the contemporary transformation of the state form and the state apparatuses as part of the new conditions of globalization and transnational capital accumulation. Building upon themes of state restructuring found in Poulantzas and Miliband, Barrow establishes the outlines of an approach that integrates the thought of both to propose a synthetic understanding of the new imperialism. (shrink)

The contemporary state is not only the main force behind environmental change, but the reactions to environmental problems have played a crucial role in the modernisation of the state apparatus, especially because of its mediatory role. The Political Ecology of the State is the first book to critically assess the philosophical basis of environmental statehood and regulation, addressing the emergence and evolution of environmental regulation from the early 20th Century to the more recent phase of ecological (...) modernisation and the neoliberalisation of nature. The state is understood as the result of permanent socionatural interactions and multiple forms of contestation, from a critical politico-ecological approach. This book examines the tension between pro- and anti-commons tendencies that have permeated the organisation and failures of the environmental responses put forward by the state. It provides a reinterpretation of the achievements and failures of mainstream environmental policies and regulation and offers a review of the mains philosophical influences behind different periods of environmental statehood and regulation. It sets out an agenda for going beyond conventional state regulation and grassroots dealings with the state, and as such redefines the environmental apparatus of the state. (shrink)

The article turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of state capitalism and their theorization of money and debt in their critique of capitalism to develop an analysis of the governmental management of the current crisis determined by ordo- and neoliberalism. The paper argues that analyses which fail to properly recognize the power of capital to determine both state apparatuses and economic policy thereby fail to grasp the real functioning of money, debt and the Euro in the crisis and (...) end up unwittingly supporting liberalism. This is true of positions such as heterodox theory that, though critical of conventional and neoliberal political economy, nevertheless continue to uphold the state as an independent or mediating mechanism in relation to the power of capital. The neglect of the role which money plays in the strategies of capital to control both the creation of value and the functioning of the state is to be found even in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism, a neglect which undermines his analysis of power. The paper highlights the implications of the standpoint of state capitalism for a more incisive analysis of the current crisis that reveals what is at stake for political struggles. (shrink)

This article seeks to reinterpret the process of state and class formation in “peripheral” societies—notably Syria—through a contextualized reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire influenced by the approach of Political Marxism (PM). In light of PM’s claim that capitalism did not emerge in France until the late nineteenth century, it draws a picture of post-revolutionary French society in which the legacy of the precapitalist Absolutist state still determined the nature of ruling class reproduction and class struggle, centered on the (...) state apparatus as the principal source of appropriation. These insights on the nature of ruling class appropriation and the centrality of the state are then applied to the case of post-Ottoman Syria, uncovering parallels with class struggles in post-revolutionary France rooted in the “Jacobin” politics of a state-dependent bourgeoisie of officials and officers. It proposes to rethink the contested moments of transition in terms of “alternative modernities” that developed in the absence of generalized capitalist relations of production. (shrink)

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari pose the question, ‘What is a collective body?’ This leads them to differentiate between bodies and organisms, attributing esprit de corps to bodies and âme d’organisme to organisms. Deleuze and Guattari oppose esprit de corps to âme d’organisme as nomadic to sedentary, the war machine to the State apparatus, and the smooth to the striated. Their point of entry to the notion of esprit de corps is a discussion of Ibn Khaldûn’s (...) fourteenth-century Muqaddimah and his concept of ‘asabiyya, which is often rendered as ‘esprit de corps’ or ‘group feeling’. They argue that Ibn Khaldûn associates ‘asabiyya with nomadism and contrasts it with the sedentary, but Ibn Khaldûn’s primary distinction is not between the nomadic and the sedentary but between rural life and urban life, and ‘asabiyya is an essential component of both forms of life. Deleuze and Guattari also claim that ‘asabiyya is secret rather than public; that it involves lineages that are pure and mobile, as opposed to impure and rigid; and that it is opposed to autocratic values. All of these claims are problematic. Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari creatively appropriate Ibn Khaldûn for their own purposes, and though they distort his thought, they do illuminate it by isolating unresolved issues in Ibn Khaldûn’s understanding of the dynamics of leadership among nomads and the origins of state power. (shrink)

Since antiquity, Confucians have sought to work with the state in order to implement their philosophy through state sponsorship. And yet, whenever Confucians have sought state sponsorship, naturally the government has adopted Confucian philosophy selectively to serve its own purposes and thus compromised the integrity of Confucianism. Throughout Chinese history, countless Confucian officials attempted to help rulers to do the right thing. They often failed when their advice went against the fundamental interest of rulers. On reflection, this (...) outcome should not be unexpected. The primary goal of rulers is to solidify power; the primary concern of Confucianism is the wellbeing of the people. When the two conflict, it is highly unlikely for a government to prioritize Confucian ideals. In a democratic era, Confucianism can influence society without joining the state apparatus. It can and must promote its social ideals through grassroots democratic participation rather than leave itself to the mercy of state sponsorship. (shrink)

After years of the welfare state, the rise of technology, combined with neoliberal governmental apparatuses, has established a new society of the precarious. In this new way of the world, productivity is not just connected to labor in the traditional sense of work hours, but more totally, to the formation of the self: work becomes performative and affective, and personal identities seep more and more into working ones. This new mode of being has another side, however: it can lead (...) to new forms of self-organization, resistance and exodus. In it we see the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to show that the fundamental transformation of Russian society that had been realized by the Soviet government since the early twenties included not only the reforms of scientific institutions or the creation of a new educational system but also a radical reevaluation of the social role of the expert knowledge. It proposes a transversal analysis of the institutional history of the Soviet science and its complex relations with the state apparatus in (...) order to show that the research policy of the twenties should be considered not only as an attempt to stimulate a “catch up growth,” but rather as an anticipation of some essential problems discussed in the contemporary social epistemology. The early Soviet government had a very particular vision of “social engineering” that was both utopian and extremely pragmatic. The Soviet Union was considered as the first truly “scientific state,” based on the idea that the historical development could be accelerated due to a party lead popular mobilization. The result of this conviction was the policy of “state-sponsored evolutionism” that created a high demand for the experts in all fields of knowledge. First, it focuses on the dualism of scientific institutions in the twenties when the “old” Academy of Sciences composed of the scientists formed under the Old Regime was disputing the role of the leading research institution with the newly created Communist Academy. This period could be described as the era of “New Scientific Policy” or some kind of “primitive accumulation” of the expert knowledge. Later it explores another dualism that existed since the creation of the Soviet Union: it consisted of the opposition between two rival projects of state building. The first one was promoted by State Planning Committee and made an emphasis on the administrative division based on economical basis, the second one was a project of People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, that proposed a creation of multiple soviet “national states” based on the principle of self-determination. Both projects required a large amount of data in various fields of knowledge and promoted a creation of new research institutions and favored the pioneering study in both central economy planning and social engineering. The aim of this article is to place the soviet experience in the comparative perspective, claiming that the communist modernization should be analyzed in the context of elaboration, in Foucault’s terms, of new “governmental technologies” which are supposed to be the products of new research institutions directly or indirectly influenced by a modern state. (shrink)

In 2011, Egypt witnessed more protests than any other country in the world: the beginning of a revolutionary process that would unfold in three waves of revolution, followed by two waves of counterrevolution. In addition to providing new and unprecedented empirical data, the book makes two theoretical contributions. First, a new framework is presented for analyzing the state apparatus in Egypt that is based on four pillars of regime support which can either prop up or press upon whoever (...) is in power: the Egyptian military, the business elite, the United States, and the multi-headed opposition. Secondly, the book brings together the literature on bottom-up revolutionary movements and top-down military coups, and introduces the concept of a coup from below in contrast to the revolution from above that took place under Gamal Abdel Nasser. (shrink)

Why government outsourcing of public powers is making us less free Many governmental functions today—from the management of prisons and welfare offices to warfare and financial regulation—are outsourced to private entities. Education and health care are funded in part through private philanthropy rather than taxation. Can a privatized government rule legitimately? The Privatized State argues that it cannot. In this boldly provocative book, Chiara Cordelli argues that privatization constitutes a regression to a precivil condition—what philosophers centuries ago called "a (...) state of nature." Developing a compelling case for the democratic state and its administrative apparatus, she shows how privatization reproduces the very same defects that Enlightenment thinkers attributed to the precivil condition, and which only properly constituted political institutions can overcome—defects such as provisional justice, undue dependence, and unfreedom. Cordelli advocates for constitutional limits on privatization and a more democratic system of public administration, and lays out the central responsibilities of private actors in contexts where governance is already extensively privatized. Charting a way forward, she presents a new conceptual account of political representation and novel philosophical theories of democratic authority and legitimate lawmaking. The Privatized State shows how privatization undermines the very reason political institutions exist in the first place, and advocates for a new way of administering public affairs that is more democratic and just. (shrink)

How can we conceive of the relation between technologies of image-making and the formations of political power, without reducing the former to merely superstructural effects of a pre-existing ideology or deducing the latter from the functional determination inherent in technical apparatuses? In this article, I revisit the notion of the state as a visual form I proposed in an earlier work, arguing that in order to understand the articulation between politics and visuality in modernity we need to pay attention (...) to the performance of showing and seeing that mediates between the spectacle and spectatorship. To grasp the way in which historical change (political and technological) impacts on this constellation, in particular in the transition from photographic to cinematic regimes of visuality between the late 19th and early 20th century, I take these questions through two rather different ‘case studies’: photographer Juan Gutiérrez’s images of Brazilian state rituals in the mid-1890s and Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Aleph’ of 1949. Whereas Gutiérrez’s photographic series, I argue, announces the cinema and its ways of mobilizing actors and spectators alike, as the limit of a 19th-century visuality primed on the stability and self-enclosedness of viewers and objects, Borges’s story retrospectively enacts the transition from photographic to cinematic seeing in an intratextual battle of acts of transcription from the impossible object at the centre of the plot, which grants infinite, universal visibility to the one who beholds it. Reading the two together, or against one another, then, allows us to see the dimension of transience undercutting the apparent solidity and timelessness with which scopic regimes promise us access to the real. (shrink)

How do states build a security apparatus after violent resistance against state rule? This article argues that in early periods of state building two main factors shape the process: the macro-strategic goals of the state and administrative challenges of personnel management. These dynamics are studied in the context of the establishment of police forces in the settler colony of German Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia. The empirical analysis relies on information about the location of police stations and (...) a near full census of police forces, compiled from the German Federal Archives. A mismatch is found between the allocation of police presence and the allocation of police personnel. The first was driven by the strategic value of locations in terms of extractive potential, political importance, and the presence of critical infrastructure, whereas the allocation of individual officers was likely affected by adverse selection, which led to the assignment of low-quality recruits to strategically important locations. (shrink)

The interpretation of the concept of reduced state is a subtle issue that has relevant consequences when the task is the interpretation of quantum mechanics itself. The aim of this paper is to argue that reduced states are not the quantum states of subsystems in the same sense as quantum states are states of the whole composite system. After clearly stating the problem, our argument is developed in three stages. First, we consider the phenomenon of environment-induced decoherence as an (...) example of the case in which the subsystems interact with each other; we show that decoherence does not solve the measurement problem precisely because the reduced state of the measuring apparatus is not its quantum state. Second, the non-interacting case is illustrated in the context of no-collapse interpretations, in which we show that certain well-known experimental results cannot be accounted for due to the fact that the reduced states of the measured system and the measuring apparatus are conceived as their quantum states. Finally, we prove that reduced states are a kind of coarse-grained states, and for this reason they cancel the correlations of the subsystem with other subsystems with which it interacts or is entangled. (shrink)

Ideology and ideological state apparatuses -- Reply to John Lewis -- Freud and Lacan -- A letter on art in reply to André Daspre.

The article argues that environmental planetary discourses have coalesced into the Anthropocene crisis narrative and reformulated the state of nature apparatus of Western political theory. The Anthropocene, as an ecological state of nature of late capitalism, casts light on the logics of geopower, which assembles species thinking, a fascination with nonlife and sovereignty, and the imaginary of extinction and mutation. Geopower shifts governmental technologies from human populations and their ‘milieu’ to nonhuman species, energy flows and ecosystems, from (...) political economy and biopower to Earth science and systems ecology. This configuration of power suggests a shift in the neoliberal agenda and imposes the Earth as a political personage, generating threatening political myths and figures of chaos and sovereignty, such as Gaia, Chthulu and Climate Leviathans. (shrink)

The state is often regarded as an abstract and neutral bureaucratic entity. Against this common sense idea, At the Heart of the State argues that it is also a concrete and situated reality, embodied in the work of its agents and inscribed in the issues of its time. The result of a five-year investigation conducted by ten scholars, this book describes and analyses the police, the court system, the prison apparatus, the social services, and mental health facilities (...) in France. Combining genealogy and ethnography, its authors show that these state institutions do not simply implement laws, rules and procedures: they mobilise values and affects, judgements and emotions. In other words, they reflect the morality of the state. Of immense interest to both social scientists and political theorists, this work will make an important contribution to the ever expanding literature on the contemporary state. (shrink)

The concept of constituent power plays a major part in modern political and legal theory- in how we think about the political. This book tackles the twofold issue of public authority and public autonomy in the modern conception of the political by analysing the notion of constituent power, its function in the modern political apparatus, and debates about its meaning and function in our own context. Focusing on contemporary debates on constitutionalism "beyond" the state, Geneviève Nootens assesses the (...) prospects for recasting the notion of constituent power in a polycentric setting that challenges state sovereignty as embodying the autonomy of the political. In doing so, she argues that constituent power belongs with the conceptual apparatus of a theory of government peculiar to a statist way of knowing, and being into, the world, and that it is too much dependent upon the statist framework for it to have critical purchase on new mappings of public authority. Nootens stresses the critical need to frame public authority appropriately if we are to conceptualize a conception of collective political agency that can sustain public autonomy in the current era. Constituent Power Beyond the State will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, democratic theory, law, and constitutionalism. (shrink)

Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation) -- Reply to John Lewis -- Freud and Lacan -- A letter on art in reply to André Daspre.

The central problem in the quantum theory of measurement, how to describe the process of state reduction in terms of the quantum mechanical formalism, is solved on the basis of the relativity of quantal states, which implies that once the apparatus is detected in a well-defined state, the object state must reduce to a corresponding one. This is a process termed by Schrödinger disentanglement. Here, it is essential to observe that Renninger's negative result does constitute an (...) actual measurement process. From this point of view, Heisenberg's interpretation of his microscope experiment and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen arguments are reinvestigated. Satisfactory discussions are given to various experimental situations, such as the Stern-Gerlach-type experiment, successive measurements, macroscopic measurements, and Schrödinger's cat. Finally it is proposed to regard a state vector in quantum mechanics as an irreducible physical construct, in Margenau's sense, that is not further analyzable both mathematically and conceptually. (shrink)

Since the start of the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel's domination of the Palestinians has deprived an entire population of any political status or protection. But even decades on, most people speak of this rule—both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates—as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. In _The One-State Condition_, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir directly challenge this belief. Looking closely at the history and (...) contemporary formation of the ruling apparatus—the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories—Azoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status. Israeli citizenship is shaped through the active denial of Palestinian citizenship and civil rights. Though many Israelis, on both political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, few ultimately admit that Israel is no democracy or question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself. Too frequently ignored are the lasting effects of the deceptive denial of the events of 1948 and 1967, and the ways in which the resulting occupation has reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Azoulay and Ophir show that acknowledgment of the one-state _condition_ is not only a prerequisite for considering a one- or two-state _solution_; it is a prerequisite for advancing new ideas to move beyond the trap of this false dilemma. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between the security state and the dominant economic interests, pointing to the ever-increasing reliance on a quantitative understanding of the natural and social worlds, which has vitiated the traditional values that constrained the exercise of power by both the market and the intrusive apparatus of the state.

The relationship that exists between the state and her citizens has been described by Jean Jacques Rousseau as “a social contract.” In this contractual agreement, citizens are bound to respect state authority while the state, in turn, has the bounden duty to protect her citizens and guide them in their aspirations. In fact, any state that does not perform this duty is guilty of violating the fundamental rights of her citizens. This, however, is not the case (...) in most postcolonial societies where the citizens see the state as an aggressive apparatus against their wellbeing because the state is not fulfilling its own part of the social contract, which requires them to protect the citizens and guide them in their aspirations. This unfortunate situation has laid the foundation for protest and anti-establishment writings in post-colonial societies – especially in Africa. Since literature, as a semiotic resource, is coterminous with its socio-political context, this attitude of the state has drawn inimical criticism from key postcolonial African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mongo Beti, and Nadine Gordimer. Using Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo, this essay shows the relationship between state-terrorism and the traumatic conditions of the citizens in contemporary Africa. From the perspective of trauma theory, the essay defends the premise that the postcolonial subjects/characters, in the novels under study, are traumatized and depressed because of their continuous victimization by the state. Due to this state-imposed terror and hardship, the citizens are forced to indulge in political agitation, radicalism and violence in response to their destitute and impoverished conditions. (shrink)

This article examines the interplay between contemporary algorithmic security technology and the political theory of the state of exception. I argue that the exception, as both a political and a technological concept, provides a crucial way to understand the power operating through machine learning technologies used in the security apparatuses of the modern state. I highlight how algorithmic security technology, through its inherent technical properties, carries exceptions throughout its political and technological architecture. This leads me to engage with (...) Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics to interrogate the question of ‘ground truth’ in machine learning. I conclude that most machine learning technology asserts identity between itself and bourgeois reality – and thus inherently reinforces and reproduces the relations of domination entailed in that image of the world. However, space still exists for machine learning to operate within spaces of political non-identity, or exceptions to the bourgeois totality, and aid in liberatory politics. (shrink)

Althusser contrasts the Repressive State Apparatus (or RSA) with the Ideological State Apparatus (or ISA). His favored example of the ISA is the school, because it trains citizens in the virtues of work and patriotism as well as inculcating, by precept and discipline, the necessary attitudes and skills for fulfilling the roles assigned to them by their social class in the capitalist..

No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in For Marx (...) (1965), and Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with Lenin and Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship. This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science. Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist." Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history. (shrink)

The governments of China, India, and the United Kingdom are unanimous in their belief that bioinformatics should supply the link between basic life sciences research and its translation into health benefits for the population and the economy. Yet at the same time, as ambitious states vying for position in the future global bioeconomy they differ considerably in the strategies adopted in pursuit of this goal. At the heart of these differences lies the interaction between epistemic change within the scientific community (...) itself and the apparatus of the state. Drawing on desk-based research and thirty-two interviews with scientists and policy makers in the three countries, this article analyzes the politics that shape this interaction. From this analysis emerges an understanding of the variable capacities of different kinds of states and political systems to work with science in harnessing the potential of new epistemic territories in global life sciences innovation. (shrink)

Conventional historical and popular accounts tend to emphasize sharp polarities between empires and nation-states. While an empire is traditionally associated with conquests, slavery, political inequalities, economic exploitation and the wars of yesteryear, a nation-state is understood to be the only legitimate and viable form of large-scale territorial organization today. This article challenges such interpretations by focusing on the organizational and ideological continuities between the imperial and the nation-state models of social order. In particular, I focus on the role (...) coercive and ideological apparatuses as well as the transformation of micro-solidarities play in the formation of polities over long periods of time. I argue that although empires and nation-states are different ideal types of polity they are highly compatible and as such prone to metamorphosing into each other. More specifically I explore how, when and why specific coercive-organizational, ideological and micro-interactional processes make this periodic historical metamorphosis possible. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that (...) a series of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception. (shrink)

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates. What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The (...) rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France. (shrink)

It is inquired how much an observer can ascertain of the quantum state of a system of which he and his measuring apparatus form a part; how much, for example, observers like ourselves can ascertain of the quantum state of the Universe. It turns out that no practicable experiment (and: perhaps, no experiment whatever) can establish that that state is not the vacuum. Some of the implications of this curious result are discussed.

When considering the possibility of intervening in nature to aid suffering nonhuman animals, we can ask about moral philosophy, which concerns the actions of individuals, or about political philosophy, which concerns the apparatus of the state. My focus in this paper is on the latter, and, in particular, the proposal from Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka that nonhuman animals should be offered sovereignty rights over their territories. Such rights, among other things, seriously limit the occasions on which we (...) might intervene in the affairs of the sovereign “community” in question, even if such intervention is in the interests of some of its members. In this paper, I first outline Donaldson and Kymlicka’s proposal as well as (what I call) the failed state objection – the suggestion that, if nonhuman animals are to be considered sovereign, then their “communities” are failed states. I then critically examine Donaldson and Kymlicka’s responses to the failed state objection, arguing that they fail. However, I claim that the failed state objection, even if successful, is not fatal for Donaldson and Kymlicka’s account of nonhuman sovereignty, and that the objection could be read as an internal critique of their project. There are at least two ways that this could be so: First, we could retain a sovereignty account but nonetheless argue for day-to-day intervention to alleviate suffering in nature, or, second, we could argue that though nonhuman animals live in failed states, there are other good reasons to oppose day-to-day intervention. In closing, I compare Donaldson and Kymlicka’s claims about sovereignty to another recent proposal, namely, John Hadley’s account of nonhuman animals as property holders. I suggest that the two proposals are not so far apart, but suggest that neither is appropriate for immediate implementation. Instead, the focus of activists keen to deploy political tools to aid those nonhuman animals suffering in nature should be on changing the ways that nonhuman animals are perceived and treated more generally. On the simplest level, this means adopting veganism and encouraging those around us to do the same. (shrink)