The state of things: state history and theory reconfigured

Abstract

This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse problems by different means in multiple locations. So, educating children is not continuous with governing colonies even though both are necessary to nineteenth-century states. For this reason, states use logistical means of coordination to link sites, and they make the power of the state seem unitary even though the exercise of state power is not.Keywords Assemblages . Bureaucracy . Infrastructure . Logistics . Materiality . Political culture In spite of efforts to rethink the character of states and how they operate, most theories of the state still treat it as a unitary actor. But it is not. States are assemblages of the active agencies of many and often conflicting people and objects in a myriad of sites from prisons to schools, military bases and highways. They are held together, sometimes very uncertainly, at particular key sites and through the actions of key actors and processes, human and nonhuman Joyce (2013; Joyce and Bennett 2010). We therefore approach the state in terms of the material processes and practices it employs to explain its complex and emergent forms. The state is an assemblage that is distinguished as a

Making climate risks work: Governmentality and “foreign residence” in British life assurance, 1840–1940

“…Like empire, life assurance depended on the production and circulation of paperwork and on effective bureaucratic practice (Joyce & Mukerji, 2017; Ogborn, 2007). Dan Bouk notes that in the US context, “By the turn of the twentieth century most applicants never set foot in a life insurers' home office – instead they arrived as pieces of paper, via the mail” (2015, p. 57).…”

The Archives Made Me Do It

“…Archives themselves are logistical tools of administration-little tools of knowledge (Becker and Clark 2001;Joyce and Mukerji 2017). Their documents serve as immutable mobiles (Latour 2005), whose circulation is used to forge official agreements.…”

“…Their documents serve as immutable mobiles (Latour 2005), whose circulation is used to forge official agreements. Because they are impersonal, they can bridge social gaps-even allowing experts without social standing to work with noble officials by insulating them with papers (Joyce 2009;Joyce and Mukerji 2017;Mukerji 2011). Documents also function as tools of surveillance collected and used to subordinate people to the state and its rules.…”

The State as God: On Bourdieu's Political Theology

“…This argument is developed by Joyce and Mukerji (2017) in a work on state theory informed by Bourdieu's emphasis on the state's production of a corporeal schemata, a bodily hexis, which is imprinted on the citizenry. 'The power of the state is mostly experienced outside discourse and below the level of conscious awareness, ' Joyce and Mukerji (2017, 3) write, centering instead on a particularized habitus, which contributes 'strongly to [the state's] naturalization, the perception of it as a single, overarching "thing."'…”