ABSTRACT
Following Foucault’s methodological critique of the constitutionalist position through, this chapter discusses a body of social and political research which is organised around a different way of approaching empirical studies of states and governmental practices. That body of work methodologically foregrounds construction not constitution. Within it, the state remains a significant focus of social and political inquiry but this is a state that is recognised as possessing no unambiguous centre, no clearly identifiable loci of control, no core architectures, no permanent, fixed boundaries, territorially or organisationally, no settled modes of operation, no clear functional characteristics and no ultimately definable purpose or telos. Instead of treating Weber’s ideal-type as a methodological solution (the constitutionalist position), the ideal-type is treated as posing the problem. Rather than use the ideal-type as a definition of the state, the aim is to deconstruct the models of statehood it projects. This is achieved by bracketing representations (or perhaps better, various acts of representation) of the state as, following Weber, the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 1946b [1919]: 78), the foremost political institution of civil society, and exploring the conditions of their success. In doing so, researchers problematise these idealised representations to demonstrate that they represent the outcome of, and are made possible by, historically, socially and culturally contingent processes and practices in and through which the territoriality, legitimacy, authority and power of the state – Leviathan’s dread properties – have taken shape, found voice and been given material form.
There are two main variants within the field of studies which take this approach: those which examine the historical emergence of fields of state practices and those which ethnographically examine the workings of the state in the present. In the first camp we have studies of governmentality, the state effect and legibility projects, such as those undertaken by Philip Corrigan, Derek Sayer, Nikolas Rose, Peter Miller, Timothy Mitchell and James Scott (and paralleled by historical-conceptual work in philosophy such as that of Quentin Skinner among others), and in the second we have a diverse body of work by anthropologists such as Michael Taussig, James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Begoña Aretxaga, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Veena Das and Matthew Hull as well as ‘ethnographic’ works by archaeologists such as Bruce Routledge and Norman Yoffee and the political scientists Mark Bevir and R.A.W. Rhodes. I will argue these can be separated methodologically and not just by focus. The first kind of study begins with specific claims advanced by the state and tracks backwards, tracing them to the diffuse sets of sites, personnel, bodies of knowledge and objects and technologies from which they originated. The second kind of studies begins with specific claims and tracks forwards, following the social and cultural careers, trajectories, ‘biographies’, etc., of those claims once they have been formulated and advanced. Where the purpose of the first kind of study is to find out how various acts of naming the state as impersonal power, Hobbes’ ‘Mortall God’, are made possible and to investigate what configurations they rest on, the purpose of the second is to find out what happens once the state has been accepted as such. These contrasting methodological strategies are used to determine what it means to talk of the state in particular socio-political contexts.
