Rethinking State and People

The notion of state is internally vague. This vagueness is carried over to political theory which reproduces it. To treat state as an entity that can be talked about is to participate in a mythology which reproduces the myth of state that enmeshes people in a misrecognized relation of power. A statist view is one that already legitimates it by recognizing it. Our ontological commitment to state is not preceded by a cognitive act, but vice versa. On the other hand, this commitment is an expression of the ways in which we come to terms with the experience of power, an intricate, complex relation of power, in our social existence.

In this section I propose to provide an analytic frame work that locates the phenomenon of state in a grid formed by the three major imperatives in the life-world of people: territory, project and mentality. Territory is the condition for the possession of natural resources. Projects cover both the production of resources for material life and the production of material life itself. Mentality refers to the whole of software (mental programming) which renders all projects and activities ensuing from them meaningful.

Territory

Control over territory is a pre-requisite for uninterrupted access to natural resources and making them available for projects. State is said to be partly identified in terms of territorial control made possible by brute force. There is no reason, other than the military power, for the continuous existence of marked territories all over the globe. This therefore also marks territorial control systems as distinct states. In other words, state as territorial control system legitimizes itself. The erasure of territories takes effect through the exercise of military power as the latter also affects the marking of territories. Territorial control is directed both outward and inward: outwardly, resisting the expansion of other territories in to one’s own; inwardly, defending the control of the territory against other internal contestants. That is, it tends to maintain the status quo, and military might is essential for this. If we are not already persuaded by a statist view, the states which have historically come down to us in that name, have autonomy with these features. It is a movement of power, human beings’ territorially warped interactive life generated, which they do not know how to get rid of; or it is a lingering historical habit that dies hard, until of course a transformative relation overcomes the resistance of the territorial imperative.

While the two-pronged territorial imperative continued to be decisive in the self-legitimization of state, history of modern nation-states witnessed a change in the equation between the territorial imperative and other imperatives of the life-world. First, state tended increasingly to identify itself with the society, in the sense that it started reflecting the mentality. Second, it began participating in the projects. It is this convergence of the imperatives, with the state as its face, which social sciences received as an un-thought category identified as state. State’s interest in the production of material resources and material life was betrayed when in the nineteenth century Europe it gradually yielded to the demand for non-intervention in the affairs of the market. A clear practical separation of economy and state coincided with the emergence of two separate disciplines of economics and political science. These two pairs legitimized each other. But state did not betray its interest in the projects. Its separation in terms of a laisez fair principle amounted to protectionism. Under its inward territorial control a market-centered production of material life got matured. My point is, where it is not explicitly expressed, the state as an un-refined territorial control remained latent in the projects carried out by human beings. Explicitly, it introduced, withdrew, and modified laws that affected the arrangements with in the social world. Implicitly or explicitly, the state seemed very close to the brute force rather than having been undergone refinement due to its upgrading to nation-state status. The point is, the social theory should recognize in state an hypertrophy of social distribution of power, which cannot be reduced to a concept of legitimized state-power anchored in the politics of nation-sate, democracy and representation. The persistence of the state with its two-pronged territorial control should not be treated as natural. Its misrecognition as natural is a consequence of the statist view in which nation is equal to society and society is equal to state.

Project

By project is meant broadly the production and reproduction of material life. The relationships people enter into in order to accomplish the projects implicate them in multifarious distribution of power. That is, the acquisition of natural resources, the production of goods, and the production of means of producing goods, all imply that human beings enter into different relations with each other. This will involve preventing (others from acquiring or taking possession of resources from oneself), trading (in which others’ being—their time and labor is exchanged for different forms of goods) and reproducing (i.e. the systematization of this relation). Preventing got to be socially sanctioned and legally entrenched for which both mentality and the inwardly directed territorial control are required. The modern nation-states have evolved elaborate preventive mechanisms which have made this relation appear natural. Without this, the acquisition or possession of natural resources and goods produced out of them would be defenseless and the relation precarious. This state support is not only non-natural and social, but also arbitrary, which derives its legitimacy in the final instance from the military force of the state. This applies to the systemic reproduction of the relations of power too. Trading is only a frame, with in which people do not just pledge their bodies to the complex network of the production of material life, but gives forth their whole being-in-time. But when this trading frame is warped on to the preventive power grid, along with the systemic reproduction of it, the production of material life for them becomes a perpetual mortgaging of their being. Recent trends show that it is not as much the production of material resources as the production of material life itself that occupies the center stage in the economy. Designing material life itself became a world-wide market. In other words, human beings’ being-in-the-world is designed; in that venture they have already mortgaged their being. With their bodies pledged and being designed externally, human beings find themselves in a situation in which their projects cannot retrieve their meaning. The point here again is that the state has assumed a power over the projects of the people in that its presence and interventions gave a specific direction to them. That is, it is not as a natural course of events that projects involve people in certain power relations. Therefore, the political, as in the case of territory, is not natural but arbitrary, here too.

Mentality

In no other aspects of social life is this arbitrariness evident as it is in the imperative of mentality. Most of us are familiar with a term that is used in connection with recent modern computing technology, i.e. software. Analogically, we can regard the human brain—the neural network—as hardware and speaking, thinking, reasoning, feeling etc. structured as software. If we extend the analogy to the realm of social existence, then social relations involving bodies, their actions, their spatio-temporal distributions, the tools they use etc. can form the hardware. Corresponding software in social existence is what I mean by mentality. It comprises or implies all the subtle as well as the gross programming required for social computing. This analogy works better, if we concede that mentality is a site of contested programming, i.e. there is no settled programs, rigorous recursive functions. On the contrary, there is an open possibility of programs diversifying themselves in to myriad evolving patterns. However, in actual social existence, only a finite set of programs gets implemented. In other words mentality is vague, complex and evolving, but actualized in terms of certain specific power relations. We can also imagine different genres of mentality, but all of which may be subjected to shifts and turns in their movements, in more or less similar ways. Mentality has both vertical and horizontal movements. Mentality as a whole moves, as in tectonic shifts, creating new genres, changing or destroying existing ones, in its movement.

My present purpose is not to provide a theory of mentality for an integrated social theory. The aim is to show how mentality, in coordination with other two imperatives, defines the character of the political in human social existence. We have noticed that the outward and inward movement of territorial control relies on brute force. But under nation-states, inward directed control now was transmogrified considerably. State is now seen as representing the people in the territory. Instead of controlling the people the state is now said to be under people’s control. That is, the internal control has been turned upside down. The prerequisite is that people become a nation. This, in other words, is to get people united in its mentality. What was involved in this transmogrification? The self-legitimacy of the territorial control is apparently replaced by a legitimating act of the people residing in that territory. Whether under monarchic, autocratic or democratic rule the governments of nation-states are supposed to reflect the will of the people. That is, the need of representation cuts across different types of state. In a democratic state this is difficult to achieve because of the bitter contestation for representation. But in all types of state legitimacy is to be obtained through representation. If king is a representative of god then the latter reflects the mentality of people. A nation-state is a specific version of the religious, when the government represents this religion and this religion reflects the mentality of the people. In other words, democracy is not a defining feature of representational politics of modern nation-states. However, the crucial point lies elsewhere. The state’s movement from the thin self-legitimation of territorial control to a legitimation from a source encompassing the whole nation is sufficient to transform the practice of governance. The inward gaze of the territorial imperative now fixes on the population. Control now does not disappear, only that it assumes a new significance in governance. The strategies of the state are to govern the mentality of the population in order to ensure the legitimacy of the government. Governmentality is now governing the mentality, through what Foucault called pastoral power and by brute force. Does this mean that the inward control directed at the internal contestants totally disappear? It has transferred to the sphere of mentality and assumed strategies that suite it, but without relinquishing the brute force. To obtain a mentality sufficient to ensure legitimation the government has to engage in producing and reproducing such mentality through a control of attitudes, thoughts, and values of the people. This is largely done by engaging actively in signification. Since culture is mentality, government becomes an active agent in the production of culture.

Just as territorial imperative and mentality are mutually implicated, mentality gets enmeshed with projects too. This is not done just by means of producing mentality conducive for social sanction of preventive mechanism (mentioned earlier) state indulges in. This is of course a nexus in which the three imperatives are mutually implicated. More importantly, the designing and producing material life required to generate new attitudes to life, creating new images of life that can become the mentality of the people. Since being of human is primarily interpretative and housed in semiosis this serves as the power grid on to which mentality is warped. That is, the evolving pattern enters into the depth of human’s being-in-the-world.

State and Representation Today

The economic geography of the globe is said to have undergone a transformation during the last decade, the cause of which can be primarily attributed to the emergence in to prominence of international organizations of finance and trade which accompanied the cross border movement of capital, labor and goods. Most significant and empirically confirmed phase of this change is the increasing acceptance of neo-liberal policy cutting across nation-states. Measures like privatization, cutting down of public expenditure, marketisation, labor flexibility, thinning down of public assets etc formed part of the neo-liberal policy. Nation-states which are supposed to be political communities with sovereignty in the sense that the policy decisions are not made under external pressure, are now said to be under pressure, or already conceded, to implementing policies that conform to neo-liberalism. This could be characterized as projects outgrowing territorial control. Although, projects had outgrown the territorial before, i.e. for over a hundred years or so in the past, giving rise to colonial control, it is in an environment in which the former colonies emerged as independent nation-states that this assumes significance. The inward territorial control under nation-state systems is now a government which is not regarded just a manager of the socio-economic life of the people it represents, but as a legitimate body for taking or implementing decisions in behalf of the people which will affect their life. What happened when projects outgrow this inward territorial control? Projects within a territory, as has been noticed earlier, have already been protected and promoted by the territorial control by way of preventive mechanism, and other interventional measures. When projects outgrow the territorial control, then the latter will naturally follow projects because of its protectionism. How? The policies conducive to this outgrowth should extend across the border. The corporations are not themselves policy-making bodies. They look up to the governments: pleading, persuading, threatening or negotiating through whatever means and however complex a manner. In other words, the projects have already claimed part of the identity of the territorial control or its nation-state version. Outgrowing projects inevitably implicate nation-states, therefore, in an agreement with other nation-states, on how the interests of the projects could be safe-guarded. It is an agreement because projects, at the global level needed the same protection abroad as it enjoyed at home. That the projects among themselves have unequal advantages is another story. The outward directed territorial control looked terribly stupid and irrelevant, when some prominent expressions of human projects have outgrown territorial imperative. Some studies show that this de-territorialization of some selected human projects are also accompanied by a global mentality. This is not surprising: since projects partly define the identity of nation-states, de-territorialization of projects is reaching out of nation-states towards forming one single state. Merging of territorial controls might be a possibility just as business merger is. But global mentality did not imply any thing resembling this. It involved human beings who take part in the production and consumption of material life across the border, thanks to the outgrowing project endeavors. This indicates a change in the mentality. Perceptions of certain elitist and younger generation describe the global mentality as it works today.

State as heir of or a form of survival of the territorial imperative is therefore not particularly affected by neo-liberal movement. It is an active participant in that movement. As for the nation-states there is the problem of governance of a population who do not directly, and a quite large number of them not even indirectly, take part in the de-territorializing movement of the new economy. But the government, which is the inward-directed territorial control in the nation-state context, by implementing neo-liberal policies, makes them pay for its own doing. That is, the bitter measures the government takes, directly or indirectly, affect the day to day projects of a large number of people. The dissent is anticipated. It is at this juncture that government exercises the control of mentality, i.e. indulges in governance proper. Agents who are actively engaged in the project endeavors with global consequence themselves either in coordination with government or independently take part in the production of mentality to this end. Television commercials and promotional culture in general send images of new styles of life which are meant to persuade and convert common people. Such efforts to produce mentality conducive to smoothly implementing, i.e. with out creating large scale dissent, may not always be successful, especially when the state concerned is a small player in the global game. Moreover, people do not normally trust their nation-state government. All governments, then, in order to neutralize the dissent, always needed a third power, a party, a community organization or leadership of a collective which could be mobilized to do this. A government does not directly represent the people; it does it through an organization which mediates between people and the government. It is through the existence of such non-governmental bodies that nation-states ensure their legitimation as a nation and feels the pulse of the mentality of the people from time to time. Looking at it from another angle, the inward directed territorial control derives the justification of this control from the unity of nation in the environment of modern nation-states. However, such unity derived from the organization of a socio-economic polity is insufficient for the stability of a government which had to adopt and implement policies that might lead to wide spread dissent among its people. Mentality as was said earlier is a contested realm. It is not just that there are so many players in the contest, but that reproduction of mentality is an extremely difficult thing in modern societies when coupled with the complexity of the non-linear relations among multiple layers of inputs and outputs. This renders any specific directionality of mentality almost impossible. The symbols and signs and their orderings, which can be both media and message at the same time, themselves have a tendency to drift. Therefore, in its horizontal and vertical movement, it tends to yield unpredictable self-styled copies by erasing the original or making it impossible to retrieve the original, thereby exposing it to manipulation. Thus, while it is true that mentality moves at long intervals in tectonic-like waves, it can also be subjected to short lived waves from time to time due to manipulations. Politicians intuit this possibility much better than intellectuals and they make use of this possibility. Government and politicians in consonance with all kinds of media can throw up issues continuously so that the policy oriented dissents or critical mentality can be perpetually displaced. This need not follow from a displacement strategy of the government; nor needs it to be deliberately brought about by the work of politicians. The homogeneity of selves can always be mobilized through some semiotic techniques. In the same population inhabit different, often mutually incompatible, homogeneous group of selves, resulting in a total chaos of selves. People are not divided into communities and classes. They are divided across communities and classes etc. in terms of tendencies to form heterogeneous colonies of selves. It will be presumptuous to characterize such homogeneous group mentality as identity. In fact, identity is a most unfortunate concept that entered the recent social theory. Identity is a symptom, in which people as a group claim to have self-sameness and politically make effort to realize it. But the fragmented homogeneities are to be strategically mobilized to obtain what is self-claimed as identities. The natural tendencies of these selves are to subside till some busy semiotic activities activate this into active mentality, so that it sends tectonic waves through the multilayered mentality. When governance fails to strike a balance, in its management of polity arrangement, i.e. of between the movement of projects and the day to day life of common people, it necessarily turns to the production of mentality. Repertoire of power constituting colonies of selves mediated by signs is always laid open vulnerably to any manipulation in polity life. Its rationality is neither liner nor rational.