John Protevi - Edges of the State

Forerunners: Ideas First

Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

From the University of Minnesota Press

John Protevi

Edges of the State

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John Protevi

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

Edges of the State by John Protevi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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To Kate, always.

The state does not have an essence. The state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power. The state is nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of a perpetual statification [tatisation] or perpetual statifications [tatisations] in the sense of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centers, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on.

M ICHEL F OUCAULT, The Birth of Biopolitics

I N THE ABOVE PASSAGE, Foucault de-essentializes the state by emphasizing its processual character; it is not a thing but a modification of governmentality practices. (Governmentality is a mode of power; as such it is an attempt to structure the possible field of action of others but in the mode of conduct of conduct [Foucault 2000, 341], that is, leading, inducing, or incentivizing rather than commanding or terrorizing or other coercive means of shaping the field of action.) Hence, Foucault recommends we do not start by analyzing the essence of the state and then trying to deduce current practices of state governmentality as accidents accruing to the substance defined by that essence; rather we should look to incessant transactions which modify preexisting practices. Foucault continues with his nominalist antiessentialism: The state has... no interior. The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities (Foucault 2008, 77).

Although in the above passage Foucault is writing about the shift in Europe from multiple feudal and religious practices to centralized administrative state functions, nonetheless we can generalize the notion of statification as the production of state-form social relations in any context. In this way, we can see statification in the anthropological sense as the centralizing and hierarchizing inherent in the putting into the state-form of social relations of nonstate societies such as egalitarian forager bands and chief-led autonomous villages.

The task of this book, then, is to use the generalized notion of statification to shift perspective and, instead of looking, as almost all political philosophers do, for the criteria by which states are justified, look rather at the edges of statification: their breakdowns and attempts to repair them, and their encounters with nonstate peoples, both their predecessors and their neighbors, those who were incorporated into states, and those who flee and fight them.

To get at what happens at the edges of the state, I call upon anthropology, political philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, child-development psychology, and other fields to look at states as projects of constructing bodies politic where the civic and the somatic intersect, where small- and large-scale social relations are made to fit with individual and group affective cognitive structures via subjectification practices.

In my investigation of state-formation processes, I take my ontological framework from Deleuze and Guattari and from Manuel DeLanda. I identify multiplicities, or dynamic interacting processes with critical takeoff points in multiple registers: temporal (evolutionary, developmental, and intergenerational), social (group dynamics, family dynamics, caretaker dynamics), and somatic (neural and endocrinological patterning). Not only are there dynamic interactions in the processes in each of these registers, there are loops among registers, via processes of niche construction and epigenetic inheritance discussed in Developmental Systems Theory (Oyama, Griffiths, and Gray 2001). If we adopt the most radical interpretations of those phenomena, the result of these loops is that bodies politic are constructed not only via geneculture interaction bringing changes to DNA sequences, but also via heritable changes to gene expression pathways provoked by socialization processes constituting historically variable niches (Protevi 2009 and 2013).

In this wide-ranging materialist ontology, I use the same basic concepts of self-organizing systems in both natural and social registers. This enables me to couple the political and the bodily, to connect the social and the somatic. Basically, Deleuze and Guattari let us go above, below, and alongside the subject: above to geo-eco-politics, below to bioculture, and alongside to socio-technical assemblages. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a crystallization or resolution of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.

A bodies politic approach sees human nature as biocultural; by connecting the social and the somatic we avoid the extremes of social constructivism and genetic determinism. In a formula, human nature has evolved to be open enough to our nurture that it becomes a sort of second nature; there is, however, a default, though not failsafe, predisposition to prosociality, to being emotionally invested in social partners and patterns, to the point of bearing risks to help others and to reinforce practices. In imbricating the social and the somatic, a bodies-politic framework allows us to see that the reproduction of social systems requires producing (somatic) bodies whose affective-cognitive patterns and triggers fit the functional needs of the system. In turn, such patterning enables social systems that direct material flows. I think this allows both an emergence perspective such that social systems are emergent from constituents but are immanent to the system they form with them, and a concretion perspective such that individuals are crystallizations of systemsor more prosaically, we grow up in systems that form us.