A bit ago I posted an entry on “traction and feasibility”:/2006/08/28/traction-and-feasibility/ and was about to do a follow up when I got distracted by crispiness and Latour. But there was a circle I was going to close there and so I thought I’d do it now.

Describing how ‘the Ipili’ became feasible requires an understanding of the way in which a particular individual comes to represent a collectivity. This means doing things like examining how the idea of the group is deployed in different circumstances, ethnogenesis, invention of tradition, politics of representation in both the epistemological and political sense, yadda yadda yadda. We — or at least I and my homies — are all very used to the idea of examining all the clockwork behind the seamless appearence of “ethnic group X”. The achieved nature of ‘the Ipili’ is easy for us to see because we are all used to the idea of ethnogenesis and the complex nature of the recognition of indigenous peoples and their representation by one group or another. But clearly this same account of feasibility could be made of any representative of any big actor. We could think of the state in these terms, for instance. How does ‘the state’ come to appear as a taken-for granted entity?

The reason that I mention all this is its relation to my earlier entry on “spatliazing states”:/2006/08/24/spatializing-states/. The potential problem with Ferguson and Gupta’s approach, it seemed to me, was the way it conflated the metaphorical space people used to imagine the state, the use of these metaphors amongst people to organize themselves as representatives of ‘the state’, and finally the analysts judgment about the success of these metaphors to structure actions such that ‘The State’ as an achievement might be said to be controlling a sector of space (for instance, a country or a city) at any particular moment of time. Another way of saying this is that these sorts of analyses of ‘The States’ relationship with indigenous people are asymmetric in that the work that goes into examining how ‘the local’ or ‘the indigenous’ or ‘the grassroots’ or whoever is intimately analyzed while the achievement of becoming ‘The State’ or ‘The Global’ is taken for granted.

Perhaps I am picking unfairly on Gupta and Ferguson here, since it is a little unclear what exactly they intend to do — on the one hand they want to thematize a previously taken-for-granted ‘governmentality’ (again, the sexy language is an issue here). On the other hand they seem to use ‘the State’ as an unproblematically existing actor in their narratives. A better target is James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like A State” which attributes the faculty of vision to an entity which, strictly speaking, lacks eyes. Although the complex processes by which local people are ‘made legible’ is demonstrated, the process by which ‘The State’ itself is made a feasible actor (there’s the word from the previous entry — feasible) is rarely touched on. We have no account of the middlemen who make up ‘the State’.

(Of course given Scott’s left-populism ‘the locals’ get a bit romanticized as well. This is why Scott is wrong in thinking his approach is Foucaultian — he imagines the vision of the state failing (or succeeding) to capture the rich organic texture of life ‘on the ground’ as if it were something which could be accurately discerned, while Foucault insists that the gaze is productive and elicits certain forms of subjectivies rather than identifying preexisting ones.)

If we followed Maia and Latour’s advice and attempted to understand the interaction of local/global forces symmetrically, we’d get a very different way of looking at these issues — one which is, for me anyway, more satisfying in the way that it takes the top off of black boxes with names like ‘The State’ or ‘Global Capital’. A Neoliberalism-Social Studies of Science mashup also has one more feature (if you move on it quickly enough!) — it’s disgustingly sexy and would doubtless help in the quest for tenure!