The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State

Notes

Notes Introduction: The Lyricism of the State 1. Notable exceptions include Aretxaga’s ‘‘Maddening States,’’ Taussig’s notion of the state maleficium in The Nervous System, and Mbembe’s consideration of the banality of Cameroonian state power in On the Postcolony. 2. Timothy Mitchell provides a historical account of how the state lost favor as an object of study in the social sciences. In the 1950s, he notes, U.S. social scientists rejected the term ‘‘state’’ because they could not agree upon its definition. Focusing on the state, they argued, also often resulted in casting other political processes outside the critical lens. Mitchell argues that this turn away from the state was also a question of disciplinary survival. The relation between political science and political power had shifted in the 1950s and political scientists had to reassert their indispensability to government policy officials. They turned from the study of the state to the study of society, expanding its field of inquiry to incorporate questions traditionally asked by anthropologists, ‘‘pushing [their] investigation into the meticulous examination of the activities of political groups, the behavior of social actors, even the motivations of individual psyches’’ (Mitchell 1999, 78). This politically motivated shift in method resulted in the obscuring of the limits of the political system. As social scientists’ field of inquiry expanded, seemingly without boundaries , it became increasingly difficult to distinguish among politics, society, the economy, and culture. In the following decades, this border confusion led in part to the reclamation of the state as not only an object of study, but also as the central entity of any analysis of power. This shift also marked a change in strategic thinking. Within the field of political science, many prominent thinkers held that the United States could not exercise its influence in the third world without fostering statist cultures. Additionally , in most Western countries, the state had endured in mainstream politics: despite the shift away from the state in 1950s academia, political speech had continued to feature the state and debate its proper role in the economy and society. Because of these renewed disciplinary and strategic emphases, the state and its conceptual aspects reemerged as a legitimate problem in the 1970s. This new generation of political scientists and sociologists considered the state as not only the central site of power, but also an autonomous entity, distinct from society, the economy, and culture. Two challenges to this schema then emerged. First, Foucault 163 164 Notes to pages – argued that power did not emanate from the centralized site of the state but rather was dispersed throughout society, working on the micrological level. Second, attention to globalization and transnational flows of capital resulted in the downgrading of the state’s power. These latter studies cast nation-states as shells of their former selves. In the 1980s and ’90s, sociologists and political scientists, such as Mitchell, began to resituate the state within their studies of modern power. Their works have demonstrated the enduring hold that the state form has over the ways societies organize themselves and the ways that state practices produce hegemonic identities and senses of belonging that are felt by individuals to be uniquely theirs. To paraphrase Mitchell, as an object of study, the state refuses to disappear (1991, 77). 3. I rely on the term ‘‘fantasy,’’ rather than imagination, because I wish to connote the creation of both conscious as well as unconscious scenarios. 4. Inspired by Foucault, Mitchell argues that the separation between the individual and the institution is an effect. However, like other political-science approaches, Mitchell’s analysis ignores a crucial aspect of state power: how it feels and how it functions on the level of fantasy. While nimbly framing the complex nature of modern power, Mitchell does not consider state subjects’ interiority. That is, he does not take into account subjects’ experience of the state nor the ways that they imagine it. . An Imperial Origin Story: Aloof Rule in Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm 1. J. A. Hobson, Hannah Arendt, Eric Hobsbawm, and Elleke Boehmer have identified this period as the era of high imperialism. This era starts with the Berlin Conference and ends in 1914 with the start of World War I. 2. In King Solomon’s Mines, Haggard’s narrator Allan Quatermain selfconsciously aestheticizes the South African coastal landscape from the side of a ship as he approaches, fixing it as a scene to analyze, absorb, and enjoy: It is...