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i'm good with most of the elements listed above.
one thing that's kinda interesting, i think anyway, is what we're talking about when we say "the state"--it really isn't obvious. for example, one way of referring to the period from ww2 through the early 1970s is "fordism"---i've probably mentioned this before, but maybe you've heard the term---this in the regulation school sense as a way to describe the form of capitalism that took shape during that period, and which mutated into "flex accumulation' when mutated into "globalizing capitalism" and so forth. anyway, one of the main structural characteristics of fordism was networks of overlapping transnational institutions that functioned to stabilise nation-state levels of capitalist organization---imf/wolrd bank; nato seato etc.---within nation-states, a parallel movement took place, such that you had any number of mechanisms on the order of that which shuts down stock trade if there's a drop of more than 500 points in a day i think--not explicitly regulatory, governance in the sense of a governor on a motor, state institutions that are invisible in a sense as state institutions...
many of these mechanisms remain operative even as the form of capitalism has mutated--largely as it turns out by moving outside the nation-state as an organizational horizon (this requires lots of changes, but you can sum it up that way)...
another version of the same question: state social services are bureaucracies that organize the world in ways that mirror how information is processed within the bureaucracy itself, and which by their normal operations impose that organization on users because they have to know a minimum about it in order to get services---but that organization extends beyond the interactions inside of office buildings into the way in which aspects of everyday life is understood. so what is the state? is it the administrative apparatus? well, that apparatus exists as a function of a particular rationality, and it' operations extend the reach of that rationality--and the administration is not an end in itself, but is a way of doing something, and that something comes with the way it is organized--so what is the state? what it organizes, what it does or the people who do the organizing? do you "enter" the state when you walk into an office building and leave it when you leave?
when we're talking about the state doing things, what are we actually talking about?
just wondering.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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