4 - The state as cultural monolith

Summary

In the previous chapter we saw how the state through its policing and security provision can be a powerful mechanism for the pursuit of special interests. The concern was with how certain general features of the security provision function of states are conducive to the articulation, consolidation and reinforcement of various asymmetries of power and forms of prejudice. In the present chapter we want to consider a complementary critique – one that is implicit in much scepticism about state policing but which finds less explicit theoretical expression than the other variants of scepticism considered in part I. This critique is concerned not with the state as machinery for the reinforcement of inequality and the amplification of bias generated elsewhere in the social and economic domain, but rather with the state as a site of cultural production in its own right, capable of generating meanings and of promoting orthodoxies of a certain type. Of course, the distinction between the state as material enforcer and as cultural initiator is sometimes artificial and never clear-cut. Frequently, as we will see, the state's ideological involvement in mobilizing or sustaining certain beliefs and sensibilities is in close synergy with its repressive function. To borrow another phrase from the old Marxist lexicon – the autonomy of the state from basic socio-economic forces and relations is only ever relative. Just as, in the argument of the last chapter, the forms of domination originating beyond the state will frequently rely upon the state and its security apparatus for their entrenchment or stabilization, so too the forms of meaning generated by the state and its security apparatus always owe something to broader social and economic pressures.