parikshith_shashikumar Annotations

3. Argument Anatomy: Excluding the Introduction, list out/ identify the key movements of the argument, till conclusion. Each one a few sentences. (If a Book, list out what each chapter/section contributed)

Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 1:03pm
The first two chapters deal with an array of political theory. Besides being where the concepts of political society and civil society are introduced, it key argumentative method expounded here is showing the dislocation of theory and history. This dislocation can also be read like a western trait, as political thinking made in the global south, especially in the case of newly formed independent nation-state India, the incorporation of population groups was written into the state constitution. What must be marked here, is that Chatterjee shows that this incorporation with the date mainframe at the outset does not resolve the differences between the citizen's category and the population's category. This means that make real two types of communities within the logics working state. These working are governmental processes. The combination of the three ideas here,  the realness of history over theoretical trend, the realness of systemically created communicates (civil and political), and the realness of governmentality as an aspect of, but different from the democratic procedure are ruminated upon in the third and final chapter. It is taken forward by how state policies and procedures, such electoral practices invoke and mobilize populations. Chatterjee here drawing attention to how such moves are contradictory to the claims and principles of the nation-state, yet its own propagation requires it to uses such moves. In legitimatizing the presence of such a move within statecraft, Chatterjee goes on to legitimize it at the level of national subjects. He takes the examples of the of  "People’s Welfare Association" whose formational aim is to legitimize a particular squatter settlement, which inherently an illegal communal category. Chatterjee shows that the claims made by the association are in keeping with the governmental notions of populations, using large swaths of marginal categories to identify themselves (refugees, landless people, day laborers, homestead). However, they use unify these populational categories in claiming to be of a singular community, one family.  Populations lack moral status, they are made of subjects whose only deification is the subjecting to a particular category, none of the conditions of populations create a claim to citizenship. However, communities do, as they are moral categories and inherently treat their subjects as value-laden entities claiming district positions. Thus communities have the conditions for citizenship, and here a population is claiming the legal status of a community, through the legitimate avenues of governmental avenues. Chatterjee in the third chapter shows how political society is a means of acknowledging and working with both top-down and bottom-up processes of population mobilization.
The second part of the book takes this argued category and applies it to the situation of globalized mobilization. From terrorist acts, global economic trends, issues of democratic universal values such as secularism, and material development plans, each chapter how's how neoliberal politics though expounding the notions of citizenship consistently mobilizes the category of populations. The key argumentative category in these chapters is the nation. At the level of global trends, nations become both the site of creating populations as well as the device. National history, economic position all becoming tactics in creating and sustaining populations. At the same time creations of such times automatically create communities of the same, sharing the very same tactics that were used in their creation. Chatterjee uses Political Societies to trace the national creation of population and the forming of communities by the same.
What must be emphasized is the book argues for the legitimacy and potential of Political Societies, because of the opposing legitimate status and limitations of civil society. The avenue inhabiting the optimal position within the nation-state, that of citizenship, is unequal in its real condition. Such inequality extends further by maintaining the civil tactics of statecraft and ignoring governmental processes of the same.
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2. Agenda : Thesis, Ideas of Focus, Claims/ Assumptions, Method

Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 1:00pm
The tension between citizens and populations is central to the book. The former are subject of the nation-state, while the latter are objects of the welfare state. However this distinction though conceptually neat plays out very differently on the ground. Chatterjee goes into the logic of its conceptual segregation and the sociobiology of their overlapping in the real world. Moreover, the first point that  Chatterjee strives to make, is that the nation-state creates both these categories. It does for its own proliferation and the resulting reality often feeds into the logic of the state. The extent of this point clashed with the neatly segregated notion. Both notions do agree that nation-state creates the two categories. However, the idea of segregation gives the implication that populations only exist within the parameters of welfare, and that such a category does not play out in the day to day functioning of the nation-state where civil society, as in citizens,  functions. The shift in Chatterjee's argument is to move away from notions of welfare and citizenship and focus on linking the nation-state and governmentality           
Governmentality is shown to be a legitimate aspect of the state functioning simply because it addresses two specific limitations built into the condition of a nation. The first is that the state must find a menses to address those identities that marginal to dominate framework. The key word here is mobilization. To treat all such identities as individual citizens are to lose sight of the fundamental contractions between the dominant and the marginal. Thus the social mobilization incorporates the identities as a population group into the national structure while also keeping the contradiction in focus. The second reason has to to do with limited resources. 
Political society is thus an acknowledgment of the governmental tendencies nation-state. It is also a means of incorporating population groups into proper political thought and consideration. 
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1. Framing : Identify the Concern, Context and Question. Comment on the relation of the three.

Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 12:54pm

The book is a collection of seven lectures divided into two parts. Chapters  1 to 3 make up the first part and are lectures given in November of 2001, at Columbia University. They establish the books key concern, which is unearthing the extent to which governmentality is both a key operational feature of modern optical state and simultaneously neglected aspect within political thought and study. The extent of this assertion comes across in the differentiation of civil and political society.
 The objective of the book is both show and tell. Political society, as being different from civil society, is a real existent community, that is a result of a liberal state, just as much as the category of citizen. The struggle for showing it is linked to the struggle of mobilizing it  (political society) as a feasible concept that can use political scrutiny. The absence of the concept and the effects of such an absence is a major topic of the book.
To be sure, the reason for such an overlooking is not merely placed as theoretical or critical oversite. Rather the problem is located within a reading of history rather than political theory. As Chatterjee notes in the first and second chapters where the question of political mobilization is addressed, the Wests implementation of governance tactics such as in the case of welfare, came into the modern nation-states framework, only after the formulation of civil rights and citizenship. In the case of the global south and it's colonized history, governmentality were the first aspects of the nation-state that were introduced. Thus Democracy's history is of more use to Chatterjee's analysis than its political philosophy. History is key to the whole text, as each lecture, and hence each chapter addresses a particular case. The first section often deals with particular thinkers and the historical significance of their ideas. The second section deals with cases where the political societies within particular state localities interact with global trends of market and politics. History as a key analytical feature that Chatterjee uses, keeps the case's social significance intact. What this also does is change the nature of the argument. The histories make the mainstream political discussion, with its insistence on civil society alone,  flawed. But not through contradictory argument, in implication, the 'show'. The 'tell' is thus becomes a suggestion, the analytical emphases on political society become a negative argument for civil societies and it's demographic capabilities.  

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