When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi
When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi
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国家什么时候有？
DOI：
10.1080/24694452.2016.1261680
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发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
3.9
通讯作者：
D. Ghertner
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
D. Ghertner
本文试图将时间性问题插入国家地理分析的核心。它通过在印度德里的贫民窟和所谓的未经授权的殖民地进行广泛的实地调查，来描述那些生活在国家边缘的人如何运用一种拓扑敏感性来接近、影响和“把握”国家。通过关注这些居民每天为确保水、电和建筑许可所做的努力的时间节奏，文章提出了两个拓扑图形，它们超越了狭义的空间隐喻，将状态解读为一个固定的、等级规模的实体，或者是一个平坦的、完全可延展的组合，没有相应的空间秩序或历史。它们是拓扑状态和自身之外的状态。对拓扑国家的分析集中在居民和官僚机构关键节点之间如何建立实时连接，产生国家形式的瞬间重构，使低级国家行为体即使在维持官僚等级制度的情况下也能获得权力。对外部状态的分析侧重于水工程师和市政官员的日常行动如何挑战将状态作为具有内外表面的常见概念映射。总而言之，这些数字揭示了一种暂时熟练的政治代理模式，它对时局可能性和直接联系开放，但往往被视为一种短视的政治倾向，是穷人和边缘阶级屈服于裙带政治的症状。
This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of the state. It does so by drawing on extended fieldwork in slums and so-called unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, to describe how those who live on the margins of the state employ a topological sensibility in accessing, influencing, and “timing” the state. By attending to the temporal rhythms of these residents' everyday efforts to secure water, electricity, and building permission, the article proposes two topological figures that move beyond narrower spatial metaphors that read that state either as a fixed, hierarchically scaled entity or as a flat, wholly malleable assemblage without consequential spatial order or historicity. These are the topological state and the state outside itself. The analysis of the topological state centers on how real-time connections are forged between residents and key nodes in the bureaucracy, producing momentary reconfigurations of state form that allow low-level state actors to capture authority even as bureaucratic hierarchy is maintained. The analysis of the state outside itself focuses on how the routine actions of water engineers and municipal officers challenge the common conceptual mapping of the state as a surface with an inside and outside. Taken together, these figures reveal a temporally adept mode of political agency open to conjunctural possibilities and proximate connections but often dismissed as a near-sighted political disposition symptomatic of the poor and marginal classes' submission to clientalist politics.