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Geoforum 38 (2007) 608–610

Critical Review

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear: Reflections on Seeingthe State (S. Corbridge, G. Williams, M. Srivastava, and R. Veron)

Paul Robbins *, Jennifer L. Rice

University of Arizona, Department of Geography and Regional Development, Harvill Building, 437A Tucson, AZ 85721, United States

Received 13 October 2006

Writing in their 1995 book, Feminism, Postmodernism,

and Development (what now seems a lifetime ago), Marc-hand and Parpart, 1995 summarized a development cri-tique that enrolled all the current momentum of criticalthought, one that held in contempt the ‘‘universal preten-sions of modernity, and the Eurocentric certainty of bothliberal and Marxist development theory,’’ while simulta-neously espousing a nearly utopian vision of developmentthat ‘‘acknowledges difference(s), searches out previouslysilenced voices/knowledges, and recognizes the need to wel-come multiple interpretations and ‘solutions’ to develop-ment problems’’ (Marchand and Parpart, 1995, p. 12).This critique also assumed and adopted a tacit vision ofthe state as a modernist menace, even while failing to givean explicit account of the state itself (indeed the term‘‘state’’ appears nowhere in that book’s index).

Fast forward a decade and the power of this critique hasby no means abated, but the ground has shifted underneathit to a great degree. First, there has been in developmentstudies, a long-delayed theoretical embrace of certain facetsof Michel Foucault’s work, specifically on issues surround-ing governmentality, or ‘‘dispersed practices of govern-ment’’ (Corbridge et al., 2005, p. 5), a concept that youcannot swing a dead modernist without hitting since theturn of the millennium. This approach to the dispersedpractices of governance raises questions about the mono-lithic and crudely modern and colonial character of thestate, and more fundamentally about the ontological statusof the state itself.

Coupled with this has been an explosion of decentral-ized, popularized, and apparently democratic localizedtechnologies of state practice, changing the way real people

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doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.11.017

* Corresponding author.E-mail address: robbins@email.arizona.edu (P. Robbins).

experience and encounter governance (though Agarwal’srecent Environmentality (Agarwal, 2005) suggests that suchtechnologies are actually quite old). The result of this burstof experiment in reform, both symbolic and actual, hasbeen a further reinforcement of the view of developmentas a messy, nondeterministic process that sometimes evenachieves goals of empowerment and sustainability, thoughusually in spite of itself.

Critical scholarship on India has followed much of thesame arc, with development critique emerging into full-blown anti-modernism in the last twenty years. This, inturn, has slowly succumbed to insights in institutional eth-nography and history portraying an Indian state that ismore fragmented, complex, and non-modern than theoften-polemical, anti-development criticism previouslyacknowledged.

But the extension of this turn of work towards the prob-lem of Indian governance itself – as daily power-laden insti-tutional practice – has yet to fully take shape. The momentis therefore right to reconsider governance and governmen-tality in India and to evaluate the effects of the develop-ment state in this light. And this evaluation is preciselywhat Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava, and Veron providein Seeing the State, an incredibly dense and thorough sur-vey of the development state as it is experienced ‘‘on theground’’ by people while they sort out the details of theirlives, encountering rules, subsidies, restrictions, facilita-tions, and a host of colorful bureaucrats, service providers,technicians, and enforcers. In daring to even attempt such aview, the book is a tremendous contribution.

Having said this, Corbridge et al. have two closelylinked goals, one of which is perhaps better realized thanthe other. The first goal is to provide an enormouslydetailed account of the differing techniques, experiments,and power shifts occurring within Indian state service pro-vision, resource management, employment generation, and

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credit provision. The latter effort is to reframe broadervisions of the state more generally.

We will not provide a detailed blow-by-blow of themeaty material of the book that forms the bulk of the firstproject, but instead highlight one characteristicallywonderful case from the text. The fascinating account ofthe Employment Assurance Scheme threaded through thebook is both paradigmatic and surprising. This programis designed to provide people with work during the agricul-tural off-season – 100 days of employment for two mem-bers of each household. The work project is defined byvillage committees moreover, who also oversee the con-tracting, through participatory democratic processes. Eventhe most cynical critic of development would have to con-sider the architecture of such an effort impressive, at leaston paper. The poor were to be ‘‘customers’’ and ‘‘masters’’of the state.

How did it turn out? In qualitative and quantitativedetail, the authors show a number of contradictory results.In 1993, it was the largest employment provision scheme inthe country, but only about a quarter of intended house-holds in multiple study sites availed themselves of the sup-port. A vast majority of the intended recipients had nevereven heard about the scheme or its participatory compo-nents. Indeed, far more people participated than knew about

the program because those participating in the schemerarely interacted with government babus in any way, butinstead through the contractors and local village leaders.This often meant that the credit and power of legitimacythat accrued from the benefits (and the many who wereindeed employed to build check dams and other importantinfrastructure) flowed to everyone in local politics except

state officers. These local political situations were some-times participatory with ‘‘beneficiary committees’’ control-ling projects and carefully auditing results, but sometimesdominated by power-brokers, big–men, who mediated theinterface between the poor and the state, dispensed its ben-efits, and accrued its political capital. The micropolitics ofdevelopment’s realization mediated the experience of agovernment program and shaped its form.

It’s a great story. But is it a program failure? And, recall-ing the postmodern critics of development from recentyears, if it is, is it because of a menacing modernist state?If it isn’t, is it a triumph of local democracy? Each examplein the book, in cases ranging from school improvementschemes to joint forest management, echoes with a similarset of complexities and questions, subverting any effort toconclude development ‘‘successes’’ or ‘‘failures.’’ Thismakes for a truly great book, for which the authors’ manycollective years of detailed work pay remarkable dividends.

If that were all this book was, it would be an extraordi-nary contribution to understanding development, explor-ing both the construction and experience of poverty, andcautioning against crude caricature of government action.But this book has tried to do more. Unlike its predecessoror prequel, Corbridge et al. (2004), published only a fewyears earlier, this book is not short on theoretical ambition.

It suggests from the outset that it will ‘‘contribute to a dee-per understanding of how the state works and is seen inparts of rural India,’’ by examining the ways individuals‘‘encounter the development state,’’ how local-level govern-ment officials execute and understand the policies of thestate, and explore ‘‘the embeddedness of the state in soci-ety’’ (Corbridge et al., 2005, pp. 19–20). As noted above,development theory is certainly ready for and in need ofthis type of revision.

As to the larger goal of rethinking the state (or reviewingit), we wonder about two things in the book’s account thatgive us pause in trying to sort out a more general conclu-sion from all the hard work. First, it is unclear why theauthors have specifically adopted, and taken more or lessunproblematically, the metaphoric binary of a state andpopulace that can see or be seen from one coherent poleor the other, a notion out-of-kilter with the many accountswithin the book itself. This appears in the text as a sugges-tion that the state can be or is a coherent and identifiableentity. The monolithic state characterization occurs nearthe beginning of the work, when the authors tell us that‘‘poorer people often see the state because the state haschosen to see them,’’ (Corbridge et al., 2005, p. 10) asthough the state could choose and look. This is largelybecause the authors have framed their book around (ormore accurately used as theoretical bookends for theiranalysis) the terms of Scott’s ‘‘seeing state’’ presented inhis Seeing Like a State (Scott, 1998) and established in thisbook’s ‘‘state sightings,’’ which reinforce an analyticalstate–society divide from the outset.

Adopting the visual metaphor, it can be argued thatScott’s account is a convex rear view mirror, designed towiden the angle of view, productively revealing the statein the ‘‘blind spot’’ of our experience in lived environments,showing the state full and in motion, but always lurkingotherwise just out of view behind us. Fully picturedthrough this meta-theoretical fun house view, it appearsas a leviathan hive–mind, compelled to adopt logics inorder to act in its interest, to govern. Through such a mir-ror, the state is seen whole and distinct, but at the inevita-ble cost of physics it must appear deceptively far away.

The authors of Seeing the State have too much localizedexperience to trust their driving to such a mirror and thisstate–society distinction is subverted throughout the vol-ume. Indeed, the book’s accounts of governance moveacross characterizations of the state as everything exceptan observant leviathan, including suggestions that the stateis a set of practices, institutions, people, performances,structures, and habits of epistemology, none of whichmay be visible in any immediate sense to the government’sclients, or even its bureaucrats. Consider the case of theEmployment Assurance Scheme outlined above, wheremany participants in the program were actually not cogni-zant that they were participating in anything even relatedto government assistance. Who is seeing and being seenhere? In such a case, what rather seems to prevail is a setof discourses (‘‘people-centered’’ assistance geared around

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‘‘human agro-economy’’) churned through institutional-ized relationships in the form of ‘‘programs’’ and re-engi-neered by people on and off the government payroll asthey accrue authority and political support through the flowof resources. All of these relations are intimate and porous.The state, to the degree it can even be said to exist here, isvery close indeed, internalized and mobilized by people,who may be fully unaware that they are involved in stateprocess. This is not the ‘‘flip side’’ of Scott’s coin – the stateseen from outside – but rather a full critique of any suchconception, the state as always experienced inside.

This is far more in line with Painter’s (1995) assertionthat modern states, including those thought of as develop-ment states, are composed of multiple actors and institu-tions, both within and outside formal state institutions,with uneven porosity along its inchoate boundaries. Thestate is ‘‘the result of complex networks of prosaic practicesof making, unmaking, and remaking by actors within andoutside of state institutions’’ (Painter (1995, p. 16)). Argu-ably, starting with this framework, the stories in the booktake on a different character. Rather than being productsof an interaction between state and non-state actors, theevents and outcomes the authors describe might be seenas the processes that actually make the state.

We secondly suggest, therefore, that to the degree thatthe state can be said to be seen in this text, apart from inti-mately close, internal, and processual, it must actually bewilled to appear. Instead of being something discreet thatcan be pointed to or sighted, it might be argued from theevidence amassed here that the state as distinct is reallythe ‘‘effect’’ of the practices and encounters described. Inthe constant subcontracting of development schemes down-wards to lower level politicians and political brokers, forexample, Corbridge et al. document the way small flowsof resources are put through a careful ‘‘spin’’ by local lead-ers who use them to consolidate power, but so that theycome to appear as part of the public interest, as acts of lar-ger state order. So too, discourses about ‘‘clean government’’and dharmic duty of politicians espoused by many of thesesame actors become a ‘‘means by which the idea of a sub-lime state is communicated to the wider public’’ (p. 197),a location beyond the squalor of local political wrangling.

In this regard, as Mitchell (1999, p. 77) observes, theappearance of a state separate from society is:

‘‘not the boundary between two discrete entities, butas a line drawn internally, within the network of insti-tutional mechanisms through which a social andpolitical order is maintained. The ability to have aninternal distinction appear as though it was the exter-nal boundary between separate objects is the distinc-tive technique of modern political order’’.

As such, the state is not a ‘‘freestanding entity,’’ butinstead, the illusion of a ‘‘distinction between state and

society’’ is an effect of the everyday processes practice ofpolitical control (Mitchell, 1999, p. 95).

Reading Seeing the State from this perspective providesa rather different interpretation of the inconsistent and var-iously ‘‘sighted’’ Indian development state. Indeed, theauthors refer to this ‘‘state effect’’ in reference to Foucault’snotion of biopower as an example of how the state sees andintervenes in the lives of the population, such that ‘‘theseprocedures produce that which we name the state as theeffect of these interventions’’ (Corbridge et al., 2005, p.15). The book does not however explicitly advance thisclaim, though it certainly has the grounds to do so.

This begs an unanswered question that hangs over thevolume. Yes, development is uneven and the poor in Indiaexperience the state differently, but why? Does this actuallyhave anything to do with an ontological object called thestate? Or is the state the product of that very unevenness?And if the latter, what might it mean for initiating realreform where clear exploitation, silencing, and violencedo occur and where local elites capture flows of dispersedvalue? At what location would it be most sensible to inter-vene? How might penetrating the illusion of the state makeits dispersal available for critical action?

In any case, Corbridge et al. offer an antidote to the con-vex mirror vision of a discreet and knowing state. In theprocess, they produce an account of a state so close as tobecome nearly claustrophobic (indeed crowded full withcountless daily details). They further provide an extremelydown to earth advancement on (and critique of) the anti-development idealism of recent years. As they insist,‘‘Power has to be engaged, it cannot be wished away’’ (p.258), but moreover, they show the power–work requiredto seize, control, and divert material resources in the dailytrench fighting of governance. As the authors of Seeing the

State show, the reality and necessity of this struggle is farmore obvious to people in India than it is to many of thegurus of development theory.

References

Agarwal, A., 2005. Environmentality: Technologies of Government andthe Making of Subjects. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.

Corbridge, S., Jewitt, S., et al., 2004. Jharkhand: Environment, Develop-ment, Ethnicity. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Corbridge, S., Williams, G., et al., 2005. Seeing the State: Governance andGovernmentality in India. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Marchand, M., Parpart, J.L., 1995. Feminism Postmodernism Develop-ment. Routledge, New York.

Mitchell, T., 1999. Society, Economy, and the State Effect. G. SteinmetzState/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn. CornellUniversity Press, Ithaca NY.

Painter, J., 1995. Politics, Geography and Political Geography: A CriticalPerspective. Edward Arnold, London.

Scott, J., 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve theHuman Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, New Havenand London.