Stateness/Estatalidade: Reconceptualizing Bureaucratic-Technical State Effects That Perform Agency, Governmentality, and Subjectivity

Abstract

What Do We Mean by “Stateness”?Stateness represents a new concept created by us, the authors of the present chapter, which builds on and diverges from Foucault’s notion of governmentality. We created the concept through a meticulous and historically grounded tracing of official data on crime, of public policies regarding crime, and of uses these two things have been put to. Our focus here is the knowledge production practices of State bureaucracies. To map State rationalities and discourses in detail, this chapter offers a case study of how statistics regarding deaths by “stray bullets” are bureaucratically constructed. “Stray bullets” is a Brazilian-specific category that confuses “drive-by shootings,” “friendly fire,” “accidental weapons firing by police,” and “exchange of fire during police invasions of neighborhoods” into a single statistical jumble. Put simply, if someone is shot to death and the State can’t (or won’t) identify the shooter, then the death is categorized as caused by a “stray bullet” (bala perdida). Data on stray bullets helps constitute a form of State-sponsored knowledge (which we call here “State language”) reflecting bureaucratic decisions and ways of thinking about the world. The concept was developed through research into State interventions and governmentality. The ways and means in which the “stray bullet” has become a legitimate category of how the State envisions its actions, violence, and citizens’ claims in response to these actions is stateness. Stateness informs certain forms of unaccountability and violence, allowing them to persist, even as it renders other logics (particularly those critical of race) invisible. In performing these functions, it ensures that only certain kinds of citizen responses are understood as legitimate. In order to explain the rationales that orient agents we have taken as our case study the introduction of the “stray bullet” category in official statistics. Here, we see it become a legitimate form of State knowledge, a part of what we call the “language of the State”, which is simultaneously the result or effect of actions, decisions, or modes of thinking about the world of bureaucracies, revealing subject agency and documents as they are made, and also a way of strengthening the power of the State un its interventions.