The State and the Circulation of Meaning

Catalog description

This course is designed as a disorientation of the State. Rather than seeing the State as a fixed, absolute entity that exists on a separate plane of existence, this course analyzes the state as an effect-producing abstraction that arises in contested circulations of meaningful signs. Viewing the state as a material abstraction (a complex sign) rather than as an absolute entity, we turn to theories of differentiation in circulation and movement. We attempt to answer the questions: What is movement? What moves? And what does movement create, break down, and change? Thinking about the implications of such questions, we will consider the extent to which differentiations in movement carve out units of governance, how the differences produced in those units might generate change, and how forms of difference might partially escape and alter such movement (or not).