The Encrypted State

What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. In The Encrypted State, anthropologist David Nugent sheds new light on these questions by focusing on disorder and delusion, rather than order and rationality. Nugent analyzes mid-century Peru, where the government experienced a crisis of rule. Officials believed that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by an underground political party called APRA that remained largely invisible to the naked eye. APRA’s ability to disrupt official processes of rule produced deep paranoia among officials. They concluded that the party had established a vast subterranean polity of remarkable power and potency, to which virtually everyone secretly belonged. This episode of paranoia and delusion is especially puzzling because immediately prior everyday administration had been entirely normal and routine. In seeking to understand how irrationality and disorder could emerge out of rationality and order, Nugent finds that government projects had always been delusional. During periods of apparent order and rationality, however, officials had disguised their delusion—from themselves and others—by employing a series of bureaucratic and documentary mechanisms. The Encrypted State identifies these mechanisms and shows how they operated. The book also explores when these mechanisms succeeded in creating a facade of order and rationality and when they failed. In the process, the volume advances a radically new way of thinking about the state.