State absorption of daily life makes any world-making project inherently political

Evidence

To the extent that all aspects of human life (whether they pertain to family, education, worship, welfare , commercial transactions, instances of birth and death, and so on) have been brought under the regulatory apparatuses of the nation— tate, the piety movement’s efforts to remake any of these activities will necessarily have political consequences. As Charles Hirschkind has argued persuasively, “Modern politics and the forms of power it deploys have become a [necessary] condition for the practice of many of our more personal activities. As for religion, to the extent that the institutions enabling the cultivation of religious virtue have become subsumed within ( and transformed by) the legal and administrative structures linked to the state, then the (traditional) project of preserving those virtues will necessarily be political if it is to succeed” ( 1997, 13). — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1284

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the modern condition described in the reader’s work on infrastructures and late-capitalist regulation; also echoes Weberian rationalization and Foucault’s governmentality. — connects to: Ordinary daily experience is shaped by the political powers that rule it. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 667