State coherence is an artifice masking competing institutional interests
Evidence
To say this, however, and once again paradoxically, is to give the racial state perhaps too much coherence. For as suggested above, the state may be thought of as the phantom of governance and authority, a territorial placeholder for sets of often competing and more or less local institutional interests and powers. In this sense, the state provides media and a measure of scope for the assertion and authorization, legislation and legitimation of institutional power(s). The latter two institutional practices offer to the former two a semblance of coherence, a singularity of style and voice, a common language and mode, the shadow of an institutional sphere in the face of prolific heterogeneous messiness. They offer, that is, the artifice of national, cultural, and expressive unity - community - in the face of fractured disunity and anarchy, the artifice of homogeneity in the face of proliferating heterogeneities. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1720
Categorization
- DEFINE: Frames the racial state as phantom unity over heterogeneous institutional powers, qualifying any overly-coherent state concept.
- QUESTION: Worth checking how this phantom-state account relates to the more structural racial-formation accounts elsewhere in the vault.
- XREF: connects to: Many political and ideological acts serve organizational coherence needs; State control confers unmatched coercive and informational advantages worth contention over — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 73