Their analysis of the state is wrong and analytically futile---it’s a network and institution that doesn’t consume movements or daily life.

The reason for these conceptual moves lies in the state’s importance for a progressive transformative politics. In the global north, left-wing critiques of the state from Marxist, anarchist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives are extensive and hard-hitting. Modern states are criticised for their repressive, coercive, regulatory, functional, and extractive practices, particularly in relation to penal policy, workfare, market enhancements, welfare, privatisation, and coercive-military engagements. While some work critically responds to particular state developments and policies, an important current in critical work treats capitalist states or, indeed, all states as inherently oppressive. But not all critical and progressive work “writes off” the state. While this article is attuned to the concerns of anti-state scholarship, it also shares an anxiety that politically abandoning the concept of the state risks withdrawing important organisational scales for planning, redistribution, and decision-making; assumes a clear division between state and non-state practices and politics; and gives up the state to elite and dominant forces; leaving progressive constituencies with a set of “less than the state” institutions. But holding on to the state does not mean holding on to a particular apparatus, institutional structure, set of functions, or even scale. First, as different writers have explored, the structures, systems, and functions of the state can be revised in more progressive ways. Second, what can also be revised are our conceptions of what it means to be a state: specifically, what states do, what makes them up, and how they interface other aspects of the social. Contemporary scholarship approaches the state conceptually in ways too varied and extensive to set out fully here. Academics diverge on whether the state is an actor, organisation, structure, field, intangible effect, or idea; on its functions and role; on the degree, character, and conditions of its autonomy or boundedness; and on its power, composition, ethos, and modalities of change. The scale of divergence between treating the state as institutional machinery, an organic formation encompassing civil society, and a relation between classes reveals the state’s conceptual plasticity as well as the political stakes in how it is framed. This is not just a scholarly dilemma. Material effects follow from how states are imagined by officials, politicians, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others, as the recent development of neoliberal statehood reveals - a political-economic project firmly embedded in, and supported by, competitive marketized conceptions of what states should and could become. In their work on the economy, JK Gibson-Graham set out to think differently about its present forms. Instead of imagining an ideal or socially transformed future economy, Gibson-Graham reimagine the economy as it is. Their depiction of contemporary economic relations provides a purposive challenge to the “naturalized dominance of the capitalist economy” as they seek to “make a space for new economic becomings”. This article takes a similar approach. It seeks to reimagine the state as it is, challenging the assumption that the state is only made up of dominant interests, beliefs, systems, logics and practices. It aims to support progressive state thinking by foregrounding the state’s dissident and transient parts. While from a global perspective, some progressive initiatives and policies seem to be driven by centralised, unified states asserting their will, this seems less evident in contemporary neo-liberal democratic states of the north. Here, progressive developments frequently appear as fleeting, oppositional activities in the interstices of dominant state practice. Approaching the state in ways that recognise dissenting, minority beliefs, values, interests, and forces as part of what composes it, of course, does not mean dissent is inevitably left-wing. There are many instances of conservative dissident state action - not least those early 21st century state registrars who refuse to marry gay couples. Publics, as I discuss, can also take a conservative form, legitimising and entrenching authoritarian, hierarchical, and exclusionary state practices. However, the dissident publics addressed in this article, namely those which seek to transform social and political practice in progressive ways, are vitally important in rendering states relevant to the left through their emphasis on the commons, liberation, and collectively held public responsibilities. In this way, publics provide a counterpoint to the increasing entanglements and alignments between liberal post-industrial states and commercial interests, something Bonnie Honig also explores in her work on “public things” as objects of democratic desires and affections. Publics provide a counterpoint to the assumption that people’s desires and affections are exclusively embedded in individuated lives and choices. This does not mean extrapolating a universal common good from differentiated interests, a process that tends to reinforce already hegemonic norms. The phrase publics rather than public or public sphere emphasises plurality as Squires’s work on black publics explores. But plurality also does not have to mean group-segmented interests. What the concept of publics, as developed here, offers, is a way of framing concerns and political projects, from sexual liberation to “no borders” migration, as matters of public concern and interest. But why treat such publics as parts of, or as intimately connected to, the state? Publics may emphasise the collective, open-ended character of concern-driven social action, but what is gained by suturing publics to the state? In the face of the counter-claim that the political value of publics, and particularly radical publics, comes from their independence and state-distance, I want to propose three reasons for foregrounding a state nexus. First, it illuminates the networks that form around progressive or dissident policy ideas within state formations. This claim echoes Samuel Chambers’ approach to the work of radical political theorist Jacques Rancière. Against interpretations of Rancière which divide institutional order from democratic politics, Chambers interprets Rancière to suggest that politics - the disruptive and challenging assertions made by the excluded in equality’s name –is always entangled with the “police” order rather than separate from it. Focusing on state publics then provides a way of tracing the ebb and flow - the transformations, silences, and erasures - that shape radical politics, as dissident political currents weave through everyday institutional “police” life. Second, tying transformative publics to the state highlights how progressive and dissident action takes up and draws upon state-generated statuses, access, and resources. Reading such action as resistance, necessarily located outside centres of power, can obscure and attenuate the power that subordinate forces can and do make use of through their state location – whether as street-level workers, school students, or prisoners. Third, recognising the state-shaped character of social life makes it possible to explore the complex ways state and other (including grass-roots) governance logics and processes combine rather than assuming they meet as discrete independent forces. I return to these claims in the third section of the paper which explores how transformative publics connect to the state.

But locating state presence within everyday life does not mean states necessarily saturate, monopolise, and dominate social practice. Social forces and things can be parts or carriers of state formations when they participate in processes of political governance, while still participating (including simultaneously) in other kinds of action. States also contribute to diverse actor-networks – from the regional assemblages Allen and Cochrane discuss, with their mix of elements from state, agency, and business systems, to the “mash-ups” of state and grassroots governance addressed at the end of this article.