If the arguments of the previous two chapters were forging a sharp scalpel for our theory, then from this chapter onward, that scalpel will officially cut into the largest, hardest, and most complex organizational structure of human society -- the state.
Throughout the river of political thought, the state has been given countless faces. It is Hobbes's "Leviathan" that ends the "war of all against all," Locke's night watchman protecting individual "life, liberty, and property," Rousseau's moral community embodying the "general will," Hegel's highest stage of "the actualization of ethical life," and Marx's "instrument for one class to oppress another." These definitions reveal different facets of the state's complex nature from various angles.
However, within our theoretical framework, we will attempt to provide a new, overarching definition of the state. This definition directly connects to the core concepts we have established earlier -- "observation," "convergence," and "violence." In this framework, the state is an "ultimate observer" that has successfully monopolized the means of ultimate "forced convergence" (i.e., legitimate violence) and thereby gained the capacity to macroscopically define and maintain "social reality" within its territory.
The state is not a passive stage but an active director. It does not merely "reflect" social reality; it uses its powerful tools to "construct" and "produce" social reality. It is a vast machine for producing "reality," and the engine of this machine is driven by the violence it has monopolized.
The task of this chapter is to dismantle this vast machine and explore the internal logic of its operation. "From Leviathan to Data Leviathan: The State's Monopoly on 'Observation'" will trace the core trajectory of the evolution of state power, arguing that its essence is the continuous concentration and intensification of the means and power of "observation" -- evolving from the classical discipline of the body to the modern surveillance of data. "'Forced Convergence' Toolbox: Law, Police, and Prison" will concretely analyze the three core violent and quasi-violent tools the state uses to maintain its "observational consensus," revealing how they work in concert to transform the state's will into an irresistible physical reality. Finally, "The Delineator of Boundaries: How Sovereign Violence Defines 'Us' and 'Them'" will explore the state's most fundamental creative function -- using differentiated application of violence between internal and external domains to delineate the ultimate boundary of the political community, thereby answering the meta-question of modern politics: "Who are we?"
This journey will lead us deep into the core engine room of modern power. There, we will see that beneath the seemingly objective and neutral laws, technologies, and institutions, the underlying code is all written in the ultimate programming language of "legitimate violence." And each of our lives operates within the parameters set by this grand program.
From Leviathan to Data Leviathan: The State's Monopoly on "Observation"
"Knowledge is power." Francis Bacon's famous dictum reveals an eternal secret of the operation of power. But within our framework, we need a more precise translation of this dictum: "The capacity to observe is power." The more comprehensive, deeper, and finer one subject's capacity to "observe" another subject or environment, the more it can predict, guide, and control the latter's behavior, thereby "converging" its own will into the other's reality.
The history of the state's evolution is, to a large extent, a history of systematically and relentlessly pursuing "complete information observation" of the population, territory, and resources under its rule. The expansion of state power and the upgrading of its "observation" capacity have always been complementary. This history can be roughly divided into two stages: from the classical "Leviathan" to the modern "Data Leviathan."
The Birth of the Classical Leviathan: Monopoly on Violence as the Meta-Monopoly on "Observation"
In pre-modern society before the birth of the modern state, power (the capacity to "observe") was dispersed. Feudal lords possessed independent armed forces and judicial authority within their domains; the church held powerful capacity to "observe" and adjudicate the spiritual lives and moral conduct of believers; guilds imposed detailed discipline on urban craftsmen; various village communities maintained internal order through ancient customary law. This was a pluralistic power structure where multiple "small observers" coexisted and checked each other. For an ordinary person living in such a society, they were simultaneously gazed upon and disciplined by multiple pairs of "eyes."
The birth of the modern state had as its core hallmark the termination of this pluralistic state of power. This process was accomplished through brutal religious wars and dynastic wars. The ultimate victor -- the central royal power (later the sovereign state) -- succeeded fundamentally because it accomplished one thing: it deprived all other social actors (nobility, church, cities, etc.) of the right to independently possess and use organized violence, and completely monopolized this right in its own hands.
Max Weber's classic definition of the state -- "a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate violence within a given territory" -- captures this core precisely. However, we must further ask: what does monopolizing violence actually mean?
In our framework, the monopoly on violence constitutes a "meta-monopoly" over all other forms of "observation." For violence, as the ultimate "forced convergence" mechanism, is the final guarantee that any "observation" can become "power."
When the state deprived the nobility of their private armies, the nobility's "observation" of their domains (for example, holding private courts to judge their subjects) lost its ultimate coercive force, thereby being downgraded to a mere "local influence."
When the state declared that church law must submit to the king's law, the church's "observation" of believers' morality could only operate in the spiritual realm; once property and person were involved, the ultimate power of adjudication shifted to the state's courts.
When the state replaced the guilds' ancient regulations with unified laws and taxation, the guilds' "observation" of the craftsmen's production process was subsumed under the state's broader macroeconomic regulation.
Through its monopoly on violence, the nascent state, like a domineering "macro-observer," forcibly shut down or took over the independent surveillance cameras of all other "small observers," connecting their signals into its own central monitoring room. From then on, within this territory, there existed only one "ultimate observer" holding the final power of "forced convergence." All other "observations" (such as those of parents over children, employers over employees, teachers over students) must operate within the grand "observation" framework set by the state, and must not conflict with it.
Observation Techniques of the Classical Leviathan: Space, Body, and Discipline
Having monopolized the meta-power of "observation," the classical state began to develop a comprehensive set of techniques aimed at making its "macro-observation" more effective and more precise. Michel Foucault provided profound insight into this. The "disciplinary power" he described is essentially a microphysics aimed at enabling the state's "observation" to penetrate individual bodies.
Mapmaking and Census
The first step in the birth of the modern state is typically the precise surveying of its territory and the systematic enumeration of its population. A map transforms a vague land constituted by local knowledge into a clear "grid" manageable from a central perspective. It enables the state's gaze (and its army) to reach any corner without obstruction. A census transforms living, anonymous individuals into "population" data that can be counted, classified, and managed. Name, age, sex, occupation... these labels are the "QR codes" the state affixes to each person, making individuals "clearly identifiable" to the state's "observation."
Discipline of the Army and Schools
Standardized military drill aims not only at combat effectiveness but also at disciplining a group of unruly peasants into "parts" that can precisely execute commands and highly synchronize their bodies. It is an "observation" technique that inscribes the state's will directly onto soldiers' bodies. Similarly, modern schooling, through unified curricula, strict timetables, and continuous examinations, shapes children into "citizens" with specific knowledge structures and behavioral norms that meet the state's needs. The school is a factory for the state to "pre-observe" and "pre-discipline" future citizens.
Segregation of Prisons and Asylums
Foucault astutely noted that the birth of prisons and asylums marked a new technology of power. By delineating a clear physical space, it segregated bodies that the state's "observation" had defined as "abnormal" (criminals, the insane) from normal society. This segregation, on one hand, reinforced the standard of "normalcy"; on the other hand, it made possible the concentrated "observation," analysis, and "correction" of the "abnormal." The high walls and watchtowers of prisons are the most direct architectural expression of the state's "observation" power.
However, the "observation" capacity of the classical Leviathan was always severely limited by physical conditions. Its gaze was intermittent, sampled, and relatively coarse. It might achieve panoptic surveillance within a prison, but it could not peer into every family's dinner-table conversation. Its census data might be once a decade; population movements and changes in between were difficult to grasp in a timely manner. Its rule, to a great extent, still relied on local elites as intermediaries of "observation." In short, beneath the classical Leviathan's gaze, individuals still possessed considerable space for "anonymity" and "invisibility."
This space, in the digital age, is being eroded and colonized at unprecedented speed and depth. We are entering the era of the "Data Leviathan."
The Rise of the Data Leviathan: From Disciplining Bodies to Colonizing Data
If the classical Leviathan's "observation" focused mainly on the discipline of physical space and human bodies, the Data Leviathan's "observation" turns to a new, infinitely vast territory: the colonization of data space and patterns of human behavior.
This shift brings about a fundamental revolution in the mode of power operation:
- Persistent and Expanding Observation: Smartphones, cameras, search, payment, and social platforms leave far more behavioral traces than existed before the digital age. Data coverage nevertheless remains bounded by devices, permissions, institutions, and quality. Incomplete records should not be described as a state “livestream” of life.
- Inferential and Predictive Observation: Institutions use behavioral data to infer credit risk, consumer preference, or security risk. These profiles are probabilistic estimates dependent on samples, labels, and model objectives; they do not “see through” a person. The central concern is that when uncertain group statistics enter preemptive screening, they may impose monitoring, denial, or differential treatment on a concrete individual who may have little opportunity to challenge the inference.
- Data Collaboration between State and Capital: Platforms hold large stores of fine-grained behavioral data, and public agencies, under different laws and procedures, may use portions of it through procurement, legal demands, data sharing, or regulatory requirements. Scope and legitimacy must be examined case by case; not every state, platform, and data flow forms one fully integrated alliance.
- The Refinement of “Soft Coercion”: Ranking, recommendation, credit, and eligibility review can guide behavior by changing visible information, transaction costs, and access to opportunities. Their effects depend on the institution: they may improve coordination, but may also create opaque discipline. The issue here is therefore a mechanism of power that requires audit, not a factual claim that an omniscient algorithm already controls everyone.
The evolution from Leviathan to Data Leviathan marks the state's monopoly on "observation" entering a completely new, unprecedentedly powerful phase. What it pursues is no longer merely the external control of territory and population, but the internal colonization of the entire information flow of social operation and the behavioral patterns of individuals.
Before this new Leviathan, privacy protects more than personal secrets; it also protects the conditions under which we form judgments and choose autonomously as independent “observers.” When a macro-observer has enough data to reshape the choice environment, it can change what you see, what you can obtain, and how costly it is to challenge a decision even without “knowing you better than you know yourself.” The threat to freedom is not that algorithms must predict people precisely, but that probabilistic inferences can be converted by institutions into real constraints.
Having understood how the state pursues its absolute monopoly on "observation" through ever-upgrading technologies, we can now more concretely examine how it uses this power to practice its core function of "forced convergence." This requires us to open its formidable toolbox.
The "Forced Convergence" Toolbox: Law, Police, and Prison
The state, as the ultimate "macro-observer," does not merely talk about its power to define and maintain "reality" within its territory. This power must ultimately be implemented through a set of effectively operating, coercive tools. The tools in this toolbox are numerous, including taxation, education, propaganda, and more, but the most central, the most expressive of the essence of state violence, is the tripartite combination: law, police, and prison.
These three constitute a complete "forced convergence" assembly line. The law provides the written, seemingly universal "program code" for the state-led "observational consensus"; the police are the on-site engineers responsible for "debugging" and "intervening" when this code encounters "bugs" in the real world (i.e., practices of "observational divergence"); and the prison is the final location where those "stubborn code" (persistent "divergers") that cannot be "debugged" into compatibility are forcibly isolated and "formatted."
Let us open this toolbox in turn and examine the blade of each tool.
Law: The Solidified Promise of Violence
Law is usually portrayed as the embodiment of reason and justice, a peaceful arbitration mechanism through which civilized society replaces barbaric revenge. In its ideal state, it indeed plays this role. However, within our theoretical framework, we need to peel back this warm veil and confront its harder core.
Law is the product of the state "solidifying" its dominant "observational consensus" in a highly abstract, systematic, and universalized language. At the same time, it is a systematic, public "promissory note" stating under what circumstances, in what manner, and against what behaviors the state will impose "legitimate violence."
Law as the Textualization of "Observational Consensus": Every legal code is a comprehensive dictionary defining "reality." Civil codes define "what is lawful property," "what is a valid contract," "who is a qualified legal person"; criminal codes define "what is a crime," "what is legitimate self-defense," "what degree of behavior constitutes a threat"; constitutions attempt to provide ultimate definitions for the most fundamental "meta-observations": "who is the sovereign," "what is the state," "what are the basic rights of citizens." The language of law pursues precision and universality; it attempts to transform the state's perspective-driven "observation" into a seemingly objective and neutral system of classification and judgment applicable to all. Through legislation, the state completes the first step of "packaging" its own, often biased, "observations" (e.g., a tendency to protect the interests of the propertied class) as "universal truths" that all members of society must obey.
Law as a "Menu of Violence": The latter part of legal provisions is typically accompanied by a "proviso" -- the consequences of violating that provision. These consequences, in all their variety -- from fines and community service to fixed-term imprisonment, life imprisonment, and even the death penalty -- constitute a detailed "state violence menu." It clearly informs every member of society: if you attempt to practice your "observational divergence" in a manner defined by law as "illegal" (for example, you believe a wealthy person's assets are ill-gotten and attempt to "redistribute" them through "theft"), then the state's violence machine will select the appropriate "violence package" from the menu and apply it to your body.
The "Predictability" and "Impersonality" of Violence: Compared to private violence (such as revenge or armed conflict), the state violence promised by law is characterized most notably by "predictability" and "impersonality." It attempts to establish a stable "violence response mechanism" that does not vary with the personal emotions of the enforcer. To a great extent, this is indeed a civilizational advance. It enables members of society to foresee the boundaries and consequences of their actions and to make rational calculations. However, this "impersonality" is also precisely the most fearsome feature of modern state violence. The police, judges, and wardens who execute violence do not act out of personal hatred; they are merely "cogs" in the vast machinery of the state, "doing their duty." This "banality of evil" makes the implementation of violence extremely efficient and cold, stripped of any moral hesitation or emotional entanglement.
Thus, the "authority" of law never stems from the logical perfection or moral nobility of its text, but from the credibility of the "promise of violence" behind it. A law that has lost the support of a powerful violence machine ready to put it into effect at any time instantly becomes a scrap of paper. Conversely, a regime that controls a powerful violence machine can, even if its laws are widely regarded as "evil laws," still enforce a "reality" that must be obeyed within its domain of rule.
Law is the "script" of violence. And the one who stages this script in real life is the police.
Police: Violence Agents Prowling the Boundary Between "Consensus" and "Divergence"
The police are the most everyday, most direct embodiment of state violence. They are the "mobile sensors" and "effector actuators" dispatched by the state into the social body. Their duty is to patrol between the stable zone of "observational consensus" and the turbulent boundary of "observational divergence," and to carry out real-time, physical intervention against the latter.
Everyday Maintainers of Boundaries: The daily patrols of the police have symbolic significance far greater than their actual arrest function. The "presence" of patrol cars and uniforms is itself a continuous, low-intensity deterrent of violence. It constantly reminds all citizens: this space is defined by the state's "observation," and the state's agents of violence are gazing upon it. This gaze itself, invisibly, "converges" people's behavior, making it more inclined to conform to the script of "law."
The "Switch" from Symbolic Conflict to Physical Intervention: When "observational divergence" escalates from verbal argument to physical confrontation, the arrival of the police marks a fundamental shift in the nature of the conflict. The police's task is not to participate in the symbolic debate over "who is right and who is wrong," but to use the exclusive power granted by the state -- the "legitimate use of higher-level violence" -- to forcibly terminate this conflict. Their batons or guns are the "ultimate reality" that can instantly render all symbolic argument meaningless. They redefine an "intersubjective" conflict as an unequal power relation between "the state and the law-breaking subject."
Discretion: The "Gray Zone" of Violence Application: The script of law is abstract, while the real world is concrete and full of ambiguity. The police, as on-site agents of violence, inevitably possess enormous "discretion." When facing a specific scene, they must instantly "observe" and "judge": is this a legal protest or an illegal riot? Playful banter among friends or malicious assault? Does it require a verbal warning or immediate use of force? This discretion makes the police's "observation" itself a direct operation of power. History and reality both show that this "observation" is often deeply colored by social bias. A well-dressed white person and a ragged black person, performing the same action, might be "observed" by the police as two completely different "realities" and consequently receive dramatically different violent treatment. The police are not just executors of the legal script; they are its "improvisational interpreters" in concrete situations.
The police are the frontmost "mechanical arm" of the state machine, directly contacting society. Their existence makes it possible for the state's abstract "promise of violence" to be rapidly transformed into a concrete physical force acting upon individual bodies at any time and place needed. And those individuals "captured" by this mechanical arm, judged to pose a serious threat to the "observational consensus," are sent to the next station on the assembly line -- prison.
Prison: The Physical "Reality" Reconstruction of the "Diverger"
Prison is the heaviest and most philosophically significant tool in the state's "forced convergence" toolbox. It is not merely a place of deprivation of liberty, but a "discipline factory" aimed at completely restructuring the entire "reality" of the "diverger" (i.e., the criminal).
Absolute Convergence of Space: The first layer of violence in prison is the absolute deprivation of space. A prisoner's entire physical possibility is "converged" into an extremely narrow space defined by iron bars and walls. This is the most fundamental deprivation of his capacity to "observe" -- he is deprived of the right to freely observe and experience the external world. His world is forcibly reduced to prison, this single "reality" completely defined by state power.
Redefinition of Time: Inside prison, time is no longer governed by individual will but is redefined by a strict, uniform, impersonal timetable. Wake up, eat, work, exercise, lights out... the meaning of each time segment is endowed by prison rules. This total colonization of time aims to dismantle the prisoner's inner, autonomous rhythm of life and reshape him into a "part" that can be precisely embedded into the state's disciplinary machinery.
Direct Discipline of the Body: Prison is the most intensive exhibition ground of Foucault's "disciplinary power." The prisoner's body becomes the direct object of power. The uniform prison garb erases the symbols of personal identity; continuous labor reforms the body's habits; punishment (such as solitary confinement) corrects non-compliant behavior through the infliction of pain. The purpose of prison is to attempt, through total discipline of the body, to indirectly reshape the mind -- to make him "learn" obedience physically, so that he may ultimately accept, even mentally, the "correct" "observational consensus" as defined by the state.
Symbolization of "Dehumanization": The identity of "prisoner" itself is a powerful form of symbolic violence. It expels a person from the community of "citizens," depriving them of voting rights, reputation, and a series of other social attributes. They are symbolized as "dangerous," "abnormal," "the other." This symbolic "dehumanization" provides a legitimizing justification for the application of physical violence against them. For they are no longer regarded as complete "observer" counterparts but as "objects" in need of "repair."
Prison is the terminal station of the state's "forced convergence" assembly line. It demonstrates, in an extreme way, the ultimate logic of state power: for the most stubborn "observational divergers" -- those who cannot be persuaded by "negotiation" nor deterred by everyday "deterrence" -- the state's final solution is to physically "delete" them from normal social reality and attempt to "format" and "reprogram" them within a fully controllable environment.
Law, police, prison -- this tripartite combination constitutes the violent spine through which the state maintains its "observational consensus." They may be hidden and invisible most of the time, but it is precisely their silent, latent presence that endows the gaze of the state as "macro-observer" with the indisputable ultimate authority to define "reality."
Understanding this internal operation mechanism of state power, we can then understand how this power operates externally to delineate the most fundamental boundary -- the boundary between "us" and "them."
The Delineator of Boundaries: How Sovereign Violence Defines "Us" and "Them"
The state, as the ultimate "macro-observer," has as its most fundamental and creative action not internal governance, but external boundary-drawing. Before the birth of the modern world order, the answer to the question "Who are we?" was fluid and plural. A person could simultaneously be a Christian, a subject of the Kingdom of France, a citizen of Paris, a member of a guild, and a descendant of a family line. His identity was jointly defined by multiple overlapping, non-exclusive "observational consensuses."
The birth of the modern sovereign state completely changed this. It insists on an exclusive, supreme identity: "citizen" or "national." It demands that every person within its territory first and foremost "observe" themselves as "Chinese," "American," or "French" -- this identity must take precedence over all others (such as religion, class, region, etc.).
How was this new, powerful community of "us" created? The answer still lies hidden in violence. Sovereign violence, through its differentiated application -- treating internal and external differently -- makes the most profound, most indisputable distinction and definition of "us" (citizens) versus "them" (non-citizens/enemies).
Internal Monopoly on Violence: Creating a "Peaceful" "Us"
As discussed earlier, the first step in the birth of the state is the elimination, through war, of all other centers of violence within its territory, achieving a monopoly on "legitimate violence." This process, in Carl Schmitt's political theology, is called "decision." The sovereign is the one who can make the ultimate "decision" and use violence to end civil war and establish a unified, peaceful order.
The immediate consequence of the internal monopoly on violence is the creation of a "de-violentized" internal space. Within this space, conflicts between citizens are forbidden from being resolved through private violence and must be submitted to the state as the sole violence arbiter (law and police). This creates a new, interdependent "community of fate" among citizens. Whether you are rich or poor, regardless of your religion, your life and property security are equally and exclusively guaranteed by this state machine.
The "universal peace" guaranteed by state violence (however false it may be) is the most basic physical prerequisite for the formation of the community of "us." It makes possible large-scale economic cooperation, cultural exchange, and political participation. All those living beneath this protective membrane of violence, regardless of the many "observational divergences" among them, share at least one most fundamental "identity": they are all people protected (and ruled) by the same sovereign violence. Together, they constitute "us."
External Violence Power: Defining a Dangerous "Them"
In stark contrast to the internal "monopoly" and "restriction" of violence, in external relations, the sovereign state's violence is unrestricted. In the "anarchy" of international relations, each state retains the ultimate power to wage war against other states -- to inflict unlimited violence.
This external, unrestricted violence power is the key to defining "them." "They," in the political sense, are first and foremost not cultural strangers, but those who can potentially be legitimately, collectively subjected to violence (killed) by "our" state machine.
Enemy: Schmitt precisely identified "enemy" as the supreme concept of politics. The enemy is the "other" whom we must physically eliminate in the existential struggle. War is the ultimate ritual in which the state mobilizes its internal "us" to systematically kill "them" from another country. In war, the act of "killing," strictly prohibited by law in peacetime, is not only permitted but celebrated as the heroic act of "patriotism." This dramatic reversal of the rules of violence draws the sharpest line between "us" (comrades) and "them" (enemies). This line is forged with blood and life.
Foreigner: In non-war situations, "them" appears in the form of "foreigners." Through its violence machine (border patrol, customs, immigration), the state strictly scrutinizes and controls the entry of "them" into "our" physical space. A foreigner's body on "our" territory always exists in a state where "privileges are temporarily granted." The state can revoke these privileges at any time on grounds such as "national security" and expel them. This right of expulsion is a low-intensity sovereign violence applied to foreigners. It constantly confirms: "our" homeland is not open to everyone.
The "Uncivilized": In the history of colonialism, sovereign violence also played a darker role. Western colonial empires "rationalized" their use of violence as a "civilizing mission." They "observed" non-Western "them" as "savages" or "primitives" in need of education and discipline. Under this "observation" framework, the conquest, enslavement, and slaughter of "them" were no longer seen as aggression but were beautified as "spreading the light of civilization." This discourse is an extremely vicious form of symbolic violence, cloaking the most naked physical violence in an outer garment of moral superiority, thereby delineating a hierarchical boundary between a "civilized us" and a "barbaric them."
The Continuous Production of Boundaries: Violence, Education, and Ritual
The boundary between "us" and "them," once preliminarily delineated through violence, must be continuously reproduced and reinforced through a series of ongoing social practices, internalized into each citizen's unthinking identity.
Conscription and War Commemoration: Conscription is the core mechanism for transforming ordinary citizens into potential executors of the state violence machine. It allows every male citizen (and in some countries, women) to personally experience and learn how to use organized violence against an enemy defined by the state. Public rituals such as war memorials, national days of mourning, and military parades, in peacetime, continuously reiterate the heroic narrative of "us" shedding blood and sacrificing to fight against "them," thereby reinforcing the community's cohesion and exclusivity.
Historical Education: History education under state control is the most important symbolic tool for shaping "our" identity. Through selective narration of history, the shaping of heroes, and the stereotyping of enemies, it constructs a clear, emotionally mobilizing collective imagination of "us" for younger generations. It tells us: where "we" came from, what suffering and glory "we" have experienced, and who "our" "enemy" is.
Passports and Visas: In daily life, passports and visas are the most microscopic and widespread embodiment of sovereign violence. A passport is the "identity certification" issued to you by the state as "macro-observer," declaring that you are one of "us" protected by its violence. And when you need a visa to travel to another country, the process is an experience of your existence as "the other," being scrutinized by another sovereign observer.
To summarize, the core logic of the operation of the state as a vast "reality-producing machine" is the differentiated application of violence. It monopolizes violence internally, creating a relatively peaceful, unified community space of "us"; it retains the power of unlimited use of violence externally, thereby defining a world of "them" full of potential threat, in need of defense and conquest.
"Who are we?" -- this seemingly warm question of identity has its ultimate, hardest answer drawn jointly by the coldest pen of sovereign violence, upon both the world map and human bodies. Understanding this, we can grasp why modern nationalism possesses such powerful emotional mobilizing force, and also why, when the sacred boundaries drawn by violence are challenged (e.g., separatist movements or large-scale immigration), such intense conflicts erupt.
Because challenging these boundaries is not merely challenging a law or a policy, but challenging the state as "macro-observer" in its most fundamental creation -- it is an attempt to redraw the ontological map of "us" and "them," stained with the blood of history. And this almost inevitably summons once again that ancient specter of the ultimate boundary-drawer -- violence itself.