Archival density itself gave the state evidence to justify policy inaction

Evidence

In their densities these documents registered distributions of administrative concern that gained cumulative and historical weight. Archives could arm the state with evidence and, in so doing, justify inaction, reduce allocations, and abort policy. In this sense, they are archival events, not non-events, of capacious quality. They register the conditions of possibility in which colonial authorities operated. They tell us about how implausibility was measured, about the constrictions in which plausible colonial truths were framed. Not least, they suggest how keenly authorities attended to the ascription of affective states in managing the present and envisaging a future of the colonial modern. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 806

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEEPTHINKING: The cascade — more documentation producing more justification for inaction, ‘archival events, not non-events’ — is a densely argued, paradigm-shifting insight about how colonial knowledge worked.
• XREF: Directly extends the reader’s central theme of epistemic anxieties in colonial governance; links to Foucault’s discourse-power and to the broader ‘colonial knowledge’ literature.

Related

• Archival density can arm the state to justify inaction and abort policy (similarity 0.95)
• Colonial archive density was driven by emotional standards for agents. (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial archives could be reactivated to serve new governing strategies. (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial archives record administrators’ uncertainty about matching rules to reality (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial state documents exceed and resist the state’s own epistemic demands (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial archives could arm the state to justify inaction and abort policy. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial archival power was partial and vulnerable to dissent, not monolithic. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial archives actively shape what counts as legitimate knowledge (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial archives actively produce categories rather than merely record them (similarity 0.81)
• The archival field both consolidates and internally resists colonial authority (similarity 0.81)
• Archival form itself constitutes a technology of colonial governance (similarity 0.81)
• Netherlands Indies colonial archives functioned as a reactivatable arsenal for governance. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial archives primarily record epistemic uncertainty, not settled accounts of events. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial archives carry anxious labor and partiality, not settled knowledge (similarity 0.79)
• Dutch colonial archives store unrealized plans as the real stuff of state knowledge (similarity 0.79)