Bureaucratic registers break lived time and place into abstract, comparable units

Evidence

The importance of a tezkera, a register, a list, or a census does not lie only in the fact that these tools enhance the efficiency of the bureaucracy or make it capable of proper book keeping. Registers, timetables, training manuals, medical reports and other such bureaucratic, textual devices all share a common characteristic: they attempt to break time and place into similar, comparable, abstract units. As will be seen in the following chapters, once these devices were used time would no longer be measured in terms of the temporal space a given act occupies (e.g. time of harvest, or of learning the Quran), but in abstract, quantifiable units of hours, minutes and seconds. … In short, people and things would be squeezed in to fit in an “inscribed” place, a slot, imposed on them by a printed register, a map, a roll call, an inventory list or a timetable. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 485

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘inscribing reality’ thesis that frames how military registers transformed social control.
• XREF: Resonates with James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State on legibility and with Ian Hacking on making up people.