Colonial categories and archives co-produce new social objects in epistemic haze.

Evidence

Sound conjecture and expectation can make governing strategies work, or as anticolonial movements have amply demonstrated, make them violently fail. And like scientific communities, new objects emerge between what one does “not quite yet know” and that for which there is not yet a name. Such epistemic objects are produced in the haze of what historian of science Hans-Jorg Rheniberger calls “a mixture of hard and soft,” or, as Michel Serres puts it, “object, still, sign, already; sign still, object already.” The making of colonial categories shares this ambiguous epistemic space. New social objects were the archives’ product as much as subjects of them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 274

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of ‘epistemic objects’ and its grounding in Rheinberger and Serres.
• XREF: The archive-as-productive-of-its-objects theme resonates with Stoler’s and Dirks’ colonial knowledge work, and with actor-network treatments of the archive as infrastructure. — connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”