Colonial states sought affective knowledge they were structurally unable to obtain

Evidence

House of Glass is the name Pangemanann gives to his report but “house of glass” references a more fundamentally disquieting space in the colonial imaginary—at once the fragile security of the Dutch police state and the false security of Europeans living nestled in it. The quest for affective knowledge—that which moves people to feel and act—was the coveted pursuit of state intelligence and beyond its grasp. Framed by the deceptions of archival access, House of Glass begins with the state archive only to veer far from it, for Pangemanann hides his most precious document in the safety of his house. In Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s vision, disappeared documents and distorted reports are the archive’s paltry truths. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 115

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘affective knowledge’ as a distinct category—knowledge that moves people to act—which the colonial archive could not capture.
• QUESTION: What made affective knowledge structurally ungraspable by state intelligence, and could any archive in principle hold it?