Commissions of inquiry manufactured the crises they purported to investigate.

Evidence

Nowhere was this process more evident than in the form of statesponsored commissions of inquiry. Colonial commissions reorganized knowledge, devising new ways of knowing while setting aside others. One implicit task was to reconstruct historical narratives, decreeing what past events were pertinent to current issues and how they should be framed. Sometimes commissions were responses to catastrophic events and extended periods of crisis. As responses they generated increased anxiety, substantiating the reality of “crisis,” the wisdom of pre-emptive response, foreshadowing that new directives were demanded, as were the often coercive measures taken to ensure their effect. By the time most commissions had run their course, political signposts were set in place: “turning points” were identified, precedents established, causalities certified, arrows directed with vectors of blame—if not action—sharply aimed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 176

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting observation: commissions do not respond to crisis so much as produce and certify it, constructing narrative signposts that authorize coercive measures.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the sacrificial-inquiry logic familiar from ‘On Sacrifice’—formal inquiries, like sacrifices, stabilize a social order by certifying blame and crisis.