Imperial power produces ignorance through acts of refusal to notice

Evidence

The official documents of colonial archives like those of the Netherlands Indies are so weighted with fixed formats, empty phrases, and racial clichés that one is easily blinded by their limpid prose and numbing dullness. Our readings are blunted by what often has been parsed as the seemingly panoptic glare of a vacuous, stylized official gaze. But in these archives the panoptic is a frail conceit. Administrative overviews index conventional forms of assumed mastery less than comprehensive knowledge. Such overviews—of regions, problems, or target populations— were rendered from cribbed and cluttered, spare and hurried reports of the disorder of things, written in the studied ineloquence of bureaucratese. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Dowd’s plan was a wonderful example of crackpot realism. The lines were laid out with geometric exactness and ignored geography, topography, region, trade, or natural affinity. Maine and Florida were put in separate time zones. It is a wonderful example of the maxim that the grid is the geometry of empire. — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 850 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Imperial dispositions are trained habits of attention channeled by rules of relevance; Colonial secrets signaled official unease about unrest without a name; Chaos represents unexplored territory and ignorance. — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life An Antidote to Chaos, 196 (+17 more)

Related

• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial secrets signaled official unease about unrest without a name (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial knowing relied on inattention and adverted gazes more than surveillance (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial administrative overviews index assumed mastery more than actual comprehension. (similarity 0.80)
• Empire produces and maintains strategic ignorance as a ruling technology (similarity 0.78)
• Historians often over-assume the dispositions colonial officials’ positions encouraged (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial administrative decision-making consolidated conflicting local knowledge into packages (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge #exemplifies (0.60) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143
• The time-zone grid ignores geography and embodies imperial control #exemplifies (0.50) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 850
• Colonial historiography fails to capture the psyches of imperial agents #expands (0.50)
• Chaos represents unexplored territory and ignorance. #expands (0.45) — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life An Antidote to Chaos, 196
• Scholars have treated colonial sentiment as ornament rather than substance of rule #complicates (0.40)