State power operates through a grid of countable, serialized categories

Evidence

The ‘warp’ of this thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore – in principle – countable. (The comic classificatory and subclassificatory census boxes entitled ‘Other’ concealed all real-life anomalies by a splendid bureaucratic trompe l’oeil). The ‘weft’ was what one could call serialization: the assumption that the world was made up of replicable plurals. The particular always stood as a provisional representative of a series, and was to be handled in this light. This is why the colonial state imagined a Chinese series before any Chinese, and a nationalist series before the appearance of any nationalists. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 679

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The warp-and-weft metaphor (classificatory grid + serialization) is one of Anderson’s densest conceptual tools — a paradigm-shifting lens on how states constitute reality by imagining series before their members exist.
• XREF: The ‘grid that says what things are not where’ resonates with the ID-card/human-surveillance logic in We (Zamyatin) and with Foucault’s Panopticon evoked later in the same chapter.

Related

• The colonial state’s thinking worked as a classificatory grid plus serialization. (similarity 0.88)