The colonial state’s thinking worked as a classificatory grid plus serialization.

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, 678

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the two-part structure of the colonial state’s imagination: the classificatory grid (warp) and serialization (weft).
• XREF: The classificatory grid echoes Foucault’s episteme and the census’s ‘Other’ boxes recall Homi Bhabha’s colonial stereotype, both central to the Islamophobia theory toolkit. — connects to: Colonial filing systems themselves produced methods of domination.; The colonial gaze was produced by specific technologies and capitalism. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 679; Colonial political grammars shaped what agents could say, not necessarily think
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that the state imagined a series before any member existed — naming ‘a Chinese series before any Chinese’ — is a dense, paradigm-shifting notion about how categories produce their objects.

Related

• State power operates through a grid of countable, serialized categories (similarity 0.88)

Broader Connections

• Colonial filing systems themselves produced methods of domination. #expands (0.92)
• Colonial political grammars shaped what agents could say, not necessarily think #expands (0.80)
• The colonial gaze was produced by specific technologies and capitalism. #qualifies (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 679