The unrealized and unimplemented deserves historical weight alongside realized events

Evidence

Jameson might designate as the horizons of the “political unconscious,” the disjuncture between what was possible to think and impossible to implement in and Indies’ context and a colonial world. Such a focus presents an analytic and methodological quandary: how much historical weight should be assigned to such a set of improbable visionary designs that were, for the most part, never implemented? How should we treat the history of what was deemed possible but remained unrealized? What can we learn about colonial cultures and the states they sustained from their aborted projects, from proposals whose circulation was interrupted, from (blue)prints that were summarily scrapped? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 631

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the reader’s archival focus: how the ‘possible but unrealized’ documents the epistemics of colonial governance.
• QUESTION: A genuinely open methodological query — how much evidentiary weight aborted proposals carry — worth tracking through later chapters.