Unrealized colonial plans archived in conditional tense read as political diagnostics

Evidence

It is the “non-eventful” quality of these archives that this chapter pursues and from which we may take our analytic cue. Rather than beginning from the notion that the colonial “facts of the matter” might be found in the concrete and discrete “events” that made up social reforms that were carried out, this archival form resides in the conditional tense. Such unrealized and improbable plans were accretions of official knowledge that we might read as a political diagnostic. These were reflective discernments filtered through a lens at once microscopic and wide-angled, at once about the Netherlands (on the cusp of a diminishing agrarian base and an as yet emergent industrial future) and a colonial utopia obliquely expressed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 624

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reading purpose on epistemic anxieties and colonial commonsense — the conditional tense as genre is an archival-meditation companion to Scott’s ‘seeing like a state’ and high-modernist paper plans.
• SEED: The ‘conditional tense as archival genre’ framing is a strong essay angle on how states store and reproduce what they never build.