archival-mode-power
A form of power that operates through storing, categorizing, and sorting individuals in databases, moving beyond direct surveillance to dynamic group management.
1 chapter across 1 book
Identify and Sort: How Digital Power Changed World Politics (2016)Josef Teboho Ansorge
The chapter '4. TECHNICS AND TOWERS' examines how sovereign power employs technics—technical artefacts and practices—to identify, sort, and regulate populations, emphasizing the role of legibility and abstraction in state control. It traces the historical and theoretical evolution of political technics from ritual and archival modes to digital power, highlighting the depoliticisation and neutralisation of political centers culminating in technics as a politically charged yet seemingly neutral domain. The chapter critiques the panoptic model of surveillance, introduces Erwin Cuntz's registry tower as a pre-digital architectural blueprint for population-based governance, and analyzes how bureaucratic labor and data architectures standardize and obscure sovereign power through automated sorting and grouping without subjects' knowledge.