personage-principle

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.

This appendix presents Erwin Cuntz's detailed proposal for a centralized German Registry system based on the 'personage principle' rather than territorial residence, organizing individuals by immutable data such as date and place of birth. The registry aims to unify and efficiently track all Germans through a highly structured filing system, including a proposed physical building design, to enable rapid access to current addresses and personal information, reflecting a vision of bureaucratic control aligned with technological progress. The system emphasizes mandatory registration and severe penalties for non-compliance, illustrating an early concept of centralized population data management.