technics-of-politics

The chapter '1. THE SOVEREIGN’S DATA' examines how sovereign power is fundamentally dependent on the identification and sorting of individuals through evolving modalities—from rituals and archives to digital technologies—culminating in the contemporary digital surveillance state exemplified by the NSA's mass data collection. It highlights the sovereign's insatiable appetite for data, the epistemological and political challenges of producing knowledge about populations, and the transformative impact of digital power in enabling granular individualization and new forms of population control. The chapter also introduces a methodological framework for analyzing political technologies as sovereignty machines, emphasizing the embedded technical codes and the need to democratize technics to reclaim political agency.

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.

The chapter examines how digital power and identification technologies, originating in colonial contexts such as fingerprinting in British India, have been repurposed and circulated globally, particularly in post-conflict state-building efforts like Liberia's disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) and security sector reform (SSR). It critiques the ideological framing of technology as inherently liberating, revealing how digital systems enforce legibility, social sorting, and political control through archival and classificatory practices that reproduce colonial legacies and create new forms of identity and governance. The chapter highlights the paradoxical role of digital technologies in constructing both traditional and modern identities, emphasizing the political and material realities shaped by these 'technics of politics' in global North-South relations and development discourse.

The chapter examines the global standardization of political identification technologies through the metaphor of the 'ship of state,' highlighting the challenges posed by digital power's homogenizing effects on political subjectivity and the limitations of traditional resistance methods. It critiques the concept of informational self-determination as insufficient in the digital era and proposes the principle of 'nymity'—a right to own and control personal data and self-representation—as a necessary framework for privacy and resistance, supported by emerging legal and institutional practices.