ArgumentDrawing and writing number among the most widespread scientific practices of representation. Neither photography, graphic recording apparatuses, typewriters, nor digital word- and image-processing ever completely replaced drawing and writing by hand. The interaction of hand, paper, and pen indeed involves much more than simply recording or visualizing what was previously thought, observed, or imagined. Both writing and drawing have the power to translate concepts and observations into two-dimensional, manageable, reproducible objects. They help to develop research questions and they open up (...) an interaction between the gathering of phenomena and the formation of theses. Related to the manifold studies of representational activities in the sciences and the humanities, this topical issue tries to refine our understanding of the capacities of drawing and writing as research techniques; i.e. as productive epistemic practices. In particular the contributions address three aspects: the material conditions and configurations of the “scene of drawing and writing,” the involved procedures of production, and the languages of inscription. (shrink)

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the (...) nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. (shrink)

This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse problems by different means in multiple locations. So, educating children is not continuous with governing colonies (...) even though both are necessary to nineteenth-century states. For this reason, states use logistical means of coordination to link sites, and they make the power of the state seem unitary even though the exercise of state power is not. (shrink)

This article argues that vehicles, roads and routes merit a much more central place in theorizations of migration politics. This argument is developed in terms of three theses. First, the study of migration politics should examine how vehicles feature in the public mediation of migration and border controversies. Second, it is important to analyze vehicles as mobile sites of power and contestation in their own right. Third, an understanding of the materiality of transportation helps to explain how the vehicle can (...) sometimes become a site of strategic political action. These arguments are in turn used to develop a concept of viapolitics as a contribution to literatures on migration, mobilities and power. Viapolitics orients us to see migration from the middle, that is, from the angle of the vehicle and not just the state. It also seeks to connect migration studies to the history of problematizations, cultural types and the mythopoetics of the road. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag nimmt den heute allgegenwärtigen Begriff „Daten“ als historische Kategorie in den Blick. Er geht der langsamen Verbreitung des Wortes unter Statistikern im 19. Jahrhundert nach und untersucht die materielle Kultur derjenigen Konzepte und Praktiken, die mit seiner Verwendung einhergingen. Am Beispiel der preußischen Volkszählung legt der Beitrag mit diesem Vorgehen bislang unbeachtete Genealogien datengetriebener Forschung frei: Nicht erst Computerspezialisten des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, sondern Wissenschaftler des 19. Jahrhunderts machten sich den Begriff für die Produktion streng abstrahierter, numerischer (...) Information zunutze. Sie entwickelten hochflexible Aufbereitungsverfahren von Massenerhebungen, lange bevor Maschinen wie das Hollerith-System oder der Computer die Kompilierung per Hand ersetzten. Bei der preußischen Volkszählung war das Werkzeug dieser „Verdatung“ die sogenannte Zählkarte, ein beweglicher Papierträger, der ein komplexes System der Auswertung erzwang. Der Beitrag rekonstruiert die Logistik dieses Verfahrens und verfolgt die durch ganz Berlin zirkulierenden Papiermassen. Er analysiert die Organisation der meist weiblichen, in Heimarbeit beschäftigten Auszähler und ermisst die sozialen und intellektuellen Anforderungen, die erforderlich wurden, um die auf den beweglichen Zählkarten eingeschriebenen Informationen möglichst schnell und fehlerlos in numerische Aggregate umzuwandeln. Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass die Verdatung nicht nur in der Bevölkerungsstatistik zu neuen Darstellungsformen und Erkenntnissen führte, sondern auch die Forschungspraktiken etlicher anderer „baconischer“ Wissenschaften prägte. Von der Nationalökonomie über die Taxonomie bis zur Paläontologie stärkte das Sehen und Verarbeiten von „Daten“ historische Sensibilitäten und führte zu überraschenden, epochalen Einsichten. (shrink)