From Single Practices to State Apparatuses: Knowledge Patterns and Hierarchies in Asylum and Environmental Policy

How can a conceptual link be built between civil servants’ practical doing with the help of inscriptions and embodied knowledge in specific administrative procedures on the one hand and the perspective of ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott 1998) on the other hand? That is, what language should be adopted for describing the ‘knowledge patterns and hierarchies’ in policy, as suggested by the “Knowledge: embodied, inscribed, enacted” framework (Freeman and Sturdy 2014)? The purpose of this paper is to discuss the possibilities of a theoretical linkage between the ‘micro level’ of doings in sociomaterial practices and the strategic effects of a ‘state apparatus’. We build on literature of anthropology of the state (Scott 1985, 1998; Corrigan & Sayer 1985; Joseph & Nugent 1994; Shore 2012, Thelen et al. 2014), focusing on the Foucauldian notion of ‘statehood’ as an effect of an assemblage of discursive and material practices, institutions, spaces, regulations and other components. We find it fruitful to bring this literature into debate with actor-network theory (ANT) with its focus on ‘modes of ordering’ (Law 1994; cf. Passoth and Rowland 2010, Latour 2013), with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (1987) notion of ‘assemblage’ (cf. Bennett 2012), as well as with attempts coming from theories of social practice to describe structures and associations on a level of analysis ‘above’ or ‘outside of’ a single routinized established practice (e.g. Schatzki 2011, Shove et al. 2012, Nicolini 2013). Our theoretical discussion is supported by selected ethnographic data from asylum and environmental policy. Our data describes how individual civil servants, equipped with reports and databases as well as tapping socially distributed embodied knowledge, negotiate uncertainty and through various means enact stability and knowability of the situation to arrive at administrative decisions and thus carry out public policy. It will be re-examined through the optics of achieving associations and translations across various practices to acquire a perspective on ‘knowledge patterns and hierarchies’ that enable strategic effects, i.e. to see and act like a state.