5. Equipped for Case-Making

Abstract

In this chapter, I trace the question of agency related to dispositifs. I take up the crucial insight of material-semiotic approaches that practices of governing are enabled and mediated by material-discursive arrangements (Latour 2010; Scheffer 2010, 45) of government. Caseworkers are becoming material-discursively assembled or equipped to be able to assemble cases and enact the dispositif (see Rabinow 2003). 1 In the first subchapter (5.1), I assemble individual and collective agentic formations that are crucial for enacting the dispositif in practices of case-making: primarily caseworkers, sections and 'the office'. I suggest some associations and socio-material technologies to be central for assembling them, namely associations that compose a proxy of the 'nation', membership devices, ritualised events of assembling collectives and associations of super-vision. In the second subchapter (5.2), I introduce central devices for re-cording lives in terms of asylum: material-discursive tools for acting upon the lives of those who claim asylum in prosaic practices of case-making. I distinguish between various types of devices, namely recording, inscription, coordinating, and writing devices. Together, these devices are crucial mediators for assembling asylum cases towards their resolution (see Part II).1 This also has consequences for the crucial issue of accountability (see also section 8.1.4):viewing practices as mediated by such composite agentic formations shifts what accountability means by both altering what counts or matters (increasingly numbers), and who accounts (increasingly nonhuman mediators).