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In the electronic age, documents appear to have escaped their paper confinement. But we are still surrounded by flows of paper with enormous consequences. In the planned city of Islamabad, order and disorder are produced through the ceaseless inscription and circulation of millions of paper artifacts among bureaucrats, politicians, property owners, villagers, imams (prayer leaders), businessmen, and builders. What are the implications of such a thorough paper mediation of relationships among people, things, places, and purposes? This book explores this question in the routine yet unpredictable realm of the Pakistani urban bureaucracy, showing how the material forms of postcolonial bureaucratic documentation produce a distinctive political economy of paper that shapes how the city is constructed, regulated, and inhabited. Files, maps, petitions, and visiting cards constitute the enduring material infrastructure of more ephemeral classifications, laws, and institutional organizations. The author develops a fresh approach to state governance as a material practice, explaining why writing practices designed during the colonial era to isolate the government from society have become a means of participation in it.

This chapter describes how the inscription and circulation practices of files in Islamabad offices constitute a complex political economy of paper. It argues that the discourses and movements of files shape and are shaped by the efforts of functionaries at every level to avoid responsibility, influence cases, and sometimes to raise money. This political economy of paper is not a market economy but neither is it a command economy. The chapter goes on to describe its historical roots in the East India Company and examines the larger politics of files as embedded in their material qualities and in procedures. It then demonstrates how file practices constitute a collective agent, and how this collective agent may be harnessed for particular projects.