Municipal Undocumentedness: Paperwork and the Performativity of Population Registers in Italy

The misuse of registration through paperwork has a political meaning and follows a political logic which perverts the function of population registers: instead of monitoring the people who live within municipal territories, they are used as devices for selecting ‘deserving’ and ‘desirable’ local citizens. When this happens, a process of deliberately asymmetric construction of social reality takes places. Population registers thus unveil their performative nature – that of devices which do not represent but do perform the population. If this is true of population registers in general, it is even truer when they are used in a selective way. The difference is that when registers are used to monitor individuals, their performativity is unintentional: those who use them seek to merely “see” the population and not to alter it. On the contrary, when registers are employed to select, their performativity is intentional: those who (mis)use them explicitly desire to shape the local community.