We inhabit forms before we recognise them as arguments. A doorway distributes bodies before it becomes architecture; a registration form allocates rights before it becomes bureaucracy; a cadastral line turns continuous ground into property before it becomes an object of political dispute; a category entered into a database begins defining a person before anyone asks whether the category is adequate. Such forms rarely announce themselves as exercises of power. Their force lies precisely in their apparent ordinariness. They operate as routes, defaults, thresholds, classifications and routines, translating abstract decisions into lived environments. Social reality is therefore not adequately described as a collection of institutions, objects, texts and infrastructures positioned beside one another. It is produced through the temporary stabilisation of relations passing among language, material arrangements, bodies, territories, technologies and systems of recognition. The central problem is not simply that societies possess forms, but that forms acquire the capacity to organise what can subsequently appear, move, endure, qualify or become contestable.
