Intermediaries as infrastructure: Interrogating the phatic labor of state-building

Abstract

Investments in the digital welfare state are often driven by the promise of removing intermediaries between the state and citizens, yet they continue to play a key role in the last mile delivery of state services. By intermediaries, I mean people who interface between bureaucrats and citizens. Their work, often as proxies for citizens, is not only to simplify bureaucratic procedures for them, but also help insulate them from bureaucratic apathy. Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe the work of intermediaries around government offices, who (in)visibly support citizens in navigating the bureaucratic procedures of enrolling into Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based national identity number. Building on Julia Elyachar's conception of “phatic labor,” I position such intermediaries themselves as infrastructure and illustrate how their affective networks can be leveraged to orchestrate a form of distributive justice to ensure that being marginal does not preclude a citizen's access to welfare services.