Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the “digital transformation” is enacted as digitalpolitical statecraft, how the paradigm of 'digital sovereignty' leads to an explicit infrastructuralization of state politics and how a Public Innovation Lab enacts the infrastructural state as situated, relational practice.

Paper long abstract:

Following the current formation of digitally sovereign transformation, one will come across new professionals: "public innovators", "public service designers" and “creative bureaucrats”. According to these new professionals, “deep change" does not necessarily come from “disruptive technologies”, but is also achieved through digital transformation practices - in other words: situated, sociomaterial, infrastructural interventions.

This contribution explores the statist or governmental turn of digitalization, through which the state is reconfigured as infrastructural subject and object of transformation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork of a governmental Public Innovation Lab in Berlin, I will demonstrate that sovereign digital politics acts as significant arena to enact ‘digital sovereignty’. Moreover, I argue that different modes of digital political practices foster multiple formations in which the state and digitalization / the sovereign and the digital are differently related. Following the actualizations of what I call 'digitalpolitical statecraft' by the Public Innovation Lab, I show how their digital political practices reframe “the state” as an infrastructural power, as infrastructural practice or as infrastructural experiment.

For capturing the sociomaterial, digital political intervention practices involved, I propose the concept ‘intrastatecraft’ as heuristic to foreground first, the administrational dimension in infrastructural statecraft and second, the component of ‘craft’ to attend to the use of instruments, materials and sociometarial tactics in which the nonhuman is explicitly introduced to sovereign politics.