Paper long abstract:

This paper is about the writing of an evaluation report of the Dutch mission in the Southern Afghan province of Uruzgan. The report silently claims to be a piece of writing that simply communicates the results of evaluation research into the state of affairs in Uruzgan. This is made possible by the effacement of the efforts that went into its making: the report has no explicit author and there are no traces of the constitution of the text and the infrastructural hazards of writing in Afghanistan. Drawing on work and fieldwork as an evaluator trainee for an Afghan research organization in 2010/11 this paper will discuss this transparency and effacement. Bringing together work on authorship, format and infrastructures I will address the socio-material work that goes into the production of a text unsettling established distinctions between the author, the text, and writing infrastructure.