Oz Frankel. States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. ISBN: 9780801883408. Price: US$48.00.

One of the most original contributions of this extensively researched book may also, however, constitute its Achilles heel. We usually encounter social investigations and reports in the context of the study of something else: nineteenth-century prostitution, disciplinary individualism, or the development of classificatory knowledge, to take a few examples. The main object of Frankel’s study, though, appears to be state-sponsored investigations and reports per se. This approach turns up many engaging and surprising details about nineteenth-century methods of social investigation, the investigators themselves, and the improvisational responses of those they investigated. However, I often found it difficult to retrace my steps from Frankel’s richly textured and very concrete accounts back to the more abstract, central claims of the book. States of Inquiry sets out to investigate what it calls two fundamentals of public culture. First are the methods, as well as actual practices and settings, of investigations with particular focus on the relation between investigators and the investigated in the field of action. Secondly, the book claims to analyze the formal and social aspects of the report itself, delineating its generic conventions, as well as the notions of authorship that it promoted, and the material history of its production, circulation, and consumption. Finally, States of Inquiry purports to pay special attention to the ways that those investigated and reported upon interacted with the investigators. It therefore complicates the idea that the subjects being represented were passive or that state power was by any means total. By looking closely at the sites of investigation, Frankel sets out to show that, “rather than simply empower the modern state, official publications and investigations facilitated unforeseen encounters and dealings between governments and legislatures and their local interlocutors” (3). Drawing on this evidence, Frankel argues that nineteenth-century Britain and the United States witnessed the emergence of a new form of politics that combined the relay of facts with new modes of political and aesthetic representation, namely those of government-commissioned reports. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s concept of print capitalism in Imagined Communities (1991), Frankel proposes that social investigations and reports across the nineteenth century in Britain and the United States produced a field of communication between the state and its subjects that he terms print statism. Emphasizing the transactional nature of this relationship, Frankel argues that it is through the exchange of knowledge and texts that scattered and disenfranchised, as well as more central and hegemonic, populations came to recognize the state. The work of Michel Foucault on the power/knowledge nexus and on governmentality certainly hovers over Frankel’s investigation. But Frankel seeks to distinguish his work from Foucauldian studies of knowledge in this period, “haunted by the specter of the panopticon,” by emphasizing what he calls the “state/knowledge nexus” within a larger economy of knowledge and communication (3). At the heart of States of Inquiry is an argument about representation and what Frankel calls the “double-mirror” aspect of state representation (17). On the one hand, investigators represented the state in the field, while also representing under-represented populations to the state. On the other hand, the state reported on society and was itself a topic of reportage. While this doubling quality is quite interesting, it seems to me that more theoretical implications could be drawn from it. The book adroitly sums up current theories of representation and suggests the uniqueness of the nineteenth-century context, but it stops short of reflecting on how these multiple dualities might revise available theories of representation. In other words, Frankel’s case seems to put pressure upon familiar and still potent notions of democratic and realist representation, ones we have inherited from the …