State sensorium. Rethinking the role of senses and affects in street-level bureaucrats’ discretion
Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucrats (1980) has inspired a range of inquiries into the inner workings of state bureaucracies and the uses of state agents’ discretionary sphere. This essay is interested in reevaluating Michael Lipsky’s seminal study from forty years ago in light of the ‘sensorial turn.’ Based on an ethnography of vice squad police raids in the red-light district, it considers how the discretionary realm of street-level bureaucrats is affected by their senses, and how the agents’ sensory practices observable in situational interaction add up to an order- and boundary-making apparatus I call the ‘state sensorium.’