The Architecture of Erasure To capture the imagination which the Act sets to project, it is our duty, then, to take time and ask ourselves what the nature of the polity it imagines would be. The Act provides a state that is inherently devoted to legibility. It assumes that citizens should be made intelligible to the state and, in a sense that is defined by the conceptual frame of the state; otherwise, they are not even recognized. This suggestion soaks in the bitter heritage