Files: Law and Media Technology -- Cornelia Vismann
Full Citation Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Trans.
Geoffery Winthrop-Young. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Print.
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics.
Chapter Notes
Preface: Off the Record (xi-xv)
- That files are the "variables" in the universe of law; the example of The
Broken Pitcher von Kleist play (pp. xi)
- Files as plural, materiality overcomes content; "Files are processed, just
like stones..." (pp. xi)
- Etymological exploration in English and German (pp. xii)
- English distinguishing btwn materiality and function: "files" referring to
the material of binding and "records" referring to their "function as
recording devices" (pp. xii)
- German non-differentiation: records and files are both referred to as Akten:
that recording apparatuses produce more files; files as an effect of records
(pp. xii)
- Ease-of-use of recording tech. means more and more files generated by them;
"authorless recording machines" ignore official attempts to curtail
recording; instructions meant to curb recording just produce more and more
files in their documentation (pp. xii)
- The ubiquity of recording, the unthinkability of life "off the record" (pp.
xii)
- Files contribute to the formation of three entities which the law is based
upon: truth, state, and subject (pp. xii)
- Limits V's discussion to just those files that take part in the generation of
these things, that is, legal files & NOT files in institutions or enterprises
(pp. xii)
- The non-definability of files; their definition is contextual; formal
definition as, "that which generates a certain type of law." (pp. xii)
- Files dealt with here as "...not an instrument or medium for the arbitration
of conflicts but as a repository of forms of authoritarian and administrative
acts that assume concrete shape in files." (pp. xii)
- Mutual determination of law and files: specific recording tech. means certain
kinds of law (pp. xiii)
- Argumentation flowing through literary examples rather than "nonfiction
scholarly self-preservation of the law"; the latter overlooks what literature
makes visible (pp. xiii)
- Literature as the residue of legal sovereignty, one of the waste products of
law becoming a discipline (pp. xiii)
- Rome as the "grand genealogical fiction: of Western law (pp. xiii)
- Rome as model for Western law (its practice, how it works) but also model for
its historical representation (expansion, archiving); files going from
visible signs of power to obscure references; from files performing to files
serving (pp. xii)
- The movement from concrete law in the visibility of files to an abstract law
which transcends files and even seeks to regulate them, from there to the
formation of self-processing subjects within the boundaries of law (pp. xiv)
- Distinction between two kinds of ways files act on specific legal
institutions and regulations (pp. xiv)
- Transmitting, canceling, manipulating, destroying, and storing (pp. xiv)
- "Data" as the "informational substrate" of files (pp. xiv)
- The movement to a "data dispositif" means that files are "removed from the
order of the visible" leaving the law unconcerned for their materiality (pp.
xiv)
- Indication of the end of the "epoch of files" since they have disappeared
from physicality (pp. xv)
- Indication of audience for the research: "...for those who work with files,
who know of their power..." (pp. xv)
- Influence from Kittler, Siegert, Ernst; other acknowledgements and thank-yous
(pp. xv)
1: Law's Writing Lessons (1-39)
A Short Grammatology of Files
- The question of whether law and state can exist without files/documentation
as a way into the discussion of the origins of the law; the transition from
oral to written law (pp. 1)
- Discussion of Claude Levi-Strauss' Nambikwara example that Derrida also
discussed (pp. 1-2)
- Not a story about the origin of writing, but an "experiment designed to show
the emergence of writing from administration." (pp. 1)
- The contractual relationship through writing illustrated in CL-S, the way
these relationships treat information and goods alike (pp. 3)
- The formalization of the "gaze of the ethnologist" by focusing on the
"factuality of the transaction...the act of handing over"; ignoring
"understanding" in favour of exchanging (pp. 3)
- Discussion of Derrida's reading of the CL-S example (pp. 3)
- The non-phonetic "writing" of the Nambikwara chief as signs that gain meaning
in the agreement between him and CL-S that they constitute information, not
in some intrinsic meaning (pp. 3)
- Compared to a phonological approach to writing with its contrast between
orality and literacy; this as shaping the usual approach to law (pp. 3)
- Literacy/writing is attached to the "preservation and duration" of law;
validity and security; orality/speech is attached to the proximity to
specific events, to case law, specific application of law (pp. 3)
- Loses sight of the kinds of legal writing which are not "...geared toward
preservation nor toward validity..." (pp. 4)
- Literature that explores that gap: Niklas Luhmann's sacral vs. pragmatic
writing; "pragmatic literacy" and the historical studies from that (pp. 4)
- These approaches still retain the usual questions of motivations for the
switch to writing and the association of writing with voice
- "What remains unknown is the rhetorical deployment of the voice in legal
acts, as well as the internal logic of signs and their movements in
administrative procedures." (pp. 4)
- CL-S + Derrida laying foundation for a "...grammatological approach to
files..." (pp. 4)
- Not concerned with reason for switch to written law but how these written
records function (pp. 4)
- To examine the origins of the law reveals the connection with "administrative
record keeping" rather than speech (pp. 4-5)
- Rereading of the Nambikwara Writing Lesson through administration (pp. 5)
- Demonstrates the "divide between authority and administration" which helps to
understand the early operation of files (pp. 5)
- Early admin. through lists; "Lists do not communicate, they control transfer
operations."; writing as a means of regulating; "Lists sort and engender
circulation." (pp. 6)
- Writing as converting items (transferable, exchangeable) into signs
(untransferable, immobile); writing as instruction (can it move? Can it not
move?) (pp. 6); "controlling transactions, "facilitating the administration of
supply inventories..." (pp. 7)
- Lists only store instructions temporarily since their function ends when the
inventory is used up; "delayed transfer" (pp. 7)
- "the more comprehensive a record, the more suited it is for long term
storage." (pp. 7)
- Detailed narratives decouple information from its immediate use, they are
radically separate from "quotidian practice" (pp. 7)
- The "place value system" of lists where items can be referred to each other;
their spatial location determines the status of the sign rather than an
outside reference (pp. 7)
- Insights about lists can be transferred to files since "lists are a "core set
of files""; files are governed by lists (pp. 7)
- Files as "algorithmic entities" and not dependent on authors; they are
"process generated" (pp. 7)
- The "non-syntactical signs" which "send record into administrative orbit";
instructions embedded in files (pp. 8)
- Lists program the movement of files and document the act through "noting the
procedure" (pp. 8)
- Executing a command means generating the next command and noting that the
command has been executed; "imperative and information" (pp. 8)
- This as the site of the misunderstanding that files are epistemic objects
endowing files with a power to document communicative acts without loss; that
an event is transferred live (pp. 8)
- Discussion of historiography (von Ranke's fetishization of files) (pp. 8-9)
- "Historians suspect that files contain the entire drama of political action
condensed into writing..." so they try to find the file that contains what
came before and after the decision (pp. 9)
- Discussion of sociology and organizational studies in the same vein; that a
decision making process can be reconstructed through files (pp. 9)
- How this misunderstanding is also an effect of "specific technologies of
presence and simultaneity" (pp. 10)
- Capacity of files to be updated, capacity for addition and circulation makes
them similar to speech; the ability to be "up to date"; files become
ontological; files become perfect recording devices that can record everything
as writing (pp. 10)
- Only with the rise of analog recording tech. do the limits of files become
visible (pp. 10)
- These disciplines reflect upon files when working with them which the law
does not do (pp. 11)
- Files as basis of legal work; validity in their truth value and everyday
operations (pp. 11)
- Only when records are pulled out of their administrative context (eg. in
court) are their status scrutinized: questions of their truth, reliability,
and context of compilation (pp. 11)
- The law does this through procedures [eg. the rules of evidence] while
historiography develops its own ancillary disciplines of validation (pp. 11)
- "Files remain below the perception threshold of the law." (pp. 11)
- For law, they're ubiquitous but unimportant in themselves (pp. 12)
- An overview of other disciplines which deal with law in history and
sociology: Middle Ages analysis of files, Diplomatics, interest in secrecy
and publicity, etc. (pp. 12)
- The previous debates around and with files open files up to becoming an
object of investigation, problematizes them and makes them visible (pp. 13)
- CV's project as translating files as they appear over time into a genealogy
of the law (pp. 13)
- Files as what stands before the law, laying the groundwork of validity and
establishing its institutions (pp. 13)
Kafka's Chanceries (13-29)
- A reprint of Kafka's "Before the Law" since this section is an extended
discussion of it (pp. 13-14) BARRIERS [spatial-institutional dimension per
pp. 25] (pp. 14-21)
- The story as one of how the law becomes "an instance of truth"; the
resistance to interpretation, "nesting of form and content" (pp. 15)
- The gate or doorway as first access into the history of law; the making of
the distinction btwn inside (the city) and outside; the passage to the
inside; "With the city the law comes into being." (pp. 15)
- The gate make the difference between emptiness and a secret by making there
more beyond its frame that cannot be accessed (pp. 15)
- "questions of law are reduced to questions of access." (pp. 15)
- "Politics of exclusion" which grow up with this (pp. 15)
- Whether laws exist or not, their mechanisms (eg. doors, legislations,
secrecy, validity, identification) remain in force; there's a will even if
they don't properly exist (pp. 16)
- The legal order consists of this "absolute reference devoid of any content.";
a "chain of references"; in Kafka, the gates behind gates (pp. 16)
- The order of referentiality enacted by "technologies of reference adopted by
the law" (pp. 17)
- The chanceries as the place "before the law" ie. where laws are issued
(synchronic sense) but also where "the rule of law is processed" (pp. 17)
- Chanceries and gates as barriers which make connections and exclude, making a
space arcane (pp. 17)
- These barriers require gatekeepers (the example of cancellari in chanceries
that flows through this whole discussion) to operate them, to actually make
and break the connections (pp. 17)
- The whole complex system of barriers with their own progression of
gatekeepers (pp. 18)
- No location in the "architecture of barriers" from which it can be grasped as
a whole (pp. 18
- Gatekeepers can either progress or terminate matters, refuse or agree; they
can be "interrupters as well as messengers." (pp. 19)
- Chanceries as none other than "the spatialized mechanism of opening and
closing gates... the relays of the law." (pp. 19)
- From here, writing the history of law starts with gates, what they do, how
they're short-circuited, how they're destroyed (pp. 19)
- That deconstruction starts here too (pp. 19)
- Open question as to whether deconstruction gets us to "law in the making"
sine it still follows the logic of the barrier, one cannot observe the
erection of the barriers while it is happening through deconstruction (pp. 20)
- Discussion of "In the Cathedral" from Kafka's The Trial to show how "The
power of barriers resides in their ambivalence..." (pp. 21)
- They "create an area of execution that is barred from view"; enforce a
"permanent trial over one's own self" (pp. 21) PREAMBLES [textual dimention
as per pp. 25] (pp. 21-25)
- Ambivalence of the law is between its making (chancery) and its execution
(prison, incarceration) (pp. 21)
- Preambles as legal textual barriers: they annunciate, they provide
"hermeneutical access"; guide the application of law but do not have legal
force, they are of the law (of Bajor) and mediate but are not the law (pp. 21)
- Contain motive, concerns of legislators & history/context of law (pp. 21);
provide the law with a "legitimizing legend", the law makes context by moving
its production process to a stylized header (pp. 22)
- Derrida: preamble as the "parasite" of the law (pp. 22)
- Law depends on the preamble; stories provide entry to the law which law would
not have without it; preambles are literature, they're stories (pp. 22)
- The preamble shows how "questions of access are spatialized questions of
interpretation"; the spatial separation of preamble and law by lines or
breaks (pp. 23-24)
- The process of interpretation and rejection; the process of dragging out
interpretation: "Fatigue instead of decision, exhaustion instead of final
verdict." (p. 24); the question of access is also a matter of time (pp. 25)
CANCELS [graphic or paleographic dimension as per pp. 25] (pp. 25-29)
- The draft is the writing that stands before the law and is converted into a
clean copy in the chancery by the cancellari (pp. 25)
- They copy drafts and, in making a clean copy, cross out the draft to show
that it no longer holds force; annulling allows the clean copy to become the
original (pp. 26)
- Copying is followed by cancelling; law is authenticated by the excluded draft
which has been crossed out (pp. 26)
- "Deleting, rather than writing, establishes the symbolic order of the law."
(pp. 26)
- This practice of deletion as having been deleted (or cancelled) itself
through its condensation into a sign or ideogram printed on drafts (pp. 27)
- The pasting over of drafts with blank sheets produces "imaginary sheets"
where the draft used to be, you know it exists and that there was content,
not what that content was (pp. 27)
- One can only track the traces of cancellation, the glue marks or the sign;
one can't access what's been cancelled (pp. 28)
- The violence of cancellation, cancellation as destruction; the "barrier of
writing that operates in the real" which holds the deciders and the executors
apart but hold them together in the same system (pp. 28-29) Bartleby, Consumer
of Files (pp. 29-38)
- Examination of Bartleby as a means of exploring the transition from chancery
to office and the movement from manual copying to mechanized copying, the
typewriter(pp. 29)
- The scribe becomes a literary model when they become unemployed by the
decline of chanceries; that is, when copyists are unemployed and write
fiction to fill the time; eg. Melville (pp. 30)
- Bartleby as running counter to the kind of work environment of the office:
sleeping where he works (from a time where workspace was not yet different
from domestic) (pp. 30); the continuity of his work (being a perfect recording
medium) (pp. 31)
- The story being full of walls with different levels of permeability (pp. 32)
- Bartleby is isolated, but only from sight, there is still the vocal
connection (pp. 32)
- In light of this, Bartleby does not convert his textual inputs into anything,
he does not eat, nor does he take any money, he just copies; nothing is
converted (pp. 32)
- Bartleby's boss has just been appointed to chancery court and is getting more
work in as a result
- "Chancery" is the practice of "equity", that the discretion of an actual
person is supposed to counterbalance the strictness of law; an actual person
enacts the law and has the power to absolve one from legal obligations (pp. 33)
- This "bicameral" system of common law and chancery had been abolished by the
American system; Bartleby is an "extra-copyist" for a system which no longer
exists, who copies even though there is no work (pp. 33-34)
- Bartleby enacts in-person the annulling operation of the chancery, the
blockage of legal verdicts, in-person within the office topography through
his refusal to check the copy (pp. 35)
- The refusal to cancel the draft prevents the circulation of legal
correspondence; the "speech act" of Bartleby "causes an order not be carried
out" which cascades through the system (pp. 35)
- The legal battle set up between the force of "prefer" (derived from chancery)
and "assume" (derived from common law negligence) (pp. 36)
- Prefer (life) wins out over legal machinery, which produces the accumulation
of waste as more functions are blocked and suspended (pp. 37)
- The act of cancellation turns back on Bartleby, consuming him and eventually
doing away with him entirely (pp. 37)
Imperium Romanum: Time of Files (pp. 47-56)
- Section on the file practices of Rome from the early republic to the reign of
Justinian (pp. 47)
- That every administrative office dealt with specific kinds of texts, they're
even named after them (pp. 48)
- The keeping of records was not standardized; the personal journal of
magistrates updated based on personal inclination as memory aids; "disorderly
updating" (pp. 48)
- Chain of transmission from year to year as new administrators copied the
previous office-holders notes into their own journals as exempla; the right
to reuse and dispose of previous records (pp. 48)
- Movement from orders (oral) to laws (recorded); shift from act to file as
acting is linked increasingly to recording (pp. 49)
- Written commands are derived from the giving of oral orders; "A letter, then,
is nothing other than a transmissible order." The messenger reads the letter
aloud to the recipient, preserving the oral weight of the order (pp. 49)
- Magistrates worked orally, using writing only to "enable commands to bridge
time or space."; "medium of delayed transfer" (pp. 50)
- Letter contained the chain of command; address as the place of delivery AND
the command that it be delivered at the same time (pp. 50)
- Command and law are separate; commands do not come into effect and are not
based on erecting barriers but are based on "updating transmissions" (pp. 50)
- The recording of acts sets the stage for law, anything recorded could be
turned into law (pp. 50)
- Translation as a precondition of command in Roman imperium
- Roman command as eminently portable; the message comes with its own
translator (rather than being translated beforehand) (pp. 50)
- Command proclaimed in the local language in public as a means of transmitting
the oral weight of command in a compatible format (making the world
compatible with Roman administration) (pp. 51)
- Transmission tradition with the movement to written word; recording becomes
independent with focus on control of transmission over the transmission
itself (pp. 51)
- The senate adopting standardized magisterial practices; transmitting commands
about the recording of commands & recording the execution of the command (pp.
51)
- The recording of execution makes records have a claim to truth since now they
are now supposed to be a public document of the past and no longer a personal
memory aid; emancipation of files from the compilers means change in power
from transmission (spatial; command) to tradition (temporal transmission; law)
(pp. 52)
- With this also comes technologies of verification: signatures, notes to
record that procedures have been followed (pp. 52)
- Producing evidence replaces transmitting news; written records comes with the
question of truth, commands can (or will not) be obeyed but CANNOT be
verified (pp. 52)
- Emergence of protocols which are NOT commands but rather preserve an act
(claim to be true) (pp. 53)
- Protocols draw authority from coming into existence at the same time as an
act; written law draws authority from cancelling (pp. 53-54)
- Oral act of command guarantees the truth of the written while written act
enables the oral act to be true (pp. 54)
- A file is nothing but its own protocol, it is its own record; "reading a file
means that the act it refers to is actualized." (pp. 54)
- With protocols come technique of keeping up with spoken word: speed writing
and the stenographers who can do it; the scribe becomes stenographer uniting
writing and erasing into a single operation (pp. 54-55)
- Having both of these practices draws file practices close to memory:
forgetting (erasing, cancelling) enables memory (pp. 55)
- The end of magistrate authority (transmission without storage, ie. without
duplicates) comes with the ability to write and erase (to have a draft which
is stored in a more durable medium) and with this comes law (pp. 56)
- The force of the law is in making "its own truth of reality"; of basing its
truth on correspondence between what is in the world and what is on file (pp.
56)
- Files reverse the burden of proof; one would have to prove that something not
on file exists in the world (pp. 56)
- Truth is generalized with file compilation, but files can only be disproved
in the sphere of law by showing that there is something wrong with its form
of recording (pp. 56)
- The world has no voice in the matter of truth, since it is the file that
carries the claim to truth (and can be disproven) (pp. 56)
- This correspondence also means that a whole reality can be erased through the
destruction of files (eg. damnatio memoriae) (pp. 56) Scrinia: File Spaces
- Section on the storage of files to show how archive office with storage
storage-retrieval (pp. 57)
- The coeval storage of scrolls and material wealth on the Capitoline (pp. 57);
follows a "politics of reserve", "economy of deferral" (pp. 58)
- Change in function of files once they're stored rather than circulating; they
become mementos and make the past material; "securing the inventory of the
law" (pp. 58)
- Archival work as an "official instruction to forget and remember" coming from
administration; state politics with the past (pp. 58)
- Through the archive, the law = "sum of all files on record."; CV designates
this the "capital" of the law; it follows the regular operation of
accumulation: the officials are dispossessed of their records so that they can
be concentrated in the hands of the state (in the archive) (pp. 58)
- "stratified law" spatialized in archive, making empire territorial meant
"immobilizing files" (pp. 59); one is always able to find the administers of
state power in the same places, there is an edge (pp. 60)
- Office comes with Archive and they cannot be separated since work comes with,
and on the storage of accumulated material; Max Weber noting the emergence of
"modern administration" with the concentration of "material means of
management" (pp. 59)
- Copying comes with storing since original letters are not fit for long term
storage (pp. 60)
- Differentiation between letters for storage and letters for transmission of
commands through whether they are addressed and sealed (pp. 60); link between
object of transmission and apparatus of transmission severed in the erasure of
addressee and sealing process (pp. 61)
Codex: File Out of Files
JUSTINIAN'S CODIFICATION
- Movement from translation to legislation from Constantine's translation to
Constantinople (pp. 61); the dream of ending the proliferation of files by
compiling all law in a single codex, having a complete overview of all
movements of files (pp. 62)
- A "loose chain of tradition" made of scrolls with no beginning nor end is
terminated by destroying the principle of file-power and installing a basal
reference which is immune to the "changing constellations of power" (pp. 62);
we have a stable legal foundation with hierarchy rather than all texts being on
the same level (pp. 63)
- The process of codification makes all the sources for it into trash to be
disposed of, all the files are no longer necessary (pp. 64); the tacit
knowledge of using files is also superfluous since the codex enables searching
by its very form; "facilitating access to any passage in any copy... was the
goal of codification" (pp. 63) THE LAW OF TRANSLATION
- Making the codex means that everything that has ever been regulated must all
exist simultaneously on the same level without contradicting, yet the source
material of files is plagued with "problems of compatibility" (pp. 65)
- Authorizations for "interpolation" and editing away all incompatibilities and
repetitions as a means of correcting this, making compatible all law into a
"universal reference" (pp. 66)
- Oral command imposes unanimity, but written law proliferates interpretations;
the codex quashes commentary (through interpolation) but in turn makes
translation a problem of interpretation (pp. 66); "immutability of writing"
imposed on codified law with commentary acting on another plane (on another
page!), interpretation is itself regulated (pp. 66)
- Word-for-word translation as a technique of ensuring that there is no
interpretation within the translation process; new laws around copying and
translating that produce bodies of work that facilitate legal references (pp.
68) NOVELLAS
- Double movement of law: codification as a means of stabilizing the past,
amendments as a means of updating the law for the present (pp. 69)
- Strict conserving rules meant a new practice of writing of "novellas" to
update the code for application in the present (pp. 69), contrast to
codification which address "the general public" rather than a specific person
(like commands), they have to tell stories to communicate (pp. 70)
- "...in law as well as in literature, novellas are news, news that give notice
of the eternal." (pp. 70)
3: From Documents to Records (71-102)
- Loss of tacit knowledge of late antique legal practices (of chancery) with
end of central Roman rule; preservation of legal text and not practice;
emergence of the document as legal text (pp. 71)
- Document's proclamation is eternal and "counts for all ages"; not a record
which documents an act (pp. 71); documents preserve and don't transmit, they
are stored by the recipient and not in an archive, they cannot be tracked (pp.
72)
- The writing is designed to impress, their appearance "represents the
authority of the issuer"
- The end of chanceries to authenticate writs means that writs had to vouch for
themselves through their form and "semiotic codes" that enforced validity;
formats developed in chanceries became formalities of authentication (pp. 72);
the name of the scribe is appended to the document (rather than an addressee)
which acts to guarantee the force of the contents, signatures gain binding
force (pp. 73)
- With this comes forgery since anyone who can follow the format can produce a
valid document; the fact that forgeries can "make history" since there is no
way of determining their status as forgeries (pp. 73); the emergence of
"Diplomatics" as a discipline of differentiating real from fake documents, a
"critique of documents" that becomes its own science (pp. 74)
- Documents can therefore be true of false (they conform to a binary coding);
files do not conform to this binary truth which relies on criteria of
authenticity (pp. 74)
- The way diplomatics becomes the dominant "paradigm" of legal history; in this
model the actual files, the transmission media themselves, have no place (pp.
75); they leave out the intermediary formats between documents and files:
"registers" which set up the apparatus that will become government (pp. 76)
Registrum Frederici II: Continuum of Files
- The development of the "registry" which makes the royal archive portable and
continuous, even in the aftermath of an archive's destruction by indexing its
contents (pp. 77); a narration of the birth of registries from the destruction
of the French royal archive in 1194 (pp. 76)
- Registries are cross-reference systems which link spatially distributed
addresses to the symbolic order (in this case, figured in the archival
order); this makes issued documents traceable meaning that they lose their
innate verification power (pp. 77-78); "Files represent a material...
repository that can be access in the real using registries operating in the
symbolic." (pp. 77)
- Registers as chronology and chronical at once: what happened and when and in
what order (pp. 77)
- By recording its own actions, "government" increasingly defines itself; power
is shifted from the addressee of a document (the holder) to the addressor
(the issuer, government), "registries ensured the sovereignty of power." (pp.
78)
- A whole institution is set up to deal with the updating, management and
maintenance of registries rather than a single person (pp. 78) REGISTERIES
- Staufer proto-state (Frederick II) mirrors Roman transition: here move from
documents to files is marked by move from parchment to paper (pp. 79)
- Royal power derived from the ability to be permanently updated, against the
papal power from "eternity"; registries are limited temporally rather than
providing permanent evidence, they are adjusted so often that an old one is
irrelevant (pp. 79)
- New economy of writing through cheap paper: luxury of partly blank pages that
can formally mirror admin. procedures, every month beginning on a new page;
mirrors electronic "working memory" (pp. 80)
- "...waste of space saves writing time." As physical arrangement carries
temporal information w/o having to write anything; margins contain
constant/repetitive entries while inside the frame contains new "information"
(pp. 80)
- Unchanging grid format determines the mode of retrieving an entry as a
two-dimensional address system based on marginal data [think of spread
sheets] (pp. 80-81)
- We have a "system" = "...virtual registries or "mental filing systems"." (pp.
81)
- Marginal dates make time discrete and countable, which itself enables
addressing; "registers link acts to time" producing an event at their
intersection; registers administer time itself (pp. 81)
- In prefiguring chronological file systems, registries are "the media
technology for a state as a permanent entity." (pp. 81-82)
- Produces a spatialized time in which past and future exist simultaneously
(Aquinas' avenum) in the same location and same form; time as a total
registry (pp. 82)
- Comparison: papal registers included only most important/highest paying;
Staufer registries included everything, enabling history writing (chronicles)
and official copying (pp. 82)
- "Registers not only homogenize time, they also standardize spatially and
functionally diverse official acts. They are universal exchangers." (pp.
82-83)
- Registers introduce "thinking in balances", credit-debit, beyond fiscal
domain; binary model of opposition appears here (pp. 83)
- With decentring of power comes a need for mobile technologies of power or
remote control; registries make their current location the centre of power
(pp. 83)
- The parade of Frederick II's files between locations, the moment when
representation of power as files and their admin. operations coincide for a
brief moment (pp. 84)
- The inherent connection between "politics of visibility" and "tactics of
secrecy" within the same strategy of power (pp. 85)
DIVINE AND SECULAR CHANCERY
- Frederick II's chanceries against the ad hoc practices of the papal chancery:
subjection to time management, fixed times for receiving/responding to
petitions, compulsory attendance by officials who are now bound to instructions
from the king and no longer "independent entrepreneurs" (pp. 85)
- Double order of divine-mystical and earthly-administrative spheres; officials
as angels who maintain the world of files and registries (pp. 87)
- Angels and jurists as "switchpoints, hollow molds, or functions" that
information passes through (pp. 88)
- Maximilian I, the White King: Disenchantment of Files
- Mystery and ministries of power became two separate worlds around time of
Maximilian I; "Administration had become unrepresentable." since it was no
longer represented, but "served to represent" (pp. 88)
- Representation: tournaments, theatre, dancing // administration kept out of
sight (pp. 89)
- Admin was now characterised by the new tech. of print; "Typography
demystified filed and relegated them to the shadow world of power." (pp. 89)
- Formalization of chanceries further; power is reduced to typeset symbols as
allegories which condense the ruler's style of control into it (pp. 89)
- Close fusion btwn ruler and staff; conflict between intense explosion of
admin tasks and Maximilian's desire to micromanage them all (pp. 90)
- Sovereign distrust demand everything be put in writing basic policy of
literacy established in Euro. Courts around 1500 (pp. 90)
- "Files increase to the degree that administrations demand written evidence."
(pp. 90)
- Technologies of "fighting the small wars" of admin: simultaneous dictation,
counterchecking, and signature (pp. 91)
COPIES, CUPBOARDS, AND FILING CABINETS
- In Maximillian I's court (around 1500), files become more like today's files;
in chancery, drafts aren't cancelled anymore but preserved in addition to
being registered, they become "copies" instead of cancels (pp. 91)
- The collected drafts are deposited in the files, while the final version is
issued as a "document"; this is pretty much how today's bureaucratic files
work in the conventional sense; modern filing emerges in the 16[th] cen. (pp.
91)
- These files become the grist for positivist historians to reconstruct
admin/political events (pp. 92)
- With the erasure of erasure through keeping all drafts, there is no one
original which can legitimize all copies; there is now an "origin" hinted at
by the strata of copies (pp. 92)
- Preserved drafts can be altered which means special supervision is now
necessary to confirm their authenticity (pp. 92)
- Drafts files change in registries; they now keep track of drafts and
copies, they are now database pointers (pp. 92-93)
- US military def. of "database": 1) database = set of files, 2) file = ordered
collection of entries, 3) entry = a key or keys & data
- The separation of files and registry means that the files can be completely
disordered, so long as they are registered in an ordered manner; org. of reg.
=/= org. of archive; files are agnostic to registration and don't announce
their registration (pp. 93)
- This non-order means that collections of files are now free to be rearranged,
they can be categorized by subject instead of chronologically (pp. 93)
- Change in conception of power, from duration territory (pp. 95)
- We can only speak of files in the modern sense when registries account for
issued documents AND incoming received documents (pp. 95)
- Sovereign as "interactive unit" that emits and receives: buildup of documents
facilitated the control procedures of royal control, a form of feedback in
which commands are issued, then their obeying is confirmed -- there's a
self-correcting cybernetic-like system in place (pp. 95)
- Integration between postal system and chancery into a single communication
network which organized foreign policy (pp. 96)
- Around 1600, the expansion of registries from specific little boxes into
whole independent agencies with extensive personnel to attach records to
their users (pp. 97)
- Furniture turn into addresses that point to specific records; the records are
only ordered when they're in use, they lapse into disorder when they stop
being used (pp. 98)
- The archive in the 17[th] century as a depot with no access facility, a
"by-product or waste product of the chancery"; reuse of files here meant
reusing the boxes and not the content (pp. 99)
- Took a long time for the practice of referring to old, no longer reused files
to come about, this was indicated by the emergence of an "archives office" to
deal with the archival repository (pp. 99)
- Disorder of records attempted to be overcome with orders produced in advance
to be applied so that incoming records take orderly form while they are
compiled; files are no longer the end product of admin acts to be deposited for
some vague future use, they now get reactivated as examples for "administrative
routine"
- Administrations that once produced disorder(ed piles of records) now process
order (from previous records) (pp. 101)
4: Governmental Practices (102-123) State Practice
- Around 1700 sovereign power became embodies in rhetoric; chancery operations
as close to courtly performance; rhetoric as appropriateness of style and
rep. for specific occasions and addressees (pp. 102)
- We have various diverse "chancery compositions" of various genres assigned to
scribes "possessing the same temperament"; a "pragmatic anthropology of the
chancery" (pp. 102)
- Politics of performance through "linguistic pragmatics", no divide between
words and actions they referred to, political domain transferred to written
language; political action took place in words since they were easier and safer
to deal with than people (pp. 103)
- Competition between jurists and secretaries in the chancery: generalist
"universally deployable secretary machines" saw themselves as superior to
jurists; secretaries as mostly ex-soldiers from the 30 years war (pp. 103)
- Saw themselves as better jurists since they were trained in rhetoric;
produced collections of ready-made letters as examples of an art of legal
drafting; setting up pragmatic skill against academic discourse of jurists (pp.
104); the collection of files from actual trials and how they were presented as
examples of new skills: how to read files, present them, what paper to use, how
to bind them, etc. (pp. 105)
- Shortening of writing, shorthand, concentration of courtly courtesies
previously appearing as ceremonies in text and in person into a single
"linear courtesy" (pp. 106)
- Change in payment scheme since it was becoming so expensive to keep
secretaries: payment by style rather than by the word, attempts at
compressing the old "bell lettrism" further, simplification (pp. 107)
- Despite this, chancery style retained special characteristics that preserved
the inside-outside distinction: formulas, abbreviations, special phrases;
"the absolutist state always operated with a special language." Necessary
distance between state-language and everyday language (pp. 107-108)
- Exclusive and excluding chancery style to produce the difference between
chancery and its environment; separation through physical barriers (latticed
windows); separation of chancery from government itself through the designation
of "state secrets" (pp. 108)
- The enforcement of state secrets by making their content arcane to the
secretaries writing and copying it; differentiation between ministers and
secretaries enforced through understanding by making government esoteric (pp.
108); secretaries are no longer responsible for secrecy, but are themselves
kept secret (pp. 109) Prussia: Philosophy of the State-Act
PUBLICITY AND SELF-ADMINISTRATION
- Around 1789, attempts to break down barriers between people and the state,
dispel the mysteries to turn disenfranchised subjects into citizens (pp. 109)
- As of 1815 in Prussia, the practical civil service skills taught in
universities was reconfigured into the research disciplines of statistics,
demography, finance, anthropology, etc.; but the skills in archiving, compiling
and writing were presupposed rather than explicitly taught (pp. 109)
- Reading and writing became a baseline that was taught to everyone in Prussia
in 1812, marking the shift away from poet-secretaries to the common
individual; everyone was integrated into the state body by breaking the earlier
access restrictions: "self administration" (pp. 110)
- The concept of "self administration" producing self-controlling,
self-optimizing civil servants (pp. 110)
- No longer a recognizable state practice, but the state now acts through its
civil servants and, ideally, through every single citizen; "there is no
administrative act, however, trivial that does not carry the sovereignty of the
entire state with it."
- More files accumulated than ever with these distributed forms of feedback,
"because a lot had to be written, a lot more had to be written"; attempts to
reduce the weight of files and the entropy associated with them (pp. 111)
KEEPING RECORDS AND BECOMING A SUBJECT
- "Subjects produce themselves by administering themselves, by establishing a
feedback with their own actions." (pp. 112)
- This form of self-feedback generalizes accountability: bookkeeping practices
no longer only apply to merchants, banks, etc. but to everyone in the form of
diaries, autobiographies, and etc.; all goals and intentions framed as a
"statement of accounts" (pp. 112)
- Centres on life as a limited time; time as a commodity necessary to be
tracked in how it is used so none goes to waste (pp. 112)
- Non-distinguishment between public and private records; subjects produced by
record keeping (pp. 112-113)
- Differentiation between secret and public through the "retention period",
temporal barrier; "Only what is no longer volatile can become history."; the
aging of records into "harmless state-supporting history" (pp. 113)
- Writing for archiving after one dies: Goethe as an example; the ordering of
writings into an orderly and coherent life (pp. 114); "Ordering and archiving
are tantamount to combining the unbridled instincts into an "active life." The
active life is that which operates by written feedback."; Goethe's mimesis of
real secretaries by performing as one (pp. 115); all waste is relocated to
grist for the biographical mill, to the files that will be processed later (pp.
117)
- "In the idle motion of files, life creates itself as a regulated
administrative procedure." (pp. 117)
- The two sovereign acts: "destroying" and "getting things done" Secret State
Archive
- Around 1800, in parallel with the constitution of the subject as individual
citizen, the archive becomes central constituent of the nation (pp. 117)
- French Revolution and the double impetus to preserve royal documents for the
public of the new republic and the anarchistic (Bakunin) impetus to destroy
files as the administrative structure of the state (pp. 118)
- The question raised by this of whether power is tied to persons or
administrative structures: answer is that it's both (combination of Weber and
Bakunin), since the material of administration must be set in motion to be able
to act and preserve the continuity of power (pp. 119)
- Prussian history as an example: "Prussia becomes the subject of the state by
administering itself." The state becomes a subject of history by anticipating
how it will be viewed by "future history", by archiving its files into an
"estate" on the state level (pp. 120)
- Archiving allows the state to be its own originator: it make the history
(through the archiving of its own acts, with everything that happens being
worthy of archiving) and can therefore write itself into history (pp. 120)
- Administrative acts as historical anticipations; "The state archive becomes
the power dispositive of the Prussian state. The "historical bureau"
administers history just as the statistical bureau administers the population."
Archive mediates between present and future ensuring the past is never over;
the way files are made to "grow organically" rather than simply accumulate (pp.
121)
- "The archive, however...[]... allows us to analyze the birth of the state
either from the spirit or from the control signs of Prussian bureaucracy."
(pp. 122)
5: From the Bureau to Data Protection (123-161)
- Chancery gets replaced by the offices which marks a change from admin.
techniques to office technologies (pp. 123)
- Example of Bismarck's Reich Chancellry, offices remain indifferent to the
messages transmitted through them, therefore this office would hardly be
effected by the advent of the Weimar Republic; end of monarchy as a problem of
distribution, how to get incoming letters to people one does not know
personally anymore (pp. 123)
- 1920s attempts at state reform through introduction of new tech. phones,
telegraph, typewriters; attempts at distributing rather than centralizing
power; the Nazis make use of the office technologies, rejecting the political
reforms (pp. 124-125)
- Short discussion of Hans Gunther Adler's book on the deportation files in
1974 and how it ignores the history of administrative techniques, the
histories of particular office tech. manufacturers, and admin experts in
relation to fascism (pp. 125)
- "...form follows form, and routine follows routine." (pp. 125) Office Reform
Around 1920 TELEPHONE, TYPEWRITER, AND CARBON COPIES
- Before reforms, condition of "unstoppable proliferation of files"; decrees
limiting weight of files to manageable levels, institution of selection
procedures (pp. 125)
- Trifecta of chancellery, archive, and wastepaper traders (pp. 125)
- Incentives offered for the destruction of files to officials; low-level
officials present to confirm total destruction of files, in doing so they
produce more files: "even the "transmutation of records into wastepaper" has to
be recorded." (p. 126)
- That nothing on file can fully disappear, it always leaves a trace even if
its just a hole (pp. 126)
- By 1910, the paperwork on the destruction of paperwork reached a huge size;
adoption of methods between 1917-1919 on reduction of records adopted from
military (pp. 126)
- Rhetoric of simplification would be adopted by Nazis, directed at "legally
guaranteed procedural matters rather than bureau-technical details" since
they needed old records of ancestry (pp. 126-127)
- Postwar offices took over telephone from battlefield offices of WWI,
attempting to curb file production by focusing on oral medium; but this lead
to new paper trails of announcing and transcribing the calls to confirm they
took place (pp. 127)
- "the link between files and officials secures continuity." "Governmental acts
must be -- not just can be -- documented in writing." (pp. 127)
- 1917 reforms also targeting secretaries and the deployment of typewriters
- Typewriters as standard equipment of governmental agencies by end of 1920s,
and with them came women workers; choice of getting married or civil service;
civil service barred married women (pp. 128)
- Link between typewriter and stenographer brought about shift from chancery to
office, all chancery operations became obsolete: draft prep replaced by
dictation/shorthand, typewriters made press copies obsolete with advent of
carbon paper, forms rendered copies unnecessary (pp. 128)
- What is filed is now a carbon copy and not a draft: now anything that was
filed was also identically in the world, there could no longer be a
hermeneutics or historiography of differences between drafts (pp. 129)
- With this formalization of admin. files lose their privileged position
entirely in the universe of writing (pp. 129)
VERTICAL FILES AND PLANS FOR RECORD-KEEPING
- Max Weber links bureaucracy and emergence of modern office (pp. 129)
- The "bureaucratic principle is... a bureau-technological one. It was the
technological superiority of files and their ordering systems that
inaugurated and secured the reign of the office." (pp. 129)
- New kind of ring binder as central to reforms of the Second Reich (pp. 131)
- Louis Leitz, 1871 opening a factory for making biblorhaptes based on the
Shannon Arch File and an expired Parisian patent, not the invention of an
inventor but "the well-contrived result of a legal circumvention in the face of
the eagerness of the German owners of the Shannon patent to go to court" (pp.
131)
- From here, the development of the vertical file, the binder (pp. 131)
- "Two worlds coincide in the binder: the mechanized world of the ordering
apparatus and the alphabetical world of letters." (pp. 132)
- "...the alphabet itself has been mechanised." (pp. 133)
- Movement of gaze from scale of the state and archive to the microscopic scale
of mechanisms (pp. 133)
- Trinitarian formula of bureaucracy from Goody: "The state, the bureau, and
the file."; governmental reforms in the 20s made the entire order of the
state derivable from a single file with the bureau acting as mediator (pp. 133)
- Binder and typewriter requires the same prerequisite: making official books
and ledgers made up of unbound pages; the development of slip boxes to hold
them binders (pp. 133, 135)
- Summary of JoAnne Yates' narration of vertical file in US: railroad companies
as driving voice behind their adoption, US Taft Commission on admin reform
beginning with questionnaires on current practices from which to formulate
recommendations; how these questionnaires set off voluntary "corrections" in
practices; here too the reforms hinged on smallest unit of the vertical file
(pp. 136)
- With binders, officials are more closely bound to their files since they
collate them on their own; the orderliness of files is transferred to the
official when they are given "their own small world of files" since the files
prescribe the ordered activities (pp. 137)
- "Once the automatism of working appliances guarantees order, those who work
with files can easily be granted autonomy in their small world of files."
(pp. 137)
- Tension between responsibility and arbitrariness is solved by giving greatest
autonomy to individual clerks, which is the flip side of submission to filing
system which automatically generates order (pp. 138)
- Automation of order promotes records rather than their human processors to
agents; folders instruct users, folders "move themselves", addresses on their
covers replace commands (pp. 138)
- Address, location, and hold-file notes as operators that process files
automobility; "nonmathematical algorithmic guiding regulations"
- Once files act like people, taking on the habits of their users, a new "time
of files" has begun, circulation of files dictates work time and work
routines (pp. 139)
- Rationally organized circulation of files operates independently of
individual processing times; psycho-technological issues are now thought as
organizational problems; eventually cybernetics of files conjures up an
automatized admin. that can do without employees at all (pp. 140)
- Increasingly intimate relation between officials and work means with the
envisaged abolition of the central registry: central control is replaced with
the sovereignty of each individual in their own small file world (pp. 140, 142)
- Uniform guidelines implemented to align a decentralized -- read as
individualized -- file processing: the "file plan" which operates like a
registry backwards by implementing order up-front rather than ordering after
the fact (pp. 142)
- New bureaucratic dispositive through planning and systematizing rather than
tidying up and registering (pp. 142)
- File plans also bring their own ordering problems: they have to anticipate
the unexpected, they need a catchall subdivision
- Classification by reference number which contains all information about file
content to get around this issue; the sign code contains the whole taxonomy
of the administration, it renders the register superfluous since you can read
all of that in the address; the entire admin. is one big filing plan where the
spatiality of the office and its addressing system are aligned (pp. 145)
- Emphasis on transparency: that the whole order could be visible at a glance
from the categorization numbers; emphasis on transparency put an end to
technologies of secrecy (pp. 145)
- New technologies of concealment: censorship happens before things are put on
record: if everything is recorded transparently, one is careful about what
one says, one makes sure that truly secret material is "off the record" since
"everything that is put on file threatens to turn against those who keep the
records" (pp. 146)
- Surveillance and Information Society: Access to Files (Inspection of Records)
- Since publication of records could create a public, files have been an
instrumental medium in differentiating state vs. society and admin. vs
citizenry; society is made alongside the struggles for access to files (pp.
147)
- This means too attempts on the arcane-ness of the state secret; state secrets
as uncontrolled, arousing suspicion
- Germany in the 1970s and the debate of line between "official secret" and
"public records" in wake of US FOIA 1967 (pp. 147)
- Once records are perceived as means of social control, identity-giving, and
memory-tracing they become objects of public concern; in US guarantees of
obtaining secret information after the fact (pp. 147)
- Up to 2006 w/ passing of Federal German FOIA, subjects were only given access
to their records in individual domain; "statement of the right of the
individual to protect herself against the state" and not an implementation of
the ideal that all should participate in government (pp. 148)
- Social demand for public transparency was transformed into personal
individual claim over valuable assets: alignment of government interests to
keep things secret and individual desire to be informed (pp. 148) Files and
Filing Systems
- In individual domain demand for greater records access concern over
protection of one's data (pp. 148)
- Fear that computer technology will increase files' usefulness for state
surveillance critique of computerized files seen as instruments of state
incursion into private sphere; files data (pp. 149)
- Jurists transformed concern over one's own data into a rite for the
protection of "personal data" modelled along claims for ownership; FDPA in
1978 (pp. 149)
- For the law, "the census object becomes the sovereign of its data."; humans
are researched and raised to the status of having the "right to informational
self-government" (pp. 150)
- Collection of data is on the same level as all the other steps (ie. storage,
processing)
- Distinction between paper files and electronic filing systems (pp. 150) Stasi
Records
- Following FDPA was the Stasi Files Act which alters the DPA by subsuming
paper files and electronic filing systems under the heading of "documents"
(pp. 151)
- Stasi Files Act regulates a specific right to access records collected by the
Stasi of the GDR (pp. 151)
- The collective concern over Stasi records with the fall of the Berlin wall as
the records were being destroyed; they found themselves in limbo between
administration and archive, they were not in active use but were also not
regulated by an archival retention period (pp. 153)
- Very different uses of these records than before that transforms based on
what use appropriates them: they become archival when used for research, they
become forensic when used in court, they become administrative when a
government agency uses them, they turn into their own record when they are
submitted to a private person (pp. 153)
- The law sees the Stasi files as being used for "self enlightenment" in the
same way as keeping a diary, to "clarity one's own fate", the assumption that
Stasi files are able to contain someone's whole life story (pp. 154)
- Classification of those who demand access to the files from within the files
themselves: victims, informal collaborators, full time employees, etc.; in
order to find this out a third party must inspect the records before they are
released to personal inspection
- This process also includes personalizing the file, redacting all context out
of it to make it tailored exclusively to the individual requesting it (pp.
155)
- New literary genre of file based autobiography, how studying files leads to
literature (pp. 156); the assumption that the files are capable of
transmitting the truth present in all use of the Stasi files, the dissolution
of the Stasi means that no one can guarantee their veracity, the files can only
be "credible" like witnesses (pp. 157)
6: Files into Icons (161-165)
- Quick narration of rediscovery of Greek lead books (pp. 161-162)
- "Whatever is not in use, or is altogether unusable turns into a memory sign
(a monument)." (pp. 162)
- Discussion of cuneiform translation programs at the Free University Berlin
and how "epochs of nonmathematical, merely quasi-algorithmic techniques for
controlling transmissions and the life of files." sits between the ancient
lists and their contemp. deciphering (pp. 163)
- Computer users as "virtual chanceries or chancellors" before their files (pp.
163)
- Intermedial competition between co-present digital and paper files;
reflection upon paper files and the movement of paper filing organizations
into the digital domain
- "files and their techniques organize the very architecture of digital
machines." (pp. 164)
- "The history of files therefore also contains a prehistory of the computer...
because administrative techniques of bygone centuries are inscribed... in a
digital hardware that remains unaware of its historical dimension." (pp. 164)
