(Source: Administory)
We learned of a Call for Contributions from
Administory – Zeitschrift für Verwaltungsgeschichte. Here the call:
Call For Contributions:
Towards a History of Files – vol. 4 of Administory
Towards a History of
Files
Max Weber famously observed that the modern
office is based upon »files«. In his characterization of the »bureau« he went
as far as to say that it was composed of the »body of officials actively
engaged in a ›public‹ office, along with the respective apparatus of material
implements and the files« (Gerth/Wright Mills 1946: 197). In recent years,
anthropologists, historians, literary critics and media historians as well as
sociologists, have moved beyond reading documents just »as evidence of any kind
of historical reality«, but rather as »testimonies of the practices and cultural
techniques embodied by them«. (Siegert 2003: 25) Drawing from the study of
discourse, materiality, cultural techniques as well as of science and
technology, scholarship on bureaucracy increasingly examines the role of
documentation processes in the life of institutions.
With respect to processes of administration
this body of scholarship revealed that »bureaucracies don’t so much employ
documents as they are partly constructed by and out of them« (Gitelman 2014: 5,
referring to Hull 2012). Files are connecting administrative acts: »Every file
note indirectly contains a command. Reporting the execution of an order
triggers the next one. […] An executed command, then, has a double orientation:
it generates the next command and notes its own execution.« (Vismann 2008: 8)
In other words, records generate files and build a papery organism that
embodies and at the same time realizes the logics of law, state, and
government.
Based on this observation, we would like to
develop the analytical viewpoint by strengthening the historical perspective.
This opens several important questions. The first asks what actually is
considered to be a file under specific historical circumstances? Some studies
understand files chiefly as those administrative objects referred to as »files«
in particular bureaucratic settings. More commonly, scholars follow Weber in
identifying files as »written documents«. However, we want to attend to files
as a particular documentary type, which was and is subject to change both as an
integrative written record and as material artefact. Therefore, files belong to
a particular genre of documentation and are defined by their relation to other
records. Understanding files as artefacts, therefore, allows for an analysis of
the historically specific ways through which documents are physically and
discursively interrelated.
Related to this is the second questions which focuses
on the role of political, medial, or material transformation for the ways in
which files gather, organize, articulate, store, and circulate individual
documents. Unlike other kinds of documents, whose completeness and temporal
finality is essential to their function, files grow and expand unlimitedly.
What effects have for example political transformations for this process? Are
filing routines interrupted, efforts made to restore a continuity of
documentation, to destroy or to hide files? Changes in mediality (e.g. the use
typescripts instead of manuscripts, or more ephemeral notes as post-its instead
of forms) will affect equally the potential of files for organizing and
synthesizing the various kinds of paperwork. Do these changes affect the way in
which people, places, things, and processes are transformed into cases and
issues.
We invite contributions that explore files that
shape or emerging during moments of political, medial, or material
transformation. Situations of turbulence highlight specific qualities of files
and therefore allow for observing particular qualities. We are looking for
contributions dealing with cases outside Europe or North America as well as
papers engaging with pre-modern times.
Issues/questions:
· discourses dealing with files
· structures of participation
· laws, norms, procedures, techniques
of production, access, circulation, storage
· materiality, material media,
including electronic media and their impact on files and vice versa
· interaction of files and
administrations, including human and non-human actors
· material and reality effects of
files
· historical emergence of files
· the file as a genre and its
boundaries (ephemeral notes)
· speech and writing (catastrophes for
administrative writing e.g. destruction of files, telephone, type writer,
post-its, email et cetera)
ADMINISTORY aims to foster debate on the
history of states and administrations. With its innovative articles and broad
methodological and theoretical spectrum, the yearbook is a key interface
between historical and cultural science research, and discussions on the state
and administration in the social, legal and political sciences. The yearbook
publishes original contributions in English and German. On average, our
articles contain 9000 words including footnotes.
If you intend to contribute to this volume,
please submit a title and a short abstract (max. 2500 characters) by August 31
2018 to stefan.nellen@bar.admin.ch.
We expect an outline sketch (around 10’000 characters) by end of September 2018
and the submission of the final article by end of January 2019.
For more information on the yearbook: https://adhi.univie.ac.at
Cited Literature
· Hans Heinrich Gerth/Charles Wright
Mills (eds.), From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology, New York 1946
· Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge.
Toward a Media History of Documents, Durham/London 2014
· Matthew S. Hull, Government of
Paper. The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, Berkeley/Los
Angeles/London 2012
· Bernhard Siegert, Passage des
Digitalen. Zeichenpraktiken der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaften 1500-1900, Berlin
2003
· Cornelia Visman, Files. Law and
Media Theory, Stanford 2008
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