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) 2: From Translating to Legislating (39-71) - CV proposes to reverse the relationship between History and it's "ancillary sciences" that are interested in the material/form of media over their content (pp. 39) - Budé and the focus on the materiality of ancient texts - The 19[th] century historiographic obsession with finding the original sources, the original versions of texts (pp. 40) - The search for the "ur-text" in Roman law has a side effect of producing "media-technological knowledge" about how Roman law was transmitted (pp. 41) - Rather than decide on the truth of the ur-text reconstruction of Roman law, we can get a view of "the media-technological conditions of its transmission." - Transmission through time as already the goal of Roman media technologies: the codex and rotuli as both updatable recording devices, but acting as the "guiding medium" of two very different "realms of law and writing" (pp. 41) - Rotuli = gluing together texts written on scrolls to form a single huge scroll [think the torah, but much smaller in size] (pp. 41) - Codex = a cluster of wax covered tablets bound together by a fastener, succeeds Rotuli (pp. 41) - Differentiation between these to mark the shift from translating to legislating (pp. 42) - Codex: allows reading with one hand, ability to random-access search the text by flipping through, not damaged by frequent reading (pp. 42) - Scroll: read with both hands, only slow serial searching allowed, damaged by frequent uncoiling (pp. 42) - Codex replace scrolls as "functional texts" (Rome's admin. Writings) through its optimized features for updating, reference and searching (pp. 43) - Scribes breaking away from Egyptian papyrus monopoly with switch to parchment for codices; facilitating rapid writing, higher durability -- linked to Roman move from territorial power to "eternal empire" (pp. 43) - Scroll and codex determine different kinds of time and law by their very material (pp. 43) - Papyrus scroll is linked to legal immediacy, the enactment of law here while parchment codices are linked to the legal code, the compilation and storage of legal edicts for later implementation (pp. 43); knife, the sign of scroll-law and stylus, the sign of codex-law: both weapons effecting the enactment of law and their symbolic force (pp. 44) - Codification is the result of deletions, the deletion of passages in an original "mother literature" which are deemed unsuitable for transmission; the mother literature (a living law of scrolls that is continually updated) is destroyed (pp. 44) - "Legal codices were barriers protected against irregular, nonauctorial, and non-authorized currents of transmission." (pp. 44-45) - Overview of Justinian's digest (pp. 45) - Histories of the law through codification begin with the transgression: "Patricide, force of law, homicide, and distortion form a unit." Where a cancelled ur version of the law is destroyed to make way for its codification for the future (pp. 45) - We have two movements: the historical-philological that is looking for the original by tracking deletions and the administrative which is "bent on the latest version" (pp. 46-47) - The media technological approach "takes into account the pragmatics of administration" without condemning it like the historians do, but rather seek to reconstruct the media technological conditions of these practices (pp. 47) 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)