That a journal dealing with the history of public administration engages with files may seem obvious – but it is by no means self-evident. Max Weber famously observed that the modern office is based upon »files« in his posthumously published »Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft«: »The management of the modern office is based on written documents (the ›files‹), which are preserved in their original or draft form, and upon a staff of subaltern officials and scribes of all sorts«. Max Weber: Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 1978, p. 957. Weber: Economy and Society, p. 957.
Shortly after Max Weber had identified files as a core element of bureaucracies for processing knowledge, they also became proper objects of scientific study. With his 1935 book »Aktenkunde. Ein Handbuch für Archivbenutzer mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Brandenburg Preußen« [The Study of Files. A Handbook for Users of Archives Particularly Considering Brandenburg Prussia], the historian and archivalist Heinrich Otto Meisner elevated files to the status of a research object for archival science. He was the first to dedicate a whole book to the study of files, thereby revolutionizing archival science. Until then, the auxiliary sciences of history had been dominated by the study of – primarily medieval – charters. Meisner’s handbook originated in lectures he had held at the Prussian Institute of Archival Science in Berlin. His students – mostly trained historians – appreciated the revolutionary implications of Meisner’s undertaking, which opened up a new and innovative field of study:
Heinrich Otto Meisner: Aktenkunde. Ein Handbuch für Archivbenutzer mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Brandenburg-Preußens, Berlin 1935, p. 3.
This classification of a systematic, analytic and genetic study of files is still valid today. From the start, »The Study of Files« not only opens up an historical perspective on administrative bodies by considering the three semiotopes chancellery, registry and archive but also gives relevance to the material–technical dimensions of files through the analytic study of their ›outer‹ features. In his contribution developing »a historical anthropology of bureaucracy«, Mario Wimmer traces Meisner’s intellectual practice: For years, the historian–archivalist expanded and revised his manuscript of »The Study of Files« – shot through with empty pages – with annotation. Wimmer draws parallels between this intellectual–bureaucratic practice of revising and Meisner’s historical revisionism.
Since Meisner’s work, the study of files is an integral part of the auxiliary sciences of history. Michael Hochedlinger: Aktenkunde. Urkunden- und Aktenlehre der Neuzeit, Wien 2009. Michael Clanchy: From Memory to Written Record 1066–1300, Cambridge 1979. Ben Kafka: Paperwork. The State of the Discipline, in: Book History 12 (2009), pp. 340–353, at p. 341. Bruno Latour: Visualization and Cognition. Drawing Things Together, in: Knowledge and Society. Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986), pp. 1–40, at p. 26.
In his 2002 ethnography of the Conseil d’État, the French administrative court, Latour has demonstrated how jurists make law with files. Latour shows how the administrative court deals with two types of documents: court records and legal texts:
Bruno Latour: The Making of Law. An Ethnography of the Conseil d’État, Cambridge 2010, pp. 71f.
Through superimposition, a judge can connect these two corpora on an intertextual level. He drafts a report by creating relations between the elements of a case (concepts, arguments, documents), i.e. the file, and the elements of normative legal texts, thereby drawing them together. This eventually enables him to make a decision and dismiss or admit a claim, to render a verdict. Law is, therefore, created by »building a fragile bridge of texts«: Latour: Making of Law, p. 70. Latour: Making of Law, p. 74.
As Latour defines the emergence of a judicial verdict as »a movement of interconnection of a specific case with a corpus of texts«, Latour: Making of Law, p. 191. Lisa Gitelman: Paper Knowledge. Toward a Media History of Documents, Durham / London 2014, p. 1. Gitelman: Paper Knowledge, p. 5.
Even before Latour explored the »Making of the Law«, jurist Cornelia Vismann reinvigorated the research on files in the fields of history, social sciences and cultural studies. In her seminal study »Files. Law and Media Technology«, first published in German in 2000, she analyzed the development of law from the perspective of bureaucracy and media technologies. In it, Vismann not only provided the study of files with a new theoretical basis but also wrote a history of files from antiquity (the Imperium Romanum) to the present (the ›disappearance‹ of files in the computer). Thereby she broadens the historical study of files by more than 1300 years, simultaneously approaching the auxiliary sciences of history with the theoretical and methodological tools of media studies. As Felix Lüttge in his ›Re-reading‹ essay explains:
Felix Lüttge: Wieder gelesen: Cornelia Vismann, »Akten« (2000), in: Administory 4 (2019), pp. 176–182, at p. 177; quotes are taken from: Cornelia Vismann: Files. Law and Media Technology, Stanford 2008, p. xi.
The rich variety of material forms and effects of files described in the articles of this volume are evidence to support this point. However, we think our understanding of files is productively oriented by two key functions, closely linked to the material forms of files.
First, files materially and discursively Mikhail Bakhtin: Speech Genres, and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee, ed. by Caryl Emerson / Michael Holquist, Austin 1986, p. 76.
Second, just as files bring documents together, they Weber: Economy and Society, p. 980.
However, the circulation of a file, the activation of a subset of records in the process of an administration action, constructs in concrete forms the effective administrative agent it appears to presume. As Matthew Hull observed:
Matthew S. Hull: The File. Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy, in: Language and Communication 23/3–4 (2003), pp. 287–314, at p. 296.
Its administrative inscriptions are simultaneously act and documentation: »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: Files, p. 8. Vismann: Files, p. 8. Vismann: Files, p. 7.
The files »act as instruments to cohere and control the organization« Richard Harper: Inside the IMF. An Ethnography of Documents, Technology and Organizational Action, New York 1998, pp. 11–12. Katherine Verdery: Secrets and Truth. Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police, Budapest 2014, p. 68. Angelika Menne-Haritz: Elektronische Schriftlichkeit und Geschäftsordnungen, in: Heinrich Reinermann (ed.): Neubau der Verwaltung. lnformationstheoretische Realitäten und Visionen, Heidelberg 1995, p. 131, quoted in: Vismann: Files, p. 8. Vismann: Files, p. 8. Lüttge: Wieder gelesen, p. 178; quotes are taken from: Vismann: Files, p. xii.
In an almost tragic irony of history, Lüttge observes that while the juristic Ph.D. thesis became a standard work in cultural and media studies, the history of law believes it can get along without files. Lüttge: Wieder gelesen, p. 179. Matthew S. Hull: Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, Berkeley 2012, pp. 153–160.
In her contribution, Mariana Dias Paes takes up the issues Vismann had raised, arguing that historians of law should pay more attention to legal files. By analyzing documents from the Benguela District Court, she demonstrates how the materialities and formalities of court documents shaped the Portuguese Empire’s colonial administration in the 19th century.
Following Vismann, media studies engaged with the emergence of files. The media historian Bernhard Siegert shifts the focus of the auxiliary sciences of history towards cultural techniques by surveying files not so much for their content as »testimony of an historical reality of whatever kind«, but as »testimony to the practices and cultural techniques they represent in themselves«. Bernhard Siegert: Passage des Digitalen. Zeichenpraktiken der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaften 1500–1900, Berlin 2003, p. 25. Siegert: Passage des Digitalen, p. 63. Siegert quotes here title LXXX of the Constitutions of Frederick II for the Kingdom of Sicily »On the Execution of Charters« from Die Konstitutionen Friedrichs II von Hohenstaufen für sein Königreich Sizilien, Köln / Wien 1973, pp.122–125.
This phenomenon, the transition from the ›age of charters‹ to the ›age of files‹ is the subject of Johannes Kaska’s and Samuel Nussbaum’s contribution. By analyzing two Austrian monasteries’ administration strategies, Kaska and Nussbaum demonstrate how administrative forms and practices of recording and storing information were highly responsive to local conditions and challenges. The struggle to organize, communicate, store and retrieve knowledge lies at the heart of the contribution by Michael Moss and David Thomas, who deal with the development of the ›file‹ in the British administration from the early modern period to the 21st century. In his contribution about late 19th century business practices, Craig Robertson argues that a new form of storing files, the filing cabinet, fostered a new conception of information as a discrete unit. Kirsten Rüther in her contribution engages with the institution of the archive and how its personal and material dimensions shape research questions. Verne Harris and Shadrack Katuu in turn elucidate the role research played in the institutional formation and transformation of Nelson Mandela’s archive.
Paying close attention to formal structures and materialities of written records, therefore, does not mean that the textual level will be dismissed; rather, it entails the analysis of the relationships between the forms of documents and the kinds of texts that are inscribed on them. Materials and forms influence what can be written and transmitted through them and whether they are recognized as ›truthful‹ records or evidence.