Abstract
Abstract This article provides a particular history of the file. It does not focus on the content of specific files or the development of filing systems. Instead it moves files from a history of administrative writing to a history of information storage technologies. My argument is that if we get ›under the hood‹ of the filing cabinet and manila folder to understand how they work we learn how information was conceptualized and understood such that it could contribute to the goals of efficiency critical to corporate capitalism. It is the contention of this article that information is a historically specific concept and the early 20th century emergence of the tabbed manila folder and the vertical filing cabinet offer insights into the development of a distinctly modern conception of information as impersonal, discrete, and therefore easily extracted. I offer the concept of ›granular certainty‹ to show how information was conceptualize, practically constituted and organized. This emphasizes the overlap between the importance of efficiency’s embrace of standardization and the specific and a conception of information as something specific. The tabbed manila folder and the vertical filing cabinet emerged from this overlap between efficiency and information.
Highlights
The tabbed manila folder and the vertical filing cabinet emerged from this overlap between efficiency and information
The novelty of the vertical filing cabinet and tabbed manila folder derived from a faith in granular certainty
The filing cabinet developed in the overlap between efficiency and information that granular certainty makes visible
Summary
In analysing the filing cabinet, I have shown that it is not a singular technology. Rather, it is comprised of a number of storage technologies. As a storage technology that allowed individual units to maintain their original identity, the vertical filing cabinet fused loose paper and the modern conception of information This was apparent when proponents sought to explain the utility of the vertical file through a contrast with the book.[62] The use of a press book or copybook in offices meant that correspondence that had once been an individual unit was bound into a singular material object. As this article has shown, they are the files of early-20thcentury American times and file clerks and offices This conception of the file appeared as part of a spatial order of storage that had distinct temporal concerns (albeit in a different register from Ernst’s arguments). As I have argued in this article, this mediated encounter with information initially occurred through the use of tabbed manila folders in a vertical filing cabinet shaped by efficiency and capitalism
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