Abstract
Abstract In this essay I lay out an argument about the scholarship on the emergent rationality of files. Looking at the case of Heinrich Otto Meisner’s groundbreaking modern diplomatics of files and the conditions and possibilities that shaped the argument of his work both practically and politically, I suggest a model for the analysis of bureaucratic mediocracy in historical perspective. I argue for an historical anthropology that acknowledges the epistemic violence and politics of inclusion and exclusion in bureaucracy in order to arrive at an historical anthropology of reason that does not deny, but instead attempts to think through its unequal terms.
Highlights
Lots of intellectual energy and work were used to rethink the politics of the Prussian state in bureaucratic terms. This rethinking of the state in concrete bureaucratic terms yet again became the prerequisite for the ways in which life outside the archive could be acknowledged within the logic of state administration by files. This look inside the bureaucratic institution and its intellectual and administrative practices, as well as the various kinds of paperwork that keeps them going, allows for a different perspective on the history of bureaucracy
Mei s n er ’ s Mod er nDiplomaticsofFiles the bird cannot escape the very idea of being caged. This does not change the fact that bureaucracy is a powerful, rational, and potentially violent form of governance and that its paperwork is set up to include and exclude in unequal terms, i.e., both with respect to the bureaucratic existence of individual subjects and their archival afterlives
The issue of who is recognized as citizen through paperwork is echoed by the problem that only those individuals from the past whose existence has left bureaucratic traces can be included in historical representations through archival materials
Summary
This look inside the bureaucratic institution and its intellectual and administrative practices, as well as the various kinds of paperwork that keeps them going, allows for a different perspective on the history of bureaucracy. Looking at the everydayness of intellectual and bureaucratic practice allows for a better understanding of the resources that facilitate it This perspective makes it clear that Kafka’s cage will never catch the bird alive while. Because the logics of everyday life cannot be translated to the emergent and changing rationality of bureaucracy, life outside of the archive can only be represented through the material traces it leaves within the papery organism of state administration. This necessary difference between the two logics, within and outside of bureaucratic paperwork, creates two territories that do not map onto each other but are positioned against each other in ethnographic perspective. Meisner’s attempts at defining its nature and describing its underlying logic are nothing but historically contingent endeavors to catch Kafka’s bird the latter will forever fly free
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