Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge

Introduction: bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge

In the 2017 Reith Lectures, the historical novelist Hilary Mantel reminded us that writing history is an ‘interpretative act’. Evidence is ‘always partial’ and ‘facts are not the truth but the record of what’s left on the record’.¹ But writing is never simply ‘left’. Every record is also an interpretive work which sifts and selects from a vast array of experiential data and wraps this data in language, fitting it into linguistic categories which give it form and protect it from oblivion. Many ‘records’ have been gathered into archives, repositories which house not what is left but what has been kept, and organise these calcified writings into hierarchical families which limit and shape the range of possible interpretations. A workshop at the University of Otago in May 2017, sponsored by the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, interrogated the ways that bureaucracy has governed these siftings and keepings. The scholars whose work is presented here discussed the ways in which public and private institutions – asylums, hospitals, and armies – developed bureaucratic systems which have determined the parameters of our access to the past. The workshop delved deeper, however, than the parameters and systems, to consider how the very materiality of the paper has influenced the records which it accommodates. At a time when digital data teems around us, paper becomes rare and its qualities come into focus. As bureaucracy abandons paper, we pause to ask how paper itself has shaped our knowledge.

The articles which follow are case studies of paperwork in different national and transnational contexts which engage with themes of privacy and public accountability, the beginning of record-keeping practices and their ‘ends’, both in the sense of their purposes and in what happens to paper after the work has finished – from preservation and curation in repositories through to the place of paper and paperwork in a ‘paperless’ world. Each article engages in some way with the way paperwork has been used to create order and control, but also the ways that it allows private challenges to government and institutional realities.

‘Bureaucracy’, wrote the French dramatist and social critic Louis-Sebastien Mercier: ‘a word coined to indicate, in a clear and concise manner, the overgrown power possessed by simple clerks’ (Mercier 1999, 172). Ben Kafka (2012) whose work was one stimulus for our workshop, suggests that Mercier helped to revive the word, a superb French pun evoking government by a piece of furniture, the bureau. Our aim in this special issue is to interrogate the ways in which this power, overgrown in eighteenth-century France and still more distended since then, shapes our historical knowledge. We are interested in the ways that the clerks, having risen to power and helped create bureaucratic structures, continue to exert influence through the study of their accumulated paperwork. The clerks ‘are all the more powerful with their pens’, Kafka quotes Mercier, ‘because their actions are never visible’ (80). The essays collected here help to reveal the pens of clerks in a range of institutional settings, and the configurations of their power.

Sally Swartz leads our special issue with a reflection on the writing and reading of records. It is ‘dwelling in the archive’ of paper, as others have discussed, that makes historical work possible (Burton 2005; Steedman 1998; Stoler 2009; Kafka 2012; Hull 2012; Farge 2013). These paper archives were produced historically: records were made, many by clerks, but also kept and organised, or in certain cases, left in the narratival disarray which produced them. This too is a form of arrangement. The work of protecting, arranging, and sometimes destroying records represents investment in certain pasts, by present governments and private organisations. Paperwork, the pride of generations of multitudinous clerks, becomes, in Swartz’ formulation, sanctionable knowledge, set apart for historians to render into narratives. Those narratives, in turn, are necessary to make the past comprehensible to readers.

To take archives as they present themselves, however, is to submit to that ‘overgrown power’ unthinkingly. The articles in this special issue pull us back from the archive to the institutions in which they were created. They are chiefly essays on the complex praxis that surrounds writing, and produces paperwork, within the political, professional, and emotional interstices which inhabited the institutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some are physical institutions, with walls which delineate or even enforce the division between internal and external populations. Others, like courts, were tollgates in the flow of people between institutions, or, like armies, aggregations of that global flow. In each, however, abstracted ‘identities’ were superimposed upon persons. These were ‘documentary identities’, a concept that has been explored by historians (Caplan and Torpey 2001) and by a strand of anthropology interested in problematizing the ‘document’ (Hull 2012; Ong and Collier 2005).

Origins

These identities were also, of course, paperwork: abstractions, to be sure, but set down in ink on paper in history, like the other genres of record created by these institutions. Ben Kafka encourages readers to look closely – historically – at these individual and seriate records. One means of doing this is to pay attention to origins – to study the purpose and function of records from their genealogy. Volker Hess, working with German sources, writes against the assumption that psychiatric practice evolved in a vacuum of pure scientific thought. At the Charité Hospital in Berlin the patient file, so prized by the psychiatrist, in fact had its origin in the ‘kitchen economy’, as efficiency demanded close accounting of the number of meals prepared each day. ‘The epistemological precondition for psychiatric narration’ came, therefore, from the kitchen. This resembles other alternative genealogies for medical records (Anderson 2013).

There are other means of studying origins. James Dunk focuses closely upon the narratives of medical record-keeping which a parliamentary inquiry revealed as being in competition in a lunatic asylum near Sydney in the colony of New South Wales. Here the beginning of bureaucratic forms of record-keeping was not the kitchen economy, although parsimony played a part, but the internecine politics of a colonial medical community. Public accountability had special significance in a colony with a strong executive government, argues Dunk, which had been established for convict discipline. Bureaucratic record-keeping was instituted, at least in part, for its claims to transparency and ‘responsibility’ in a colony alarmed by the effects of ‘irresponsible’ governance, and making a bid for ‘responsible’ government, in which the local population elected representatives and held them accountable in a way they never could hold imperial governors to account.

Colonial societies held out the promise of being freed from oppressive traditions of the old world yet they looked to that world for bureaucratic models when inventing their own. Examining the development of lunacy legislation in New Zealand, Barbara Brookes argues that the very blurred boundary between reason and unreason occasioned an avalanche of paper to assure settlers that the newly-founded state would not deny the liberty of the subject. Using asylum archives she argues that asylum paperwork had unexpected outcomes, where the Weberian triumph of rationality came up against the disorder of madness. The paperwork multiplied in response to the demand for greater accountability that even put paper into patients’ hands and, occasionally, led to their release.

Ends

The generative power of accounting in creating material records is at the heart of Charlotte Macdonald and Rebecca Lenihan’s examination of nineteenth century British imperial military files. ‘Lives in the Lines’ proceeds from the utilitarian imperial origins of military ‘identities’ to their material presence in the pockets of their ‘redcoats’, to the way in which the modern digitalization of these files changes their role in shaping knowledge. The army evolved bureaucratic processes early, in order to ensure an ‘effective strength’ for combat: tracking the legitimate movement of men, money and supplies, but also allowing the assessment of individuals. Macdonald and Lenihan focus upon paybooks and discharge certificates, which were made from durable paper stock and linen. They were documents intended to last, and often outlasted service. Though many soldiers were illiterate, they recognised the value of their paperwork, and carried it closely. Pension claims were dependent upon these documents, which were able to meet changing demands upon them in the lifetimes of the soldiers, and still more demands as they were archived, and became records of a different nature.

One private archival collection of a different nature lies in the files of the St Andrew’s Colonial Homes, a residential school in Kalimpong, North East India, which were the means of tearing families asunder. Jane McCabe, who participated in the Otago workshop and whose contributions influenced this collection, speaks to this history of enforced separations in her 2017 monograph Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted(McCabe, 2017) – a history which the school’s files, for all their bureaucratic detachment, struggle to contain. Having survived the national rupture of partition and the migration of its children, the small, private archive on site at the Children’s Homes now enables families to restore the rifts captured on the paper which created them. The peculiar quality of the Children’s Homes as a still-functioning institution which guards a private colonial archive in a postcolonial setting points to the special tensions of colonial institutions. In such institutions paperwork may, in fact, offer more than the hope of decolonial subversion – they may offer the hope of restoration.

Birth and rebirth

Kathryn Hunter traces the frustration of the families of defence force personnel as they tried to obtain information and seek compensation in the wake of the Great War, the first to be labelled a ‘world’ war. Hunter shows the way bureaucracies interacted during and after this global conflict, and the legacy of their arrangement. The files of the Australian and New Zealand defense forces worked, argues Hunter, to shape the war as a Dominion and national moment rather than an Imperial one. It was the prosaic growth of bureaucracy, she argues, rather more than the distinctive heroics of the ANZACs, that came to define the national parameters of New Zealand and Australia in the early twentieth century.

Working on nineteenth century New Jersey, James Moran compares the bureaucratic legacy of the asylum and that of the civil law in knowledge production about madness. Whereas asylums and their bureaucratic legacy are familiar to those working in the field of madness studies, lunacy investigation law has received little historical attention, despite the pioneering work of Akihito Suzuki (2006) and treatments which approach the investigation from different perspectives (Stebbings 2012; Dunk 2018). Moran’s ‘Tale of Two Bureaucracies’ incorporates his own research narrative – a chance discovery of a rich seam of legal files which offered insight into the workings of madness outside the institutions designed to contain it. Such institutions developed powerful conceptual frameworks, as asylum historians have become more aware, so that reading the two bureaucracies together, legal and psychiatric, is instructive. More than this, however, Moran encourages us to take a broader view of the way that histories of madness have been guided by the ready archives left by asylums, their records protected and arranged by the medical and archival apparatus of states. Not only the paperwork itself but the politics of preservation and organisation has had profound influence on the histories we have written.

Digitization leads to a new kind of rebirth, or as Macdonald and Lenihan put it, to reincarnation. They note how the ‘digital collapses space and time’ in a way ‘perplexing to creators of historical knowledge trained to consider context, provenance, selection, silence and position in the “sources” they consult to “make” history’. Much greater accessibility comes at the cost of the clues that lie in the very material of the archive. Brookes also notes that the curating of psychiatric files for online exhibition gives them an order and neatness masking the hierarchy and disorder apparent in the original documents.

Historians are, in a sense, hostages to the archive. Footnotes, which are integral to our practice, pin us firmly to it. References give the impression of mastery over archival material, but archives have an anterior influence over the arguments and narratives we discover in them. But what determines this narratival field? Traversing kitchen accounts and structures of institutional accountability, the making of nations and the restitution of histories long buried and forgotten, the essays in this collection draw attention to the generative role of institutional bureaucracies in the creation of the archive, and of its power to shape knowledge. The pasts that present themselves in archives are those which clerks, superintendents and responsible ministers created when they demanded and set down certain information. Paperwork is therefore far from transparent or natural. And it is powerful.

It is for this reason that in this collection we follow Swartz’ call to pay attention to the work of writing, navigating between the private writing of doctors for the purposes of their diagnoses, through the demands of institutional knowledge and government oversight that records be public, visible, and legible by clerks and ministers everywhere. To look again at the afterlives of these records and the ways they can be made comprehensible in different places and times, and for different purposes (recalling Stoler 2009 reading ‘along the archival grain’ of the paper legacies of empires), demonstrates the extent to which institutions authored their narratives, and historians in archives can disassemble and reassemble them. Close reading may reveal the mixture of fact and fiction and demands of institutional narrativisation lying under the authoritative gloss of the medical register, personnel file, and requisition form.

The work of Verne Harris (2012, 2015) and Wolfgang Ernst (2015) reminds us of the deep politics of archival work, and by extension, our narratives written in and from them. Several essays in this volume demonstrate the ways in which paperwork itself carries the potential for resistance and subversion; official narratives may be undone by recourse to the scribbles and scratches, for instance, in a paybook carried by a soldier on long marches, in humid postings and desperate battles.

While it may elide such scribblings and other marginalia, digital access to written records promises perhaps to liberate us from archival politics, and from the more mundane calculus of research funding and travel expenses. But universal access (pointed to in the already-passing technical language of the URL, or ‘universal resource locator’) is a euphemism, since resources are not universally made locatable. Digitisation has its own politics which surfaces in digital curation (replicating earlier politics) but also in access to funding. Political decisions are made about what to make accessible and we are faced with the paradoxical outcome that military records from the First World War for example, which contain detailed medical information, are freely available online, whereas psychiatric records from the same period may be closely guarded. Even when psychiatric records date from years preceding whatever embargo period is legislated, names may be removed. Clearly in serving one’s country, rights to privacy get lost whereas in the psychiatric archive, the stigma of mental illness is imagined to continue after death.

The vast digital accretion of sources by companies such an Ancestry.com present the past as densely populated, and knowable, but this is a fiction with which we have to reach some kind of accommodation. Such corporations promise an ever-growing harvest of ‘facts’, and lead the researcher down apparently seamless paths, click by click, tap by tap. We know, however, that those paths are full of fissures and deceptions: paper has been lost or never made; people doctor forms; everything is more intricate than it seems. By dreaming the archive we restore imagination to what is supposed to be a bureaucratic dullness, and leave space for the unknown and unfinished in our project of writing the past.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Brookes

Barbara Brookes is Professor of History at the University of Otago. Her research has explored the interface between the history of women and the history of medicine.

James Dunk

James Dunk is a research fellow in the Department of History at the University of Sydney and a conjoint research fellow of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle. He is a historian of medicine, science and colonialism, with particular interest in the politics of mental illness. He has recently worked on the history of planetary health and of paperwork an bureaucracy. In addition to his academic work, James writes for the Australian Book Review and Rochford Street Review.

Notes

1. Michael Durrant. 2017. ‘“Facts are not Truth”: Hilary Mantel Goes on the Record About Historical Fiction’. The Conversation. Accessed 17 December 2017. http://theconversation.com/facts-are-not-truth-hilary-mantel-goes-on-the-record-about-historical-fiction-79359. To listen to the lecture series go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04rkn39.