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The Mystery of Paperwork

Vismann 's Files, originally published in 2000 and translated from German in 2008 by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, is a recent addition to a growing body of studies in media and media technology that is emerging from the German-speaking scene and available in English. Friedrich Kittler is undoubtedly the best-known figure in this context, but Winthrop-Young, this volume's translator, has helped to shepherd a great deal of the work of these German writers into the English language, where it has recently gained greater recognition for the unique combination of media studies and the history of technology that seems to serve as its common thread. Befitting its subject, Vismann's Files offers a simultaneously circuitous and precise elaboration of the transformation of writing and record keeping from Roman times to the present, continually reminding the reader of the specific materialities, temporalities, and institutions that have attended revolutions in filing practices. Like Bernhard Siegert in Relays : Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (1999), Vismann persuasively argues that greater attention should be paid to the social role of what John Guillory once described as the "information genres" of media and communication. Her study is a fascinating tour through the changes in writing and recording