In 2002, Vermont architect Bren Alvarez acquired 11 disused filing cabinets, which she stacked one on top of the other, creating a single 40-foot-plus column of 38 metal drawers. The resulting sculpture was called File Under So. Co., Waiting for …, though it is colloquially referred to as “the world’s tallest file cabinet.” Alvarez’s aim was to ridicule the Southern Connector (“So. Co.”) road project, which remained unbuilt since its 1965 proposal (hence the 38 drawers). The satire was all the more pointed because Alvarez placed the sculpture on the proposed route of the project; nearly 20 years later, the sculpture is now in its own zoning ordinance limbo for relocation 100 feet away.
“Alvarez’s sculpture succeeds as satire,” Craig Robertson writes in the afterword to his study The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, “because in the early twenty-first century the file cabinet is associated with inefficiency.”
File Under is the only example of explicit wit in Robertson’s otherwise gravely serious and self-serious survey of the rise and fall of the filing cabinet. “In explaining the significance of the workings of a filing cabinet,” Robertson writes, “my focus is on culture and social relations of power.” He adds that “by acknowledging the historical specificity of different conceptions of the file, I aim to bring to the foreground the power dynamics that characterize the organizing and ordering of information, and to recognize the significance of shifts in how information is conceptualized, constituted, and organized.” Robertson is nothing if not true to his word.
It may seem at first that Robertson’s study is needless. People of a certain age, beginning with my grandparents’ generation and ending with my own “Xennial” generation (those born in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s), have always known the ubiquity and benign tyranny of the filing cabinet. Yet The Filing Cabinet functions on the assumption that there is a gap in our understanding of this unassuming metal rectangle. Robertson believes that the filing cabinet, like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a harbinger of revolution, a disruptor like no other.
Robertson begins his study with President Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Elihu Root, who found his department’s old system of book- and ledger-based record-keeping impractical. “The tipping point for Root came when a request he made for a handful of letters resulted in several large volumes appearing on his desk.” At Root’s urging, the State Department adopted “a numerical subject-based filing system housed in vertical filing cabinets” in 1906, while “a more comprehensive decimal filing system followed in 1910.” The early filing cabinets had been invented the decade before by companies such as the Library Bureau, which soon staked a large claim in equipment and best practices for an emerging office culture that put special emphasis on efficiency and a “scientific” approach to management. The primary effect of the filing cabinet was reducing information to a state Robertson calls “granular certainty,” defined as “the drive to break more and more of life and its everyday routines into discrete, observable, and manageable parts.”
It would be more accurate to describe The Filing Cabinet not as a history of information but as a history of the control of information, or just of control, period. The filing cabinet changed the work environment and imposed a new order on it. Compartmental storage meant compartmentalized information, in which the parts were more essential than the book- or ledger-based sums of old. Such storage required specialized keepers with new sets of skills, to be taught to an emerging workforce, mostly made up of young white women. Women were considered naturally gifted at filing because they, according to a cited Library Bureau pamphlet, had an “instinct for order.” But instinct was not enough. A good file clerk also had to learn to “control [her] thoughts as [she] must [her] pencil.” “The assumption,” Robertson writes, “was that a clerk would misfile if she failed to compartmentalize, if she failed to keep her work duties and her personal concerns (‘fine clothes, the theatre, pleasant parties, Tom, Dick and Harry’) in their proper place and order.”
As “a worker defined by and subsumed within routine to ensure the smooth functioning of the system,” the “file girl” became an avatar of middle-class identity in the early 20th century, characterized by rationality, efficiency, and a white Anglo-Saxon or assimilated, neutral ethnicity. And the attitude epitomized by the filing cabinet spread well beyond the office. Schools thought that the filing cabinet, by organizing poems by subject matter rather than genre or author, could help students read poetry “rapidly for pleasure” rather than study them “intensively for long periods of time.” In the home, domestic organizational units influenced by office furniture were offered for the kitchen and the living room. (This desire to “systematize” the home lingers even now in voyeuristic shows such as Hoarders and Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, which depict clutter as a disordered state in need of drastic intervention.) Elsewhere, Robertson cites an interview Thomas Edison gave to Cosmopolitan in 1911, in which the inventor predicted that “babies of the next generation will sit on steel high-chairs and eat from steel tables. They will not know what wooden furniture is.” Such was the promise of the age of efficiency.
As an addition to the wave of critical history now underway (along with the “1619 Project” and the Showtime docuseries The Reagans), The Filing Cabinet has much to its credit. Robertson’s style is clear, even if he deploys terms such as “gender,” “middle-class,” and “whiteness” as if he’s trying to meet a quota. His prowess for raiding an archive is formidable, and he has a talent for cherry-picking unusual details, such as citing two filing-themed poems from two different filing-themed magazines. The accumulated material creates a kind of retro dystopia that complements the more notorious midcentury icon of efficiency: the lobotomy procedure.
If Robertson himself has no acumen for satire, he has provided plenty of material for others who do. Something of that sort seems ever in need. The digitization of information has only intensified our attachment to efficiency. On the other hand, in times of social precarity like ours, even a dull profession such as a filing clerk is enviable for its stability.
Yet the grimmest irony of the filing cabinet is the simplest one. As the sculpture in Vermont demonstrates, an object that is revolutionary one moment can just as easily be a waste of space the next.
Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter: @CR_Morgan.
