ABSTRACT
Governments all over the world started to use card indexes as recordkeeping tools, often for demographic purposes, in order to manage information on citizens and foreigners. One only has to browse online to find many examples. Sometimes card indexes are silent testimonies of the abuse of state power. Situating information in a communication context also enables us to explore its material and transformational aspects and related power modalities during its journey through time and space. Paper is the main vehicle for administrative information. Being part of the network, the ‘immutable mobiles’, ‘paper machines’, or ‘surprise generators’ facilitate or ‘translate’ these processes and are therefore infused with performative power. As historical research usually starts in the archives, it seemed logical first to explore the model’s two outer dimensions of the card indexes, and then focus on the events in the first dimension that gave birth to their initial creation.
