ABSTRACT
What happens to writing when it is not being written or read? What happens at the moment when writing disappears into the objecthood of the book, the library shelves, the index-card, the computer folder or the physical folder in the filing cabinet? Despite much interest in the idea of the archive as a conceptual structure, and an enduring scholarly fascination with the specific libraries, papers and archives of individual writers and scholars, there is, as yet, not much reflection on those transformative moments where the pure textuality of writing materialises into a literal object in the filing system, the library catalogue or even just the piece of paper in the pile.
This chapter offers a short (sometimes historical, sometimes theoretical) meditation on some of the places where writing disappears in and out of the filing system. The technology of organising and storing writing has become an acute preoccupation of the contemporary age (formalised in an era of ‘information science’, the Dewey Decimal system, the hanging file and the Windows folder); but it has its roots in a much longer and more varied history of the organisation of knowledge, from the stone tablet to the book press and the index-card. The filing system (however rudimentary, chaotic or organised) is always both a material and conceptual form of organisation: it mediates between writing at the moment that it is written or read and the keeping and monumentalising of writing as something owned, held at bay or stored up for later use. As a material technology, it innovates new forms of storage and retrieval which permeate our everyday lives; it acts as point of intersection between writing, intellectual thought and personal experience and, I argue, represents a potent cultural imaginary – even, in late modernity, an aesthetic.
