Files: Law and Media Technology (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) - Softcover

Vismann, Cornelia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080475151X ISBN 13: 9780804751513

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Quod non est in actis, non est in mundo. (What is not on file is not in the world.) Once files are reduced to the status of stylized icons on computer screens, the reign of paper files appears to be over. With the epoch of files coming to an end, we are free to examine its fundamental influence on Western institutions. From a media-theoretical point of view, subject, state, and law reveal themselves to be effects of specific record-keeping and filing practices. Files are not simply administrative tools; they mediate and process legal systems. The genealogy of the law described in Vismann's Files ranges from the work of the Roman magistrates to the concern over one's own file, as expressed in the context of the files kept by the East German State Security. The book concludes with a look at the computer architecture in which all the stacks, files, and registers that had already created order in medieval and early modern administrations make their reappearance.

About this title

About the Author

Cornelia Vismann is currently a researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She worked for many years previously as a lawyer in Berlin and the former East Berlin.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080475151X
• ISBN 13: 9780804751513
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216