A Preliminary Critique of Filing Cabinets from the Perspective of Recursive Archival Furniture Studies
Dr Wanda Thrufens
The title of Dr Wanda Thrufens’ paper commits, in twenty-one words, several of the errors the paper subsequently identifies in filing cabinets. It describes itself as preliminary. It invokes a field—Recursive Archival Furniture Studies—that did not exist before the paper named it and has not acquired independent existence since.
It uses the word “perspective” in a context where no alternative perspective is acknowledged as available. And it promises a critique of filing cabinets, which it delivers, at the cost of making the reader feel that filing cabinets have been waiting a long time for precisely this critique and will not rest easy now that it has arrived.
Thrufens opens with a proposition that she attributes to no one but advances with the confidence of someone who considers it received wisdom: that the filing cabinet is not a neutral object. This is her first move, and it sets the paper’s characteristic register—the air of revealing something that has been hiding in plain sight, combined with the suggestion that only the author was positioned to notice it. “We have inherited the filing cabinet,” she writes, “as we inherit most of our cognitive infrastructure: without examination, without consent, and without any clear understanding of what it assumes.” The filing cabinet, on this account, does not merely store documents. It encodes a theory of knowledge—one that presupposes discreteness, sequence, the priority of the category over the item, and the existence of a mind sufficiently sovereign to have designed the category in advance of encountering the material. Thrufens considers all four presuppositions contestable. She contests them across forty-seven pages, including appendices.
The contestation of the first presupposition—discreteness—occupies the paper’s opening section and involves what Thrufens calls “the misfiled document problem,” which she presents as a structural critique rather than a clerical error. A document that sits uneasily between categories—the letter that is also a contract, the memorandum that is also a complaint, the receipt for twelve yards of green baize that is also, potentially, evidence of something not yet determined—does not merely present an administrative inconvenience. It reveals, Thrufens argues, that the categorical structure imposed by the cabinet pre-empts the meaning of its contents. “The misfiled document does not fail the system,” she writes. “The system fails the document. The cabinet demands commitment to a category before the nature of the document is fully known, which is epistemologically identical to demanding a verdict before a trial.” This is a striking formulation. It is also slightly stronger than the evidence requires, a quality that recurs throughout the paper and that Thrufens appears to consider a virtue rather than a tendency to manage.
Professor Gerhard Ünsel of the Hochschule für Archivwissenschaften in Marburg, reviewing the paper for the Journal of Material Documentation Theory in 2019, described Thrufens’s critique of filing cabinet discreteness as “the most important contribution to the theory of archival furniture since Kloss’s The Drawer as Epistemological Unit in 1978.” He cited her misfiled document argument at length, appended a commentary agreeing with every component of it, and concluded that “Thrufens has permanently altered the way any serious scholar must approach the vertical storage unit.” Kloss’s monograph, when located, turns out to be a forty-page pamphlet published by a small press in Hamburg whose catalogue does not appear to include other titles, but its existence was not something Ünsel invited the reader to verify, and the Journal did not request that he do so. Thrufens cites Ünsel’s review in her revised edition’s preface as evidence that the paper “has found the reception in the field that the field clearly needed to offer it,” which is the kind of sentence that only makes sense if the author and the field’s principal reviewer share a definition of the field that excludes dissenting voices. No dissenting voices appear to have presented themselves, which the paper attributes to the strength of the argument and which a neutral observer might attribute to the narrowness of the readership.
The second presupposition—sequence—receives what Thrufens considers her most rigorous treatment and what the reader may consider her most ambitious. The filing cabinet, she argues, imposes chronological or alphabetical sequence on material whose own internal logic may be neither chronological nor alphabetical. A folder labelled “A–D” does not reflect any property of its contents. It reflects a decision made about the English alphabet that predates the documents by centuries and that the documents themselves had no opportunity to contest. Thrufens devotes eleven pages to this argument, drawing on Foucault’s The Order of Things—specifically the preface, in which Borges’s fictional Chinese encyclopaedia demolishes taxonomic confidence—and on von Entenbraten’s observation that the interesting dimension is invariably the omitted one. “Von Entenbraten,” she writes, “was describing cognitive experience, but he might equally have been describing what happens when a document is placed in a folder labelled D–F. The document’s interesting dimension—its relationship to a document three drawers away, its contradiction of a memo filed under a different initial, its status as residue of an explanation that no longer exists—disappears at the moment of filing. The cabinet does not archive knowledge. It archives the decision to stop looking.” This is the paper’s best sentence. It is also the sentence most likely to be quoted by people who have not read the rest of the paper, a prediction Thrufens appears to have made herself, since she italicises it and places it at the end of a paragraph, which is where writers put sentences they wish to be extracted.
Dr Miriam Seacroft of University College London, whose own work on the phenomenology of office furniture appears in the collection Spaces That Think: Material Culture and Cognitive Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2021), described Thrufens’s sequence critique as “arriving at conclusions that phenomenological theory has gestured toward for decades but declined to make explicit.” She adds: “Thrufens does for the filing cabinet what Heidegger did for the hammer: she removes the assumption of neutrality and reveals the object as an agent in its own right, with its own commitments, its own preferences, and its own theory of what knowledge looks like.” Heidegger’s hammer, for readers who have not recently revisited Being and Time, only reveals its nature when it breaks: the functioning hammer is invisible in use, and only the broken one draws attention to itself as a thing with properties and demands. Seacroft’s comparison is generous, clearly made with affection for the argument, and would have been more persuasive if Thrufens’s filing cabinet revealed its epistemological commitments through failure rather than through forty-seven pages of sustained argumentation. The cabinet in the paper does not break. It is interrogated. This is a different procedure, and not obviously Heideggerian, but Seacroft has committed to the comparison and the collection’s editorial board has committed to Seacroft, and the sentence stands in print.
The third and fourth presuppositions—the priority of the category over the item, and the existence of a sovereign designing mind—Thrufens treats together in what she calls the paper’s “synthetic section,” a designation that in academic prose usually means the section where the preceding arguments are joined rather than extended. The joined argument runs as follows: the filing cabinet presupposes that someone knew, in advance of filing, what the material was and where it belonged; that the category pre-existed the content and arrived ready to receive it; and that the person who designed the filing system occupied a position of sufficient overview to impose order on material whose nature they had not yet fully encountered. Thrufens calls this “the archival god problem” and traces it, in a move of considerable audacity, to Enlightenment assumptions about the rational subject, which she then connects to the grid-plan city, the periodic table, the Dewey Decimal System, and what she describes as “the fundamental furniture of modernity, of which the four-drawer lateral filing cabinet is both the most literal and the least examined example.” This is a large claim for a piece of office furniture. Thrufens makes it without appearing to notice its scale, which is either genuine intellectual confidence or a failure to stand at a distance from one’s own argument long enough to assess it. The paper does not provide a vantage point from which to decide.
Professor Ünsel, asked by the Marburg Archival Quarterly in 2020 to reflect on the paper’s reception since his initial review, said: “Thrufens has established a field. I would say she has established it almost single-handedly, except that the field’s foundations lie in work she synthesises with such fluency that the synthesis reads as origination. This is the highest compliment one can pay a scholar.” He then paused, according to the interviewer’s note, and added: “She cites me, of course, in the revised edition. I find I agree with myself.” He said this as though it confirmed something. The interviewer did not ask what.
The appendices to the paper address three subsidiary problems: the epistemology of the hanging file, the ontological status of the pending tray, and what Thrufens calls “the recursive cabinet problem,” which holds that any system designed to store critiques of filing cabinets must itself employ a filing system, and that the filing system it employs will instantiate precisely the assumptions the critiques contest. Thrufens notes this problem in a single paragraph and declines to resolve it, citing von Entenbraten’s refusal to define Boulderdash as “the methodologically honest precedent.” She describes this in the same paragraph as “a deliberate structural irony,” which is the academic phrase for an irony one noticed and decided to keep. The pending tray appendix is the most interesting of the three and the one Thrufens develops least, perhaps because a critique of the pending tray would require her to acknowledge that her own paper has been pending—in the sense of unresolved, awaiting a verdict, sitting between categories—since its opening sentence. The paper’s central claim generates, in the terms of the AHDH’s own framework, a quantity of explanatory residue that the forty-seven pages do not clear. The cabinet demands commitment to a category. Thrufens commits to the critique of this demand while filing her critique in the category of academic papers, which have their own drawers, their own alphabetical sequences, and their own implicit theory of what knowledge looks like. The paper does not address this. Professor Ünsel does not address it. Dr Seacroft’s Heideggerian comparison does not address it.
What the paper offers, beneath the audacity and the italicised sentences and the field Thrufens has established almost single-handedly, is a genuinely useful observation: that storage is never neutral, that the decision to file is a decision about meaning, and that the object designed to contain knowledge contains, along with the knowledge, an unexamined theory of what the knowledge is. This is worth saying. It may not require forty-seven pages, three appendices, the periodic table, the grid-plan city, Foucault, von Entenbraten, and a Heideggerian filing cabinet to say it. Then again, the history of academic publishing suggests that brevity is itself filed under a category that most journals have misplaced, and that the pending tray, as Thrufens notes, exerts its own epistemological commitments on everything that sits in it long enough.
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