Revisions and Revisionisms in H.O. Meisner’s Modern Diplomatics of Files: An Essay in the Historical Anthropology of Bureaucratic Mediocracy

Abstract In this essay I lay out an argument about the scholarship on the emergent rationality of files. Looking at the case of Heinrich Otto Meisner’s groundbreaking modern diplomatics of files and the conditions and possibilities that shaped the argument of his work both practically and politically, I suggest a model for the analysis of bureaucratic mediocracy in historical perspective. I argue for an historical anthropology that acknowledges the epistemic violence and politics of inclusion and exclusion in bureaucracy in order to arrive at an historical anthropology of reason that does not deny, but instead attempts to think through its unequal terms.

In the following, I lay out an argument about the scholarship on the emergent rationality of files. I understand this essay to be a contribution to an anthropology of bureaucracy in a historical perspective. From the perspective of praxeology, the ethnographer of science and technology, Bruno Latour, went as far as to ask whether modernity, as it was and still is imagined, ever existed in the realm of praxis. 6 Viewed through this perspective, it turns out that many of the umbrella terms that organized the logics of Western rationality start to collapse. This enables one to reconsider them in the resources for a historical anthropology of reason.
This holds true, as I will show, for bureaucracy as much as for everyday life. In the case of bureaucratic administration, particularly in relation to archival filing systems, state institutions set out to catch Kafka's bird.
Listening to its song, one may learn not only about birds but also their cages.
This essay is, therefore, intended as a contribution to a history of files. Unlike most of the papers featured in this special issue, it does not look at bureaucratic practice in non-Western contexts or in early modern times.   One of their goals -achieved during World War II through the Nazi regime's strategic plundering -was the acquisition of archival materials on the other side of the »Polish corridor«. 22 Meisner was not an ardent Nazi. In fact, he was not only »a Prussian and remained true to his colors«, but he was in conflict with Nazi party members in the Reichsarchiv.
Even though he had joined the party in 1937, 23  Meisner's thinking as a historian of administration.

A common impression today of streets in Weimar
Germany is that they were populated by innumerable Benjaminan and Kraucauerian flaneurs. 25  has not been able to ignore the same scene at the platform for long-distance trains at Berlin Alexanderplatz. On its East end, we spot an exit-sign above the staircase. That is to say, this exit no longer is an exit but just an entrance.« He calls this initial observation a »semantic change« in the urban sign system. The railway management wanted to indicate that something had changed and added a tiny sign »No« next to the exit-sign. » Since the smallish grey-in-grey sign, even with good eyes, is barely legible from a distance and everyone keeps looking at the bigger one with its bright black-on-white letters that continuously shouts its original message into the world,

Revisions in Original Order
The  ironically, did not adopt, which is surprising given the premium he placed on rational organization.
One example for this more general trend of the early 20th century will illustrate the differences relative If one opens the archival copy of the book (see Fig. 1

159.
The system of color-coded highlighting was something he already used in his notes from Tangl's lectures. It remains unclear whether its logic was consistent over the decades or was only applied to each text individually. Most likely, the system was rather random and changed from sitting to sitting. What becomes clear from the various items in the literary estate is that Meisner used different pens and pencils for his notes over the decades. Typically, he used whatever was at hand, be it writing utensils or paper.
Like many scholars, he often reused pieces of paper.   This does not change the fact that bureaucracy is a powerful, rational, and potentially violent form of governance and that its paperwork is set up to include and exclude in unequal terms, i.e., both with respect to the bureaucratic existence of individual subjects and their archival afterlives. The issue of who is recognized as citizen through paperwork is echoed by the problem that only those individuals from the past whose existence has left bureaucratic traces can be included in historical representations through archival materials.
There is, of course, always an alternative existence, i.e., whenever it makes us believe to have caught the bird, it becomes a place of the other. In that moment, its discourse turns structurally heterologic and thus its analysis has to turn to a theory of the other, be it ethnographic, psychoanalytic, or radically historical.
Along these lines, this essay aimed at providing a historically informed anthropological perspective from within. Looking at the everyday practice of bureaucracy in ethnographic perspective may turn out to be one possible way of provincializing Europe from within.
This approach may offer one way of understanding the conditions and possibilities that shaped what we take to be the nature of bureaucracy, a nature that is contingent on the historically changing perspectives its critics and defenders use. In that sense, Meisner's attempts at defining its nature and describing its underlying logic are nothing but historically contingent endeavors to catch Kafka's bird although the latter will ultimately forever fly free.