In reply to: The Filing Cabinet
The affordances of the filing cabinet as an information technology have produced new relationships between power and epistemology. 15 The distinct concepts of storage, filing, information, and efficiency have been activated in certain institutional settings to establish social dynamics and relationships, especially those of gender and labor. In this light there are two crucial and overlapping points: first, the filing cabinet illuminates an important moment in the genealogy of information; and second, the filing cabinet belongs to the material history of efficiency. Indeed, the vertical filing cabinet brings to the fore a commitment to particularization that shaped the use and conception of information at the beginning of the 20th century.