Office Supplies Conference

This program is subject to change.
All papers will be pre-circulated and there will be no presentations. Audience members are strongly urged to read the papers by the members of the panel that they plan on attending in advance. To request access to papers, please email raja.adal@pitt.edu with your affiliation and the panel(s) that you are planning to attend. For more information, please click here.
The material history of state authority, of corporate capitalism, or of any other modern institution begins in the office. Without paperwork there is no government. But with paperwork, there also come the paper, pens, brushes, screens, drives, keyboards, and other instruments for inscribing, copying, transmitting, storing, and consuming texts. This conference seeks to trace the material history of inscription in bureaucratic cultures. In scope it covers the globe and in time, although it takes our current historical moment as a point of departure, it starts with the assumption that the very first office technology may well have been writing itself.
Methodologically, this conference brings together three roughly defined fields that have often existed in isolation: media studies, the history of writing systems, and the study of bureaucratic cultures. Fueled by the rise of electronic literature, literary theorists have joined media theorists in thinking about how transformations in the medium of writing is recasting our relationship to the text. Scholars of writing systems are also concerned with the material mediation of writing but focus on the invention and development of scripts and on the consequences of changes in their material bases. Scholars of bureaucratic cultures study the material mediation of writing in the context of institutional structures, whether corporations or government bureaucracies or otherwise, that are ubiquitous in everyday life. This conference seeks to cross-pollinate these three approaches. It asks not only how instruments of inscription from brushes to typewriters to computers have changed over time, but how their transformation relates to how power is constructed, distributed, and exerted, within the office and beyond.
We ask two central questions. First, how do instruments of inscription mediate bureaucratic practice? Does it matter if a text is written with a brush, a pen, or a typewriter? Historians have traditionally focused on the semantic contents of texts while art historians have been concerned with the formal properties of images. Can a material history of writing provide us with a vantage point from which to think about the relationship between semantic meaning and material form? This is all the more of a concern today, when we are unsure about the future of the text. As writing is de-territorialized, produced anywhere in the world, including by non-human bots, the separation of the body of the writer from the text that began with scribes and typewriters has, with fake news, brought us to the edge of a crisis of credibility. What is the future of writing? This moment, when it also seems that the written text is being supplanted by images and video, is a good time to rethink the visual, aesthetic, and material nature of writing.
The second question concerns how writing mediates our relationship to the archive. How does it matter if we see an office document in its original, as a facsimile, or as a printed reproduction? Bureaucratic documents such as laws and treaties often take multiple forms. Japanese laws from the nineteenth century to today, for example, are simultaneously printed in an official gazette and available as a unique copy with the vermillion seal of the emperor, the wet signature of the cabinet ministers, and the date and summary of the law written with a brush. Does it matter which version of the law legal scholars, historians, or anyone else uses? And what methods do we use for “reading” the materiality of a document? At a time when digital methods are allowing for the large-scale distant reading of thousands or millions of texts, can we use such methods without forsaking the materiality of the text?
Co-organized by Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh) and David Lurie (Columbia University).
Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh)
Stephen Chrisomalis (Wayne State University)
Andrew Glass (Microsoft Corporation)
Katherine Hayles (Duke University)
Matthew Hull (University of Michigan)
Hoyt Long (University of Chicago)
Bryan Lowy (Princeton University)
Christopher Lowy (Carnegie Mellon University)
David Lurie (Columbia University)
Brinkley Messick (Columbia University)
Mara Mills (New York University)
Lara Putnam (University of Pittsburgh)
Dennis Tenen (Columbia University)
Annette Vee (University of Pittsburgh)
Tyler Williams (University of Chicago)
Yurou Zhong (University of Toronto)