Homo Documentator: Architecture and the Political Economy of Information

HOMO DOCUMENTATOR: ARCHITECTURE AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INFORMATION

Michael Faciejew Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00728/1900950/thld_a_00728.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021

In her prescient essay What is Documentation? 1 Suzanne Briet, What Is Documentation?: English Translation of the Classic French Text, ed. Ronald (Qu’est-ce que la documentation?), published in E. Day, Martinet, Laurent, and Hermina G. B. Anghelescu (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, French in 1951, the renowned librarian and UNESCO 2006), 17. Briet’s coining of the “technique culturelle” anticipates the “cultural technique” affiliate Suzanne Briet outlined how a new science discussed in contemporary scholarship on media. See Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: of documentation—a forerunner of today’s infor- Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New mation science—had in recent decades expanded York: Fordham University Press, 2015). “productivity” in all cultural, scientific, and industrial fields. As an entirely new kind of “cultural technique,” documentation’s reach had become so pervasive, she wrote, that it had given rise to homo documentator—an individual “born from the new conditions of research and technology”:

The hand served the mind; the tool has developed the brain. The brain in turn guided the hand. Such is the omnipresence of intelligence. “Documentation is to culture as the machine is to industry.” (PAGÈS) It is not too much to speak of a new humanism in this regard. A new race of researchers “is in the making.” It springs from the reconciliation of the machine and the mind. 1 https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00728 © Michael Faciejew

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50 DISTRIBUTION tion—that was produced,tion—that managed, substance—informa atechnical as science reconceptualized knowledge tional science and documentation modern architecture with organiza of alliance the how examines cle ofpractices information. This arti on the forces of industrialization but modernization hinged not strictly wherein making, the in decades shift, resonatedreflections with culturala tual labor” upon thought itself? “intellec of category sociological new a impose to erudition of a discourse eclipse industrial norms of productivity when Or ahandbag? into tossed and roll amicrofilm to transferred be could library entire an speculated, Briet as when, order collective to happens cal culture of information. But what a techni to instead point analogy on sis Roi du projetDeuxième pour la Bibliothèque Boullée’s in Étienne-Louis rendered an orderly totality, as emblematically bookshelves represent the world as neat where room, reading the of space figure the collective architectural aprivileged as had also humanism post-Enlightenment period. This a nationalized public sphere in the created had which culture aprint of product the was Briet by intimated ism to the renovation of the Bibliothèque moral order. I pay attention particular work was equated with social and how the optimization of intellectual trace scale—I a national on nized orga were etc.) archives, (museums, ies and other institutions memory fundamentally transformed how librar where the of discourse documentation ture. Focusing on interwar France— infrastruc amaterial by supplied and of that thought, the understood Briet given era shape collective models a of circumstances social and cal techni the how theorized had who Febvre, Lucien and Mumford, Lewis Otlet, Paul like thinkers by Influenced HOMO DOCUMENTATOR human the rewiring thus time, in and space in rhythm intellectual anew created had reader, the telescript— Dictaphone, planner, the telephone, the microfilm day work—the intellectual of tools Far from a fringe theory, Briet’s Briet’s theory, afringe from Far (1785) (1785) productivité 2

(fig. 1). (fig. (fig. 2). (fig. and her machinic The The Briet’s empha old human old ------

d’outillage national the by funded was library the economy. ipating in a nationalized information an active documentation center partic into culture conserve to aplace from they aimed to transform the library Briet among other librarians. Together Cain and the of participation Suzanne library’s General Administrator Julien was planned in with the collaboration printed documents. The renovation of accumulation relentless the by tionally obsolete and overburdened func become decades two previous transform an institution that had in the 1931 assiduously in to began Spitz as the library’s Chief Roux- Architect, Labrouste Henri and Visconti Louis of ( boss factory of a efficiency the with for running press his office tectural happens, was celebrated in the archi it as who, Roux-Spitz, Michel architect nationale was by conceived the French The renovation of the Bibliothèque Factory A economy of information. emerged from this political interwar tor wealth, Briet’s ical economy” centered on financial “polit a nineteenth-century of product the was dollars, for hunts who man” homo economicus Mill’s Stuart John Where users. vidual tion technologies which targeted indi the to room reading informa discrete of space collective the from relocated was control epistemic where factory,” commentators as anrary “intellectual nationale, described by contempo expanding Labrouste’s central stack stack central Labrouste’s expanding included These system. streamlined a into them reshape and services and to coordinate library departments a comprehensive set of interventions logistically complex project entailed the 1938, 1931 and between stages modernization and economic renewal. of avision with infrastructure a cultural the compatibility of crash—highlights market stock 1929 the of effects the rural meant electrification, to mitigate as such works, public for budgets lus patron , a human hungry for information, Completed in three, successive successive three, in Completed ).

Following in the footsteps footsteps the in Following

5 That the renovation of 51 homo documenta —a set of stimu of set —a , an “economic 3

plans ------5 4 3 l’art, 2017), 162–75. 2017), l’art, de d’histoire national Institut France; de nale (Paris: natio Christine Mengin Bibliothèque Aurélien Haquin, Conraux, Anne-Sophie and d’histoire au architecturale c l’int de tion Muller, “Michel Roux-Spitz: Une modernisa interwar renovation, see Simon Texier and Léa nationale’s Bibliothèque the of overview an For 1983). P. Mardaga, Belgium: (Liège, 1888-1957 Architecte Roux-Spitz: Michel Rémy, Sylvie and Laroque, Didier Raynaud, Michel see Roux-Spitz, On 66. 3 (1937), tectes,” d’archi agences “Les Sabatou, Jean-Paul view/Entry/33678755. http://www.oed.com/ 2020, 30, September Online n.,” in Economicus, “Homo See Mill. of critics century late-nineteenth by used ly term “homo oeconomicus” was subsequent the in economy” political of definition “the on article 1836 October an in notion this identified Mill London and Westminster Review (Oxford University Press), (Oxford University accessed L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui é rieur,” in Richelieu: quatre siècles œ ur de Paris, de ur

Figure 1. Paul Otlet. Le travail intellectuel, Personal Papers of Paul Otlet, Encyclopaedia Universalis Mundaneum, Atlas, n° 3805, Brussels, 1944. Collections of the Mundaneum, Belgium. 8, no. no. 8,

. The The . OED OED Figure 2. Étienne-Louis Boullée. View of reading room2021 in a projectSeptember for25 on the expandedguest by Royal Library, 1785. http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00728/1900950/thld_a_00728.pdf from ed. Downloaded - - - Bibliothèque nationale de France. -

6 Jean Gallotti, “La Première usine intellectuelle both below ground and above (seven not unlike those that organize a factory du monde,” Vu 10, no. 463 (January 27, 1937): new stories in total); reinforcing the floor. Together, the images depict the 117–19. 7 See Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, entire building structure; carving library not as a place of sluggishness Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, out a state-of-the-art catalog and or boredom, but a discretized system trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA: bibliographic reference room beneath of intellectual work. Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 109. the famous Salle de Travail; construct- Conventionally understood, a ing a new infill building for the prints factory contains expensive technol- and manuscripts department; erect- ogy; it concentrates workers in a single ing a new storage annex in Versailles, location; and crucially includes the serviced by a vehicular shuttle; and monitoring of work. Factories operate completely refurbishing the building through a strictly controlled workforce, infrastructure, including a network often through techniques of scientific for pneumatic tubes, a telephone management. But, as the tradition of network, extensive fireproofing, elec- historical materialism reveals, a factory tric lifts and elevators, electric lighting, is also an apparatus that produces Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00728/1900950/thld_a_00728.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 and a modernized heating and venti- subjects and organizes society. If the lation system (figs. 3-4). The result of environment depicted in Galloti’s arti- the comprehensive overhaul was a cle was indeed a factory, Freund’s series of modernized rooms logically perspective reveals two architectur- distributed inside a historicizing shell ally significant transformations. First, which retained the representational that the factory’s locus of subjectiviza- caractère of Labrouste’s monument tion was extended from the body to the to print culture. mind. Second, that the library “type,” In 1937, after much of Roux- historically associated to the panoptic Spitz’s work had been completed, technologies that exert control over the writer Jean Gallotti proclaimed the the body politic, now targeted indi- Bibliothèque nationale the “world’s first vidual users through equipment and intellectual factory” in an article in the tools. To declare that the library was popular magazine Vu. 6 Labrouste’s a factory was thus to redefine knowl- central book stack, concealed behind edge as a resource or commodity the Salle de Travail, had been cele- subject to production, regulation, brated a decade earlier by Sigfried and distribution, and to transform the Giedion as an “ur-building” of modern- reader into an intellectual worker. This ism, a spatial machine grounded in the coupling of the industrial and the intel- tenets of a modern industrial society. 7 lectual proposes an entirely different 9, no. 3 But Gallotti’s peculiar assertion that set of moral and technical codes to the library was a factory—a metaphor regiment a public’s engagement with rather than a simile—went one step information. Pointing to the “world” in further in its celebration of the reorga- its title, the article posited that such

Réalisations. Vol. II. 1932- Réalisations. Vol. nization of one of France’s most valued intellectual factories were on the cusp storehouses of cultural heritage into an of becoming the dominant paradigm. efficient technical system. Likewise, the photographs by the German photog- Administering Memory L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui L’Architecture rapher Gisèle Freund accompanying Galloti’s article insisted less on the The idea that the modern library is a stature of the architecture than on its space of control is not new. Think here animation by the industrious bodies of of the impact of Jeremy Bentham’s patrons and staff (fig. 5). The dynamic Panopticon on the organization of montage of photographs shows a prominent institutions like Sidney range of individuals, pens in hand and Smirke’s British Museum Library read- heads bowed, intensely focused on ing room (1854-1857). Mechanical open books and documents. Another library equipment is likewise not new. image shows a library employee In his important study from 1845 on retrieving documents—one of several library architecture, for example, Léon steps in a complex circulation system. de Laborde proposed an elaborate Elsewhere, a bird’s eye view looks mechanical reference desk, whose down onto the Salle de Travail, occu- fluted columns doubled as channels pied by library patrons in neat rows for books moving between the reading (Paris: Éditions Fréal, 1950). Éditions Fréal, (Paris: Michel Roux-Spitz. Book storage expansion beneath Henri Labrouste’s central stack at the Bibliothèque Michel Roux-Spitz. Michel Roux-Spitz, 1935-1937. Photograph by Albin Salaün. From nationale, Paris, 39 de Paul Diagram showing the network of pneumatic tubes in renovated Bibliothèque nationale. From des ordres et transport mécanique livres,” “Transmission Vienne, (March 1938).

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4 8 See Léon de Laborde, De l’organisation des room and the book stacks above it away from the humanist discourse Bibliothèques dans Paris (Paris: A. Franck, 1845). (fig. 6). 8 What distinguished the reno- of erudition that organized the nine- 9 In architectural history, Otlet’s work in the fields of documentation science and international vation of the Bibliothèque nationale teenth-century library, a concept of intellectual cooperation is eclipsed by his role was a technical redefinition of knowl- “information” emerged that is recog- as the instigator of Le Corbusier’s 1928 design edge which reoriented the locus of nizable still today: a discrete entity that for a Mundaneum. For an overview of Otlet’s 11 work, see Wouter Van Acker, “Universalism control from the collective body and is produced and efficiently managed. as Utopia: A Historical Study of the Schemes the space of the reading room to the Documentation evolved in paral- and Schemas of Paul Otlet (1868-1944)” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Ghent, 2011); Alex information technologies that defined lel with the technical culture that Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and an individual user’s experience in fundamentally reshaped France’s the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford, New space and time. This reorientation cultural and political spheres in the York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 10 The term “memory institution” is used in the was made possible by the architec- 1920s and 1930s. In this period, a fields of information history and library science tural convergence of two moderniza- new cadre of “engineer-experts” was to encompass both physical places where tion discourses: documentation and granted a prominent role in govern- collections are stored and the services that allow for their circulation. See, for instance, organizational science. ment and policy and concertedly Alex Byrne, “Institutional Memory and Memory Developed at the turn of the twen- adapted the principles of Henri Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00728/1900950/thld_a_00728.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Institutions,” The Australian Library Journal tieth century by the Belgian interna- Fayol’s theory of labor administra- 64, no. 4 (2015): 259–69. On the “lieux de mémoire”, see Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de tionalists Paul Otlet and Henri La tion (first published in 1916) to the mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). Fontaine, documentation encom- organization of society at large. 12 In 11 On the modern library as a space of eru- passed an apparatus of institu- architecture, the cultural politics dition, see Neil Levine, “The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and tions, practices, and instruments of organization crystallized in the Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève,” meant to facilitate the exchange of modernist discourses of équipement in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century 9 French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton knowledge. In addition to expand- and outillage. Most commonly asso- (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 138–73. On ing the tradition of bibliography— ciated with the polemic of “mechani- the emergence of a culture of “information” limited by the epistemic unit of the cal selection” raised by Le Corbusier in interwar France, see Sylvie Fayet-Scribe, Histoire de la documentation en France: biblion—to all media, documenta- in the pages of L’Esprit nouveau in culture, science et technologie de l’information standardized indexing practices 1924, équipement has been under- tion: 1895-1937 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000). across memory institutions to trans- stood as a set of aesthetic criteria 12 See Henri Fayol, Administration industrielle et générale (Paris: Dunod et Pinat, 1918). On the form them into the nodes of a larger borrowed from industry to stan- politics of organization in interwar France, see network of intellectual cooperation. dardize design and eliminate the Marjorie A Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: Where librarians were once consid- bourgeois ornamentalism that char- French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900-1940 (Stanford: Stanford University ered experts on the content of the acterized the decorative arts before Press, 1999); Jackie Clarke, France in the Age books that were stored in individual World War I. 13 But it also encom- of Organization: Factory, Home and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy (New York: Berghahn, buildings, a new modernist faction passed a framework for the efficient 2014). of professional “documentalists” organization of interior environ- 13 See Le Corbusier, “Besoins types, meubles emphasized the broader systems ments. In professional magazines types,” L’Esprit nouveau, no. 23 (1924): n.p. See also Alexandra Lange, “White Collar Corbusier: which produced and communicated such as Mon Bureau, published From the Casier to the Cités d’affaires,” Grey documents. Organizations such as since 1908 to promote a holistic Room, no. 9 (Fall 2002): 59–79; Jean-Jacques the Union Française des Organismes philosophy of scientific manage- Brisebarre, ed., L’empire du bureau: 1900-2000 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1984). de Documentation (UFOD), founded ment, “equipment” was conceptu- 14 See, for example, Joseph Wilbois, in 1931, also began to regulate the alized as the “material organization” “L’organisation de l’entreprise: l’organisation indexing and communication proto- of a business, which rationally coor- matérielle,” Mon bureau, no. 20 (October 1933): 459–62. cols at a national scale. It produced dinated humans and machines in the 15 S. Gille-Delafon, “Le Bureau central des manuals to standardize the library work environment (fig. 7). 14 Linking chèques postaux de Paris,” La Construction Moderne 52 (June 1937): 614–21. Roux-Spitz professions, supported the devel- the built environment to supply and completed several projects for the PTT, includ- opment of new technologies such profit, this language of administra- ing the enormous Hôtel des Postes in Lyon as microfilm, and established norms tion captured the modernist idea (1935-1938). See Michel Raynaud, “Michel Roux-Spitz: Vers un monument fonctionnel,” for the spatial organization of build- that buildings were not merely static Monuments historiques, no. 184 (November ings. These documentary principles “constructions” but instruments for 1992): 55–61. distinguish “memory institutions” distributing labor in space and time, from the “realms of memory” (lieux and therefore that they contributed de mémoire), defined by historian to an orderly and productive soci- Pierre Nora as sites encompassing ety. The discourse of équipement a community’s shared symbolic real- thus cloaked a technocratic agenda ity. 10 If there was a conceptualiza- of cultural and moral renewal under tion of “memory” in documentation the guise of ideological neutrality. science, it was as a standardized Roux-Spitz’s renovation of the technical process, as in computer Bibliothèque nationale coincided memory. With documentation’s turn with his establishment as an expert in

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administrative architecture, with proj- Hastings, the office of Albert Kahn, 16 French librarians such as Suzanne Briet and ects such as the monumental six-story and Charles Z. Klauder)—all of which Yvonne Oddon, of the Musée de l’Homme, conducted research trips in the United States to Centrale des Chèques Postaux in had integrated industrial systems study the integration of technologies in buildings Paris’s 15th arrondissement, a postal and equipment beneath historicizing as well as strategies of spatial organization in check processing center constructed institutional façades (fig. 8). 16 It was institutions such as Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and the Peabody Institute. For Oddon’s account of between 1931 and 1933, and his work already noted that a new annex build- the Michigan library, see Yvonne Oddon, “Une as Chief Architect of France’s Ministry ing for the storage of printed materials Bibliothèque universitaire aux États-Unis. La bib- liothèque de l’université du Michigan” Revue des of Post, Telephones, and Telegraphs was constructed in Versailles, and that bibliothèques 38 (1928), 129-155. (PTT).15 In these projects, Roux-Spitz a shuttle service operated between the 17 “Bureau Central des Chèques Postaux et Bureau reconfigured the tenets of a French two sites. This division of the library Central des P.T.T. du XVè arrondissement de Paris,” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 7, no. 10 tradition of structural rationalism, shows that institutions by necessity (October 1936): 16–19. crystallized in the earlier postal archi- began to be conceived as complex, tecture of Julien Guadet’s celebrated decentralized entities requiring artic- Hôtel des Postes on the rue du Louvre, ulation through services rather than adapting them to the logic of scientific static structures. Just as Roux-Spitz’s management. Applying his Beaux-Arts Centrale des Chèques Postaux had education and its emphasis on logi- been described in the architectural cal planometric compositions, Roux- press as a “perfectly adapted instru- Spitz organized different programs ment of work” for having made the according to the temporal relations institution much more efficient, allow- between the different tasks and func- ing check payments to be made in tions performed by workers. six minutes, so too was the library The distribution of labor simi- subject to organizational criteria. 17 In larly informed the renovation of the similar language, a 1938 issue of Bibliothèque nationale. In his research L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui focus- for the project, Roux-Spitz had looked ing on modern libraries detailed the 10, no. 463 (January 27, 1937). © to American libraries and their manu- rationalized steps of the full cycle of Vu facturers of equipment—including the a book’s circulation, proclaiming that New York Public Library, the General human workers, with the help of pneu- Library of the University of Michigan, matic tubes, catalog request cards, and the University of Pittsburgh and elevators, among other technol- Library (respectively designed by ogies, were now able to retrieve and John Merven Carrière and Thomas distribute items to patrons in no more Spread from article declaring the Bibliothèque nationale “world’s first Jean Gallotti, “La From Photographs by Gisèle Freund. intellectual factory.” première usine intellectuelle du monde,” MCC/IMEC RMN gestion droit d'auteur/Fonds

HOMO DOCUMENTATOR 55 Figure 5. than seventeen minutes. 18 Most of the issue’s articles show in fact that modern libraries were evaluated not for the civic ideals they represented but the technical systems they used. 19 Borrowing the vocabulary of French technicians, Roux-Spitz too problematically blurred architectural problems with social ones: in his own publications, he commonly positioned himself as an “architect-administrator” contributing to a national renovation project. 20 The hybridization of architecture with the discipline of management was a step away from the engineer- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00728/1900950/thld_a_00728.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 ing culture that led Sigfried Giedion and others to proclaim Labrouste to 6 be the first “architect-constructor” whose meticulous disposition of struc- systems reconfigured the relation- manufacturing documentary ture introduced a modern conception ship between knowledge and soci- products, following methodical of space. 21 The twentieth century ety. It is the rendering of thought as a rhythms and constant and rigorous idea of a library’s “material organiza- “material organization”—its translation controls. The conditions of production”—where order is realized through into a processing chain for discrete tion must be such that the cost of an interdependent set of operations documents—that made it possible to return affords the dissemination in unfolding in time—reflected a complex conceive of intellectual life as a realm the “knowledge market” of prod- temporal dimension of planning that of optimization and potential mercan- ucts responding as perfectly as was fundamentally different from tilization. To put it differently, it is the possible to the needs of very differ- the mechanical, repetitive temporal- application of the cultural logic of ent user categories. 25 ity of nineteenth-century industrial supply to information that made it culture. 22 This follows what the histo- possible for architects to assume a According to Mestre, information, rian of technology JoAnne Yates new role in the design of a modern like other “goods,” had a use-value. has discussed as the importance of information economy that targeted Mestre’s statement is evidence of temporal regulation in histories of not the collective body in the read- the reshaping of scientific disciplines organization: the material artifacts ing room but the individual subject after World War I, when researchers, that structure or constrain commu- at their mnemotechnic equipment. industries, and businesses forged nication or the relations between new connections to serve the larger the parts of a system are an essen- Political Economies of Information aim of France’s economic recov- tial mode of establishing power rela- ery. In his understanding, epistemic tions. 23 The factory expertise applied If the library was indeed a factory, as streams followed the logic of supply to the Bibliothèque nationale points the editors of Vu claimed, then it was and demand that also applied to the to the idea that order was in contin- also necessarily a node in a larger commodity market, conditioned by ual construction—a process, not a supply chain of information. By the speed and cost-effectiveness. thing—and that it encompassed both 1930s, this “economic” aspect of This language of industry and the body and the mind. information was already the subject commerce points on the one hand Since Émile Durkheim’s and Max of debates on international intellectual to the gradual absorption in the inter- Weber’s foundational work on modern cooperation. In a report prepared for war period of “intellectual” profes- rationality and social organization, the League of Nations’s International sions into sociological conceptions historians and social scientists have Institute of Intellectual Cooperation’s of labor. 26 The streamlined interiors of studied how cognitive activities are to committee of “expert-librarians,” Louis the Maison de la Chimie, designed by a great extent incidental to the insti- Mestre (who was the engineer on the Constant Lefranc and Eugène Brayer, tutions that manage memory—insti- groundbreaking project for Paris’s illustrate this new economic lens on tutions typically founded to reinforce Maison de la Chimie, a documentation intellectual work. On the other hand, social conventions. 24 The Bibliothèque center founded in 1927 and opened Mestre’s factory and market meta- nationale’s absorption of multiple in 1934) described this new reality of phors point to a streamlining that technical discourses of moderniza- production and distribution: took place on the territorial scale. tion (of the book, the machine, and Indeed before computational tech- the building) reveals that trust in the [Documentation centers are] nologies and fiber optic infrastruc- ostensible neutrality of technical like “factories” charged with tures, memory institutions operated

56 DISTRIBUTION 18 See Paul De Vienne, “Transmission des ordres,” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 9, no. 3 (March 1938): 66–69. 19 See, for example, H. Moreau-Febvre, “La Régulation automatique,” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 9, no. 3 (March 1938): 78–79. 20 See Michel Roux-Spitz, “Contre le nouveau formalisme,” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 3, no. 3 (April 1932): 61–63. At the 1930 Salon des ar- tistes décorateurs, Roux-Spitz exhibited a design for his own office as a“bureau d’administrateur” (an administrator’s office). 21 Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, 98. 22 On the machinic, regular temporality of “circulation” in nineteenth-century architecture, see Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York, N.Y: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 86–101. 23 As Yates argues, time is neither a subjective Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00728/1900950/thld_a_00728.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 nor an objective notion, but a set of principles enact- ed within particular organizations. JoAnne Yates, “Time, History, and Materiality,” in Materiality and Time: Historical Perspectives on Organizations, Artefacts and Practices, ed. Francois-Xavier de Vaujany et al. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17–32. 24 See Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986). 25 Mestre delivered these remarks at a meeting of the Union Française des Organismes de Documentation in May 1933. Louis Mestre, “Les centres de documentation: Caractéristiques – Coordination des services – Fonctions utilitaires. Résumé de l’Exposé présenté par M. L. Mestre.” Box 153, Fonds IICI, UNESCO Archives. 26 See Gisèle Sapiro, ed., L’espace intellectuel en Europe: De la formation des États-nations à la mondialisation, XIXe-XXIe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), 111–45.

7 De l’organisation des . Bibliothèque nationale de France. Mon Bureau , formerly known as L’Organisation (Paris: A. Franck, 1845). A. Franck, (Paris: Léon de Laborde. Design for a mechanical reference desk. From Léon de Laborde, Léon de Laborde. Design for a mechanical reference desk. From bibliothèques dans Paris Cover of the April 1937 issue (1926-1936). Cathedral Cathedral of Learning, University Pittsburgh, PA Charles Z. Klauder. construction progress showing ten completed stories, May 16, 1930. University of Pittsburgh.

TITLE 57 8 Figure 6. Figure 7. Figure 8. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00728/1900950/thld_a_00728.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021

alongside “mass media” and other de la lecture publique, which facili- communications technologies such tated on the one hand the systematic as telegraphy and the postal system, exchange of documentation among dictating how information was distrib- diverse professional and research uted across institutions, regions, organizations and on the other a and entire nations. What marked larger social project of literacy and the transition from “print culture” to “public reading” (lecture publique). “document culture” was a problem Documentalists, generally on the of distribution: not the idea that infor- left, militated for the modern library mation traveled but that its efficient as an instrument leading the masses regulation in time and in space was toward edification to form a new post- correlated to its value. war collectivity that transcended the A nationalized idea of public and institution of class. In this moderniza- professional information networks tion, the social and technical roles of was institutionalized in France in the librarian were reconceived. The the interwar period. 27 Under the first edition of the Manuel pratique du jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public bibliothécaire, published in 1932 by Instruction, to which all French the ABF, substituted the bibliophilic libraries belonged, the Bibliothèque tradition with a utilitarian approach nationale emerged in the legisla- to the increased circulation of docu- ture as the coordinating organ for all ments. The librarian was framed as national services, including interli- a “technician” whose responsibili- brary loans, library inspections, and ties were standardized across the cataloging protocols. The shift from nation’s institutions. 28 A network of the closed world of individual librar- regional and municipal libraries was ies was coordinated by a range of also set in place. This involved both organizations such as the UFOD, the rebuilding libraries damaged during Bureau Bibliographique de France, the war, for instance the municipal the Association des bibliothécaires library of Reims, and constructing français (ABF), and the Association new buildings such as the one at Pau

58 DISTRIBUTION that Jacques Ruillier designed follow- would be a central feature of France’s 27 Although this article has focused on the ing strict standards. For regions not postwar technocratic modernity. 31 French context, documentation gained trac- tion in many international contexts—in places adequately served by library build- Briet’s homo documentator like the Netherlands, Great Britain, the United ings, the French authorities created emerged from this new conception States, and beyond. In the postwar period, prototypes of “bibliobuses” to further of intellectual work, which forced documentalists such as Julien Cain and Suzanne Briet worked with UNESCO to ad- the mission of “lecture publique” information and space to converge dress the global scale of public knowledge. (fig. 9). 29 The mediation of epis- in a vast material infrastructure. While See Amanda Laugesen, “UNESCO and the Globalization of the Public Library Idea, 1948 temic power also extended to the the universalism of Briet’s “docu- to 1965,” Library & Information History 30, no. colonies. The first bibliobus proto- menting human” should be treated 1 (February 1, 2014): 1–19. type, whose interior was fitted by the with necessary skepticism, it never- 28 The Manuel outlined all aspects of the operations and management of libraries, ranging library stack and equipment manu- theless suggests an alternative to the from the required equipment, to modes of facturer Forges de Strasbourg, was “posthumanist” subject discussed in engaging the public. See Léo Crozet, Manuel produced for the Department of architectural histories of modern- pratique du bibliothécaire (Paris: Emile Nourry, 1932). Aisne and served as an experiment ism, whose variability and dispersal 29 The first “bibliobus” was deployed to serve for future implementation in France’s is said to originate in the decenter- rural populations in 1931. Developed by theDownloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00728/1900950/thld_a_00728.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 colonies. This coincided with events ing forces of industrialization. 32 The French company Renault, it was based on an American model that had circulated in the such as the 1931 Congrès interna- restructuring of homo documentator northern French department of Aisne since tional sur la lecture publique, held in occurs not because of the metaphor- 1921. See Georgette de Grolier and Eric de Algiers, which folded colonial librar- ical logic of mass production and Grolier, “Bibliobus et bibliothèques régio- nales,” Revue du livre et des bibliothèques 6, ies into a larger project of overseas standardization, but through a paral- no. 2 (March 1938): 36–61. governance. These activities demon- lel form of rationality which suggests 30 See Edward Eigen, “Banking, Botany, and Bibliothéconomie: The Herbarium of Benjamin strate the importance of an informa- that intellectual capacities and social Delessert,” in On Accident: Episodes in tion infrastructure in empire-building structure are reshaped through the Architecture and Landscape (Cambridge: projects: library patrons, as intellec- continual production of new docu- MIT Press, 2018), 240–73. 31 See Gabrielle Hecht, “Planning a tual subjects, could be “instructed” mentary linkages. Technological Nation: Systems Thinking and into a collective order no matter how The duress of industrial meta- the Politics of National Identity in Postwar decentralized they were. phors in this history—which echo France,” in Systems, Experts, and Computers, ed. Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes The term bibliothéconomie, or the present-day vernacular coin- (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 133–60. library economy, crystalized in the ages “knowledge workers,” “data 32 See K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the nineteenth century as the science of mining,” and “productive meetings”— Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer ordering libraries, has been discussed demonstrates that “new” information (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). as a toolbox of architectural regulation concepts inherit an epistemologi- 33 See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential that made collected books, always in cal legacy. To some extent, it could Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt their place, perpetually retrievable—in be said that the intellectual labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, other words, it made fixed knowledge discussed by documentalists in the 1996), 142– 57. communicable. 30 The library economy first half of the twentieth century reso- of the interwar period points instead nates with the Marxist postindustrial to a dispersal of information—initially notion of “immaterial labor,” which produced or stored in one place but expands a commodity logic to service functionally embedded in a supply sectors not traditionally recognized as chain in excess of a single institu- work. 33 Indeed, the new ties between tion’s epistemic structure. In a matter information, industry, and business of just a few decades, the alliance of fostered by documentation centers modern architecture, organizational instituted a tertiary economic sector theory, and documentation science that modified the assumed social and dismantled the humanist concep- commercial role of intellectual activi- tion of knowledge to reconceive it ties. But it is important to distinguish as a discretized, technical stream of the brief few decades of “document information that emulated the laws of culture” bracketed by centuries of production and supply. Supply in this print culture and present-day “infor- (September 27, 1933). instance functions as a potent analytic mation society.” Hypothesizing that frame not as a measure of scarcity such a figure existed at all, homo and abundance but for its activation of documentator reveals a sociomate- information into a nationalized realm rial history in which capitalism’s reach L’Intransigeant of “action”—a prospective rather into the cognitive realm was not yet than historicizing mentalité whose absolute, and thus still afforded other prescription of a modern future at the possible realities to design. juncture of technology and politics The first French bibliobus. From French bibliobus. The first Bibliothèque nationale de France.

HOMO DOCUMENTATOR 59 Figure 9.