Miller Center | Paper and Power: On the Phenomenology of Accounting Books, Statistical Tables, and Photographs | Michael Zakim
Miller Center | Paper and Power: On the Phenomenology of Accounting Books, Statistical Tables, and Photographs | Michael Zakim
Zakim will begin his talk with some general observations regarding paper's role as an essential technology for translating knowledge into power. This background will be followed by a more detailed consideration of three particularly powerful knowledge systems that proved critical for establishing social (and epistemological) order in the disordered conditions of capitalist revolution in the nineteenth century: accounting, statistics, and photography.
He will then finish with a brief discussion about the fate of the knowledge/power nexus in a paperless future (which has already arrived) of digitized information systems. All this in less than an hour!
Michael Zakim is the author, most recently, of Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (Chicago, 2018) and of Paper: A Global History (forthcoming, in Hebrew). He is currently writing about the invention of photography. Zakim teaches history at Tel-Aviv University in Israel.