My Vertical Organizer
Vertical Organizer, preliminary sketch, gouache and watercolor. JD
At what moment in life do you decide that a white plastic vertical file is a necessary accessory? What prompts the deliberate decision to go to an office supply store or big box emporium and select a purpose-specific designed object in response to a profound need you suddenly feel to discipline the papers and folders in your life?
Was it actually my decision? A deliberate demonstration of agency within alternative possibilities? Or scripted into the unfolding sequence of events from the moment of the Big Bang? I find it hard to imagine that the forces of the universe had nothing better to do than to conspire to create a long history of organic chemicals, industrial processes, and cultural conditions within which my specific family circumstances would imprint me with a disposition towards responsibility through neurotic mechanisms in my individual psyche such that one day sometime in probably about 1987 I acted on the illusion that I was freely choosing to have my file folders stand upright to facilitate some particular advantage to my professional/intellectual productivity. Trivial consumerism may be the final bastion against theories of a deterministic universe. I truly believe I could have chosen the black plastic version.
At the time I acquired it, this now-yellowed plastic item was a luxury item, my budget severely constrained by debt incurred in a final year of graduate study, a move, and new job. Still, I felt I was at the beginning of a fully adult phase. Clearly, I needed to be organized, or at least, to subscribe to the illusion of order among the papers that began to proliferate. That was also the first period in which I paid income taxes in a serious way—with account sheets, itemized deductions, receipts, and record-keeping. The woman who taught me how to organize my financial matters was an accountant to whom I got connected through a colleague who had helped to hire me into my position at UT Dallas. This was an excellent academic job with a real salary and benefits. I was thirty-four years old and with the exception of a brief few stints of steady employment in my twenties, this was the first time I had a regular income and the feeling of having arrived at a new phase of grown-up responsibilities.
But what is this thing? This white plastic file organizer? The upright rather than horizontal orientation conserves space–the footprint is the same as that of a single file folder but it can contain dozens. The design offers an overall view, not quite aerial or omniscient, but surveilling, that keeps the labels on the file tabs in the line of sight. I could look along the top edge and see reminders of work in progress, calls to conscience, spurs to action, and zones of avoidance all laid out in a single array. The illusion of control was there, even if acknowledged as an illusion, and tapping the edges of the files into line, martialing their die-cut forms, provided at least a tactile satisfaction, even if the tasks each represented resisted such easy management.
Made of plastic, the hard-extruded ubiquitous material has kept its shape, though after four decades in my life this object has faded from its original hygienic white into a shabby, grungy, yellow. (Apparently this is a sign that the polymer chains have decayed from a combination of exposure to light and heat, a matter of concern within the plastic industry.)[1] The organizer has shifted from a place of primary visibility to the back room of my life, serving a storage function rather than a desk-top role. But looking at it in this moment before de-accession (it has come to this), I can’t help but reflect on its curious history within a cultural lineage of office to domestic spaces in which document management technologies, for that is what it partakes of, infiltrated not only our homes but our minds. Did conscientious housewives managing their affairs in the Middle Ages seek to stack their hand-written documents in full view? Did they discipline their thoughts by imagining how such practices would impact their activities? Doubtful they had sufficient numbers of parchment sheets to require such an apparatus. And even by the time paper appeared in domestic households after European production of the technology was imported from the East in the 15th century, it was hardly abundant. Nor was it immediately used for the multiple transactions, activities, scribblings and research work to which in my life it has been put almost without reflection resulting in the mess the organizer was engaged to manage.
According to the professionals in document management who sponsor the DOMA Technologies site, the first vertical file cabinets were created by Edwin Grenville Seibels in 1898.[2] This invention, again according to DOMA, “effectively revolutionized record keeping.” While I can believe that those upstanding pieces of office furniture, the smooth operation of their drawer mechanisms kept agile with the aid of metal rails and fine ball bearings, were an artifact of the turn of the previous century, I am also glad to have the support of another site for details of a longer view.[3] The GAPS (Global Asia Printings Singapore) site (where they can help you print anything from t-shirts to toothbrushes, billboards to bottle labels) begins with an acknowledgment that the “need for organization has been a constant throughout human history,” though I would be curious to have some evidence for the file structure of Australopithicus–or even CroMagnon–office managers. Certainly by the time records were being kept—an activity generally dated to the storage of hard grains about 11,000 years ago in Mesopotamia–the need for ways of identifying ownership in silos and storage rooms had been acknowledged.[4] Around 7500 BCE, a system of clay tokens became codified as a record-keeping system using impressions of objects and quantities. This was about four thousand years before cuneiform writing—a notation of language—began to develop as a system. These clay objects were in turn stored in clay jars—a pragmatic approach, but maybe not easy to order in a reliable way. The librarian at Alexandria, Callimachus, is credited with creating the first classification system for ordering the papyrus rolls that cluttered the shelves of that venerable and vital institution in the 3rd century BCE. But documentation for this is scant. Medieval scribes had their own methods of organizing the materials in their care—by title, date, or author, and/or size and shape. But all of that is another story, far from my haphazard organization of folders in a plastic stand with a recent history.
Industrialization caused a major transformation of the paper industry and an explosion of uses to which it was put. Many activities previously carried on ad hoc were now intricately linked to record keeping systems. Much of what had been oral communication or on-the-spot signage—menus, announcements, advertisement, admissions to events–became transacted through paper artifacts. Not only did businesses proliferate, but the paper trail on which they depended did as well. One has only to glance into the pages of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, first published in serial in 1853, to encounter the sense of absurdism generated by the endless-seeming proliferation of paper in the era. While the alphabet had been used since early antiquity as a means of ordering (stones in the Sinai had been assembled into structures according to the sequence of letters inscribed on them following transport to a building site), the development of elaborate systems of naming, characterizing and classifying added meta-dimensions to the activity in the 19th century. Imagine, keywords as a concept—descriptions of contents, not merely the names of documents, emerged from the chaos of business into the discipline of administration. And then, the “tab” appears—that incredible innovation to enhance the visual access to crucial information. High speed presses, die-cutting, wood paper pulp—the office supply industry is up and running as the revolution in machine technologies expanded into every area of modern life, including information management.[5]
But what of my miraculously banal plastic vertical organizer? What were its antecedents? From someplace in the deep memory storage zones of my mind, the image of a wire coil anchored in a stand of wood emerges from obscurity. These artifacts can be found on eBay vaguely resembling the 2000-year-old Antikythera mechanism with its more than thirty gears and complex calculating capabilities.[6] Those wire coils align, leaving just enough space between them for papers and folders to be kept upright. These are pre-plastic organizers, and in that memory image they sit next to another device, the pointed metal spike in its own wooden base on which one document after another is unceremoniously pushed into place, a daily office massacre. By contrast to the cool aesthetic of the form-made plastic, these metal devices look crude, even cruel, though they speak to an urgent necessity. Behind them, again in my mind’s eye, I can see those letter boards beloved of trompe l’oeil painters, William Harnett, John Haberle, and John Peto. In offices and even domestic spaces those flat areas of display allowed for sentimental memorabilia (postcards, billets douces, handwritten envelopes) to be held in view beside the variable detritus of a life—theater tickets, programs, laundry chits, and tailor’s bills.[7] A charming disorder, rather than an organizational approach, characterized these objects in reality and in their simulacral representations in paint.
But my object, already structured with many assumptions about how it should and would be used, was cast in a polymer plastic whose material origins are prehistoric, the stuff of ancient carboniferous forests. Petroleum, coal, and natural gas, but mainly crude oil, are extracted and refined to begin the production process. Heated in a furnace until it can be separated into different compounds, the oil yields hydrocarbon molecules that create long chains known as polymers.[8] These petroleum-based molecules are processed into pellets, turned into sheets, melted until they can be blown into molds in any conceivable shape. The white pigment in plastic is most often derived from titanium dioxide because of the way it scatters available light.[9] The complexity of that statement cannot be ignored, and in the chemical industry the understanding of the many properties of pigments—shape, geometry, reflectance, interference and many others–is a highly developed science.
But material science was far from my mind when I picked up the hard-edged form in my hand, weighed its ability to withstand the wear and tear of regular use, and to provide years of service. I don’t think I even thought about its footprint on my desk, or other matters. I simply gave into the lust for order, as if by controlling my folders I might control my life. I aspired to the level of cool hard competence it embodied in its clean lines. The ultimate success of such an object is to become unnoticed and then, now, discarded. Such is the fate of dependable things in a world of expendability.
[1] https://polymer-additives.specialchem.com/tech-library/article/yellowing-of-plastic
[2] https://www.domaonline.com/2021/12/07/the-history-of-document-management-1/
[3] https://globalasiaprintings.com/blog/history-of-file-folders/
[4] Naomi Newman, A Brief History of Grain Storage, MillingGrain.com, June 8, 2020. https://millingandgrain.com/the-history-of-grain-storage-22328/
[5] For a wonderful study, see Ronald Day, The Modern Invention of Information (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).
[6] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Antikythera-mechanism
[7] Johanna Drucker, “Harnett, Haberle, and Peto: Visuality and Artifice among the Proto-Modern Americans,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 74, No.1, March 1992, pp 37-50.
[8] https://www.bpf.co.uk/plastipedia/how-is-plastic-made.aspx
[9] https://polymer-additives.specialchem.com/selection-guide/pigments-for-plastics and the sources: https://titantio2.com/source-of-titanium-dioxide/