The document is a bureaucratic technology, one that offers “proof in support of a fact,” performs a “know-show function,” and holds “social power” as both a “representation of a fact” and an “inscription of an act.”  Documents are “social objects” to which “human beings collectively award status functions,” and they are “instruments of bureaucratic organizations” that “are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves.”  These formulations (from Suzanne Briet, Lisa Gitelman, Maurizio Ferraris, Barry Smith, Matthew S. Hull, respectively) offer the beginnings of a notion of the document as an object that testifies to, teaches about, memorializes, or otherwise registers some social concept agreed upon by two or more people.  

This ACLA seminar welcomes participants eager to take documents seriously and enter colloquy about how documents figure into the stories people tell, the lives they lead, the world they co-create, and the record they leave behind.  Papers may bear upon the ways that documents drive literary narratives across genres and national traditions, the ways they set the terms of cultural production, the ways they fuel the cultural industries, the ways they structure everyday experience, the ways they articulate a relation to the past or present or future....  Of particular interest are presentations that trouble existing notions of what counts as a document, how documents function, where documents exist, who or what acts with or upon documents, and/or who or what is acted upon by documents.