Destruction of Documents: Erasure and Accountability in the Administrative State

How deleted or destroyed paperwork impacts organizational capacity and memory-and allows power to evade accountability. Administrative documents mediate bureaucracies and trust in them, making organizational life possible. In Destruction of Documents, Andrew Whelan argues that the politics of paperwork are most explicit when the paper trail is deleted, burned, shredded, or otherwise done away with. Exploring how irreconcilable administrative ideals have been understood across historical and cultural contexts, the author shows that the destruction of administrative documents both legitimates and conceals the organized irresponsibility of bureaucratic power. From radical calls for liberation through burning the files to demands for their salvage in the service of justice, the book presents an analysis across four case studies: the Nechaev affair, an 1870s controversy concerning Russian revolutionaries; the shredding of files in the US embassy in Tehran in 1979; the "right to be forgotten" in the contemporary data economy; and the 2018 scheduling of environmental records at the US National Archives. Across the case studies, the author describes how political power escapes accountability, and thereby secures continuity, by exceeding the material constraints of the media through which it operates. The destruction of bureaucratic media is thus central to how administrative authority is legitimated: renewing a tacit social contract while deferring its fulfillment.

About the Author :
Andrew Whelan is a sociologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. His research has been published in such journals as Critical Sociology, Social Media and Society, and The Sociological Review.

Review :
ENDORSEMENTS

“What if it turns out that power grows from the feed slot of a shredder? In this thrilling book, Andrew Whelan takes us through both overt and covert histories of paperwork meeting its end. This document, at least, should endure.”
—Ben Kafka, Columbia University; author of The Demon of Writing

“Whelan brings out the unexpected in a most ordinary problem: What to do with our documents? Surprising and theoretically rich, Whelan contributes incisively to scholarship on archives, institutions, and power.”
—Jessa Lingel, University of Pennsylvania; author of The Gentrification of the Internet

“Bureaucracy is a machine for storing files. In this extraordinary book, Whelan spins this idea to consider forgetting, unpublishing, disposal, and hence to think about life outside the filing cabinet.”
—Martin Parker, University of Bristol; author of The Organization of Things