This project explores the socio-spatial interrelations between German labour administration and the labour market through a study of the information technologies (writing and registration technologies) that allowed labour offices to select, store and produce relevant data on manpower. The main aim of this project is twofold. Firstly, to understand how through technical media the myriad forms of individual economic activities were ordered, evaluated and thus inscribed into larger entities such as occupational classifications, legal norms, the labour office, the market, or indeed a political order. Secondly, to investigate how, in turn, the evolving interactions between these technologies and administrative uses shaped the spatial and material foundations of the labour administration specifically and of the modern state more broadly.

The empirical example of twentieth-century German labour administration provides a particularly interesting focus for this research project for a number of reasons. First, it is an empirically rich example through which to study failed or rejected technology. Surprisingly, data production on labour and transmission in Germany at this time essentially bypassed mechanical punched card and tabulating machines, relying instead on nineteenth-century information technology until the incorporation of magnetic storage devices in the late 1960s. What was so distinctive about the ‘handwriting space’ co-produced by paper technology and the human senses (hands, eyes and ears) as to defer the ‘mechanic space’ of punched card machinery? How can both spaces be described and what are the media-technological, epistemological and praxeological differences from the ensuing ‘electro-magnetic space’?

Second, analysis of the repeated attempts at rationalizing the often slow and unreliable ‘paper network’ – generated in 1935 and re-established under Allied occupation post 1945 – offer a fascinating window onto the technological and institutional bases of the modern economic state and the multiple possible constellations of government involved. As this project will further elucidate, this ‘paper network’ was magnetized and electrified precisely at a time when state government assumed greater responsibilities towards the economy and the working population, namely during the heydays of the corporatist welfare state and social and economic ‘planning’ in the 1960s and early 1970s. Most importantly, there is evidence that crucial elements for the modernization plans in the 1960s relied on experiences of the amalgamation between health insurance agencies and the labour administration under the Reich Registration Order, issued in 1938 under the Nazi regime. What does the apparent stability of governmental power reveal about the workings of technological materiality within state administration and the various ‘spatialisations’ (Verräumlichungen) implied? To what extent did the media technological shift (paper vs. magnet) enable a novel form of accumulation and (spatial) concentration of state administration vis-à-vis the labour market and individual economic activities?

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