Elizabeth Travelslight December 11, 2008 Professor Soraya Murray DANM 201
Archives Elsewhere //Though at this point it feels like Archives Everywhere
The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token to the future... what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives. (Derrida 18)
There can be an elsewhere, not as utopian fantasy or relativist escape, but an elsewhere born out of hard (and sometimes joyful) work of getting on together in a kin group that includes cyborgs and goddesses working for earthly survival. (Haraway 3)
Introductions The writer invariably begins with her words. From the many she selects the first; from the first many usually follow. (Though the single word seems to have a suggestive and convienient fashionability all its own.) The writer’s words begin as a particular inheritance– an inheritance of meaning and memory technology that potentially unlocks its past, with the risk of releasing unfamiliar arrangements in the service of new articulations– passwords into elsewhere. There can be an elsewhere. I approach my task here as a writer for it is also as writer that I have made my approach to art. What concerns me at present is this inheritance as knowledge making practice within the context of art and interdisciplinary scholarship. That said, the question really is, quite literally, what might I make of archives? Perhaps, because of my disposition toward writing, I am prone to archives. I easily forget that “permanent marker” is a relative contradiction in terms and “disappearing ink,” a redundant norm. This too shall pass. But for now, the mark remains on the page. I begin with archives for several reasons:
1. Archives permits some poetic noun-verb homophonetics. With one word I get both a plural, suggesting “There are many archives.” And a third person singular present tense verb, implying a “Who or what that archives?” This suits my pre-occupation for both plurality and action as intrinsic to dynamics and complexity. It is from such a system that the word comes to me and into which it returns.
To suggest archive in the tempting singular launches us easily into generous white clouds of concept and clever associations. Derrida has laid down so much twisted deconstruction around the word, that I am hard pressed to escape his interceptions. However, for now, I would like to know that my investigations concern themselves with material-semiotic practices and do not begin and simply remain conceptual.
The archive is the first law of what can be said, the system that governs, the appearance of statements as unique events...that which determines that they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine as it were, like stars... |The archive| is that which, at the very root of the of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of enunciability. (Foucault 28-29)
The Archive then, as it were, is inherently many, plural in its materializations; and the subsequent differentiating archival distributions fascinate me as the embodiment of discourses themselves– as the embodiment of discursive possibilities.
2. Archives includes tremendous etymological and grammatological potential. We’re opening the heart of media studies, political theory, materials science, epistemology and communication. For the lover of words, archives maintain a rich terrain.
If we allow that words can be more alive, more seed-like than stones, if we allow them a bio-logos rather than mere logos, one might ask, “What flowers from this word? What makes it grow?” We already so easily ask the question “What are its roots?”– taking etymology as a study of the word’s truth. Additionally, taking archives dynamic multiplicity, we might also consider, “How are its routes? Where does the word carry?”– acknowledging that we are as likely to scatter as our language. Our continued globalizations and diasporas create and necessitate new patterns of growth and understanding; a re-thinking of our words to reflect the re-shaped forces of our relationships. This renewal and mutability suggests the possibility of new archives or even perhaps an-archives.
The colonialist epistemological dualisms of relativism and realism require tropic swerving in a spirit of love and rage. Anarchists knew that kind of thing; anarchists made strong knowledge claims, not vapid truces. In the face of many established disorders we need to practice saying “none of the above.” (Haraway 3)
Thus I am intensely curious about the potential for archives to swerve, to be troped, in the service of new knowledge claims. Archives suggest the possibility of touching and the omnipresence of deterioration. Archives, so vulnerable to erasure, resist erosion and stand against those forces in motion. How easily do they swerve?
Here is some etymology:
archives 1603, from Fr. archif, from L.L. archivum (sing.), from Gk. ta arkheia "public records," pl. of arkheion "town hall," from arkhe "government," lit. "beginning, origin, first place" (see archon). The verb is first attested 1934. (Online Etymological Dictionary)
archon one of the nine chief magistrates of ancient Athens, 1659, from Gk. arkhon "ruler," prp. of arkhein "to rule," from PIE *arkhein- "to begin, rule, command," a "Gk. verb of unknown origin, but showing archaic Indo-European features ... with derivatives arkhe, 'rule, beginning,' and arkhos, 'ruler' " |Watkins|. (Online Etymological Dictionary)
And a definition:
'Archives' are made up of records (AKA primary source documents) which have been accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime. For example, the archives of an individual may contain letters, papers, photographs, computer files, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries or any other kind of documentary materials created or collected by the individual--regardless of media or format. The archives of an organization (such as a corporation or government), on the other hand, tend to contain different types of records, such as administrative files, business records, memos, official correspondence, meeting minutes, and so on. (Wikipedia)
With archives we call upon a powerful and ancient word-place that unfurls the life in language itself, its technical, mechanical, biological, and geological life. Archives brings us the material technologies, the geographic locations, as well as the tangled embodiments that constitute the possibility of collective memory inseparable from the semiotic, semi-permanent annunciations and inscriptions that make imagined communities possible.
3. As practices, archives are inherently interdisciplinary, interpellating scholars of all kinds– historians, chemists, lawyers, librarians, activists, philosophers, biologists, architects, hardware engineers, software engineers, writers, artists, genealogists, archaeologists, geologists, curators, and of course archivists.
Interdisciplinary scholarship involves welcoming a wide audience– with all the humility and courage that entails. For such work is necessarily undertaken and communicated by experts and non-experts together, in a kind of re-forged knowledge making that is partial and temporary, suggesting that perhaps all knowledge might only be ever partial and temporary. The interdisciplines restlessly resolve themselves in running circuits among nodes, intent upon articulating a network of connections that escapes resolution in a single discipline.
Archives have shaped our notions of embodiment and space, the orders and disorders of our relations, delimiting the public and the private; property and provenance; the insides and the outsides of given community. An exploration of human archives reveals a practice of memory that extends beyond only-the-human. As much as the particular moments to which our archives offer testimony, it is the commemorating materials and technologies themselves –and our relationships to them– that determine the possible qualities of memory, including the particulars of permanence, coherence, recoverability, and all the ontological implications that entails.
Handling Accumulations: How Memory Washes Ashore and Away
Implicated within archives are several forces at work. Of particular interest to me is the visible and invisible evidence of human hands as the productive organ of artisanship and craft and –if we are persuaded by Benjamin’s speculations on the subject– hands also as the integral organs of storytelling. We are no longer familiar with this practice. The role of the hand in production has become more modest, and the place it filled in storytelling lies waste. (After all, storytelling, in its sensory aspect, is by no means a job for the voice alone. Rather, in genuine storytelling the hand plays apart which supports what is expressed in a hundred ways with its gestures trained by work.) That old coordination of the soul, eye, and the hand which emerges in Valéry’s words is that of the artisan which we encounter wherever the art of story telling is at home. (Benjamin 108)
1. Non-textual archives This emphasizes primarily oral/aural memory and recollection like poetry, song, theater, and storytelling, but could include other non-literate memory technologies such as geology, dance, and craft.
2. Textual archives I am invoking a generous sense of the word text here to include written words, narrative, and documentation. This includes manuscripts, maps, drawings, photographs, cinema, and mechanically produced texts in a variety of media like stone, wood, clay, ink, paint, paper and pages of varying composition, film, magnetic tape, and microfiche, etc. – the familiar bulk of traditional archives that spans the range from earliest writing to film and photo media.
3. Digital archives floppy disks, digital tapes, optical disks, solid state drives, and servers (including CPUs, RAMs, and hard disks).
As much as these layers are discrete, there is much that is mutual, tense, and, interpenetrating among them. They exist simultaneously though their appearance, emphasis, and effect vary with geography, culture, and historical distributions of capital and technology. This is in part because previous technologies are often what make new forms initially comprehensible as successful media and likewise, new technologies allow for re-interpretations of earlier media productions. Additionally, media produced in one context can be re-formatted and reproduced in another, raising hermeneutic questions about the absolute fidelity of a message and its medium; how we maintain and authenticate our memories. More often than not, my examples reverberate through out these layers, troubling both the distinctions between them and the linearity of their progress.
Example 1: The Almanac of the Dead Because they were the very last of their tribe, strong cases were made for their dying together and allowing the almanac to die with them. After all, the almanac was what told them who they were and where they had come from in the stories...The pages were divided four ways. This way, if only one of the children reached safety far in the North, at least one part of the book would be safe. The people new if even part of their almanac survived, they as a people would return someday. (Silko 246)
... she dropped a page of the manuscript into the simmering vegetable stew. The girl had done it so quickly the hunchbacked woman had no chance to protest. The woman watched the stew for a longtime. The girl watched beside her. The thin brittle page gradually began to change. Brownish ink rose in clouds. Outlines of letters smeared and then they floated up and away like flocks of small birds. The surface of the page began to glisten, and brittle curled edges swelled flat and spread until the top of the stew pot was nearly covered with a section of horse stomach. Well, it was a wonderful stew... |Later| in a quarrel, the little girl who knew the secret of the stew had told the others. The little boy began to cry. He said he would not eat another mouthful because he might be eating the part of the book in which the alien invaders are wiped out forever. He might be eating the passage of the story that describes the return of the spirits of the days who love the people.” (Silko 249-250)
Forced out of necessity, the children resolve together to eat only the pages they have learned by heart. Once sustainably nourished, the children survive the journey and the almanac is passed on, undergoing further re-mediations and material translations into the present day as a fractured, repaired, partial, multilingual deterioration and accumulation of language, translations, and appendices. The novel begins as the almanac approaches its most contemporary re-incarnation, data processing into a word processor, which, presumably, reveals to us the almanac as the novel itself.
This early post-Columbian life of the almanac enacts a literal embodiment of a community’s archive, revealing a narrative life that perpetuates in no small part through a metabolic memory technology. We see that the people and their records are deeply intertwined, in the flesh, by an internalizing of their history in the body. This edible vulnerability of the almanac to radical translation characterizes to varying degrees many of the changes that the it undergoes over the rest of its history, offering a model of living, partial, preservation and interpretation that contradicts the taxidermic preservations of Western archival practice. The almanac maintains an undeniable truthfulness that problematizes the hegemony of Western truth by enacting a non-hermetic life of the document.
Example 2: Databases/Digital Archives In “Database as Symbolic Form” Lev Manovich describes the emergence of the database as the new creative logic of new media.
As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order that list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. (Manovich)
As a public resource, digital archives provide new channels of access, creating “archives at a distance.” Technology makes it possible to use information from archives as place other than where the source material is actually kept. The user of different data bases all over the world is no longer obliged to visit in person the holding institutions. (Ketelaar 73)
Example 3: Digital Literacies Besides the database, we find other transformations in the characteristics of text produced with digital media. Some are small transformations that still bear close resemblances to mechanically produced text and instantiate traditional “reading” practices in the pre-digital sense. However, we begin to also recognize much greater changes in the experience of literacy, a kind of digital literature that is a unique contribution to digital archival media and requires the development of new writing, reading, and archiving practices that introduce unfamiliar kinds of embodiment, what N. Katherine Hayles calls virtual subjectivity: Although the shape of virtual subjectivity is only beginning to emerge and is therefore difficult to envision clearly, certain features are coming into focus. Proprioceptive coherence in interplay with electronic prostheses plays an important role in reconfiguring perceived body boundaries, especially when it gives the user the impression that her subjectivity is flowing into the space of the screen...The symbiotic relation between humans and intelligent machines has complex effects that do not necessarily all point in the same direction. (Hayles 92)
If we compare the advent with digital literacy, including hypertext, software programming, moving and/or pixilated textuality, and databased narratives, with the development of phonetic literacy- there is no reason not to anticipate profound effects. Many of us are inhabiting and sharing new kinds of bodies with the potential to re-organize our relations. Here, in fact, is where much of the discursive work of cyber-feminist practice takes off. If the pre-digital order of our relations is in large part determined by textual media and our archives of them, as evidenced by the enduring traditions of the Greeks upon the West and of the West upon the rest; and the pre-digital order of our relations was primarily organized around documents of property, class, gender, sexuality, race, and nationality; then, the potential for a re-ordering of those relations exists. It’s something to get excited about if your not super invested in the current order of things.
However, digital literature and all of its potential might be measured against the stronger archivability of traditional textual media material and the persistence of uneven access to digital media that profoundly exaggerates the unevenness in access to literacy, let alone English. Like Oguibe, I agree that much of the libratory rhetoric coursing through the internet is misleadingly naïve. Utterances of “we” are highly contingent upon who is able to hear and respond to its call, share in its rewards. Yet much of Internet discourse perpetuates the notion of this almost miraculous place, a “global community” which in fact remains to many as mysteriously distant -as gated and labrynthine as any enclave of the ultra wealthy- that simultaneously remains in many vital ways an urgent economic burden upon the lives of many. Our notions of "global community" have not, as Oguibe demonstrates, realized their full libratory potential.
Indeed, the truth-value of information gathered from the Net is reinforced rather misleadingly by its essentially textual proclivity and in turn by the text’s historical and scriptural association with truth, especially in the West.” (Oguibe 174)
I’m curious as to how to turn these media tools so that the support they provide is more mutual for every one at every stage of production. The bodies that digital technologies so easily render invisible are least of all our own.
Example Four: The U.S. Virgin Islands
The relationship between communities, memory, and written records is complex and multi-faceted. The reflective, reinforcing, and remembrancing roles that historical records play in the construction of community memory support the evidential, authenticating, and factual roles. Vital to all such roles must be the ability of the community to access the records to build and defend that memory... Through the accession, appraisal, preservation, housing, and maintenance of a community’s written records, archivists facilitate the construction of memory. (Bastian 6)
without recourse to solid grounding in historical materials, the struggle to control the image of the society through the control of the interpretation of its cultural history goes on, and it is part of the struggle to control the future of the society itself. (Bell 9)
Another Caribbean writer observes that “what is achival in the Caribbean, as the Caribbean writer knows, is what got lost in the annals of sugar cane burned every harvest like the library of Alexandria, what disappeared in spray in the wake of the slaves.” (Walcott 8)
While there is still much to be learned about how Virgin Islanders may formulate their history and their relationship to their African and Carribbean origins once they are able to access the fullness of their own archives, Bastian undertakes, in addition, an exploration of collective memory in the community as it “is framed within the wide definition of the records that it creates, a definition that embraces not only written forms of remembrance and recording that include oral traditions, public ceremonies, commemorations, artifacts, and markers such as public statues and private grave sites.” (Bastian p.6) Among Bastian’s findings she notes, a Virgin Islander folklorist who “points to the discrepancy between written and oral folk traditions, stressing that even though many of the folktales are written down, nuances in the physical movements and performance of the storyteller ‘make the full story come alive” (Bastian 11); demonstrating the fact that with or without any historical information potentially arising from archival research of their own, Virgin Islanders have cultivated a refined embodied archive of peformative history.
Provide Your Maps: The Atlas Group
The truth of the documents we archive/collect does not depend for us on their factual accuracy. In other words, it does not matter to us whether blue prints were found buried 32 meters under the rubble in downtown Beirut... One of the questions that we find ourselves asking is: How do we approach facts not in their crude facticity but through the complicated mediations by which fact acquire their immediacy?
What we have are objects and stories that should not be examined through the conventional but reductive binary, fiction and non-fiction.
(The Atlas Group, 179)
record (v.) c.1225, "to get by heart," from O.Fr. recorder "repeat, recite, report," from L. recordari "remember, call to mind," from re- "restore" + cor (gen. cordis) "heart" (as the metaphoric seat of memory, cf. learn by heart); see heart. Meaning "set down in writing" first attested c.1300; that of "put sound or pictures on disks, tape, etc." is from 1892. (Online Etymology Dictionary)
I think it is absolutely fascinating that the word record comes from the word heart, as in “by heart.” There is a wicked contradiction in our usage of the word, in light of all the records, is there not? Yet, I cannot also help but imagine that there is a collective embodiment then at the heart of our recordings; that in sharing language, in all that is and will become recordable through all our media, (past, present, and not-yet-realized) there is a sense of our heart, a one heart that more than one may agree (or maybe disagree) to share- a claim that we might make “to be” together as more than one. I guess that why I’m interested in archives as emphemera. They are a way of making temporary knowledge claims, temporary hand on heart embodiments that eventually leave space for the emergence of elsewhere –which is never already here– for the imagined communities to come.
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