User:Grrrreat/thematic1/notes-16-01-12
Annotation Arjun Appadurai, Archive and Aspiration.
Memory and the Archive.
Gap between neural memory and social location of memory.
Formerly (Humanist perspective): The Archive as obejctive tool to preserve the "prestige of the past" (Halbwachs) in the form of documents. The idea of document in that context has since then gained a wider and wider sense. Documents can now beartifacts, monuments or even parts of a city. Here the document's inherent spirit is the driving force of the archive. Thus the archive is sacralized, resulting in a split of memory and desire.
Foucault questioned the objectivity of the archive by looking at the design by which the traces in the archive are produced. He sees the archive not as way to preserve accidental and/or precious traces of collective memory but as way (or tool) for authorities to selectively construct this collective memory.
Besides Foucault's dark and dystopian views of the archive there is a more neutral perspective to the archive. Documentation should rather be seen as intervention, and all archiving as part of some sort of collective project. The archive is not just a place to keep memories that might be interesting for collective memory, but more of an anticipated form of the future collective memory which the archive is being built towards.
Due to the Internet and it's free-for-all capability to build, edit and maintain archives and the lack of stately curation of these archives, the archive is being brought back closer to it's original state of being a "deliberate site for the production of anticipated memories by international communities".
New to this form of the archive: natural social collectivities build memories out of connectivity, virtual collectivities build memories out of connectivity. These are the acted out fantasies of restoring agency (power) to the game of sociality, not a way of seeking escape from the social as such. So on the one hand the digital interactive archive is able to restore the important social, collective memory building workings of the archive but on the other hand it denaturalizes the original relationship of memory and the archive by making the interactive archive the basis of collective memeory rather than leaving memory as a substrate that guarantees the ethical value of the archive.
Migration, Memory and Archival Agency.
In short the assumption can be made that by creating more vast and easily accessable digital archives the number of imagined worlds and imagined individual selves is rising. This is especially true for migrants. For them the will to aspire, to leave the current situation and go somewhere else needs an imagination of what to aspire to (more precisely: where to migrate and what to do there). So by being able to access archives and feed their imagination their potencial to aspire is heightened.
Another interesting aspect is that for migrants memory becomes hyper-valued because they are leaving the domain of the collective memory they belong to as well as the domain their individual memory is tied to. Therefore, when arrived and settled down at the location they migrated to they have to piece their identity back together. Sometimes without even exactly knowing of what has been lost. This is often done by means of various media, making it possible to socially connect the reconstructed archives/identities together and therefore gaining a wider perspective on subject matter. This is how a feeling of collective identity is able to be (re- or newly) constructed in the foreign domiciles. But these identities rely heavily on the media used to construct them and therefore exist partly only inside of these archives. The archive acts here also as some kind of safe haven, far away from the monothematic storyline projected on the migrant by his surroundings. In it debates on identity and politics are lively and driven from multiple prespectives. The migrant archive is therefore a prefect example for an archive that is the constant and conscious work of imagination rather than a collection of traces and the luck of material survival because it simply can't afford to be like this without losing value to its contributors.
Aspiration and the Memory Gap
"The archive as deliberate project is based on the recognition that all documentation is a form of intervention and, thus, that documentation does not simply precede intervetion but is its first step."
Therefore archives are not only about memory but also about imagination. In times of bureaucratically constructed archives this may have been hard to see, but in the times of internet, interactivity and connectivity the archive can be more and more easily preceived as interactively designed and socially produced.
"The archive, as an institution, is surely a site of memory. But as a tool, it is an instrument for the refinement of desire."
This desire is the most important factor for the capacity to aspire, which is a precious resource especially for not so well-situated people.
"Archives, viewed as active and interactive tools for the construction of sustainable identities, are important vehicles for building the capacity to aspire among those groups who need it most."
Agents, living people build archives by negotiating the gap between neuro-memory and social memory, in which new solidarities might produce new memories rather than to wait for them to appear.