User:Sebastians/prototyping/Text Archive

Annotation

In Page Magazine's 8th issue, titled "When Historical", Norman M. Klein talks about the archive, and about his latest project The Imaginary 20th Century, which is a mix between novel, and archive. Klein is an urban and media historican, writes novels, and is a professor at the California Institute of the Arts.

He describes how the institutional archive was used as a supposedly objective/unbiased instrument of control, and surveillance. The archive always had the final say in a way that couldn't be modified later on (like the word of god).

The internet gives people the opportunity (through e.g. social media) to intervene in the official record, to comment on it, and to generate new records. In that sense the archive, or databases, could be an instrument of power that we all share, and that could liberate us.

However, Klein is worried that the archive might be filled with "hysterical facts", and that it might be, or is, ruled by "mob action". Another problem he sees is that there are too many sources that are unreliable, that add non-facts, and that decide what is archived, and what not. Furthermore he ponders on wether search engines provide the liberation they promise, or if they privilege the instances behind them because the search engines' behavior is programmed.

What interests Klein is archiving as an act of producing fiction, as a form of storytelling. To him, an archive is always fiction, a construction, an "assemblage", the compiling of a story out of a pile of traces, and this holds true both for the early institutional archive als well as for the current, collective archive. (He's pointing to the Wunderkammer, and to the picaresque novel as early interesting references in science and literature). As search engines, and filters allow to combine data in endless forms, archiving now has a sculptural quality.

Looking at an archive, what is most meaningful to Klein is not what is in an archive, but that which has been left out. He calls the archive a collective memory, and a collective psyche, where fact and fiction coexist.

He finishes the interview by pointing to artists, writers, media designers, and librarians (and the likes) as the ones, who should further develop the form of the archive. This could lead to a reinvention of the novel, and even to the reinvention of democracy.

His project: imaginarytwentiethcentury.com/

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Words & quotes I liked:

• collective psyche
• "The archive can be understood as the open-ended site for the production of anticipated memories and connectivities." (in the opening question by Pages Magazine)