User:Silviolorusso/thematic2/appadurai-archiveandaspiration

Notes of "Archive and Aspiration" by Arjun Appadurai

Social memory/ collective memory

relation extenalities vs internalities

electronic archive (elettrolibrary): non-hierarchical, digital para-human features

Pierre Nora's "places of memory"

gap between neural locus of memory and its social location

Memory and the Archive

humanist perspective: archive, social tool for the work fro collective memory, neutral, even bening tool to keep the most significan portions of the past

archive expresses itself through the document

old notion of the archive is an empty entity that works as guardian to the document

UNESCO braodened the notion of the document (tesi chiara)

archive lives of its "pastness"

archive is sacralized as the site of the past of some cultural collectivity, not considered for its own materiality

humanist persp: memory vs desire

property of the archive: ideology of the trace (Marc Bloch)

"The archive is built on the accidents that produces traces"

All intentionalities come from the use we make of the archive, not from archive itself.

preciousness and moral authority of the archive derives from the accidents that produces its traces.

Foucault: archive is not innocent

evidence born out of nosological (disease's classification) gaze.

we need a new way to look at the archive

Foucault was too pessimistic

what's about personal archives?

documentation as intervention

archive as collective project

the archive as the product of the anticipation of collective memory.

archive as aspiration rather than recollection

electionic archive allows an active, open-ended collective building

communities that creates archives: new kind of community. reliance on the absence/impossibility of face-to-face

examples: expatriates, artists, MUDDS(?), chatrooms, etc.

inverted relationship between memory and connectivity: social collectives build connectivities out of memory, virtual collectivities do the opposite

memories out of connectivity

miming socialities, building whole identities, producing cloned socialities

prosthetic sociality

collective memory and the archive? seemengly 2 opposite faces

1. electonic devices restore link between archive and popular memory
2. electronic archive denaturalizes the relationship of memory and the archive, (juxtaposing one another I guess... not clear)

Migration, Memory and Archival Agency

in "Modernity at Large": in globalization, and migration -> disjunctures between location, imagination and identity.

'moving images meet mobile audiences'

migrants as undocumented citizens

work of imagination -> capacity to aspire

how archive contribute to the built of migrant identity?

living archive

memory becomes hyper-valued for many migrants

memory of loss: confusion about what is lost and what is to be remembered

confusion -> constitution of different types of archive

critical role of media

define a widely plausible narrative

long-distance nationalism, Benedict Anderson

in the electronic age imagined communities are more "real" than natural ones

eelam.com (imagined country called eelam) Imagined country of the Tamil pop. of Sri Lanka

website is sacred geography, more than a sign for the real geography. A simulacrum, a self-sustained reality

reading together enriched by the web

memory vs public narrative

migrant archive is active and interactive

migrant archive: continuous and conscious work of the imagination (relation to the new society)

archive as a map

Aspiration and the Memory Gap

archive as a meta-intervention

archive about memory, but also about work of the imagination, social project

memory affiniy with desire (Eliot, Proust)