User:Sebastians/rwrm/essay

1st Draft

Todo: Citations...

Todo: Headlines...

Intro

With digital data being easily created, copied, manipulated, and stored, the archive, and the act of archiving have become somewhat omnipresent. New archives are built, and new data is submitted constantly by filling in all kinds of forms, by uploading photos or videos, and by tagging, categorizing, and rating what we submit, and what we consume. Whereas action IRL (e.g. communication) not necessarily produces a record, almost everything happening online will be stored in a database by default. (Blurring of online & offline??) However we are not only consciously creating what could be called, in positive terms, a collective memory. When being online, we are constantly leaving traces that are stored in databases, forming archives of profiles that we, as the subjects of these tracking processes, cannot access. Putting these hidden archives aside, the public archive is so immense, and so quickly growing, that we cannot find anything anymore without relying on the help of others – which in fact mostly comes down to using a search engine. Relying on sophisticated algorithms, and making use of both the public and the hidden archives, search engines assemble records to form a possible representation of what we searched for.

But what exactly is an archive? What is its relation to power? And do all the input fields, asking us to contribute to the archive, make it more open, more democratic?

What is a possible attitude towards the archive, and the process of archiving, now that our present somehow is lived (recorded) as an anticipated memory, and now that we rely on algorithms and services to manage, store, and maybe delete these memories?

[…]

The historical a priori and the archive

In The Historical a priori and the Archive, which is a chapter in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault introduces what he calls the historical a priori, and describes his understanding of the term archive. His historical a priori however is not to be confused with a formal a priori, which describes knowledge that is independent of experience. It is not a condition of validity for statements. Instead, Foucault describes it as a condition of reality, and in fact the whole set of rules determining which statements and things can be part of a discourse, how they persist, how they are transformed, and which statements and things are excluded, forgotten or overlooked at a certain point in time. The historical a priori is a limited space of communication encompassing way more then individual books or authors, but not, for example, the whole universe of a science.

Regarding the emerging of statements and things, Foucault observes that they neither emerge only from the order of the mind nor only from the order of things, but are introduced through what he calls systems of statements. He proposes to call these systems archive, introducing a different notion of a term, that often describes the merer sum of documents making up the past of a culture, or an institution collecting and organizing these artifacts.

In order to find out why certain statements appeared, it is necessary to look at the conditions under which they appeared, and not at what they denote, or who made them.

Consistently, Foucault writes that the archive of one's own culture can not be described. A description becomes possible on the basis of discourses that have ceased to exists in our culture, and that thus somehow are placed outside our language. He calls the methodology for analyzing an archive archaeology. However by using this term, he is no referring to a search for a beginning, but to a carving out of conditions (the aforementioned systems and functions).

[…]

Allan Sekula: Reading an Archive

Somebody writing about the reading and analyzing of an archive is Allan Sekula. He is both a writer and an artist, with photography being his medium of choice and study. Sekula might not keep the temporal (chronological?) distance, however possible keeping it might be anyway, that Foucault calls prerequisite for analyzing and describing an archive. But his essay provides us with many hints on how to read and understand an archive, and on what an archive can be in a more narrow – and maybe more tangible – sense than what Foucault described.

Sekula basis his essay on the analysis of a photography book that compiles photos taken by Leslie Shedden, the owner of the biggest and the only financially sustainable photo studio in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. All photos had been taken in this region dominated by industry and coal-mining between 1946 and 1968. Shedden's biggest client was the local coal-mining company. Further customers were the miners and their families, and local shopkeepers.

Sekula's Notion of the Archive

An important observation that Sekula makes is the fact that in an archive, authorship and ownership not necessarily coincide, and that it is the latter that makes an archive an entity. With changing ownership, context gets lost, new interpretations arise, and the original use and context of the archive's items – in Sekula's case photographs – is only residual: “New meanings come to supplant old ones, with the archive serving as a kind of 'cleaning house' of meaning” (Sekula 1982, p.445). Archives can be understood syntagmas, changing over time, out of which statements can be constructed.

Now we are all authors but…

This distinction between authorship and ownership is especially interesting when looking at our current online activity. We are constantly adding new textual content (tweets, status updates, blog posts, etc), photos, and videos to the web. Unlike Shedden's customers that are now appearing in the photography book, we are in fact the authors of these "archive items". And unlike Shedden himself, we deliberately choose to include them into a specific archive. However, as this archive is almost always some company's website or web service, we aren't really the owners anymore after clicking the submit or upload button. This is not a problem of ownership in the classical sense, not an opposition to the copying, pasting, appropriating, and remixing of content online. With our communication and our memories becoming data in a corporate environment, we have little clarity concerning "our" data's future context, use, modification or existence/deletion.

Truth/Knowledge

Convinced that finding and documenting the truth is a matter of quantity, archiving projects almost always claim or strive for completeness. While the belief that photographs depict reality might be vanishing, Sekula claims that there is still a belief in the archive to organize its contents in a meaningful manner. Furthermore he claims this "archival perspective" to be closer to the capitalist, the bureaucrat, the engineer, etc. than to the worker, as such an archive can only be managed by bureaucratic means.

To Sekula, archives are far from being neutral as they embody the “power inherent in accumulation, collection, and hoarding as well as that power inherent in the command of the lexicon and rules of language” (Sekula 1982, p.446). Through their structure, archives maintain a hidden connection between knowledge and power.

Domenico Quaranta, an art critic and curator in the field of media art, just recently curated a show called "Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age". For the accompanying catalog he wrote an essay with the same title in which he addresses algorithmic archives as power systems. Quaranta points out that based on algorithms, search engines regulate and manage our private memories, and decide what we remember and what we forget. He highlights the importance of communities of people that “collect, reorganize, vote, tag, remix, manipulate, and redistribute Internet content”, an involvement he considers to be a means of fighting the archive as a power system, and making it more human.

INSERT HERE: Friedrich Kittler on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (in Kittler's "Nacht der Substanz")

How to read the archive

Returning to the photography book, Sekula looks for a way how to read the archive, and how to read the images with the described problematic in mind. He discusses two approaches – on one hand treating the photos as historical documents, and on the other as aesthetic objects – just to show how both of them fail in understanding the underlaying archive (systems of power). Even though this might be rather specific to photography, I want to briefly reflect his observations as I think they are helpful nonetheless, and as they form the basis for Sekula's final conclusion.

Todo: Historical Documents

Todo: Aesthetic Objects; connect to Web 1.0 aesthetic

Todo: "material cultural history"

TO COME

INSERT HERE: Norman M. Klein interview by Pages Magazine. Archives & Fiction, etc.

INSERT HERE: Attitude towards the archive, artistic practice

Bibliography

Foucault, M., 1969. The Historical a priori and the Archive.
Sekula, A. (??). Reading an Archive in L. Wells 2002 ed. The Photography Reader
Quaranta, D. (2011) The Artists as Archivist in the Internet Age in: Collect the WWWorld, by Quaranta, D. (ed.)
Kittler, F., 1989. Die Nacht der Substanz.
Klein, N., 2011. Imaginary Future and the Archive in: Pages Magazine.