User:Andre Castro/research/1.2/essay-archive

Online archives: power and remixes

negotiation of aspirations within online archives

the role of remixes within the archives

Outline(unfinished)

Archive and Power

Online archive: a negotiation of aspirations: between authoritative archive figures and a popular everyday communitarian archive Examples: web2.0 services: youtube, flick, facebook

The role of the remix

Does the remix of the archive plays a role in this negotiation? Is it challenge the authority behind the archive? Do glitches create short-circuits

- 2 versions of the same image ??

Introduction

In this essay I will like to discuss the online 'communitarian' popular archive. I will argue that for the majority these are still entities related to and representing authority, although built and shaped by the users. I will present the remix as strategy for, not only for gaining an understanding of the archive, but as glitches, that can defy the archive's authority.

Archive and Power

• Derrida

In 'Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression' Derrida traces back its meaning to the Greek 'arkheion' "the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded'. And at this this location official documents are written and safeguarded. The archons are not only entitled to secure the official documents, but also to interpret them in order to validate a system of power. From such interpretations the law was recalled and applied (pp: 9-10). The archive has its origins as a tool for power, granting , the possibility for those who were allowed to interpret its documents to impose their reading on those who weren't granted such privilege. Also the archive has also been a tool for control and monitoring of the population

++ [Norman Klein and the history of the archive p.4] [Foucault]

Online Archives

folkloric archive

Although acknowledging this role archive as a policing tool validating power and knowledge structures, Appadurai takes also into account the every day life archive, the archives that belong to the individual, the family, the community. In his view, this online folkloric archive, which allows for users a active role within its construction, 'is gradually freed from the orbit of the state and its official networks'(p.16).

still a power structure

Norman Klein however is more skeptical, and sees beyond the democratic possibility of online folkloric archives, revealing them as scripted spaces. Although allowing, or are even being mostly made of user's intervention, online folkloric archives are often scripted spaces, with an ideology behind. By looking of what is excluded from archive a picture of the ideology scripting the archive begins to form. Take the example of Facebook, where pictures smashed heads are acceptable while nudity is censored; such a choice in what can be said and cannot, makes its ideology very prominent. Necessarily the range of possible discourses becomes restricted to this highly ideological space. As Klein argues that 'in the US, archiving has turned into collective schizophrenia; into ten thousand unofficial lies and racist innuendos, guided by wealthy right-wing investors ... a blizzard of factoids that poisoned what remained of our national politics'

While creating an illusion of an empowering and liberating free space, where one can express his/her views, it actually diminishes the citizens political strength.

[We can see here a soft-control, a modulation, in a society of control. The individual is not deprived from the right to express her view, but her view will be filtered (of modulated) by the channel used to make it public. If such view fits within the ideology it can stay, if it doesn't it quietly and painlessly disappears.

site of emergence

Klein however acknowledges relevant shift from the traditional archive to online one. It left being a site of preservation to become a site of emergence, of what is still to be inserted into it. 'If archives are incomplete, is is no longer because the documents did not survive the passing of time, but of what is still to be inserted and re-invented into them'

a transmission medium

Given this scenario, where archives are no longer sites of preservation of memories, what can be said to be their function? Perhaps they are more TRANSMISSION medium, that allows one's views to quickly and efficiently reach large audiences. It has 'site for the production of anticipated memories and connectivities' 'a document is posted and re-posted several times'

++ [Laric]

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• product of negotiated aspiration: users vs. archive institution

desire is suppressed (Klein)

Examples: web2.0 services: youtube, flick, facebook

We cannot say that an online communitarian and popular archive is no longer attached its past as a power figure, never-the-less the uses users make of it transforms it. The archive becomes a site of negotiated aspiration. Users and the institution behind the archive negotiate their different and often conflicting aspirations.

The role of remix

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From my experience in creating 'Liberté, Equalité, Beyoncé' - a radio station ... - I can see that I become empowered, I am allowed to interpret the archive, to create statements [FOUCAULT] from the objects that are contained with the archive. Does then such an approach empowers also the listener? I presume it doesn't. What does it do then?

* the interpretation of the archive * the interface the way you navigate * what the interpreation says [LARIC]

• Foucault (where?)

LEB empowerment

• does it transfer to the listenrs

Design of the archive - a result of its use

• the interpretation of items from the archive - tells more about the interpreter
• Laric - Versions
• Foucault (p.145)

the faults/glitchs of the archive

Derrida- p.10

Foucault in exposing his notion of the archive as system from which statements can emerge as events and things, uses as an example the different interpretation one past event ('so many things said by so many men') can acquire in the act of interpreting it.

As OLIVIER LARIC states in his piece Versions: 'How an incident happens may reflect nothing about the incident itself, buts reflect something about the person involved in the happening and supplying a how ... In the telling and retelling people reveal not the action but themselves'

Foucault 'The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.(p.145) '[The archive] reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is in the general system of the formation and transformation of statements'(p.146)

• archaeology - 'discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive'(p.148)

Appadurai - intensified archive - a place to sort out the meaning of memory

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Steve's notes on further developments:

• later Foucault (1984) - constructing of the neo-liberal subject

liberalism produces freedom that we consume it produces another subject self-contained individual

organization of society as organization of flows

What can be done until the 11th of April?

Formulate a text:

• negotiation of aspirations within online archives
• The role of remixes within the archives.