User:Eleanorg/1.2/Annotation: 'Archive and Aspiration' (extract)

Annotation: Archive and Aspiration by Arjun Appaduri

pp. 14-25

Social memory, like individual memory, is a mystery because it is located both spatially/biologically and also socially/psychologically. Appaduri likens this paradox to the Cartesian split between mind & body.

MEMORY AND THE ARCHIVE

For example: a humanist model of the archive sees it as a kind of (intially empty) "body" which contains documents; a body "animated by something less visible - usually the spirit of a people, the people, or humanity in general." (p.15)
Fundamental to this idea is the belief that historical "traces" enter into the archive by accidental survival (p.15). After Foucault, this notion is no longer viable: "he [Foucault] showed that all evidence was born in some sort of nosological [ie, classifying] gaze" (p.16).
However, not all archiving is implicated in institutional power as Foucault suggests. Archives are built every day as "the product of the anticipation of collective memory" in the forms of, for example, "the personal diary, the family photo album, the community museum, and... oral archives" (p.16).
"Thus the archive is itself an aspiration rather than a collection" (p.16), "the material site of the collective will to remember" (p.17) - not the traditionally concieved "tomb of the accidental trace" (p.17).
Now, with electronic comms "...the archive returns to its more general status of being a deliberate site for the production of anticipated memories by intentional communities" (p.17) as archives are "gradually freed of the orbit of the state and its official networks" (p.17).
However, unlike in face-to-face communities, online communities actively build their memories through archiving rather than vice versa (as was the case traditionally).
The traditional gap between the physcial site of memory and its community 'spirit' may thus be narrowing, or at least becoming bridgeable.

MIGRATION, MEMORY AND ARCHIVAL AGENCY

"...in the era of globalisation, the circulation of media images and the movement of migrants...the archive of possible lives is now richer and more available to ordinary people than ever before" (pp. 18-19). This is a good thing, even if material circumstances still often prevent (poor) people from attaining those lives. It has enhanced people's "capacity to aspire", without the development of which "poor migrants will always remain captive to the wishes of [those in power]." (p.19). Not sure about this... AA takes a somewhat patronizing view of the narrow horizons of the poor in the absence of mass media/migration, and runs dangerously close to locating the source of their exploitation in their own lack of imagination.
Migrants have a special relationship to archiving, as working out their relationship to their memory & past is an ongoing project for them. "This confusion leads to an often deliberate effort to construct a variety of archives..." (p.21). The media & internet are often instrumental in this, though migrants do not only consume media images but collaboratively archive through email etc.
This online communities should be taken seriously - for example eelam.com, an online Tamil nation "rehearsed in cyberspace, and inclusive of its incomplete expression in the soil of Sri Lanka." (p.22) Such "diasphoric public sphere[s]... allow for new forms of agency in the building of imagined communities." (p.22).
These diasphoric archives display "an intensified form of what characterizes all popular archives: it is a place to sort out the meaning of memory in relationship to the demands of cultural reproduction." (p.23).

ASPIRATION AND THE MEMORY GAP

"The archive as a deliberate project is based on the regognition that all documentation is a form of intervention and, thus, that documentation does not simply precede intervention, but is its first step." (p.24).
Digital, collaboratively produced archives connect memory with desire - or, the "capacity to aspire".
They also bridge the gap between "neuro-memory and social memory", as both exist within active subjects who "produce memories" (p.25).