The Archive from Database to Interface
Alessandra Luciano
student number: 10230734
Date completed: 27 July 2014, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Thesis supervisor: Marijke de Valck
2nd supervisor: Alexandra Schneider
Program: Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image
Department: Heritage Studies
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Marijke de Valck for her incredible patience and great feedback. Most importantly though, my mum who is the most incredible woman I know. To my sisters Valeria and Emanuela, who always believe in me and believe everything is possible. Everything is for them. To Bethany without whose friendship and endless support nothing would ever be possible. Thank you for turning doubts into strengths. To my closest friends, I cannot name you all, but you know who you are. Thank you for keeping me grounded the love and the crazy. And finally to my auntie Linda who has left an undeniable trace in making me who I am and who I aspire to be.
Table of contents Introduction / 1
Part I: A New Modern, the Postmodern Archive and Narrativisation / 6
1. A New Modern: Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard / 9 1a. Michel Foucault / 9
1b. Jean-François Lyotard / 15 2. The [Postmodern] Archive / 20
2a. Context / 20
2b. But what is a postmodern archive? / 25 2c. Archivists as Performers / 30
3. Narrativisation / 35
Part II: From Database to Interface / 42
1. The Media-archaeological Archive / 42 1a. Archive as System / 46 1b. Archive deconstructed / 49 1c. Archive as Memory / 52
Part III: The Archive and Interface: A case study / 56
1. The CNA a case study / 57
1a. Amateur film archives: Luxembourgers in the Belgian Congo / 60 2. Conclusion: New model gone unnoticed / 64
Bibliography / 69 Filmography / 72
Introduction
In the following thesis I argue that the archival community’s approach toward archives needs to be revised. Even though some of the theoretical foundations of archival theories and practices are valid and - despite the change I am arguing for - will remain relevant, there are nevertheless changes and approaches that so far have not been accounted for. The reasons why they have not been voiced yet can be numerous, and are not of concern here. However, what I intend to do is to identify these changes, because if we ignore changing practices, we risk failing to see shifting power relations and the changes of society. This is problematic, if archival practices are to indicate and reference nations’ and communities’ contemporary modes of communication and history.
Currently, archival theory is dominated by a postmodern approach toward history. The first part will elaborate and sustain this claim, whereas part two will pull this thesis away from this particular theoretical background, in order to not only provide the much needed change I am calling for within heritage studies, but also simultaneously show these changes and the evolution archives have been going through. In order to achieve this, I approach the archive and archival studies from a media-archaeological standpoint, and discuss the archive as a medium.
In the first part I explore postmodernism and what it entailed/s for heritage studies. The opening section is structured around the works of Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. In the second section, I explore more closely current perceptions of archival theory and practice as imbedded in postmodernism. Postmodernism as a buzzword from poststructuralist and 1970s theory, which has divided scholars ever since, has quite distinctively left its mark on archives as exemplified through articles such as ‘Archival
Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts’, which appeared in the first volume of Archival Science in 2000 by Terry Cook, or his ‘Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodernism) Theory to (Archival) Performance’ co-authored with Joan M. Schwartz two years later for the same journal, or by Eric Ketelaar’s now canonical piece ‘The Meaning of Archives’ written in 2001 also for the publication Archival Science. The discussions whether “postmodernity really happened” mainly centre around the fact that arguing for a clear break, identifying when society left modernism for postmodernism, is highly debatable, since every phenomenon can have multiple origins, and such identification is left to the sensitivity and believes of the respective scholar. Whereas in academic circles postmodernity is either rejected or accepted, it would be safe to state that within the archival community the phenomena of postmodernism is accepted and has changed the approaches of heritage institutions, their role in society and what we might expect from them. I explore postmodernism's influences on archival studies to lay the foundations on which contemporary archival studies are based, as I then proceed to break away from this modus operandi and theoretical backdrop, since I believe that theoreticians and practitioners need to move forward if they want to understand and be part of the current societal evolution. Indeed, I claim that remaining in a postmodernist rhetoric stagnates our perception of archives, impeding the development of its practices and theories. However, I do not deny the existence of postmodernism, or argue against its historical value, but perceive it necessary to move on from.
As stated earlier, in the first part I deal primarily with scholars that have structured our historical thinking, which will later be identified as postmodern. Within heritage and history studies, which also extend into archival practice and theory, one of the most influential scholars is Michel Foucault. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, published in 1969, Foucault
identifies our historical and archival practices as embedded in societal modes of thinking and actions. To paraphrase Foucault’s sentiment: maintaining master-narratives as means to impart knowledge and information is a top-down approach to install and maintain power. He perceives the bridging of historical gaps as violence enacted on a discursive level, and provocatively stated that as a society we can learn more from a past culture through its archival practices, then by the objects saved. The absent objects and ruptures in a historic linearity become his point of study. This methodology is known as historiography.
Ten years later, commissioned by the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec, French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard writes The Postmodern Condition: a
report on knowledge, in which he argues for the end of master-narratives that have influenced
our thinking and educational system. The Postmodern Condition is the outcome of a study to understand and perhaps even anticipate the future of the French-speaking Canadian educational system. This book already anticipates many of our current socio economical practices that were starting to develop in the 1970s. Lyotard identifies these changes as the computerization of society. As such he already began to address the increased immateriality of on which society based its economic and social practices. Lyotard already perceived the monetary value of the production of information and education which he called postmodernity. This increased immaterial cultural value Lyotard discusses can be directly reflected with today’s information and network based society.
I outline the work of these two philosophers first, because their scholarship has had an impact on present archival studies. Thus, in the second segment of the first part, I look at the work of Eric Ketelaar and Terry Cook primarily, since Ketelaar’s notion of “tacit narratives” has largely influenced the archival community, also breaking with the master-narratives as
understood by Foucault and Lyotard. And, some of Cook’s work deals extensively with postmodernism’s influence on archival theory and practice.
Ketelaar, Cook and their peers, such as Tom Nesmith and Mark A. Greene for example, discuss the potentiality of the archive in re-addressing historical believes. The archival object is no longer a static object on which one meaning is ascribed to, but becomes an active element in the production of memory and history. The work of the archivist is to be aware of the multiple-narratives and thus to provide the adequate context to an archival collection. Referring also to the fact that not only the historical document performs but also the archivist.
However, even though this point of view is and will remain valid, the archive is still discussed as a permanent and fixed storage location, despite its increased digital nature. This is precisely what impedes a new understanding of the archive, as we will see through the media-theorist Wolfgang Ernst’s 2013 publication Digital Memory and the Archive at the beginning of the second part of this thesis. In this section, I choose a media-archaeologist over a historiographic approach, since it allows me to distance myself from a postmodern reading.
In Digital Memory and the Archive, Wolfgang Ernst elaborates the archive as machine in constant transfer and no longer as storage space. This removes the archive from a system as institution, and helps to position it within system as media. Especially considering its increased digital nature and networked approach to its holdings. This will also allow me to position the archive within the broader spectrum of our information based and networked society.
As we will see, following Ernst, it becomes clear that archives are no longer based on storage but continuous transfer. This has important ramifications for the archive, since documents are constantly re-purposed, but not only in a “multi-narrative” way, as they are
also reduced to the most basic symbols of 0s and 1s. Whereas an oeuvre used to always be tied to its carrier, for example a photochemical print or legacy tape1, within a digital archival
environment the content or the oeuvre exists independently, and is no longer assimilated to its medium of origin.
As such, I argue that the increase lack of a referent needs to be addressed since archive based on storage is archive based on the authenticity of the archivalia. However, with the opening up and digitisation of the archive, it has aligned itself closer to a producer and enabler of networks than to a vault: moving itself from database to an interface function.
In the final segment I elaborate on the archive as system and creator of networks. The archive becomes increasingly navigable. This entails the breakdown of the archive as fixed location in space, as it has become centreless. Taking a media archaeologist approach I argue that this leads to the destruction of the archive as we know it. Because of the constant exchange and flow of information the stories created do not remain but are constantly morphed, paralleling the “moving data phenomenon” that network studies and mobile media technology studies theorise. Thus, it seems to me that when discussing the digital, the physical archive is left behind and never addressed, yet the collection in its numerical code is still addressed as such. What we have missed is that through creating our own narratives, we have forgotten the archive. We do not archive, we move and (re)create. My conclusion will be that by removing ourselves from a postmodern approach, we come to realise that the archive no longer exists. This could be considered a “digital archive fever”. Our death drive has lead to an archival Y2K, annihilating the archive as database.
Part I: A New Modern, the Postmodern Archive and Narrativisation
Transitions are never clear cut. It is impossible to pinpoint exactly the moment when something is ending and another starting, as the affix already indicates: it is a process. The same applies to literary and philosophical movements, and historical periods. As such, there is no precise date when society left modernism for postmodernism, as change is always gradual and never abrupt. A timeframe is nevertheless possible.
To greatly oversimplify, in Western Europe and North America postmodernism is inherently linked to post-colonialism and post-industrialism:
“The construction of the paths and limits of these new global flows has been accompanied by a transformation of the dominant productive processes themselves, with the result that the role of industrial factory labor has reduced and priority given instead to communicative, cooperative, and affective labor. In the postmodernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest on another” (Negri & Hardt xiii).
Postmodernity involves political and economic changes altering every strata of society. For example, with the increased closing and delocalisation of factories toward the East in Western countries, what constitutes labour has changed since the end of the 1950s. The primary industry sector has been replaced by the tertiary service sector, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt explain in their book Empire: “The central role previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers in the production of surplus value is today increasingly filled by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power” (29). Governments started to invest in information production and development, mobile communication technologies and the
banking system. The increased immateriality of labour2 has changed the nature of work and
by extension also the workers’ social and family life. Finally, as Jean-François Lyotard posits: “Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the post-industrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age” (3).
In other fields postmodernism has made itself noticeable as “the society of the spectacle”, the idea that mass consumption and production, just as cultural homogenisation has alienated people from themselves, which Guy Debord addressed in various essays all collected into one publication by the same name. Similarly Henri Lefebvre discusses the homogenisation of our social spaces as an outcome of our consumer society in the The
Production of Space. As such, postmodernism not only entailed an economic and political
shift but also impacted art and aestheticism. The latter most prominently noticeable in architecture, and the rise of the so-called “non-places”, a term coined by Marc Augé in
Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.. These can be airports and
shopping-malls, which can also be addressed as homogenised spaces of consumption. In the art world postmodernism meant the commercialisation of art and the rise of the art-market. Art has become a commodity, entering the cycle of cultural capital3 (Pierre Bourdieu).
2 “Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledge.
Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor - that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge or communication” (Negri & Hardt 294)
3 “...capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is
immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain condition, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications; and as social
capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain
conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility.” (Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The forms of Capital’. 1986, 47.)
Postmodernism has been identified on multiple levels, which is simultaneously its strength and weakness, as the late Terry Cook rightfully explained in his 2001 article ‘Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth: postmodernism and the Practice of the Archives’: “The problem with postmodernism is of course one of definition” (7). Since this thesis is not concerned with adding to the conversation on postmodernism, but on the contrary I am actively trying to disengage from it, I am nevertheless interested in exploring two seminal texts that have added to the postmodern discourse. This scholarship has challenged the ideas of knowledge and history on which most of the twentieth century is based on. This is of interest here because it has also influenced our present understanding and perception of the archive, and will later allow me to explore Terry Cook’s statement that “postmodern concepts offer possibilities for enriching the practice of archives” (2001 1).
Whereas, the latter section of part one addresses directly the postmodern archive, it is necessary to first understand the developments that lead to its creation, since “the dominant intellectual trend of this age is postmodernism, and it will thus necessarily affect archives” (Cook: 2001, 2).
Whereas Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge is an analysis on the [future] developments of knowledge in the twentieth century society due to technological changes, or to use Lyotard’s term “computerisation”, Michel Foucault’s The
Archaeology of Knowledge has influenced the way we do history, also impacting heritage
studies. Both scholarships complement each other and have influenced archival studies more specifically, and generally they have both questioned (Lyotard) and dissected (Foucault) discourse formation, knowledge and power.
1. Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard
1a. Michel Foucault
The influence French philosopher Michel Foucault had in the last and is still having in the current century cannot be overstated. His work has had such an impact in the West that syllabuses cannot be imagined without at least some of his texts; they even crossed over into the “mainstream” as attested by the fact that his books became bestsellers, not only remaining within the rigidity of academic structures. Foucault’s studies of social bonds and societies are mainly approached by looking at discourse formation, as in how societies have approached and classified historical events, and subsequently how these exemplify power relations. I believe that the strength of Foucault’s work lies in the fact that he exposes the system we live(d) in through complicated yet very relatable examples, such as clinics, schools, mental health etc., and the power structures that go unnoticed because they are seamlessly woven into our everyday. According to Foucault then no relationship exists outside of power, and power here is not to be understood as physical force or violence (although such direct power also exists), but power also signifies resistance. Again Negri and Hardt provide a succinct explanation: “Power can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord” (24).
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, published in 1969, Foucault proposes the suspension of belief in grand historical narratives, and analyses how individual statements form discourse and consequently expose power relations. This is where I perceive Foucault’s influence on Jean-François Lyotard becomes visible. Lyotard’s exposure of the legitimation
crisis appears to be a slightly different yet similar approach to Foucault’s study of power relations through the formation of language and discourse. Thus, similarly to Lyotard, Foucault approaches discourse as construct. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault states:
“I would like to show that discourses, in the form in which they can be heard or read, are not, as one might expect, a mere intersection of things and words: an obscure web of things, and a manifest, visible, coloured chain of words; I would like to show that discourse is not a slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language, the interaction of a lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analysing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of reality, not the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects” (48).
The “ordering of objects” (Foucault 48) is the hierarchical order of things, or in other words the power relations amongst discourse creating statements. And further, as we will come to understand in the latter part of this section Lyotard’s questioning of the legitimation of knowledge, and the language games we play.
Historicising through the study of discourse and language, Foucault is concerned with the ways in which history, and by extension knowledge, is passed on, as it shows societal practices at hand, “[discursive practice] must not be confused with the expressive operation by which an individual formulates an idea ...; it is a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function” (117). The Archaeology of Knowledge has become a seminal text that discusses what can be referred to as the communication contract between people, and the discourse in which the exchange of information occurs. Like Lyotard, Foucault explores the formation of discourse and its influence on language, which legitimises discourse in return,
“A task that consists of not - of no longer - treating discourses as groups of signs, but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (49). Thus, according to Foucault the act of communication is embedded in political and social practices, and is therefore a valid point of departure for social and cultural analysis.
Within the formation of historical discourse Foucault has claimed that what actually needs to be analysed is not necessarily what the historian documents, but how. His reflection is based on the idea that historians have the default position to cover up or justify gaps within history, “discontinuity was the stigma of temporal dislocation that it was the historian’s task to remove from history” (Foucault 8). This desire for grand narratives, which is no longer part of our contemporary mode of thinking, is what Foucault simultaneously studies and dismantles in his analysis of the formation and communication of knowledge. The way we document, the desire for smooth historical unity and linearity, is of greater relevance to Foucault than the documented elements.
The act of communication is never neutral or legitimate in itself, since the ways in which events are described can be deduced from it and placed within a specific rhetoric that is needed to justify actions, and is a product of its time, “the object does not await in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity. [...] It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations” (Foucault 45). Indeed these relationships are economical (class), cultural (traditions and norms), and social (behavioral contract). However, as Foucault remarks: “these relations are not present in the object; [...]”, but need “to be placed in a field of exteriority” (45). Statements and events do not exist as individual atomised objects and their meaning is not internal to them, but become relevant once they form a communication act. All these relations, whatever their nature, is what Foucault refers to as “discursive space” (Foucault 45).
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault uses “discursive space” as simultaneously a theory and methodology to approach history (45), and “[discursive] relations characterise not the language used by discourse, nor the circumstances in which it is deployed, but discourse itself as a practice” (46). Crucial for new historicism, it acknowledges the way in which we theorise and historicise as embedded in cultural and, thus by extension, linguistic structures. According to Foucault, the mistake historians have been making is to think that events form discourse, whereas the opposite seems to be more accurate: history is created via discourse - the way we approach, name, and discuss happenings is what ultimately defines them. Thus, for example cataloguing in the postmodern archive is not a simple phase of the workflow, but becomes a self-aware act and part of the archivist’s performance.
This is also the space were discontinuities can become productive fields for theorisation and not just mere gaps theorists and historians need to overcome. “Foucault’s idea is that every mode of thinking involves implicit rules that materially restrict the range of thought” (Gutting 33), but ruptures in linear historical narratives can reshape thoughts and “once these immediate forms of continuity are suspended, an entire field is set free” (Foucault 26). As such, the social and political climate, and language dictates the communication and the narrative act in which archives are also directly or indirectly involved with.
This is important here, because archives tell (hi)stories. Despite objects being witnesses of the past, as we have seen an object has different meanings according to who is telling the story and in what context. Even though these might be self-aware actions, thus exposing and referencing the mechanism that has produced a specific story, our networked society sets, to use Foucault words, “an entire field free” and consequently all its possible narratives. However, on a different level, archives’ main tasks are no longer solely based on
the collection and its upkeep, but on their use and transfer. Indeed, the many digitisation and valorisation programs that archives undertake speak to this.
Even though Foucault mainly addressed paper traces, I believe the document can be anything: paper, ancient artefact or a moving image. All those elements are part of a communication act. These artefacts simultaneously create and justify history, since they are the primary source of consultation, “The document is not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory; history is one way in which society recognises and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked” (Foucault 7). Foucault subtly challenges the innocence documents have been attributed with and benefitted from. Distrust toward the document is indeed how Cook describes the contemporary archivist’s relation to the document and perceives it as a postmodernist trope, “postmodernists have a deep ambivalence about the document or record” (4). However, the historians’ relation to the document used to be one of trust, as “The document was always treated as the language of a voice since reduced to silence, its fragile, but possibly decipherable trace” (Foucault 6). Historians’ task was to provide a platform for this voice, and theirs, which meant to present the documents and their connection in a way that could not be challenged. This method placed documents into a narrative arc, with a justified beginning, middle and end. However, Foucault argues that the image of history as grand narrative and collective consciousness can no longer be accounted for, as what “postmodernism seeks instead to emphasize the diversity of human experience by recovering marginalized voices in the face of such hegemony” (Cook 2). It is the “questioning of the document” that helps us conceive of discontinuities within history, and by extension knowledge. This is an example of changes in and of discourse, as the perception of history and its function is altered through our approaches to it.
Furthermore, history as linear model believes in the grand narrative(s) that stem(s) from documents. However, this model has since mid-century been replaced by the questioning of the document, not only in terms of its context and source, but also in its capacity to form discourse, as we have moved from product, ie. the document, to process, “The context behind the text, the power relationships shaping the documentary heritage, and indeed the document’s structure, resident information system and narrative conventions are more important than the objective thing itself or its content” (Cook 3).
On his study of discourse formation, Foucault does not want to unveil the ideological and political forces behind them in order to destroy them, but understands his analysis as a way of unearthing the narrativisation process, which informs not only the production of knowledge and its hold over memory, but consequently also that of power.
1b. Jean-François Lyotard
In 1983 French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard co-founded the International College of Philosophy with other renowned thinkers, amongst them Jacques Derrida. Not a traditional university per se, the college aimed at reviving philosophy studies and its status as a necessary discipline within any field of research. This mode of structuring the collège is emblematic of Lyotard’s own approach towards research. Indeed, Lyotard’s work spans across many disciplines and topics, yet le fil rouge conducteur amongst all his oeuvres is his conviction that no rational, theory or ideology can provide only one explanation to life and society, and most importantly it should not. Heterogeneity and diversity is the essence of any society and community. Rationalising and homogenising ways of being and thinking is, according to Lyotard, the ultimate form of capitalism, since it produces value where there should be none. Anticipating the future Lyotard states: “The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to be the commodities they produce and consume - that is, the form of value” (4), as this brings with it a hierarchy of existence, inextricably linked to the legitimisation of knowledge. In his book La Condition Post-Moderne/ The Postmodern
Condition: a report on knowledge, commissioned by the Conseil des Universités of the
government of Quebec Canada, and published in 1979, Lyotard asks: where knowledge resides, who has the right to create and access it, and ultimately: who has the power to legitimate knowledge? Through this simple formulation Lyotard exposed the inherent link between knowledge and power, which might not have been a new concern, but according to Lyotard the stakes have increased, because it is further amplified through the computerisation
of societies and the data it produces. Thus, the postmodern condition is a crisis of legitimation of not only knowledge, but as we will see also of narrativisation, amplified through the mass production and dissemination of data in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the foreword to Lyotard’s book, political theorist, Marxist and [former]4
postmodernist Frederic Jameson succinctly explains: “...postmodernism as it is generally understood involves a radical break, both with a dominant culture and aesthetic and with a rather different moment of socioeconomic organization...” (Jameson vii). This break also involves the educational system and this is where Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition is situated.
Lyotard defines “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv). Lyotard understands metanarratives as those grand theories that structured academic research and thinking, and which are embedded in the rational and logic established during the Enlightenment, concepts such as reason, truth and progress. His “incredulity” is poststructuralist in that he does not believe in one theory or how, in the preface to the book, Frederic Jameson refers to them as “older master narratives of legitimation” (xii). These, as Jameson explains, “no longer function in the service of scientific research - nor, by implication, anywhere else e.g. we no longer believe in political or historical teleologies, or in the great “actors” and “subjects” of history - the nation-state, the proletariat, the party, the West, etc.” (xii), or in History with a capital H. Metanarratives, despite the admittedly confusing name, are master-narratives, grand-theories presented as the ultimate ways to understand and read society. Metanarratives encompass any story that proclaims universal
4 In A Singular Modernity (2002), one of Jameson’s later works, he proclaims: there are no
multiple modernities and modernisms. Although very nuanced in regards to the problematics of postmodernism, this book stands in contrast to his famous earlier work Postmodernism, or,
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), where Jameson clearly engages and discusses
veracity, holding sway over knowledge by manufacturing its own truths. Thus, according to Lyotard this new modern is the end of the master-narratives, or how archivist Terry Cook posits: “The postmodern distrusts and rebels against the modern. The notion of universal truth or objective knowledge based on the principles of scientific rationalism from the Enlightenment, or from employing the scientific method or classical textual criticism, are dismissed as chimeras” (3). Thus, breaking away from master-narratives as method of communication and education signified a change in the perception of society. It shook the ground on which society as we knew it was built on, since the end of metanarratives questioned the legitimation of the beliefs and philosophies on which society is founded. How then present, identify and move-forward a society when the ground on which its identity resides is taken away? As Lyotard asks: “Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” (xxv).
Indeed, how do you impart information when the rules of communication have changed? The end of narratives affected research, academia and how knowledge was shared, and signified changes in how we communicate. In Lyotard’s words, “This breaking up of the grand Narratives leads to what some authors analyze in terms of the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates into a mass of individual atoms” (15). However, Lyotard immediately dismisses the notion of a severed communication bond, and already identifies human interaction as network and the “mass of individual atoms” (15) as something positive rather than negative: “a person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be” (15), and thus sees this moment as precisely “more complex and mobile than ever before” (15). Indeed what informs societal practices are not grand narratives, but smaller narratives that are interconnected, and the more there are, the shorter the distance between the nodal points, the larger and increasingly
complex the network of a given society or community. This is why Lyotard sees in the increase of immaterial culture, due to fast growing computer technology that can store, restrict and allow access to data, as a phenomenon that needed to be addressed sooner rather than later.
Therefore, language becomes a crucial element, since it is the way information is presented and structured, what we call rhetoric, that sets the tone. Indeed, Lyotard further argues that language always justifies itself, “science [...] is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy [...] making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative” (Lyotard xxiii). It is precisely these grand narratives that Lyotard dismisses as no longer feasible, and presents the formation of syntax as a threat to knowledge, since language can easily manipulate it.
At this point, you need to permit a slight yet informative digression. The manipulation of information, which has increased with the digital, can also be applied to objects, just think of curating in a museum or online. Manipulation can happen on two levels: the first being with intent and purpose, whereas the second manipulation can just be the nature of things. Intent manipulation is the criticism scholars like Foucault and Lyotard had on history and how it was taught, because the document could be bent to fit the story that governments, school boards or other authorities wanted to tell. This already hints at the second level of manipulation, namely that by definition an object’s meaning and purpose is derived from where and how it is framed regardless of the context of its creation. Indeed, the ease in which objects of any kind can be manipulated has become a major concern of the archival world. Understanding that each new manipulation of an element does not alter its meaning per se, but
reframes it, clearly points to its malleability. It is how information is presented from which its meaning is derived.
This is important here, because the notion that context and framing matters, has become even more relevant for understanding the contemporary archival world since the inception of the Internet. It is precisely the notion that nothing is fixed - even though I agree that might have never been the case - but the speed in which information travels is unprecedented, and therefore it is important to make this point early, as to understand what this implies for archives. This paradigm keeps being readdressed, indicating that context and framing and the malleability of information and objects matters, and has become the driving force behind much of the 20th and 21st century scholarship on history and archives, “the document does not open itself nor speaks for itself, but only by inference from its semantic genealogy. It does not speak for itself neither because it merely echoes what the researcher whispers, it only tells what the researcher wants the document to tell him or her” (Ketelaar 138). This rings true, not only because it is, but also because this is precisely what Foucault taught us, and Lyotard expressed through his “language games5”. This is their legacy to the
historians and archivists of the second half of the twentieth century and those of the twenty-first. As such, postmodernity is obsessed with language, because, according Lyotard and Foucault, “language games” represent authority, power and legitimation. Language unbeknownst to itself expresses structures of power relations, and the legitimation of knowledge.
5 Lyotard borrows the concept of “language games” from Wittgenstein, and re-appropriates it
2. The Postmodern Archive
“Just as modernization did in a previous era, post-modernization or informatization today marks a new mode of becoming human” (Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt 289)
2a. Context
As discussed in the previous section, changes in and off society due to technological and political shifts questioned notions of truth and subsequently also that of knowledge production, affecting communication in its broadest sense6. Based on these perceptions of
history and its production, archival studies have also shifted from a mere inscriber and keeper of history as linear and progressive, to an open source for questioning dogmas and perceiving new voices and power relations. However, in order to discuss what has come to be known as the postmodern archive, the political and social climate from which Foucault and Lyotard wrote needs to be investigated a little further, as it helps to situate contemporary culture as immaterial, and why the communication act, in which also archives participate, has become essential in understanding contemporary modes of knowledge and value production, and exchange of information.
My social framing and understanding of events is informed by and is set within post-Marxist literature. Thus, the following segment is supported by political philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, written in 2000 and which exposes the transition from modernity to postmodernity, from sovereign nation states to deterritorialised forms of power that are no longer centred around the concept of nation, but around that of a globalised world.
As we have seen in the first section postmodernism can be defined “as incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard xxiv), those grand theories that impose a rational and logical lookout onto society. It was predominantly accepted, within structures of Western society, that knowledge and power were instructed top down. In the first half of the twentieth century access to education was reserved to a privileged few, social life structured by labour (industrial and agricultural), and moral was dictated by the clergy. This organisation of the body and mind can be traced back to the theories of the enlightenment period. During the enlightenment, which is considered an era of progressive thinking and hailed as man’s capacity to expand its consciousness, the “accumulation of specialized culture”, how Jürgen Habermas and Ben-Habib call it in Modernity versus Postmodernity, was considered an improvement, since it aimed “for the rational organization of everyday social life” (Habermas and Ben-Habib 9). However, as Italian scholar Antonio Caronia put it “Rationality is not ‘order’, it is just one of the possible orders, obviously efficient in its own right, but we cannot assume that there is no other order possible” (my own translation from the Italian7 17).
Whereas of course democracy existed and was exercised in most countries, it was maintained with anti-democratic actions such as discrimination toward certain races and the exploitation of colonies. Anti-colonial and anti-segregation sentiments of course already existed, unfortunately however it took two world wars to realise that multiple experiences and realities
7 Here is Caronia’s original quote in Italian: “La razionalità non è ‘l’ordine’, è solo uno dei
possibili ordini, efficienti a suo modo, evidentmente, ma non possiamo pensare che non esistano altri modelli di ordine”.
are worthy and exist simultaneously. In fact, it is no coincidence that the enlightenment was questioned with the rise of populism and fascism8.
The Great War (1914-1918), whose hundred year anniversary is being acknowledged this year, already modified the European geographical and political map, by reassigning borders and getting rid of monarchies9. However, the rebuilding of Europe was unsuccessful
and backfired, since it was based on a winner/ loser model, pushing countries like Germany into a corner. Whereas of course many other reasons gave rise to fascist sentiments throughout Europe (Spain, Portugal Italy, and Germany), Germany’s invasion of Poland and the subsequent escalation into World War II, is also seen as Germany’s attempt to regain its previous status as an imperial power and its dignity after World War I. Indeed the rebuilding of Europe after World War II was handled differently, since also the Allies understood the political mishandling of the First World War. What’s more, in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II, what nation could have had the audacity to impose their political model and social beliefs onto neighbouring countries? Thus, not only was rebuilding Europe done with more precaution but also Colonial Europe ceased to exist10.
This influence on the geographies and policies of European countries fundamentally changed the face of Europe. Europe’s complete destruction (physical and moral) allowed for the emergence of newer approaches toward itself, its history and future, since nations broke away from the traditional structuring of society and power, toward a more complex notion of
8 Indeed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was thought of by Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno during World War II and later assembled into a book in 1947, one of the claims that lead to the questioning of the enlightenment is that it allowed for such
systematised horrors as witnessed during Germany’s Third Reich.
9 Imperial Germany and Russia ceased to exist, just like the Ottoman empire and the
Austro-Hungarian powerhouse dissolved after World War I.
10 Of course this was a gradual process, influenced by the Marshall Plan predominantly to
community, diversity and “The shift of the population from subjects to citizens...” (Negri and Hardt 95). However, the emerging philosophical and political framework did not deny the existence of power, but allowed for multiple and simultaneous power structures to emerge. As we have seen postmodernity questions modes of thinking, teaching and the universality of such concepts as truth and knowledge. As a direct consequence it allowed for multiple narratives, producing counter-histories. Thus, enriching history, and re-attributing agency and visibility to marginalised voices and opinions.
This account may make it sound that postmodernism saved the world from racism, ignorance and abuse of political power, or as Negri and Hardt put it into what could easily be a slogan: “Enlightenment is the problem and postmodernism is the solution” (140). Whereas this is true in many ways, because it provided a nuanced view of life, it also paved the way for “soft powers” and political dominance that might no longer be exercised by direct violence and ideology, but that are often disguised within everyday mundane activities complemented through our communication practices. Whereas imperial power ceased to exist, Empire emerged, “What is new is that postmodernist theorist point to the end of modern sovereignty and demonstrate a new capacity to think outside the framework of modern binaries and modern identities, a thought of plurality and multiplicity. However, confusedly or unconsciously, they indicate the passage toward the constitution of Empire” (Negri and Hardt 143).
Negri and Hardt’s notion of empire can be considered an intervention as it tries to demystify the idea that within a postmodern society there are no power structures. Whereas indeed European countries no longer exercised the power that had characterised most of modern society pre and post industrialisation, power nonetheless remains present, but under a new shape: “The end of modern colonialism of course, has not really opened an age of
unqualified freedom but rather yielded to new forms of rule that operate on a global scale. Here we have our first real glimpse of the passage to Empire” (Negri and Hardt 134).
Why I use Negri’s and Hardt’s work lies primarily in the fact that their own basis for their treaty on contemporary society is directly influenced by Foucault’s work. Foucault’s exposure of power relations innate in society and language as a constant legitimiser of its own construction, provided Negri and Hardt with a fruitful terrain to, not only use Foucault’s theories of power relation, but to also take them one step further: “Foucault’s work allows us to recognize the biopolitical nature of the new paradigm of power. Biopower is a form that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and re-articulating it” (Negri and Hardt 23). One new such paradigm is indeed society’s networked condition, which has increased since the emergence of social media. As such, economic, cultural and social life are constantly mediated.
It is within these changes that Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophies, or better yet interventions are situated. One of the consequences was to perceive education and history as no longer existing in a vacuum but influencing opinion from bottom-up, and understanding that power structures are everywhere. Decades later their influence has become widely accepted, and have had a direct impact on heritage studies and the archive, participating to the philosophical concept of the postmodern archive.
2b. But what is a postmodern archive?
Something makes us want to preserve, keep and archive for the future. I believe the desire to keep traces is innate in our society and culture. The Western cultures do not pass on their heritage, traditions and customs orally but through writings with a pen or light. We write everything down and leave paper traces that become trails over the years. Of course how much and what we keep is personal. I, for example, have developed somewhat of a dislike toward holding on to my paper traces, such as ticket stubs, flyers of exhibitions, and other more or less important documents. Nevertheless, storing and preserving are inherently human; we all do it for numerous and divergent reasons. Whereas these are our personal archives, there are also institutional archives, whose mission is the conservation, preservation and valorisation of a society’s, a city, or even a community’s history. These archives can be administrative, and exist out of pure practicality, others are cultural, and attest to an epochs art, lifestyle and its creative energies. These archives are usually structured and organised, more or less according to archival good practice codes, and the institutions’ budgetary and human resources. Whatever the nature of an archive, it is always a trace to and of a past; they are the physical prove that something has happened.
What this event is or was is often (re)constituted via the documents and/ or object that provide contextual framing. The archive is the space within which documents are aligned in order to produce discourse, regardless of the narrative. However, the produced narratives should still be perceived as a reconstruction of an historical account through a contemporary lens, and “there is not one narrative in a series or collection of records, but many narratives, many stories, serving many purposes for many audiences, across time and space” (Cook 3). As we have seen in the first section, documents create statements and subsequent discourses,
and are our primary source of consultation, the archive is therefore important within the communication act and the dissemination of knowledge, as “between the language that defines the system of constructing possible sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words that are spoken, the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated” (Foucault 130). In Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing
Intellectual Place of Archives Tom Nesmith, whose own research pertains to contemporary
archival theory and how it impacts knowledge and the dissemination of information, attributes this changing nature to postmodernism’s influence on our communication practices: “The postmodern view of communication helps us to see archiving anew and, perhaps for many, to see it for the first time, since it is an activity that has typically gone on almost invisibly, even to those who often use archives” (26). Even though his article was written in the time of mass media - pre social media - the way we communicate was already key to how we create and then remember the past. This as we will see becomes trickier and increases with the advent of social media and the Internet 2.0. Indeed just two years prior to Nesmith’s publication Terry Cook stated it clearly: “an archival paradigm shift is indeed occurring” (2000 1). Archivist Mark A. Greene qualifies this archival paradigm shift as a suspicion toward truth, not only voicing heritage studies and institutions reservations toward the enlightenment project, but also aligning the latter with postmodernism: “The archival paradigm rejects this increasingly untenable belief in the objectivity and truthfulness of any form of documentation, including transaction records. [...] in fact, there is no universally valid conception of ‘truth’ that transactional records or other forms of documentation can transmit, only multiple truths” (Greene 52). What’s more, Cook comments if we do not perceive documents as neutral, but their use as mere construction from which we can deduce society’s control over
memory, the past and subsequently also the future, then “what is true of each document is true of archives collectively” (Cook 3).
The ways in which archives present and make information accessible influences knowledge and memory. Until mid-century archives were seen as perpetrating the acceptance of grand historical narratives. However, the archive has since broken from its own role as enabler of linear history and engaged with the idea that the documents it holds are in constant flux, “from product to process, becoming rather than being” (Cook). Archival materials’ meaning and value are not intrinsic, but are created through the contextual framing of the documents. Archivisation - the process of collecting and memory making - is not only embedded in, but also shapes society and culture. The archive is not a neutral terrain, but reflects and interacts with current societal modes of existence and production. However, we need to stop solely focusing on them as enabler of multi-narratives, and truly start to ponder their changing nature.
Ketelaar has most succinctly described a form of the postmodern archive in his paper ‘Tacit Narratives: the Meanings of Archive’, published in Archival Science in 2001.
According to Ketelaar tacit narratives are present in every archive, and need to be exposed, since he states “that archival fonds, archival documents, archival institutions, and archival systems contain tacit narratives which must be deconstructed in order to understand the meanings of archives” (131). The word tacit here can be equated to unsaid, unspoken and implicit, amongst others. This means that wherever history is collected, and maybe even at the level of its production, do histories emerge that are unvoiced and often remain in that state unless we take action. According to Ketelaar then it becomes primordial to make those voices heard in order to truly understand the wider and complex implications of the many narratives
archives hold. In other words, it is to expose the networked condition of the archival holding, because as we have seen nothing exists in a vacuum, especially not language.
We might just say that Ketelaar is advocating for and talking about context, which is true, however, tacit narratives go beyond context and into the most human activity, namely that of the creation of its own history. In a more poetic way Ketelaar reminds us that archives, no matter how liberal and open, are still governed by institutionalised logic and the idea that we cannot dissociate ourselves from narrativisation, no matter how conscious we are in our manipulation of records that have become archives. Not only do the documents and their context tell stories, but most importantly tacit narratives emerge what seems to be completely independently and unbeknownst to us about how we document, “numerous tacit narratives are hidden in categorization, codification and labelling” (Ketelaar 135). They tell the stories of our communication practices and thus touch the core of being human, “This implies that studying the archiving process itself (and not just using archives in the familiar way to study other things) is a vital aspect of the pursuit of human understanding” (Nesmith 27). Just like Foucault was interested in the way we document not necessarily only what we document, so does Ketelaar attempts at unveiling archival meanings through his concept of tacit narratives come close to provide a way of understanding how archival practices function.
This is inherently postmodern because it questions the document, and thus by extension our narrativisation practices, removing it from a positivistic approach toward history, exposing and exploring a wider narrative arc that goes beyond that of providing adequate framing. What’s more even tough not stated explicitly, because tacit narratives are subliminal, they counteract master narratives. Since tacit narratives also further imply manipulation and power relation that not only produced the document but also created it, “The archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Foucault in Ketelaar 134).
Ketelaar’s alignment to a foucauldian approach of history cannot be denied. It is the archivists explorations of “multiple perspectives” (Ketelaar 132) and investigations into the document itself, pushing its boundaries that informs Ketelaar’s tacit narratives. The rejection of grand narratives in favour of tacit narratives clearly is an outcome of the postmodern turn within the humanities. And just like Foucault, Ketelaar sees in archives “the tacit narratives of power and knowledge” (132). However, as we come to understand the importance and vast implications of archives, on a more pragmatical level the question that emerges is: what happens to the archivist that deals with this paradigm shift?
2c. Archivists as Performers
In his article ‘Archival Science and Postmodernism: new formulations for old concepts’ published in 2000, Terry Cook states “The role of archival science in a postmodernist world challenges archivists everywhere to rethink their discipline and practice” and Greene comments: “It is vital that archivists reclaim and reaffirm a broad conception of their professional purpose and an equally broad definition of what constitutes archival material” (42). As such, with the paradigm shift comes also a new definition of what it means to be an archivist.
Scholars like Terry Cook and Mark A. Greene, amongst others, have reassessed the role and function of an archivist as no longer a passive figure in a dusty room, but have understood the archivist as an active power figure who can attribute meaning to an archive’s collection. This new archivist does not just preserve the holdings and keeps the public out, on the contrary archivists actively engage in valorisation projects and open the doors to the collections. Indeed the archivist is aware of its role as essential in opening the multiple interpretations of various documents, and exposing tacit narratives. Breaking away with master-narratives has since Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard been the postmodern turn, and archives have embraced this turn, which has lead them to have an active role in society, as
“At the heart of the new paradigm is a shift away from viewing records as static physical objects, and towards understanding them as dynamic virtual concepts; a shift away from looking at records as the passive products of human or administrative activity and towards considering record as active agents themselves in the formation of human and organisational memory; a shift equally away from seeing the context of records resting within stable hierarchical organisations to situating records within fluid horizontal networks of work-flow functionality” (Cook 1).
Thus, if documents are no longer perceived as inanimate objects, then also the role of the archivist from mere inscriber and collector of information needs to be readdressed, “Documents are thus dynamic, not static. And the archivist as much as the creator or researcher is one of the narrators” (Cook 7). An archivist performs; he or she puts archival documents into a composition. A corpus of documents put together can build a complex story. As aforementioned, the archivist’s role is no longer passive, but has become active in putting a collection into the forefront. His or her actions might be conscious, they are nevertheless personal, deciding which item they might deem important or valuable to first conserve and subsequently perhaps make public. It needs to be noted however that choices are often made because of a lack of human resources and budgets to treat entire collections, and not necessarily out of an active engagement to hide certain archival fonds. As a consequence, postmodernism is not only about exposing multi-narratives, but it also challenges archivists, as it “requires archivists to accept their own historicity, to recognize their own role in the process of creating archives, and to reveal their own biases” (Cook and Schwartz 181). Whereas archivists were always aware of their own influence, this is also now public knowledge. Ideally some would have archivists carefully document all their choices, which as such is a good idea, but just impractical11 and time consuming.
Therefore it would be safe to state that today an archivist not only works as a conservator, but also as a curator. Since the Internet has become, or at least appears to be, an access all areas and open space, a reoccurring phrase is: “everyone is a curator,” and with a large following on the Internet this person can indeed become a tastemaker. Whereas most people would agree that using the word curator might not be accurate and denigrating to the actual profession, they appear to be missing the larger picture. I am interested in that
statement because it testifies to the notion that everyone has access, whereas everyone is fixated on the notion of the curator I would like to point to the fact that it is a manifestation of the network to which archives now belong to and which I will address in more detail in part two of this thesis.
The momentum has thus increased since the Internet, allowing archives to become more interactive: from having their catalogue online, to inviting users to tag their collection or simply allowing the end-user to view some of their holdings from home. Archives are open to several perspectives of the same documents. Their role is no longer to merely hold on and propagate one storyline, but on the contrary to increase the different and sometimes multi-perspectives of a historical event; to collect as many voices as possible, in order to have a more rounded story as possible.
Nonetheless, even though archival studies has through the postmodern turned their back on what scholars refer to in regards to history and its making as “nineteenth-century positivism”, I still I am precisely a little vary in regards to this positivistic approach. I consider this liberating postmodern force has perhaps blinded us to the still very active yet more invisible forces at play in society, “The simple fact is that archives exist not only in metaphorical ways, as described by Foucault and Derrida, but as part of a very real, very material network of power over memory” (Ernst 195). As a consequence, it has paradoxically kept the archival studies static, instead of trying to further unfold the archive’s role within society 2.0, the archival theory remains fixated within a postmodern mentality, impeding any further theoretical and practical work on the perception of archives. I consider it a paradox, since on the one hand archives have fully embraced the increasing interactivity and were able to redefine themselves as active agents. On the other hand however, this influence has never been projected onto the physical archives and their wider scope in society. The rhetoric has
always remained within the notion of the postmodern archive further enabled by the Internet and web 2.0 cultures.
Finally, reminiscent of Michel Foucault Cook reminds us: “The context behind the text, the power relationships shaping the documentary heritage, and indeed the document’s structure, resident information system, and narrative conventions are more important than the objective thing itself or its content” (3). Therefore, if, as Foucault argued, you can learn more from a society in how it documented itself and its efforts at bridging historical gaps than by what it kept, then what could be said about the way we perceive and work in archives today? It would be possible to argue that this attempt might come to early, since it might take another generation to comprehend our current society. However, how we approach and deal with archives today will influence our tomorrow, “the ideas held at any given time about archives are surely but a reflection of wider currents in intellectual history” (Terry Eastwood as qtd by Cook 2).
As such, it is important to briefly mention the archive pre-postmodernism as it helps us to define the archive and point to its evolution. This type of archive was unnoticed yet still influenced society; things were in absentia. After the postmodern turn, the archive is no longer passive, but has become an active and informed space12. Objects and different meanings were
brought into presentia. Despite their differences, they are both archive as database, from which objects were retrieved and put into different narrative arcs. The archival object at this point appeared static. Today, however, in the digital era this is brought onto a different level, namely that of the interface, since collections can be called-up from any point in the world and linked to new objects and case studies, widening the object’s network. As a consequence, I believe that this complicates the notion of archive as previously understood and theorised.
However, before addressing that issue, I would like to venture further into our communication practices since speech also defines and qualifies the event and can help us understand how we create and exchange information.
3. Narrativisation
History either told through a conscious manipulation of information or through a self-reflexive act narrativisation remains present in both instances. Frederic Jameson embeds narrativisation as a social practice, which despite the pro-claimed death of the master-narrative, he maintains is present and identifies as “political unconscious” (xii). As Frank Rose explains “we use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others.” (Rose, Prologue, location 127, par.1) However, the end of the master-narrative does not imply the end of narratives all together, but in a post World War II and post-colonial society the idea of one universal history is no longer conceivable. In part two, I argue that precisely this innate drive toward narrativisation will paradoxically change the nature of the archive, a major source from which we draw our communication practices, knowledge and power.
Even though Jameson does not directly address the archive, he assimilates the function of storytelling to them, “as a property of storytelling itself, of precisely those narratives, heroic or other, in which we have been taught to see a form of primitive data storage or of social reproduction” (xii). He sees in the way we communicate, and the way we historicise the product of archivisation, something Foucault also extensively discusses in The Archaeology of
Knowledge. Thus, language, like documents, becomes storage from which it is possible to
retrieve modes of thinking.
Even though postmodernism, like any changes in society, was gradual, the moment is still identified as crisis. These changes did not only affect the way we did history and perceived civilisations, but as a consequence it also became a moment of questioning identities, as who we are and wanted to be as a society, since nations always operate(d) as a
