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The Post-Archive Condition
Sven Spieker
The Post Archive Condition
We live in the post-archive condition. By this I do not mean to
say that there is no creation of documents, no gathering or saving
of information, no storage, on the contrary: I mean to say that
these activities have become so ubiquitous and widespread that
writing a text and archiving it; or shooting an image and storing
it in a separate location (or sending it to a place far away) have
become activities that run virtually parallel to each other,
eliminating the temporal (and often spatial) gap that has
historically separated one from the other, a gap that is generally
thought to define the archive. At one time, archives were defined
as depositories for documents that had been withdrawn from
circulation. In the current age, such withdrawal is all but an
impossibility: today, nothing seems more difficult than to durably
expunge information. And the very notion of a document is in
question at a time when we have all but abandoned our trust in the
authenticity of traces, the belief that archives accumulate by
accident, and that chance can successfully underwrite an archives
claim to objectivity.
In the post-archive age, a document may be composed and saved in
an archive (on the computer in a section reserved for backups; or
on separate servers in cloud computing) at the same time,
collapsing two formerly distinct archive operations: writing and
saving. Today to write is to save, is to create an archive. And so
we might ask, what does it mean to distinguish between the
recording, data mining, registering, and scanning that goes on all
around us, on the one hand, and the archive as a separate
institution [arkheion] devoted to the storage of documents that no
longer circulate, on the other? With todays global data streams,
the difference between storage and circulation--the distinction
that defined the traditional archive at its very core--is not so
easily drawn. To be sure, old fashioned archives reserved for the
storage of documents do exist, but they exist alongside a very
different practice of information processing - one virtually
defined by its lack of concern for institutional and technical
boundaries, boundaries that archives have traditionally enforced
very strictly. While information storage has become a topic of
ubiquitous importance, it is now less a matter of storing
information in one place than of distributing it across a network
of nodes (servers; computers; desktops; mail programs, etc.)
between which this data moves freely, and where it is also stored
at the same time. And so, what I want to call the post-archive
condition is neither a discrete institution (the traditional
arkheion), nor a set of technical protocols that are specific to a
particular medium or agency, but rather a networked flow of
information that collapses the functions that traditional archives
had kept carefully separated.
The traditional archive functions hierarchically and vertically:
hierarchically, in that it is founded on principles of order,
punctiliousness, and accuracy that have their basis in a set of
humanist values (objectivity; precision; rigor; progress) that
conceal their highly ideological nature. And vertically, in that it
is built on an archeological model, whereby each of its layers
corresponds to a specific slice of the past. As I show below, in
the post-archive condition, such stratification is given up in
favor a more horizontal archive that functions less like an
archeological site than as a screen on which different sets of data
are collated, processed, remediated, yet also stored. The
post-archive condition gives a name to the fact that today
archiving (as opposed to the archive as a technically and
administratively discrete institution) is ubiquitous: to deal with
information is to create an archive of that information at the same
time. This means that we may need to update the critical tools with
which we approach the archive: gone are the days when archiving was
an afterthought to the production of documents; now, the
production, processing, and storage of information can no longer be
neatly distinguished from each other. As we will see, this has
implications that go far beyond the archives technical parameters:
in fact, at a time when the media specificity that was one of the
hallmarks of modernism is a thing of the past, a purely technical
(administrative, bureaucratic) definition of archives simply will
not do. The post-archive is not defined by technical protocols or
set administrative procedures.
The kind of archiving I associate with the post-archive
condition (as opposed to the archive in the singular) collapses the
collection of information with intelligence gathering, profiling,
data mining, and other techniques that combine the collection and
storage of data with their analysis and use for purposes that range
from commerce to policing to military operations. Todays global
archiving, as opposed to traditional archives, not only accumulates
data, it instantly analyzes that data and re-deploys it to to
create statistically significant sub-sets which, once aggregated,
can be used to create profiles which in their turn become targeted
advertisements, terrorist profiles, etc. The militaristic metaphors
here are telling: the origin of this kind of
operation--technically, logistically, operationally--is the kind of
intelligence gathering that fuels any war. According to Wikipedia,
the goal of data mining is to extract information from a data set
and transform it into an understandable structure for further use.
A major rift is opening up between commercial and governmental data
gathering operations that occur in secret (Facebook; the NSA), and
those that are undertaken in public, say by individuals who use
social networking sites or the internet to collate their own
archives from what is available to them there. Unlike the
traditional archive, whose secrecy was often a function of its
diplomatic and legal status, in the post-archive condition, the
secrecy of universal archiving has become subject to lively
debates, and access to information is the defining issue of the
post-archive age.
Archiving is everywhere, but the archive is elusive.
Post-archiving does not need an archive as a single location.
[IMAGE#1: CLOUD] In cloud computing, for example, a network of
servers all over the globe archives our texts and our songs, and
this network takes the place of a single inventory or storage
place. In fact, given the way in which sets of data are distributed
across such a network, it may be quite misleading to speak about
storage at all, as the term seems to indicate a single location
where something is stored. The cloud as archive - a more
paradoxical formulation could hardly be found. Clouds are by
definition dispersed, their contours uncertain, and they span the
globe. Clouds as sites for archiving suggest a formless and
non-technical archive (which of course in reality it is not), an
archive that is as ethereal as the air we breathe, and as
inevitable as the weather. In fact, we do not speak about
cloud-archiving, we speak of cloud computing, and we mean by that a
type of use of computers that defines itself in relation to a
global network that is as far away and yet as inevitable and
all-pervasive as clouds. Here the archive effect is instantaneous:
when we visit Amazon or Facebook, our movements, choices, and
actions are tracked and immediately analyzed by algorithms: which
websites do we visit, where do we stay and how often do we click on
a certain address. If we go through security at an airport, our
bodies are scanned. Google Earth maps the globe from a macro to a
micro-scale progressively, inventorizing our streets, buildings,
but also interiors, even e-mail addresses and (perhaps) the
messages we send [IMAGE #3: DRONE].
Crucially, we no longer associate the storage of information
with the past, with memory, or with archeology. In the post-archive
condition, stored information can be used for any purpose, much
like the data stored by a computer can be visualized in any number
of ways. As I write this text, the NSAs gathering and storage of
vast amounts of telephone records in order, as the agency argues,
to prevent terrorist plots, have just been made public. These
records were archivized not in order to foil specific, and ongoing,
activities, but future ones. Of course, such data gathering and
storage occurs in the world of neo-liberal global commerce as well:
the records stored by a communications company may be useful for
law enforcement, yet they may also be useful for targeted
advertising purposes. Where in a traditional archive we confront a
collection of documents whose parameters were set in advance (no
archive can indiscriminately collect everything) and whose purpose
is to help a historian reconstruct the past, in present-day
archiving, no such parameters exist: to refer to this type of
operation as mining is odd, since it has little in common with the
archeological metaphor that has dominated the modern thinking about
archives ever since Freud. According to that thinking, the archive
corresponds to a layered archeological foundation whose different
strata allow the historian or archeologist to examine the past as
the present, one layer at a time. By contrast, as I hope to show,
the post-archive tradition connects and collates practices and
documents on a horizontal plane, suggesting a plurality of
heterogenous elements.
The Archive as Network
The post-archive condition is not a phenomenon of the last
decade or so. Nor is the erosion of the archive that we witness
today purely the result of neo-liberal economic policies, of
globalization, or the spread of Google Earth. In fact--and this
will be my concern in this essay--, the archives erosion as a
discrete operation and its substitution with the archive-as-network
and other more distributed forms of information storage and
distribution has an alternative history: here, the image of the
earth does not (yet) equal global corporatism and surveillance,
hinting instead at an emancipatory vision that seeks to connect
individuals with collectively owned and distributed information
with the help of technology.
In the first half of the 20th century, two distinct critical
responses to the archive of 19th-century historicism can be
discerned in art. First comes the critique by members of the early
20th-century avant-gardes (Duchamp, etc.) who intervene in the most
basic assumption of the 19th-century archive, the idea that in an
archive relations in space can always become relations in time. The
aesthetics of shock (photomontage) developed by other members of
the historical avant-garde was another way of intervening in the
hermeneutic operations that transformed an archives documents into
an ordered historical narrative. In the mid-1920s, the (anti-)
archival aesthetics of shock that characterizes avant-garde collage
and photomontage were joined by another model, one that critiqued
the 19th century archive, and with it historicism more generally,
by harnessing it to a specific type of knowledge production. In an
article from the early 1920s, the theorist of productivist art and
founder of LEF, Sergei Tretiakov [IMAGE #11] wants to explain the
progress made by the Soviet state in transforming reality. He
writes: The juxtaposition, for example, of a photograph of a tiny
village on a putrid little river with one taken a year later in
which a glass building has replaced the villagesuch stunning
juxtapositions force you to radically reconsider the obsolete
notion of a human lifetime, for our century equals a millennium in
earlier times. It is clear that the service photography renders in
documenting, and celebrating, the new reality cannot become
effective without an archive to supplement it: in order to become
documentary, an image of the truth, the photograph that shows the
new reality (a glass building has replaced the village) has to be
juxtaposed with another (second) image (tiny village on a putrid
little river), one that confirms its truth by testifying to what
once was; there cannot be truth in one image alone, only in an
archive of at least two images. Paradoxically (and tellingly, for
the situation in the Soviet Union in the 1920s), the archive is
here not a place for the reconstruction of the past, or for memory,
but a place that allows us to experience first hand the rapidity
with which that past disappears: by comparing how far we have come
already we can gage, for better or for worse, how far we will
go.
In the debates around documentarism and the nature of facts
during the 1920s and about the role technical media such as film
and photography played in the shift to a newly affirmative
aesthetics of truth production, the archivehere thought of as an
antidote to the earlier, shock-based model of photomontage--played
a central role. First, as the replacement of a principle of shock
with a principle of accumulation; second as the way of replacing
montage with organization; and third, as a way of turning the
artist from a skilled craftsman into a producer of knowledge.
It was in the mid 1920s that the theoreticians of of Soviet
Proletkult organization (Bogdanov, Tretiakov) defined labor as an
organizational activity that encompassed both physical and
cognitive, intellectual work. For Walter Benjamin, as for Tretiakov
before him, a crucial part of the artists alignment with other
producers was the need for the artist to cease being a specialist
who relies on his or her skill to produce an art object ready for
consumption and commodification. As an antidote to this
evisceration of arts critical function in the face of a culture
industry that can co-opt even the most critical images, Benjamin
suggests that the photographer transcend his specialization and
become a writer, so that he would be alienated from his original
craft: What we require of the photographer is the ability to give
his picture that caption which wrenches it from modish commerce and
gives it revolutionary use-value. In other words, the intellectual
has to betray his class and move from being someone who supplies
the production apparatus with contents to someone who becomes an
engineer and who refuses to supply that apparatus with fodder. Only
in a state of alienation from his craft (and class) does the artist
turned producer/worker discover that his means of production do not
belong to him, which in turn opens his or her eyes to the necessity
for solidarity with other producers. I want to suggest that one of
these alienated states for the artist was to become an archivist.
As archivist and bricoleur, the artist no longer produces, he
choses, labels, classifies, dealing with the fragments of reality
and aligning himself with other producers. This is the logic of the
constructivist archive, for which Vertovs Man With a Movie Camera
1929 [IMAGE #12] serves as an outstanding example.
The film is a portrait of a synthetic Soviet city put together
from still shot from several Soviet cities and locations. At one
point in the film we see Vertovs wife as she stands in front of an
archive of individual shots (the city; factory), selects them, and
splices them together so they can become the film we see. The city
can only be visualized through the archive of individual snapshots
of which the film is made. The film itself consists exclusively of
shots from this archive, held together by the cameraman who is
shown moving about the city with his camera, taking shots from all
kinds of angles. We often see Vertovs camera mounted on an
automobile in a way that is remarkably similar to what a Google
Earth car looks like as it moves through the streets. In other
scenes, we see a massive camera stalking through the city as if it
were alive, and taking pictures from above. [IMAGES] Vertovs film
is structured by the differential relationships between the body of
the cameraman and the body of the camera; between the city as an
integrated urban space and its archival reconstruction in film;
between the time of the day and the time of the film, etc. The
archive, in a sense, functions as the arbiter of these
relationships: it does not produce closure (the city is
inexhaustible, it cannot be finally mapped or visualized); instead
it sets up relationships between images, shots, and camera angles.
In The Man With a Movie Camera, the relay of an experience is
crucial: through his work with the tool that is his camera, Vertov
gives us access to his labor.
By contrast, the territory mapped by the imaging specialists at
Google Earth reflects a post-labor position: there is no cameraman
behind the scanner that sits atop the Google Earth car, just as
there is no archive of images; the stick on the roof of the car
contains a whole battery of remote controlled (digital) cameras.
When the car is in motion the images taken by the camera and the
cars location are stored on a computer in the car, organized and
sent to servers. No experience of labor is being translated here,
even where lots of data is being transmitted. And information is
here understood very differently: its not personal, not embodied as
with Vertov, nor is its archive anomic. The uniformity and
steadiness of the data-stream contrast eloquently with the erratic
movements of Vertovs cameraman who in one scene is seen as he lies
before an oncoming train in order to capture its approach.
A crucial element in the critique of the traditional archive
undertaken by the historical avant-garde was its rejection of
provenance, a rejection whose theoretical elaboration occurred a
decade later in Walter Benjamins famous essay about the work of art
in the age of technical reproduction with its claim that the
disappearance of the aura was intimately tied to the loss of the
place in which an artwork belonged by tradition. In fact, the
archive of historicism was also based on the assumption that in an
archive, every document had its own unique place, reflecting a
specific point in time. The principle of provenance, the most
prominent archive principle of the 19th century, stipulated that in
an archive every item has a place that reflects accurately its
origin in a specific other place. By contrast, in avant-garde
photomontage, elements are freely movable across the horizontal
plane of its support; there is no origin or original order for the
elements that come to rest on this surface.
According to Benjamin Buchloh, in the postwar era, the archival
interventions of the historical avant-gardes gave way to something
he calls the anomic archive. However, while the anomic archive
continues, however obliquely, the constructivist critique of
provenance that began earlier in the 20th century, more formative
for the post-archive condition is the fact that in the 1960s and
70s, the idea of the archive-as-network began to compete with the
archive-as-construction. Instead of focusing on ordered series of
provenances or collections of documents, the 1960s and 70s favored
connectivity over the discrete archive, associating the latter with
stable canons of knowledge that preclude participation and
collective agency. In the age of the developing computer network
and space travel, it is not provenance but the network that comes
to the fore: to create an archive is to establish a net of
connections that resembles a map more than a layered archival site
or a series of provenances.
In the late 1960s and 70s, the archive was thought of less as a
storehouse of past traces, a treasure trove of memory and Bildung,
than as a deeply conservative bastion of canonical knowledge,
authority, and power that restricted access to true information
rather than facilitating it. The efforts undertaken in the 1960s
and 70s to either create or appropriate global networks for the
generation and distribution of information were by and large not
focused on discreet archival storage with its assumptions of
hierarchy and authority; in fact, the idea of storage as a final
stage in the processing of information was suspect as it seemed to
imply a static approach to information. Instead, the storage
function was subsumed under a dynamic model for the transmission
and exchange of knowledge in such a way that that knowledge
constituted itself only as a result of its dynamic flow through a
more or less regulated network. Such a system, which could be the
telephone network or the postal system, was the opposite of an
archive, if by the latter term we mean a more or less stable
repository for a more or less stable amount of information. It was
also potentially global: the 1960s and 70s represent a first, and
now often forgotten, moment of global thinking, a moment when
thinking in terms of the whole became big. As Buckminster-Fuller
writes in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth: Nothing
seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to
understand all and out everything together. [IMAGE BUCKY MAP]
It is not by coincidence that studies like Diane Cranes
Invisible Colleges (1972) sought to account less for the content of
an archive than for the communities (of scientists) that helped
shaped, or even created, such content across the networks and
communities to which they belong, offering in the process an
account of how knowledge changes over time as a result of such
distribution. The critique of education that is a hallmark of the
1960s and 70s also frequently targeted the idea of teaching as the
transmission of an intrinsically stable archive of knowledge.
Critics of traditional schools such as Ivan Ilich (Deschooling
Society, 1972), focused on what Ilich calls left wing institutions
that would facilitate cooperation, communication, and the exchange
(rather than the ownership) of knowledge. Clearly, Ilichs agenda is
directed against a certain understanding of the archive as a
repository of knowledge: the basis for the exchange he advocates as
a replacement for traditional school were communication networks
such as the telephone, the postal service, or the computer. His
idea was that a truly free network is one that circumvents the
modern logic of consumption, enabling individuals to engage in an
unmitigated exchange of information: the network here replaces the
school. Having found their match with the help of a computer,
individuals would agree to short-lived encounters with other
individuals with whom they discuss a problem or quotation that
concerns or interests them: A computer-arranged meeting to discuss
an article in a national magazine, held in a coffee shop off Fourth
Avenue, would obligate none of the participants to stay in the
company of his new acquaintances for longer than it took to drink a
cup of coffee [...]. Education for all means education by all. In
1970, the artist Luis Chamnitzer referred to this kind of
instruction as a form of alphabetization, seeing art as one of its
principal agents. As an information exchange based not on corporate
uniformity and military expediency but on openness, dialogue, and
heterogeneity at the service of the whole (earth), the network here
functions as a kind of forum or commons where ones personal
experience replaces anonymous market forces. The idea here is
neither to facilitate acquisition nor to supply information about
prices but rather to establish an archive as a forum for an open
dialogue that gives participants, who are also suppliers, the
information they need to orient themselves in the present.
Ilichs deschooled society, which replaces the anonymity and
alienation of modern urban life with networked exchange and
dialogue, is also a de-archivized one; information is not consumed;
it is lived, processed, and experienced. The technical media that
facilitate such exchange, such as the computer, are for Ilich not
archives in the sense that they store information; they rather
function as (ideally pure) channels of communication that are, in
the authors view (naive though it may seem from todays vantage
point), capable of channeling the disinterested exchange of
knowledge that allows its users to function as free agents:
Telephone link-ups, subway lines, mail routes, public markets and
exchanges do not require hard or soft sells to induce their clients
to use them. Sewage systems, drinking water, parks, and sidewalks
are institutions men use without having to be institutionally
convinced that it is to their advantage to do so. Networks, in this
understanding, are not archival in that their use does not
presuppose a clear separation between means and ends, the very
logic that governs the world of commerce and politics. In the
totally administered world, the archive serves as the workbench for
a logic that ties specific ends to particular causes, and vice
versa. In post-archive networks, on the other hand, the distinction
between form and content that underwrites the means-ends logic of
the political and the economic sphere is blurred: enjoyment comes
from the network itself as much as from the messages it
channels.
A pedagogical (post-) archive project that helped dissolve the
archive function in the direction of the network and collective
agency was the so-called Whole Earth Catalogue (Access to Tools),
which was published for the first time in 1968. It was an archive
of sorts: in different rubrics that included sections on land use,
shelter, industry, craft, community, nomadics, communications, and
learning, it listed 400 large pages worth of books, tools,
implements and other useful tools suggested by and commented on by
the catalogues users themselves [IMAGE #4: WEC]. The cover of the
Catalogue is adorned with a picture of the globe taken by the first
Apollo mission, and, on the back cover, with a quote from
Buckminster Fuller who, as the compilers assert, inspired the
project as a whole. According to the compilers, the function of the
catalogue was to be an evaluation and access device. With it, the
user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to
do the getting. The compilers continue: An item is listed in the
CATALOG if it is deemed: Understanding Whole Systems; 1. Useful as
a tool; 2. Relevant to independent education; 3. High quality or
low cost; 4. Easily available by mail. [IMAGE #5, 6: WEC]
However, the Whole Earth Catalogue was neither an archive nor a
mail order catalogue in any straightforward sense of that term:
nothing is for sale directly; instead, readers sent in their
recommendations, annotate them, so that other users can see their
reviews and then decide for themselves if they want to purchase a
certain products--for the most part, other books--or not. If
Buckminster Fuller claimed, in his Manual for Spaceship Earth, that
there was in fact no instruction manual for spaceship earth, the
Whole Earth Catalogue was not designed to fill this gap. With its
hundreds of pages of quotations and short reader reviews of books
and other manuals, the WEC functions more like a meta-manual, a
manual on how to find your manual: it is information on how to
handle information, rather than on how to act or what to do. The
difference is crucial: WEC is an archive, and as such emancipatory,
not because it supplies you with meaningful instruction, but
because it teaches you how and where information circulates. If on
the surface of things the Whole Earth Catalogue resembles a
mailorder catalogue, upon closer scrutiny, it is far from it: the
point is not the consumer objects we desire but the larger
principle of an open exchange of experiences with tools that form
part of a larger system. As such, this archive is a wager on the
future rather than the past: not a manual, it is more like an
effort to understand the rules so we can act responsibly in the
future, and not as narrow minded specialists but as as informed
universalists.
***
Ever since the 1960s the archive has organized two (or more)
different takes on globalism: one inspired by a vision of the
archive as a way of allowing individuals to access information in
order to act on behalf of a global whole without relinquishing
their individual agency (WEC, Buckminster Fuller); the other a
centralized corporate operation of data gathering that relates to
the archive first and foremost as a self-regulating, autonomous
storehouse of information whose aggregated wisdom by definition
exceeds that of individuals. Such thinking was echoed by the
economic theories that were being developed in the late 1960s by
the followers of Friedrich Hayek, a role model for Milton Friedman
and detractor of John Maynard Keynes [IMAGE #7]. Hayek believed
that the more complex society becomes the less individuals are able
to comprehend it. In this line of thought, consumers supply the
market with information through their behavior as consumers of
goods, thus contributing to the vast archive of information that is
the market. The latter acts as a kind of general intellect that
provides consumers, whose ability to process the complexities of
its workings is by nature limited, with the kind of information
about prices and values they need in order to carry out their
transactions. In this instance, crucially, individuals act as
passive participants in a market that supplies them with
information that in its turn compels them to act in a certain way.
Hayek openly suggests that the capitalist market is what gives
individuals access to the kind of wisdom they cannot themselves
possess. As markets pile up price information from buyers and
sellers who will never meet, they regulate a global system that
includes individuals only as agents of the market itself. It is
striking how closely this model resembles modern data mining
operations, even where these operate with much more sophisticated
technologies: whenever we carry out a business transaction, or even
a phone call, Google Earth and other such archiving operations
resolutely follow Hayeks model: as agents in the market place we
supply that market with information by acting within it (as sellers
or as consumers).
In the late 1960s, one of the outlets for transforming the
archive into the post-archive network was conceptual art, which
subscribed not only to an aesthetic of administration but also to
an innovative idea of the archive as a way of reconciling, through
dematerialization and reduction of visuality, the agency of
individuals with the concern for the many. One can see this at
work, for example, in the exhibition catalogues the curator and
critic Lucy Lippard created in the late 1960s in the form of stacks
of standardized index cards [IMAGE #9], naming her exhibitions
after the population number of the city where the exhibition was
held (in Vancouver, 1970: 955,000). Crucially, while the size of
the cards that introduced each artists work was standardized,
Lippard invited each artist to design their own cards for
themselves in whichever way they pleased: here once again we have
an example of how the archive can function as an arbiter between
the individual and the communal, between a common format and the
kind of visual cacophony that also characterizes the WEC. In the
late 1960s and 70s, many publication followed a similar model by
giving several participating artists an equal amount of space that
they were invited to fill. There were many other projects like this
in the late 1960s and 70s, both in curatorship (Seth Siegelaub) and
in publishing, such as magazines that allotted artists a certain
amount of space where they could freely organize information. Here
as with Lippard, the idea was to enable individual agency within a
collective, and the archive in both cases served as the outlet for
these efforts.
It was the photographer and critic Allan Sekula who in a project
entitled Fish Story connected the idea of the artist as producer as
it was conceived in the 1920s as part of a critique of provenance
with a different kind of network: the global network of commercial
operations across the oceans that had developed as a result of
neo-liberal economic policies during the 1980s and 90s. Preparing
for his archival project, which was explicitly conceived as a map,
Sekula spent several weeks on a large cargo ship, with a view to
mapping the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced
capitalist world. The artists residency on the vessel established
an operative (Tretiakovs term), interventionist and
production-based position for the photographer. Its as much about
the global image archive as a about container commerce: images
floating around. Yet at the same time doubts about the efficacy of
this critical model abound as Sekula follows the drift of global
capital. As the artist himself wrote, alluding directly to the loss
of provenance as a guiding principle for his investigation, with
the shift from the groundedness of landscape to the fluidity of
seascape, and with the destabilization of the worlds geopolitical
balance beginning in 1989, the drift and uncertainty of an extended
work in progress seemed appropriate. Sites were chosen for reasons
that were whimsical as well as thematic. (p. 202) The political
charge of Sekulas archive is ambiguous; on the one hand, his
investigation follows the movement of capital and its often
dramatic effects; on the other hand, it also seeks to analyze these
movements.
In the present era, archival mapping on a global scale has
itself become corporatized. Google Earth has created a vast
technically and visually uniform archive of the developed world
that can be accessed by people all over the globe who have access
to the internet. The WEC, too, used the idea of the network, but
here the network was not a system of satellites or camera cars that
systematically scan the streets, but rather it was the users
themselves whose cacophonous contributions to the catalogue
translated into a visual montage that could, as such, not be
further from the uniform variety of Googles late-capitalist whole
earth. For Google, we are consumers of a corporate globalism that
reduces the globe to its data formats. For the sub-cultures of the
1960s, the variety of such formats was a given. When I exited the
plane at a major European airport the other week, the first thing I
saw was an advertisement by a bank, declaring in huge letters:
Future Investors Must be Explorers. The slogan reminded me of
Buckminster Fullers Great Pirates, the now extinct, lawless
entrepreneurs who ruled the world by their superior knowledge of
the whole, through great anticipatory vision, great ship designing
capability, and original scientific conceptioning. The Great
Pirates, the only ones who knew that the peoples in the different
un-connected parts of the Earth knew nothing of each other helped
them share their respective tools and resources -- a function the
Whole Earth Catalogue tried to emulate and revive. By contrast,
today we live in an age when global corporations exploit and market
resources (not, as the WEC, tools) on a global scale, and when
ideas such as Buckminster Fullers have become little more than
slogans.
The Horizontal Archive
The horizontal archive eschews the vertical orientation of the
traditional archive; it abandons the latters association with the
trace and with memory and turns to scale (the map) instead; it
favors remediation and post-production over a focus on single
documents in a specific place; and it is part of a larger
development in global art that creates artistic value not through
individual works or practices located in one place but as a
function of (global) connectivity. Where Fish Story still preserved
a connection with the critical interventions in the archive from
the early 20th century (the production of critical knowledge), this
is no longer the case with more recent incarnations of the
horizontal (post-) archive. Sekula had still assumed that it might
be possible to find a scale that would allow him to map the archive
of global commerce. Now it seems as if that archimedic point has
disappeared. In contemporary art and literature, the work with, or
in, archive documents as a way of opening up a space for what is
possible (rather than what is real) often begins, paradoxically,
with the foreclosure of knowledge. For instance, Jrgen Gasilewskis
2006 novel The Gothenburg Events uses a multitude of painstakingly
collected and researched documents to reconstruct George W. Bushs
2001 visit to the Swedish port city of Gothenburg on the occasion
of the EU summit meeting. [ILL: COVER] By combining documents with
elements of fiction, Gasilewskis novel provides a literary, yet
also oddly documentary elaboration of the demonstrations and police
violence that accompanied the EU summit, as well as their judicial
aftermath. For Gasilewski literature is a way of uncovering the
implicit narrative constraint of a document. By this the writer
means that an archival document does not contain or own its own
status as an index or trace; rather, it searches for that status
within what the author calls the greatest of stories, reality.
Calling his novel a literal fiction, Gasilewski focuses on the
figure of an alleged German agent provocateur with yellow hair who
figures in the internal police reports and, subsequently, in the
right-wing Swedish press as an anarchist and German terrorist. The
true identity of this German, whose alleged subversive activities
the press soon utilized to refer to all the demonstrators as
terrorists and whose testimony was used in court against the
demonstrators, could never be established. He was most likely an
invention by the police. In Gasilewskis novel, by contrast, the
figure of the German terrorist becomes a real, i.e., fictional
character. As such the German terrorist in The Gothenburg Events is
the counterpart to the ghosts that haunt the archive in One Day.
The novel continuously creates effects of disorientation and
archival misprision that create openings in the archive for what is
possible rather than what is factual or real. Gasilewski challenges
our idea of a stable boundary between the document and literature;
between the archive and the real; and between art practice
(writing) and politics. Just like the police archive documents the
existence of an agent provocateur who was in all likelihood
fictitious, Gasilewski, by placing this fictional character within
the limits of his documentary novel, not only discredits the police
archive as a fiction, he also establishes The Gothenburg Events
(his novel) as the only possible documentary practice, since it
alone is capable of unveiling the narrative constraint that
inhibits the police archive, meshed up as it is in relations of
power, from functioning as an index of what really happened.
At the heart of the novel is less the reification of knowledge,
or the suggestion that knowledge is emancipatory in and of itself,
than its subsumption under various regimes of a connecting practice
that is, as such, typical of the horizontal archive. Such knowledge
practice views the archive as an inventory in Rancieres sense, the
potential of objects and images in terms of common history. The
defining feature of the archive as a space for the production of
knowledge is that it blurs the line between practice and theory,
between art and action, creating various forms of disorientation we
have to forget, to identify the narrative constraint if we want
documents to not only signify what happened (a hopeless
undertaking) but what could happen.
The horizontal archive creates lateral connections between
activities and events, but it refuses to establish a normative,
rational history for them. The result is desorientation rather than
orientation, illegibility rather than legibility, and connectivity
rather than syntagmatic relations that correspond to an ordered
grammar for the production of archival statements (Foucault). When
Palestinian artist Emily Jacir has her camera confiscated by
Israeli soldiers and a pistol held to her temple as she passes an
Israeli checkpoint on the Ramallah-Birzeit road in order to get to
her university [ILL. EMILY JACIR], she returns the next day, cuts a
hole into the bag that she carries with her, and records her walk
for eight days. This process of carrying over does not, however,
result in the production of historical evidence. What Jacir records
and documents is not the Israeli occupation of Palestine she
documents only her walk, which is, literally a carrying over.
However, Jacirs archive is never neat or focused, it doesnt (unlike
Sekulas) aspire to mapping its territory from a vantage point that
would allow that territory to become transparent. Jacirs archive is
shaky, it shows things from uncertain perspectives, depending on
the road and the daily course. It misses a system, a method, a
regularity beyond the fact that the artist returns every day. Her
recording is born from repression (Jacir cannot show her camera,
thats why its in the bag) but it is also a result of the artists
defiance: she goes to school regardless. As a form of protest, the
horizontal archive reflects a desire less to revise history than to
desorient it, creating small archival openings that allow, perhaps,
to glimpse a different future.
The horizontal archive is a matter of scale, and it opens an
experience of the present rather than offering an authoritative
interpretation of the past. The map becomes elusive in the process.
As an example, let me briefly discuss a work by Peruvian artist Luz
Maria Bedoya, entitled Linea de Nazca (2008), a single-take video
of 2:40 mins length that records, from a car driving across the Pan
American Highway in the Southern Peruvian desert, the area where
the Nazca lines (300 B.C./900 A.D.) are located. The artist drew a
ladder on the gallery wall in charcoal; additionally, there are
five framed sentences taken from oldest published book about these
lines, a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca desert in
southern Peru believed to have been created between 400 and 650 AD.
The hundreds of individual lines drawn in the desert include
abstract designs as well as animal motifs (they are visible as such
only from a plane). The shallow lines are a good example for the
way in which an archive becomes legible when it is viewed from a
certain scale or perspective. The images of the Nazca line, which
count among Perus greatest tourist attractions, are classically
viewed from a plane. In Bedoyas work, on the other hand, what I
would call the archival perspective--one that privileges a specific
vantage point from where all the lines align to become forms,
figures, or images, is given up. The speed with which Bedoyas car
is traveling through the desert, horizontally rather than
vertically, increases the viewers visceral experience at the
expense of a successfully integrated reading that can transform the
lines into meaningful figures. Bedoya, we might say, puts herself
in the position of the producers of this archive (who were
themselves blind to the overall design they were creating-there are
no mountains nearby); she refuses to be its consumer. This does not
mean, however, that she does not register the many efforts that
have been made over time to make sense of these geo-glyphics. And
so, the ladder on one wall of the installation is designed to evoke
not only the workings of scale, but also the activities of Maria
Reiche, a German woman who studied the Nazca line in the middle of
last century. These captions on the wall (focused on the right
height at which to see the Nazca lines), also invite the viewer to
simulate Bedoyas drive through the desert right there, in the
gallery: as we move alongside the framed captions, we may try to
avoid that central point from which they all make sense, opting for
the experience of the lines and letters rather than for their
meaning.
As a contribution to our global moment, Bedoya favors an
approach that with G. Spivak we might call planetary, a term she
opposes to the globe: The globe is on our computers. No one lives
there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The
planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system;
and yet we inhabit it, on loan. It is not really amenable to a neat
contrast with the globe.When I invoke the planet, I think of the
effort required to figure the (im)possibility of this underived
intuition. Bedoya, we might say, also tries to create an archive
that we can inhabit rather than wanting to master or consume it (as
Google Earth does). That such inhabiting requires her to traverse
the desert at great speed testifies to her reluctance to give in to
the nostalgic temptations of slow localism: our globality cannot be
reversed, and archiving is one of its principal conditions.
A planetary perspective in Spivaks sense can also be observed in
Lina Selanders film Around the Cave of the Double Tombs (2010), a
video and book project that deal with the artists multiple visits
to the West Bank city of Hebron. Around the Cave of the Double
Tombs takes its starting point in several research trips to the
West Bank, especially to the city of Hebron. The mute video links
photographs and still images that show a model of ancient Jerusalem
in a Museum, a check-point with its massive security architecture
squeezed into a historical building, houses, walls, objects. The
camera records continuously, but haltingly, disturbing, in curator
Felix Vogels words, our perception and sense of orientation and.
Still and moving images alternate with short texts that open up an
inquiry into what we are seeing. The inquiry, narrative or not,
articulates a knowledge but it also disarticulates it the archive
exists in the moment. As Vogel comments: It is through a
renunciation to speak on behalf of someone or to represent someone
or a specific objective, but instead to focus on the ontological
status of image and text in film that Around the Cave of the Double
Tombs unleashes its potential of letting the real shine through,
or, as one of the text panels states: The real is cut and
re-assembled, returning with a different origin. Selander creates
an archive suspended between motion and frozen inertia. Here is a
sequence of moving images that show a chain link fence above a
shopping alley in Hebron, built to protect Palestinians from
settlers throwing stones at them. [VIMEO https://vimeo.com/24333665
// 3:20: SELANDER]
The book Selander produced from this film is an instance
remediation, the translation of one archival medium into another.
The perforation make the pages of the book seem as if they once all
belonged together; and yet, the combination of black pages; text;
and more or less detailed black and white images of the border
crossing never cohere into a meaningful narrative. Here again, we
are dealing with a concatenation and combination that does not
locate truth in the documents themselves but in the opening that is
created as a result of their combination and concatenation. For
Selander, it is during the process of editing when, to paraphrase
Harun Farocki, she takes leave of any plan she may have had for her
material, realizing that such planning is, in her words, nonsense.
Drifting across her own material, Selander creates local orders
without an overarching master plan; she pushes her material to a
point where, as she herself asserts, she feels herself excluded
from it. Going beyond what Tretiakov might have had in mind when he
wrote of the revolutionary realist archive: for here, it is the
material itself that is the location for explorations without a
fixed destination, uncertain journeys in archival space that may,
at times, become politically relevant or revelatory, but without
any consistency.
With Bedoya and Selander, the (post-) archives only content is
connectivity itself: the point is not to construct a message, an
identity, a meaning, or an interpretation by collaging of collating
information, or to reveal the rules for such a construction
(Foucault); rather its the experience of connecting--people,
images, texts, and documents--that matters to both artists. It is
therefore neither a matter of provenance; nor of a critique of it.
Instead the post-archive needs to be considered before the
background of the network aesthetic developed during the 1960s and
70s. Beyond that, the contemporary post-archive, whose focal point
is the contemporary rather than the past, functions as a scaling
operation: it aims to offer experiences of globality on a variety
of different scales, both local and global.
The Horizontal Archive and the Future of History Writing (Raqs
Media Collective: The Capital of Accumulation)
In his study Provincializing Europe, the historian Dipesh
Chakrabarty, outlines the difficulties confronted by historians who
approach subaltern histories from the vantage point of the Western
archive and the legacy of Western historiography more generally.
For an event to be included in this archive, it has to respond to a
set of rational criteria that determine the events plausibility,
its workability as a historical truth. But what if an event falls
short of these criteria? Chakrabarty mentions the example of
striking workers in rural India (the Santal) who explain going on
strike with reference not to a set of rationalized grievances or
demands but to their local Gods who, according to their testimony,
prompted them to take the action. From the point of view of
rational historiography (including Marxist analysis, which would
want to look at such a strike from the point of class relations),
such an event (a strike prompted by local deities) cannot easily be
explained rationally in order to absorbed into the archive of local
history: Let me call these subordinated relations to the past
subaltern pasts. They are marginalized not because of any conscious
intention but because they represent moments or points at which the
archive that the historian mines develops a degree of
intractability with respect to the aims of professional history. In
other words, these are pasts that resist historicization. These
minor pasts resist inclusion into the archive to the extent that
they cannot be subsumed under one of the universal historical
narratives that make up that history.
In tracing the contours of a type of method that might avoid the
marginalization of minor pasts like the one mentioned above,
Chakrabarty argues for a twofold approach: the first refuses to
historicize or otherwise interpret such miracles, allowing them
instead to exist as a way of being in the world that is
contemporaneous with ours. In the cited example, this means to
accept the locals invocation of a miracle without interpreting it
as irrational, or a lapse in class consciousness. The second
approach involves an engaged historical approach that views
instances such as this as (necessary) stages on the way to greater
justice and democracy. According to Chakrabarty, both of these
mutually exclusive approaches need to be considered together: To
stay with the heterogeneity of the moment when the historian meets
with the peasant is, then, to stay with the difference between
these two gestures. One is that of historicizing the Santal in the
interest of a history of social justice and democracy; and the
other, that of refusing to historicize and of seeing the Santal as
a figure illuminating a life possibility for the present.
What I call the horizontal archive hints at a similar double
take. On the one hand, it responds to the post-archive condition,
the realization that the archive as a singular entity founded on an
ordered approach to history can no longer function. On the other
hand, within that realization, it suggests ways in which a
different history based on connection and connectivity, and focused
as much on the present as on the future, can be imagined. To
illustrate the point, let me briefly discuss a film by New
Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective entitled The Capital Of
Accumulation (2010). Based on found footage as well as material
accumulated by the artists themselves, The Capital Of Accumulation
is a two-screen video installation commissioned as part of the
Goethe Institutes Promised City project that writes an oblique
narrative of the relationship between different metropolises and
the world based on the effects of global capital and migration. On
a vast horizontal plane the film veers back and forth between the
cities of Bombay, Berlin and Warsaw, establishing asymmetrical
analogies and juxtapositions. What appears like an archive-based
detective storythe search for the missing body of Polish-born Rosa
Luxemburg, who went to school in Warsawsoon turns out to be, at the
same time, a study of the cyclical dynamics of capital and its
expansion and contraction in different parts of the world. It is as
if Luxemburgs 1913 book The Accumulation of Capital, a rather dry
analysis of the reproduction of surplus value in the capitalist
economy, was here taken as the basis for an approach that moves as
much by poetic analogy as by analysis.
The two screens of the installation fulfill a double function.
On the one hand, they recall Luxemburgs analysis of how surplus
value is accumulated: So that that part of surplus value that is
destined for accumulation really can be capitalized it has to take
on concrete form. Only that form enables it to function as
productive capital. For this to happen it is necessary that the
surplus value [] be divided into two parts, a constant one
consisting of dead means of production and a variable one that is
represented in labor wages. If this statement obliquely hints at
Tretiakovs dialectical approach to the archive, The Capital of
Accumulation also goes beyond that approach, substituting the
principle of accumulation (connection; collating) for the kind of
progressive history favored by Tretiakov. We may see in this
gesture an effort to enact Chakrabartys suggestion for a type of
historiography that does not reduce the heterogeneity of lifeworlds
to universal principles and methods. In the Capital of
Accumulation, the scenes shown on both screens of the installation
are for the most part not symmetrical, and their differences are
not dialectically sublated. Thus we are shown how Berlin expands in
the 19th century, swallowing up the surrounding villages and
countryside, while Bombay contracts in the wake of the massive
textile strike of the 1970s, which leaves a vast empty space at the
center of the city. The two images are placed next to each other,
and no over-arching narrative bridges the differences between them.
Another such juxtaposition or parallelization in the film (CLIP
17:15) concerns the textile workers strike in Bombay in 1982,
combined with references to the postwar reconstruction of Warsaw,
which included a stadium and the establishment of the Rosa
Luxemburg light bulb factory at the very heart of Warsaw. Much like
the former textile district of Bombay in the early 1980s, so the
light bulb factory too lies in ruins at the end of the 1980s, ready
to be blown away by the force of capital much like the textile
factories in Bombay had a decade earlier. Again, these events are
collated on a vast horizontal plane where they exist next to each
other. Interestingly, the artists connect their archive work with
the present as much as with the past: That is why, just as the
recovery of memory and history (of defeats and dispersal, of
powerlessness and servitude as much as of survival and creation),
and the painstaking reconstruction of an archive of lost and
scattered meanings is one of the first cultural tasks on the agenda
of the insurgent, a critical engagement with a documentary mode of
practice too becomes (for the same reason) one of the key
undertakings of the contemporary art practitioner who seeks to
express contemporaneity as much as s/he engages with art. The
contemporary moment, nothing if not a contest of images that seek
to define globality, demands documents as counterweights to its own
documentary record.
One of the crucial archival scenes in the film has the 90-year
old nephew of Rosa Luxemburg, who lives in Warsaw, leaf through a
photo album while he reminisces about his childhood and his
encounters with his aunt. Another scene shows animals in the Berlin
Zoo and speculates on how animals might have been witness to the
grisly murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the Nazis.
Such witnessing is part of a general pattern in the film that links
documentary, as a way of producing truth, to other forms of
production. For instance the notion of solidarity brings a strike
in Bombay in the early 1980s together with the Polish union
movement of the 1980s. And if Rosa Luxemburgwho herself organized a
general strike in her early political careerand her book The
Accumulation of Capital are central to this journey, there is also
her Indian counterpart by the name of Luxme Sorabgur, a scramble of
the letters in the name Rosa Luxemburg; also, in Raqs video, Berlin
is not only the place where Rosa Luxemburg was killed but also host
to the film studios that during the 1920s produced a series of
Indian themed movies. Foucault distinguished between two types of
knowledge, savoir and connaissance. According to him, savoir is
systematic knowledge, it is the process which permits the
multiplication of knowable objects, the development of their
intelligibility, the understanding of their rationality, while the
subject doing the investigation always remains the same.
Conversely, connaissance is the process through which the subject
finds himself modified by what he knows, or rather by the labor
performed in order to know. It is what permits the modification of
the subject and the construction of the object. Savoir is knowledge
that exists independently of the subject and of the conditions
under which it was produced. Connaissance, on the other hand, is
knowing without a final product that takes into account the labor
that was necessary to produce it, and the influence this has on the
subject. To an extent, savoir is congruent with what Roland
Barthes, in his study of photography, refers to as studium
(systematic meaning), while connaissance is closer to what he calls
punctum, the rupture of studium in a moment with a high affective
charge. The distinction between connaissance and savoir might be
useful for Capital of Accumulation, too. Perhaps with the
horizontal archive, too, it is a matter of (re-) connecting the
archive with a plurality of heterogeneous life practices.
The Horizontal Archive is Uncreative
In his critique of the humanist archive, the sociologist Arjun
Appudarai has argued for the (post-) archive as a space where
connectivity allows for the construction of tentative identities.
For Appudarai it is not a matter of creating a community on the
basis of an archive of shared beliefs or convictions (the
Constructivist model). What interests him is a form of community
that is not build on a face-to-face history and hence not on the
archive of traces: Where natural social collectivities build
connectivities out of memory, these virtual collectivities build
memories out of connectivity. The collectives that base their
existence on the archive Appudarai has in mind are not founded on
kinship, genealogy, and intimacy but on invented or mimed
identities and cloned socialities developed through social media.
This (post-) archive is manifestly not the archive of historicism,
with its assumption that everything in order to be understood has
to be historicized, or modernism, with its trust in the necessity
to find a voice for memory: The very preciousness of the archive,
indeed its moral authority, stems from the purity of the accidents
that produced its traces. In this view, any hint of a deliberate
effort to produce or protect a trace is a taint, to be spotted and
eliminated by the historians tools of triage.
Appudarais critique of the humanist archive focuses on the
possibilities the non-humanist, diasporic archive might offer to
migrant populations. In his film One Day (2003), Akram Zaatari
investigates a population whose history, much like that of the
migrants addressed by Appadurai, had until recently been written
almost exclusively by outsiders: the Bedouines that once populated
the Arabian peninsula. One Day begins with a book, a history of the
Bedouines written many years ago by a Western scholar, and moves
from a double take on this volume (in English and in Arabic) to a
sequence that shows an archival file containing the photographs
that had been used in the book. However, Zaataris film is not a
documentary in any straightforward sense of that term. Rather than
historical narrative, as was the case with Bedoya as well, Zaatari
is interested in scale: rather than looking for the right height
from which to approach and understand the Middle East (the correct
perspective, the archive point), Zaatari assumes a horizontal
(post-archive) position: like Bedoyas, his film often focuses on
long takes from a zooming vehicle that create blur rather than
analytical clarity. The film combines found photographs and sounds
with sequences short by Zaatari himself. Instead of using the many
archival images and documents (both visual and audio) that appear
in his film as objectifying sources of knowledge, Zaatari subjects
these materials, or their observers, to a radically destabilizing,
dis-orienting force, as if to suggest that the meaning of an
archival photo or document is as fleeting as the speed with which
we scan over it. Sometimes that force is the camera itself as it
scans the surface of a photograph in such a way that it loses its
coherence [VIDEO CLIP 9:50]. In the preceding clip, Zaatari changes
the scale of the recording: suddenly the archival photographs we
have seen before in the archival box appear as close-ups, then they
appear as slides, blown up, etc. The effect is disorientation: as
no medium has any specificity any more, the archive loses its
ability to asign or enable transparent meaning. The result is
desorientation, but also a higher affective charge, a heightened,
more intensely physical experience of the space and its images. It
is as if Zaatari has to un-know, or de-inform, the document before
he can summon it to testify: mindful of the problems inherent in
information, yet unable simply to return to the naive enthusiasm
for the whole earth that animated the 1960s (WEC), Zaatari attempts
to find a different approach.
More often than not, the force of disorientation in One Day is
speed, which is also not coincidentally the defining force in every
war (VIDEO CLIP 21:37; 34:38). Zaataris problem seems to be that it
impossible to settle for a normal pace, a zero degree of knowledge
and understanding, as any documentary practice establishes, or
imposes, its own speed. In this way, he suggests a different form
of an archive: one that does not so much establish a history as it
seeks to be contemporaneous with its subjecxt matter (thats why
Zaatari interviews a current Bedouin). This is already in evidence
when at the very beginning Zaatari, his hands covered by gloves,
flips through an archive of historical photographs taken in the
1950s [VIDEO CLIP 1:40]. Then there is the slow speed of the camels
that populate the desert [VIDEO CLIP 47:25]. When the artist films
the road and landscape outside the window of his moving SUV, the
landscape flattens and gets blurred, haunted by the flat gray
figures from historical images that Zaatari finds in a historical
book about the now lost lifestyle of the Bedouoines (the Great
Pirates of Arabia!) that seem to move before this background at
their own breakneck speed [VIDEO CLIP 34:35]. Here we could be
witnessing a Fata Morgana; or perhaps such haunting is the general
condition of the archive once it has been freed from the
constraints of representation: both the images and their observers
are in motion, at different speeds, and the effects thus created
exceed any truth we might expect an archive to perform.
The key to Zaataris handling of the archive is one of the
hallmarks of the horizontal archive, its scalability: as we move
from one archival record to another, we realize that the only thing
that mediates between the records is their differing scale, the
many different resolutions and formats, and different viewing
speeds. Rather than a global message (say: the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict), it is these differences in scale that create the only
unifying principle int the archive. Not history then, only
connectivity, the linking of different scales and approaches
without creating any kind of synthesis. As a result, history, in
One Day, is not the horizon for these speed-induced distortions; it
is not the condition that allows us to experience the documents
used in the film as real, or to translate them from a state of
latency or potentiality into positive knowledge. The documentary
images do not exist as such; they exist only as series of aggregate
statesfast; slow; clear; blurred, etc.that prevent them from over
being self-same; they cannot be translated. Or rather: they can
only be translated. At one time, a female voiceover that provides
an academic commentary on an old photograph moves back and forth
seamlessly between English and Arabic, as if to suggest that the
archive is not the condition of translatability; rather, it is the
space where translation occurs, or does not occur. While at times
the caption provided by the female voice is perfectly clear and
academically transparent, at others (in the Arabic passages) it
ceases to make sense for non-Arabic speakers. Or rather, it does
make sense, but that sense does not travel through languages
expressive function, as if to say that the practice of knowledge
production is not here tied to such transparency; things can happen
even in the absence of translation. [[VIDEO CLIP 5:10]
Much as was the case with Bedoya and Selander, the paths
traveled by Zaatari, both in the real landscape of the Middle East
and as he scans the surface of historical photographs and
documents, does not serve the goal of orientation and a regulated
transfer from one point to another. Zaatari believes that his
archival practice is not involved in the reconstruction of the past
but in what he calls a potential history of Gaza based on possible
[rather than objective] facts. (Hommi Bhabba has recently compared
archives to the road not taken). Thought of not as a tool of memory
but as an active practice of remembrance that joins the fragments
of many worlds in an open ended process, Zaataris film tell us
about the present; yet at the same time it may also offer momentary
glimpses of a future yet to come. As a horizontal archive, One Day
has little in common either with the vertical archive where spatial
relationships were always ready to be translated into temporal
ones, or with the aesthetic of shock used by the histortical
avantgarde to debunk that model. Zaatari does not create a collage
or a photomontage. Nor does he view himself as a knowledge worker
in the tradition of Tretiakov. Instead his film must be seen in the
context of other recent efforts to reframe the process of artistic
production, with an emphasis away from originality and authenticity
to one focused on connectivity.
Without focusing on the implications of his ideas for the theory
of the archive, the curator Nicholas Bourriaud has referred to this
state of affairs, in the sphere of art , as postproduction, a
suggestive tern by which Bourriaud meant a form of post-autonomous
art production that creates linkages and connections between
existing forms rather than creating new ones. In postproduction,
the lines separating production and consumption, the medium and its
contents, are forever blurred. As an example, Bourriaud quotes the
kind of playlist you may find on an iPod: a postproduction artist
uses and manipulates existing forms rather than using new ones. If
this procedure is archival, it is so not in any archeological way.
No past is being accessed or reconstructed; a present is
constructed out of existing fragments, and the virtuosity of this
undertaking lies more in the process than in the result. Related
concepts include Marjorie Perloffs unoriginal genius or Kenneth
Goldsmiths uncreative writing with its charge that literary writing
today is a process of collating much more than a process of
invention driven by an original genius. Such collation is by
definition horizontal, and abandons the vertical orientation that
had characterized the traditional archive. In all these cases its
not a matter of construction. And so this kind of horizontal
archive is very different from the archive of material traces. Its
focus is remediation, not the isolation of individual media. Hito
Steyerl has created a related concept, poor images. By poor images
Steyerl means images whose quality is bad, its resolution
substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of
an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant
image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital
connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as
copied and pasted into other channels of distribution. Steyerl
refers here to the way in which information deteriorates when it is
transferred from one format to another, and the way in which the
resulting bad images might be today the only refuge for a use of
images that seeks to resist their endless re-purposing. In all
these cases, I want to suggest, the post-archive is used to
re-connect, however tentatively, with the emancipatory critique of
the archive that was undertaken by artists and curators in the
1960s and 70s. As I have suggested, that critique was not simply a
continuation of the critical approaches to the archive that were a
hallmark of the early 20th-century avantgarde (photomontage; shock,
etc.). In their emphasis on networks and in their global
orientation, the post-archives of the 1960s and 70s cannot be
separated from the political realities as well as the technical
developments of the postwar era. In reconnecting with these
approaches, artists and curators who use archives today seek to
create an alternative to corporate globalism.
Sven Spieker, Los Angeles The 19th-century archive model was
built on the assumption that whatever accumulates in the archive
ends up there by accident. Archival documents, in this reading,
were traces of activities inasmuch as they were not created with
the archive (with memory or history) in mind. As a result they
allowed their users to access the past as present: in an archive we
witness transcripts of chance, protocols of accidents, of a present
without a future. Indebted as it is to a certain understanding of
the medium of photography--which not coincidentally is often
referred to as the most archival of media--, this idea of the
archive is frequently linked to the problem of (individual) memory,
the recovery of the past, etc.
As I have shown in my book The Big Archive (2008), these values
are for the most part associated with a certain understanding of
masculinity, as archivists were by definition thought to be
male.
HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining. Accessed 07/13/2013.
In the process, our understanding of data and information has
also changed: where traditional archives store documents, in the
post-archive condition, what is being stored is often
meta-data.
Seregei Tretiakov, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Aufbau,
1985)
See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter's "Atlas": The Anomic
Archive, October, Vol. 88, (Spring, 1999), pp. 117-145
Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer. Here cited from
HYPERLINK
"http://www.berk-edu.com/VisualStudies/readingList/06a_benjamin-author%20as%20producer.pdf"
http://www.berk-edu.com/VisualStudies/readingList/06a_benjamin-author%20as%20producer.pdf.
Accessed 07/13/2013.
See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter's "Atlas": The Anomic
Archive, October, Vol. 88, (Spring, 1999), pp. 117-145
R. Buckminster Fuller, Oprerating Manual for Spaceship Earth
(Zurich: Lars Mller Publishers, 2013), p. 25.
Ivan Ilich, Deschooling Society (London: Marion Boyars, 1970),
p. 21-22.
Luis Chamnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics
of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007)
Ivan Ilich, Deschooling Society (London: Marion Boyars, 1970),
p. 22.
Whole Earth Catalogue (Random House, 1971).
Allan Sekula, "Notes for an Exhibition Project" (for Witte de
With, Rotterdam), 1992, unpublished manuscript (xerox), p. 1. Cited
from HYPERLINK "http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/162"
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/162. Accessed
07/23/2013.
Fish Story can be viewed as a reaction to what has been
described as the nomadism of the 1990s. Nomadism is a reaction
formation to the twofold problems with globalization: first, to the
way in which it is perceived to level and homogenize everything.
And second to the backlash against globalization that was becoming
visible in many parts of the world, especially in Eastern Europe,
in the form of a resurgent nationalism. The artist-nomad who could,
on occasion, become an archivist, is a compulsive traveller who is
adrift in knowledge.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
(Zurich: Lars Mller Publishers, 2013), p. 28
Ibid., 29-30
What Gasilewski refers to as allegory, and what must not be
confused with Walter Benjamins use of this term, builds to an idea
rather than building on an idea, a process Gasilewski has compared
to the peeling of a banana. It is as if the parts of the allegory
are empty, even as they all build to an idea once they have been
connected.
Jacques Rancire, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Polity, 2009),
p. ...
Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York:
Columbia UP, 2005), p. ...
Felix Vogel, The Anterooms of the Real, Approaching Lina
Selanders, Around the Cave of the Double Tombs, HYPERLINK
"http://linaselander.com/pdfs/Felix%20Vogel%20text.pdf"
http://linaselander.com/pdfs/Felix%20Vogel%20text.pdf. Accessed
07/13/2013.
Ibid.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought
and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007), p. 103
Ibid., p. 108
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital. HYPERLINK
"http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/.
Accessed 07/22/2013
Raqs Media Collective, HYPERLINK
"http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/images/pdf/b1c525b6-b75f-450c-b876-d693c6e60ba3.pdf"
http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/images/pdf/b1c525b6-b75f-450c-b876-d693c6e60ba3.pdf.
Accessed 07/13/2013.
I take the term uncreative from Kenneth Goldsmiths recent book
Uncreative Writing (2012).
Arjun Appadurai, Archive and Inspiration, .
Ibid., p. 17
Ibid., p. 16
Nicolas Bourriaud, Post-Production (Lukas & Sternberg,
2007). See also Also Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October, Fall
2004, No. 110, pp. 3-22
Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing (New York: Columbia
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, HYPERLINK
"http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/"
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.
Accessed 07/13/2013.
