Mike Featherstone Archiving Cultures

Mike Featherstone

Archiving cultures

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that to understand the legitimacy of a culture we need toinvestigate its relation to the archive the site for the accumulation of recordsArchive reason is a kind of reason which is concerned with detail it constantlydirects us away from the big generalization down into the particularity and sin-gularity of the event Increasingly the focus has shifted from archiving the lives ofthe good and the great down to the detail of mundane everyday life One impli-cation here is that rather than see the archive as a specic place in which wedeposit records documents photographs lm video and all the minutiae onwhich culture is inscribed should we not seek to extend the walls of the archiveto place it around the ever yday the world If ever ything can potentially be of sig-nicance shouldnrsquot part of the archive fever be to record and document ever y-thing as it could one day be useful The problem then becomes not what to putinto the archive but what one dare leave out Some of the implications of thesequestions were considered by Georg Simmel in his argument that there has beena build up and overload in the production and circulation of objective cultureThis is now beyond our subjective capacity to assimilate and order given the nitelimits of the human life course we all face It is something which confronts theindividual with irresolvable dilemmas over selectivity with each particular choiceamounting to a wager which inevitably closes off others Related questions aboutthe dif culties of handling cultural completeness were also addressed by JorgeLuis Borges in his discussion of the Library of Babel and the Aleph Yet both couldhardly have anticipated the full implications of the electronic archive thedevelopment of new technologies for storing searching and communicatinginformation through the Internet with its databases and hypertext links The elec-tronic archive offers new possibilities for speed mobility and completeness ofaccess to cultures which have become digitalized which raise fundamental ques-tions about ownership intellectual property rights censorship and democraticaccess The implications for culture are clear the new electronic archives will notonly change the form in which culture is produced and recorded but the widerconditions under which it is enacted and lived as well

KEYWORDS Archive culture library hypertext Internet database

British Journal of Sociology Vol No 51 Issue No 1 (JanuaryMarch 2000) pp 161ndash184ISSN 0007 1315 copy London School of Economics 2000

Archive keeping is essential for a civilized communityChambersrsquos Encyclopedia Vol I (1959 5701 q in OED)

The archive is also a place of dreams(Steedman 1998 67)

Nothing is less reliable nothing is less clear today that the word lsquoarchiversquo(Derrida 1996 90)

INTRODUCTION

As we enter the new millennium with its prospect of increased cultural com-plexity it should be remembered that we are by no means the rst gener-ation to feel overwhelmed by the speed scope intensity and volume ofcultural production and reproduction Writing in 1911 in an article en-titled lsquoThe Concept and Tragedy of Culturersquo published in the new journalLogos which aspired to create a forum for a new philosophical cultureGeorg Simmel (1997a 73) observed the growing imbalance between objec-tive and subjective culture remarked

There thus emerges the typical problematic condition of modernhumanity the feeling of being surrounded by an immense number ofcultural elements which are not meaningless but not profoundlymeaningful to the individual either elements which have a certain crush-ing quality as a mass because an individual cannot inwardly assimilateever y individual thing but cannot simply reject it either since it belongspotentially as it were to the sphere of his or her cultural developmentOne could characterize this with the exact reversal of that saying lsquoNihilhabentes omni possidentesrsquo which characterized the blissful poverty of theearly Franciscans in their absolute liberation from all things that wouldsomehow still tend to divert the soul from its path through themselvesand thereby make it an indirect route Instead of that human beings invery rich and overburdened cultures are lsquoomnia habientes nihil possidentesrsquo

The condition of potentially having ever ything but possessing nothingsuggests that the stock of objective culture has gone beyond the absorptivecapacity of human beings who must work within the limits of what can beassimilated within a nite life course For Simmel (1997b 102) the indi-vidual could not keep pace with the vast accumulation of lsquoculture of thingsof institutions and objecti ed ideasrsquo which lsquorobs the individual of any con-sistent inner relationship to culture as a whole and casts him back again onhis own resourcesrsquo (Simmel 1997b 102) Hence Simmel draws attention tothe failure of subjective culture to deal adequately with the problem ofselectivity manifest in the arousal of eeting aspirations and the rootlessarbitrary character of modern life

Simmel (1997c 256) also saw this process of the accumulation of objec-tive culture in terms of the development of the world-city in which lsquoa single

162 Mike Featherstone

city broadened into the totality of world productionrsquo The world fair ortrade exhibition was particularly important here as it concentrated thewhole world in one place not only in terms of the collection of exhibitsbut the way in which it becomes a place lsquoto which the whole world sends itsproducts and where all the important styles of the present cultural worldare put on displayrsquo But it is not only a question of the accumulation of stylesand goods which are sent to the city for consumer culture activities such asworld exhibitions but also the ways in which the cityrsquos own manufacturingand culture industries replicate and reproduce this cultural repositoryHence Simmel concludes that through lsquoits own production a city can rep-resent itself as a copy and a sample of the manufacturing forces of worldculturersquo1

Many themes are evident in Simmelrsquos work which resonate with contem-porary preoccupations the concern with the overload of cultural produc-tion the loss of a sense of cultural bounded-ness centricity and order thefragmentation of culture the dominance of life over form the overload ofculture which becomes impossible to assimilate There is also the sense ofan expanding consumer culture and the genesis of world cities that leadsto the globalization of culture and the increase in the volume of culturalproduction and reproduction beyond our capacity to recover the variouscultural objects images and fragments into a framework through which wecan make sense of it These aspects of Simmelrsquos work have persuaded somecommentators that he can be identi ed as postmodern avant la lettre (Wein-stein and Weinstein 1991 Featherstone 1991) Yet there is a further aspecthere which needs drawing attention to in his essay on the Berlin TradeExhibition which is quoted from in the previous paragraph Simmel (1997c256) remarks that lsquoIt is a particular attraction of world fairs that they forma momentary centre of world civilization assembling the products of theentire world in a con ned space as if in a single picturersquo While he cautionsthat this unity can only be apprehended as lsquoa oating psychological idearsquothe contiguity of objects and styles in a physical location also gives it anillusory objective unity and nitude summoned up in his use of terms suchas lsquototalityrsquo lsquosingle wholersquo and lsquocopyrsquo

Simmelrsquos reference to lsquothe whole world in a con ned place as if a singlepicturersquo resonates with Jorge Luis Borgesrsquos short story lsquoThe Alephrsquo writtenin 1949 Borges (1999a 281) refers to the Aleph as lsquothe place wherewithout admixture or confusion all the places of the world seen from everyangle coexistrsquo It was lsquoa small irridescent sphere of almost unbearablebrightness probably two or three centimetres in diameter but universalspace was contained inside it with no diminution in sizersquo (Borges 1999a283) He goes on to elaborate

Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror let us say) was in nite thingsbecause I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos I saw thepopulous sea saw dawn and dusk saw the multitudes of the Americassaw a silvery spider-web at the centre of a black pyramid saw a broken

Archiving cultures 163

labyrinth (it was London) saw endless eyes all very close saw clustersof grapes snow tobacco veins of metal water vapor saw convex equa-torial deserts and their every grain of sand saw every letter of everypage at once saw simultaneous night and day saw tigers pistonsbisons tides and armies saw all the ants on earth saw a Persian astro-labe saw the circulation of my dark blood saw the coils and springsof love and the alterations of death saw the Aleph from everywhere atonce saw the earth in the Aleph and the Aleph once more in the earthand the earth in the Aleph

The Aleph actualizes the dream of completeness of possessing the wholeworld and human culture in an accessible form Its visual form in whichwe peer at something akin to a high-de nition hologram offers an immedi-acy and self-evidentiality we directly see the world and its contents past andpresent in this sense it is nearer to life than culture Borges says nothingabout our ability to control the Aleph and direct what we see but seems toimply its agenda is out of control or at least beyond our control that iteffortlessly and seamlessly pulls out and zooms in to minutiae creating abewildering ow of spinning images which provides a high degree of instan-tiation

There is another Borges short story lsquothe Library of Babelrsquo whichaddresses the same theme of cultural completeness but here the focus isupon text rather than imagelife Borges (1999b 112 115) tells us that theLibrary is composed of lsquoan inde nite perhaps in nite number of hex-agonal galleriesrsquo which house books which are comprised of lsquoall the poss-ible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols that is allthat are able to be expressed in ever y languagersquo He adds that

When it was announced that the Library contained all books the rstreaction was unbounded joy All men felt themselves the possessors of anintact and secret treasure (Borges 1999b 115)

In fact the Library is so huge that if millions of volumes were wantonlydestroyed any reduction would be in nitesimal as although each book isunique and irreplaceable lsquothere are always several hundred thousandimperfect facsimiles ndash books that differ by no more that a single letter or acommarsquo (Borges 1999b 116) The narrator goes on to speculate thatalthough he suspects that the human species is on the verge of extinctionthe Library will endure Commenting that lsquothose who picture the world asunlimited forget that the number of possible books is notrsquo the narrator con-cludes

The Library is unlimited but periodic If an eternal traveler should journeyin any direction he would nd after untold centuries that the samevolumes are repeated in the same disorder ndash which repeated becomesorder the Order (Borges 1999b 118)

Here we have two contrasting images of culture On the one hand there


is the Library a collection of texts which while they possess an order in thesense that there are repetitions gives little overall sense of order in termsof meaning or logical schemata Various scholars of the archive journeythrough it in the search for some ultimate order or meaning or seek tomystically summon it up without success The architecture of the archivewhile possessing order in the uniformity of its galleries and bookshelvesthe format and length of books the type of orthographic symbols used thisitself does not facilitate a uniform classi cation of the books Many peoplehave tried to produce catalogues and systems of classi cation but havebeen defeated by the sheer scope of the problem The Library amounts toan unmanageable labyrinth to get lost in In one sense the Library is alwaysalready in ruins Hence while the pendulum swings heavily on the side ofcompleteness in terms of housing almost all possible imaginable books italso swing heavily towards disorder as opposed to order in terms of ourcapacity to handle chart or make sense of it In terms of the Simmeliandichotomy it represents the overload of objective culture which swamps sub-jective culture On the other hand the Aleph stands for life in its immedi-acy There is no mediating code or textual system between the viewer andthe world Although it is a metaphysical or mystical concept from the per-spective of our time it can best be understood as a form of vision machinea lsquostatic vehiclersquo in the line of descent which runs from the cinema to tele-vision digital multimedia and virtual reality which can instantly and effort-lessly transport us into the heart of distant things (Virilio 1999 Armitage1999)2 The Aleph anticipates the shift in the nature of the interface fromscreens to sentient rooms to virtual environments It also anticipates thedrive towards empowerment through miniaturization being only a fewcentimetres across It offers speed exibility and mobility of images alongwith completeness and effortlessness of access

While the Aleph ful ls many aspects of the dream of technologicalreason it can be related to a further image of the accumulation of objec-tive culture William Gibsonrsquos depiction of cyberspace in his novel Neuro-mancer

A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimateoperators in ever y nation by children being taught mathematical con-cepts A graphic representation of data abstracted from the bank ofever y computer in the human system Unthinkable complexity Lines oflight ranged in the nonspace of the mind clusters and constellations ofdata Like city lights receding (Gibson 1986 51)

In this ctional world cyberspace is a global electronic informationnetwork lsquothe matrixrsquo which operators can access (lsquojack-inrsquo) through head-sets (lsquotrodesrsquo) via a computer terminal (lsquocyberspace deckrsquo) Once in thematrix operators can lsquo yrsquo and zoom into any part of the three-dimensionalvirtual reality system of data coded into various colourful iconic architec-tural forms laid out beneath her like a vast metropolis a city of data a Bor-gesian library of vast databases containing all a culturersquos deposited wealth


where every document is potentially available every recording playable andevery picture viewable (see Featherstone and Burrows 1995) While Gib-sonian cyberspace scores high on the level of completeness as a parallelworld which has replicated all of objective culture the virtual world con-tains many of the same power struggles which dominate the access to infor-mation in the everyday world Hence there are electronically protectedno-go areas especially the military and corporate databases and there is acontinuous struggle for information which entails a continuous cycle ofintelligence gathering spying counter-intelligence and surveillance

We are currently being faced by the lsquodigitalization of culturersquo whichpromises enormous gains in the speed and mobility of access to infor-mation Nevertheless many of the questions raised by Simmel Borges andGibson still importantly remain Can the expansion of culture available atour ngertips be subjected to a meaningful ordering or is the desire toremedy fragmentation to be seen as clinging to a form of humanism withits emphasis upon cultivation of the persona and unity which are nowregarded as merely nostalgic as we begin to explore post-human formsWhat potential transformations of the human sensor y apparatus andhabitus will occur as all cultural production and consumption becomesincreasingly mediated through information technologies and people haveto learn to inhabit technological cultures To what extent will the scope andexpansion in the availability and ease of access to cultural sources increaseour concern for detail and complexity Something which leads to therelated problems of closure of drawing boundaries around a work both inconception and execution (the use of hypertext to move between and jumpacross electronic texts being a central aspect which will be discussedbelow) If we are faced by a vast unbounded sea of data how will navigationbe managed and legitimated Will disintermediation the direct access tocultural records and resources from those outside cultural institutions leadto a decline in intellectual and academic power or will the increased scopeand complexity overwhelm the untutored user and lead to greater demandsfor reintermediation involving the context framing and mapping skills ofcultural intermediaries

It has often been observed that sociology developed its referent lsquosocietyrsquoas a generic type in close relation to the needs of the nascent state in orderto establish itself as a bounded separate administrative entity This led tothe neglect of analysing the relations between states or social and culturalphenomena which were formed beyond or disputed the authority claimsof the state (Tenbruck 1994 Wallerstein 1991) If libraries museumsarchives and other cultural repositories developed in conjunction with thestate we need to consider the trajectory of the power struggles between stateelites administrators and wider publics over their aims and purposes Yetwhat happens when we move to widen the cultural frame of referencebeyond the authority of the state to take into account globalization pro-cesses the increased ow of information images goods money and people(Appadurai 1990 Lash and Urry 1994) Is this merely to be considered as


a process of state deregulation or are there processes of reregulationbeginning to take place on a transnational level that could lead towards thedevelopment of global cultural institutions and a global public sphere

If one of the potentials of the new communications technologies is tofurther the development of transnational public spheres (Appadurai 1996)it is also clear that the driving impetus behind globalization has been theuse of information technologies by transnational corporations extendingtheir scope through the development of electronic networks Informationand culture are valuable commodities hence corporations have beensetting up their own electronic archives and databases for commercial pur-poses One of the potentials of the new information technologies such asthe Internet is for new principles of classication and connectivity todevelop such as hypertext which favours serendipity and the establishmentof less hierarchical linkages Yet if the capacity to jump out of one text intoanother is regulated by market imperatives and every access point beyondonersquos own little domain into the collective virtual archive entails passingthrough an electronic toll-gate then the potential for a genuine globalpublic cultural archive is diminished With this one might add also ridesthe future of the university for the growth of private universities in manyparts of the world and the establishment of consortia to develop Internetuniversities with global scope in the USA not only establishes a newrelationship between the state and higher education but also will producea different relationship to the library the archive and cultural repositorieswhich stand behind the canon and syllabi In short who will archive culturesin the future ndash the state or the corporations or the public

THE ARCHIVE

The trouble de lrsquoarchive stems from a mal drsquoarchive We are en mal drsquoarchivein need of archives It is to burn with a passion It is never to rest inter-minably from searching the archive right when it slips away It is to runafter the archive even if therersquos too much of it right where somethingin it anarchives itself It is to have a compulsive repetitive and nostalgicdesire to return to the origin a homesickness a nostalgia for the returnto the most archaic place of absolute commencement (Derrida 1996 91)

According to Derrida (1996 2) the term archive derives from the Greekaekheion a term which rst refers to a house which is lsquothe residence of thesuperior magistrates the archons those who commandedrsquo It was a placewhere of cial documents were led with the archons not only acting as theguardians of the documents but also having the hermeneutic right to inter-pret the archives and speak the law3 This involves what Derrida (1996 3)refers to as lsquothe archontic principlersquo the archive requires that the docu-ments are gathered together in some place Something which entails thepower of consignation that the documents are coordinated together into a


single system that possesses a unity of identi cation and classi cation whichensures that there cannot be any separate or secret cache While the archivethus conceived was one source for the sovereignty and legitimacy of rulersand power holders the grounds for the law and the knowledge base for theidentity of the collectivity it has also been increasingly seen as the reposi-tory of the national memory4 The archive is the site for the accumulationof primary sources from which history is constructed (Lynch 1999 67)This does not mean that what goes into the archive is not the source of overtand covert struggles ndash far from it

There is a politics of the archive given its role in grounding authority andthe social order and a struggle to turn archives from a private or restrictedaccess place into one of open public access The Greek model is of coursenot the only model of the archive Le Goff (1992) refers to the ways in whicharchives along with other lsquomemory institutionsrsquo such as museums andlibraries were tied to monarchical power He tells us that in Zimri-Lumrsquospalace in Mari (c 1785 BC) numerous tablets were found in an archivalcentre other early royal palaces housed diplomatic nancial and adminis-trative archives (see Osborne 1999 54ndash5)

With the development of the modern state the archive becomes a placefor the accumulation and storage of administrative records There is atension here between the assembly of archival materials for immediate usefor governmentality and state intelligence and the development of an openpublic archive that is the repository of the national memory This tensionis not just one of function but also of scope In the case of the developmentof the British Empire information gathering (encyclopaedic knowledge ofother peoples) was crucial both for purposes of administration and thelarger aim of sustaining its power potential in the lsquothe Great Gamersquo of theimperial power struggle for global hegemony within which it was locked AsRichards (1993 14 cited in Hevia 1999 239) remarks lsquothe archive was lessa speci c institution than an entire epistemological complex for repre-senting a comprehensive knowledge within the domain of Empirersquo Thisprocess required agents in and beyond the frontier regions of the Empireto seek out local knowledge much of it with a strong empiricist base afterthe rise of scienti c method and statistics in the wake of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment This also entailed delving into other less accessibleindeterminate archives the alien archives of Indian and Chinese languagesources5

In England the Public Record Of ce was founded in 1838 as lsquothe treas-ure house of the nationrsquos memoryrsquo yet it was not until the Library Act of1850 that the original concept of restricted access was modi ed in line withthe notion of the liberal subject to allow the entry of in lsquoone and allrsquo (Joyce1999 38) Likewise in France after 1870 Pierre Nora (1994ndash8) tells us thata professional positivist history was constructed which drew on the archiveto constitute a lsquomemory nationrsquo (Joyce 1999 37) The archive formed thebasis for the emergence of not only the national but also the social and theclose relationship between the national and the social which emerged in


the nineteenth centur y With regard to Germany Wolgang Ernst (199914) makes a distinction borrowing a term from computing between ROM(programmable read only memory) and RAM (random access memory)From 1806ndash1918 the network of Prussian state archives functioned as lsquoanon-discursive juridical ROMrsquo solely for the use of the bureaucratic systemThe separation of those records which were still essential for state businessfrom les which were seen as lsquosimplyrsquo historical value meant the separationof a RAM archive from a ROM one A historico-cultural notion of thearchive developed in the late-nineteenth century to challenge the legal par-adigm with the development of German historicism and sought to includelsquoall traces of human actionrsquo putting the emphasis upon not just what isstored but what of the present has to be processed ltered and producedfor the archive (Ernst 1999 16)

The discipline of history thus placed a premium on lsquoarchival credibilityrsquoThe archive is a site for particular kinds of knowledge and styles of reason-ing which legitimated a type of expertise lsquothe right to make statementsabout the past about history about change about fate and by extensionin a deliberately delimited way about the future the right not necessarilyto predict the workings of providence still less to dictate them but to acertain kind of providential seriousnessrsquo (Osborne 1999 54) Archive reasonis a kind of reason concerned with detail it directs us constantly away fromthe big generalization down into the particularity and singularity of theevent Yet this singularity is itself produced through a discriminating gazeand entails an lsquoaesthetics of perceptionrsquo to enable the signi cant to be liftedout from the mass of detail Given that detail can mean just about anythingthe focus shifts to the mundane and ever yday life as Osborne (1999 59)puts it lsquoIf royal memory was a memory of the sovereign and great acts thearchival memory in its modern forms is a memory ndash even when it focuseson the great and the powerful themselves ndash of everyday detailrsquo From deTocqueville onwards the concern has been to focus not just on the singu-larity of great events but on the everyday which is an effect of the collec-tion of mundane information We nd this concern too in Foucaultrsquos focuson how religious confession gives way to administrative confession in whicheverything has to be registered in writing and accumulated in dossiers andarchives (Osborne 1999 61)

It is well-known that in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972 130) Foucaultemployed a broader non-empirical notion of the archive Here the archivedoes not refer to the collection of documents the archive as a site and insti-tution but lsquothe general system of the formation and transformation of state-mentsrsquo The archive then has a virtual existence and amounts to the systemwhich governs the emergence of enunciations For Foucault the archive islsquothe sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon a person as documentsattesting to its own past or as evidence of a continuing identityrsquo (1972 129cited in Osborne 1999 53) Yet the practice of Foucaultrsquos writing took himinto archival detail to use the archive to write alternative histories andrecover the commonplaces of ordinary lives This resonates with the


writings of Stanley Cavell who argues that it is the mundaneness and inef-fability of the ever yday that gives the ordinary something of the Freudianuncanny He remarks that lsquoThe ever yday is what we cannot but aspire tosince it appears to us as lost to usrsquo He adds lsquothe world must be regainedevery day in repetition regained as gonersquo (Cavell 1994 171 172 quotedin Osborne 1999 62 63) In effect archival reason provides a comfortingroutine repetition through its focus on the ordinary in the face of thedoubts scepticism and relativism which history also induces Once we takethis broader view of the archive of culture it is clear that the commonplaceand the ever yday encompass vast realms of life and potentially anything canbecome signi cant for archival reason the various personal collections inbiscuit-tins shoe-boxes and old suitcases in the attic which are all aroundus (Bradley 1999) Here we think too of the photographic archives andmuseums and the extensive use of home video cameras whose footage mayone day be collected by new archival entrepreneurs To this we can add theproblem of archiving electronic information such as the Internet Thepotential for controversies over the ownership and guardianship of archiveshas also grown apace Here we think of the accusations of deliberate dis-tortion tampering and wanton destruction which have surrounded thearchives of Sylvia Plath or Rudyard Kipling (Velody 1998 Kemp 1998 35)

Rather than see the archive as a speci c place in which we depositrecords documents photographs lm video and all the minutiae onwhich culture is inscribed should the walls of the archive be extended andplaced around the ever yday world If everything can potentially be of sig-ni cance should not part of the archive fever be to record and documenteverything as it could one day be useful The problem then becomes notwhat to put into the archive but what one dare leave out The Freudianvision of the unconscious is of a kind of archive in which ever ything experi-enced in the past resides ready for access and recovery once we discoverthe code The archive fever is to attempt to return to the lived origin theeveryday experience which is the source of the imperfect and distortedmemories which are our archives and whose transience and forgettingmakes us uncomfortable (Derrida 1996 92) Many have sought to recap-ture through memory traces the richness of that everyday life one of themost notable efforts being Proustrsquos Agrave la Recherche du temps perdu Yet what ismore unusual are those who seek to archive their lives as they live themThe French installation artist Christian Boltanski began a project to recordhis life as he lived it and collect all the documents pertaining to his life(Hobbs 1998) This collapsing of the boundar y between art and life hasbeen a familiar one since Dada and Surrealism and re-emerged in the PopArt of the 1960s Life as art or as archived through art was captured insome of Andy Warholrsquos movies for instance in the 8 hour movie of awoman asleep in bed which sought to faithfully record the second by secondrepetitive mundanity of the whole process of everyday living ndash or sleeping6

The sense of incompleteness and shifting sites of archival work is furtheremphasized by Joyce (1999) who draws attention to the effects of the


changing relationship between the nation and the social As the lsquomemorynationrsquo gives way to lsquohistoricized memoryrsquo a new massively expandedarchive open to democratic scrutiny and counter claims comes into viewWith the transformation of the nation and the social the lsquomemory nationrsquodisappears and through the experience of rapid change new temporalitiesappear along with new sites of memory (one need only to think of the impli-cations of multiculturalism here) If we have in recent years seen the rise ofmuseums which provide contested dialogical and multivocal histories jux-taposing the inner accounts of histories of slavery and oppression along-side ofcial histories (Pieterse 1997 Bennett 1995) then the archive whichis the ground for the particular contingent construction is constantly shift-ing and expanding its boundaries This process necessarily directs thearchival gaze towards the sites from which the archive is drawn and themediating role of the historian or researcher The latterrsquos experiences andmemories now cease to be an impediment to be overcome but rather aresource a site of memory where the archive can be seen actively to be atwork Here it is germane to recall the remarks of the urban historian PatrickJoyce (1999 47) who is well aware that the city archive is not merely whatis in the library but is also the city which surrounds the library

Therefore the street is my archive the built environment is my archiveHowever I walk now in the city that I wish to describe then The personwho walks in this city now is also the boy who once walked in that citythen in this case London The archive in my case the library and especi-ally the public library certainly archives the street and the built environ-ment but of course it does not exhaust their meaning which is producedout of the experience of these things an experience refracted throughmemory not least memories of class

If the trade of the archivist especially the urban researcher necessarilyentails a certain capacity for acircnerie then it is only a small step to Walter Ben-jaminrsquos experiences of walking the city of Paris and constructing his own per-sonal archive that provided the basis for his un nished Passagen-Werk orArcades Project (1982) Benjamin an avowed collector was very muchattuned to the details the minutiae of everyday life such as tickets handbillsposters postcards newspapers nameplates photographs in his attempt toconstruct a social and cultural history of Paris in the nineteenth centuryThis was evident both in his collection of a vast range of material and in hiselaborate ling system which used key words the various Konvoluts such as(A) Arcades Novelty shops salesmen (B) Fashion (L) Dream City andDream House Dreams of the Future Anthropological Nihilism Jung etc in which thousands of documents were classied under an elaborate keyword system (Buck-Morss 1989 50) He closely followed the principle of cita-tion in which the detritus and minutiae of urban life were asked to speak forthemselves Re ecting on his method he remarked lsquoFormula constructionfrom facts Construction through the complete elimination of theoryrsquo (Ben-jamin GS vol V quoted in Frisby 1994 97)


Here the method was one of literary montage in which lsquothe shocklikemontage of the materialrsquo the lsquokaleidoscopic fortuitous juxtaposition ofshop signs and window displaysrsquo was assumed to do the theoretical work(Buck-Morss 1989 73ndash4) The sophisticated methodological re exivity atwork here is very much evident montage in the construction of the workre ects the montage in the consumer culture urban cityscape the text isconstructed like a city lsquowith a thousand gatewaysrsquo to re ect the actual com-plexity of the city the reader is encouraged to indulge in intellectualacircnerie to engage with a text which has been written about a city throughwhich acircneurs strolled in the nineteenth centur y and now in which theauthor himself strolls as a researcher-acircneur in order to summon up noveljuxtapositions and half-remembered impressions which will stimulate therecollecting and researching process (see Featherstone 1998)

The visual nature of many sources in nineteenth centur y metropolitanconsumer cultures also persuaded Benjamin that the researcher shouldconceptualize and structure his research through a sensitivity to the visualform As he pointedly remarks lsquohistory breaks down into images not intostoriesrsquo (N11 4 Smith (ed) 1989 67 cited in Gilloch 1996 112) Photog-raphy in particular captured the immediacy of everyday life the transienceand contingency of the moment that aided the visualization of the past asan image It enables an image of the past to ash up in the now of thepresent and trigger off a Proustian meacutemoire involontaire a spontaneous andunexpected momentary sensation and impression of the past For Ben-jamin such lsquodialectical imagesrsquo made possible a form of redemption of pastmoments which allowed others to speak and gave voice to what had beenunsaid (Gilloch 1996 114) Benjamin was also aware of the way in which lm through its use of close-ups slow-motion and montage best capturedthe rhythms and shocks the momentary and eeting sensations which tookthe viewer into the immediacy and detail of urban life (Gilloch 1996 45)Hence Benjamin sought to provide a lsquosustained presentation of concreteexperiencersquo to provide the most extreme sense of concreteness of an era(Caygill 1998 132) Yet however much we want to see Benjamin as develop-ing his archive of the city in order to redeem the immediacy of the past thedetective piecing together fragmentary clues to discover what actually hap-pened there is also the sense that the momentary recoveries themselvesmust remain incomplete and partial7 In effect the fragments the discardedminutiae of urban life can never be pieced together again they remain tan-talizing in the capacity to speak to us Yet they speak in an allegoricalmanner summoning up half-remembered memories which only lead toother incomplete allegories broken allegories for which no nal resolutionis possible Ultimately then Benjaminrsquos text-as-city with its eschewal of con-ventional narrative structures has a unifying labyrinthine quality to it thereare many portals of entry repetitions circlings and crossing through thesame places from different directions which itself echoes the orderlydis-orderly structures of urban ever yday life8 A textual architecture andmethod that we can speculate could have been more fully realized through


the use of new electronic information technologies with hypertext andmultimedia Hypertext would facilitate the multiple entr y points and non-linear associational jumps across the material and multimedia wouldpermit the use of a fuller range of sources lm photographs soundsmusic voice recordings which could be accessed in their own right orallowed to run concurrently with the text

THE ELECTRONIC ARCHIVE

If the experience of the modern metropolis summoned up for Benjaminthe possibility of developing a new categorical framework which stressedmovement and complexity and was better able to capture the transitivity ofurban life through categories such as lsquoporosityrsquo lsquothresholdrsquo and lsquoshockrsquo(Caygill 1998 120) then we can add the corollary that what some refer toas a second major shift within modernity or the lsquosecond media agersquo (Poster1995) premised on the development of information technology offers thechallenge to extend further or even rethink this whole categorical frame-work If the modern city provided an opportunity to rework the relation-ship between the archive and everyday life then the architecture of the datacity what has been referred to as the lsquocity of bitsrsquo (Mitchell 1995) can takethis process into a range of new directions and new agendas for sociologyEspecially so if we cease to regard information technology as merely a toolbut rather see it more as a lsquothird naturersquo in the process of delineation anew virtual world we are only just starting to learn how to inhabit whichwill stand alongside the original lsquo rstrsquo nature of the biosphere and thelsquosecondrsquo nature the humanly constructed world of the built environmentand material technologies (see Luke 1999)

Margaret Morse (1998 187) has remarked that lsquothe Internet is amongstthe greatest architecture that the world has ever knownrsquo pointing to itslsquoelegant nonhierarchical rhizomatic globalrsquo structure Yet the virtual archi-tecture of cyberspace could not be further away from that of the Gothiccathedral with which she favourably compares it Given the incompletenature of the Internet the more appropriate architectural metaphor is thatof an open building site parts of which are already falling into ruin ratherthan something that has been planned and completed Furthermorewhereas a building has a self-evident visual presence the architecture of theInternet resides somewhere hidden behind the screen Relatively few usersare aware of the structure of the digital electronic networks The imageryemployed in terminology such as lsquodata owsrsquo or lsquobit streamsrsquo summons up uidity speed and mobility Yet little attention is given to the channellingand structuring effect of the software and the hardware Not only does theprogrammer specify the hypertext and hyperlinks which inscribes thepotential movements of the user or consumer it has also been argued thatwe remain unaware of the writing that precedes our own possibilities forwriting since the lsquohuman writing passes through channels already laid out


in computer hardware and communication channels the miniaturizedwriting in the sand that links thousands of transistors on a silicon chiprsquo(Kittler cited in Tabbi 1997 243)

Although the term lsquocyberspacersquo often refers to the virtual spaces of com-puter networks it has been pointed out that virtual spaces are not in facttrue spaces but collections of separate objects In effect lsquothere is no spacein cyberspacersquo (Manovich 1997 297) The distinction between haptic andoptic perception is useful here haptic perception isolates the object in the eld as a separate entity whereas optic perception uni es objects in aspatial continuum Three-dimensional virtual spaces seem to operate likesystematic Renaissance space conceived of as existing prior to objects Yetcomputer-generated worlds are more haptic than systematic with the mostcommonly used 3D computer graphics technique being polygonal model-ling which involves the superimposition of objects over a backgroundrather than placing them in space A perspectival projection creates theillusion that the objects are placed together but in fact they have no con-nection at all (Manovich 1997 298) Hence the space of the web cannot bethought of as a coherent totality rather it is an aggregate space a collec-tion of numerous les which may well be hyper-linked but have no overallperspective to unite them VRML (virtual reality markup language) whichhas recently been introduced an anticipation of the ctional cyberspaceworlds of William Gibson (1986) and Neal Stephenson (1992) works onthe same principles A virtual world has a uid ontology which is affectedby the actions of the user with more detailed lled in the longer one stopsin a particular place Hence while it may be possible to create a virtualarchive in cyberspace as for example in the popular lm Disclosure (1995)where the leading character played by Michael Douglas searches for les inthe form of books as he lsquowalksrsquo through a database in the form of a three-dimensional replica of the New York Public Library (see discussion in Fidler1997 183) the space is constituted in a very different way from the spacesof everyday life

To carry out research in the archive one needs to make a catalogue asystem of classifying the data or materials which has some ordering func-tion and helps us deal with the problems of selectivity and navigation Thesimplest method is to give the data an accession number based upon thedate of arrival (see Ernst 1999 17 for a discussion of the German archives)but this tells us little about the content of what is classi ed With thedevelopment of the Library material becomes systematically classi ed andsearchable through the catalogue the index and the bibliography Yet acentral problem of the Dewey system which became the most widelyadopted form of cataloguing lay in the classi cation of interstitial areasbetween the clearly demarcated elds of knowledge In addition there wasthe problem of how to insert new emergent elds into the hierarchy of sub-divided elds and cope with the rise of cross and inter-disciplinarity (Cubitt1998 12) The main purpose of the library system was to enable the readerto nd a particular book or locate the range of books written by a speci c


author It was the incapacity of the existing systems to cope with innovationwhich led to new systems such as Bliss and Ranganathanrsquos Colon Classi -cation These focused not only on the de ning core subject of a book buton the wider range of other aspects it also incorporated Hence the advan-tage of such systems was that they enabled the location of books by sharedinterests even if they lsquobelongedrsquo to different disciplinary categories (Cubitt1998 12) The Colon system then was developed around a synthetic prin-ciple which has been referred to as lsquothe grandparent of internet searchenginesrsquo (Cubitt 1998 12)

Where the electronic library scores in exibility mobility and speed overthe actually existing library of books is that the search engine the cata-logue or classi catory system does not have to remain external to the ma-terial Electronic search engines become possible when texts and othercultural objects (images sounds) have become digitized reduced to elec-tronic data immense heaps of bits They work by foraging all the les ofthe database to discover all possible matches to the bit-string translation ofthe original request (Fidler 1997 181) Over the last decade we have seenthe introduction of databases which are becoming widely used informationsystems Here we think of the world-wide success of systems such as Medlinealong with a range of electronic expert systems in law and other elds(Lanham 1993 122) In business government and the military eld in theUSA training increasingly takes place through interactive videodisc whichenable searches and rapid movements through and across material Thishas become familiar with the availability of the Oxford English Dictionaryand Encyclopaedia Brittanica in CD-ROM formats the same search prin-ciples are employed in on-line Internet databases

A key aspect of the electronic search and research process is the use ofhypertext In contrast to the ideal of memory as a store into which onedescends to pull things out hypertext works on a less hierarchical morelateral view of knowledge as the links between data As Caygill (1999 8)remarks lsquothe key to the conceptual organization was a system of lateralnon-hierarchical links between arbitrary nodesrsquo which facilitated the track-ing of associations and favoured the inventive developing of new structuresnot just retrieving information It facilitates lateral jumps out of a particu-lar page or text into another as long as the other texts are constructedusing the same HTML (hypertext markup language) This means that theboundaries of a particular text become uid one does not just read verti-cally down the page but increasingly laterally as when one nds a particu-lar reference interesting say the title of a book one clicks on it and jumpsout of the original document into a summary of the book from which onecould jump again into the actual text or details of the authorrsquos life herother books or numerous other associative links The series of associativechains one follows or constructs facilitates a form of serendipity and brows-ing which may lead to creative insights and a loss of a sense of the relevanceof the initial starting point This also revolutionizes the nature of footnotesfrom being marginal and less signi cant data they grow into the status of


portals the jumping off points to other texts the peripheral byways cannow become the major routes to other texts9

In one sense this is not new most scholars from time to time browse inthe library or when they write pull out books from the shelves of their ownpersonal library which often lie about the place in jumbled piles to enrichthe associative possibilities of the writing process This is why scholars in thepast depended on large personal libraries and also why they so muchenjoyed the pleasures of the book collector who as Benjamin (1970 60)remarked is able to experience the tensions between order and disorderthe chaos of memories and sense of chance and fate which the particularcollection of texts summon up along with onersquos own particular habits ofreading and use which harden into the equivalent of the order of the cata-logue

The creativity of the reading process made possible through hypertextlinkages can work two ways On the one hand the words the author haschosen to hypertext will direct the gaze of the reader to a particularinterpretation of the text and its associative eld and perhaps curtail thecapacity of the reader to make jumps and inferences not intended by theauthor On the other hand once the reader has escaped the original docu-ment the way ahead is open and authorial intentions and authority can soonfade into the background (Levinson 1997 140) In addition when themateriality of a book gives way to the immateriality of electronic texts thatdo not have a speci c location there is a new freedom of composition froma series of in nitely manipulable fragments Instead of immediately appre-hension of the whole work as is the case with the visible object of the bookelectronic texts introduce lsquolengthy navigation in textual archipelagos whichhave neither shores nor bordersrsquo (Chartier 1995 18) With a book we canonly underline or write in the margins with electronic text we can copyrecompose move things around Books work off a strong distinctionbetween author and reader whereas with electronic texts lsquothe readerbecomes its coauthorrsquo (Chartier 1995 20)

A further important aspect of the capacity to rewrite the text is the ca-pacity to reformat it in terms of a shift in the alphabetimage ratio Thismeans an increased use of computer graphic images in texts as is alreadyoccurring in medical and scienti c research and the arts It also means anincreasing use of visualization as a conceptual tool something particularlyapplicable in research on scienti c and artistic chaotic systems along witha whole host of other possible applications in the arts and social sciencesThe capacity of electronic text to offer a much wider repertoire of perfor-mative signs (using certain letters symbols or coloured text) to indicatemood it is argued will also increase (Lanham 1993 127ndash8) This willexpand the rhetorical possibilities and the stylization of virtual public lifeIf writing increasingly becomes a more dynamic network of visual andverbal symbols then the resultant multi- or hypermedia mixture of alpha-betic iconic and auditory information will not only help to ful l one ofthe long standing dreams of the visual arts with the interchangeability of


forms through digitalization but also will alter the nature of intellectualand academic production and reception something which will have a widerage of implications for the future of the university How one archives suchhypermedia textual productions with their greater level of transitivity andinteractivity which makes the electronic text take on some of the dynamismof the oral text and threatens to abolish the authority of the lsquo xed editionrsquois another major issue (Lanhan 1993 xi)

There is a further aspect of hypertext which has implications for ourcapacity to handle and archive culture the question of scope or scale Onceone is joined up to other computers through the Internet and if largeamounts of textual imagistic and oral material are digitized and hyper-texted and held in electronic databases around the world there is intheory little reason why one could not access any aspect of this world ofculture This reintroduces the problem of the scaling decision how andwhere one will place the limits of what is to be read and decide on theappropriate level of generality Tim Berners-Lee the founder of the WorldWide Web was very much attuned to this question He saw the Web as notmerely a mechanism for information retrieval from a global archive Ratherit offered the potential of a new inventive relationship to knowledge thatovercame the hierarchical relationship found in the traditional archiveThe operating systems he devised based on HTML URL (UniformResource Location) and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocols) weredesigned to ful l the creative potential of hypertext and worked well withthe dynamic and unpredictable ows of information of emergent systems(Caygill 1999 9) Yet it can be argued that the WWW has largely lost theinventive side of hypertext and instead has become an archival system basedupon information retrieval from an existing stock For Berners-Lee theproblem is that the current con guration of the Web is limited to receivermode with the interactivity being still very much of the broadcast or markettype (limited to the act of purchase lsquoclickrsquo) This is a long way from Berners-Leersquos vision of a collective medium with the lsquoability to annotate to interactto up-date informationrsquo (Caygill 1999 9) The threat to the Web from anarrowing down to the interests of business is to become a lsquoglobalmarketmonoculturersquo The state also represents another form of threatwith its concern to enforce censorship and intellectual property rightsWith the recent US Supreme Courtrsquos ruling along with the technical dif -culties of policing and enforcement the state has for the moment pulledback from the question of censorship but intellectual property rights are amuch more central element of market culture and may not be so easily dis-carded As Caygill (1999 10) comments

At the core of Hypertext is the idea of linkages between documents ndash ifa right of intellectual property is extended to a link in a hypertext thenthe system as a whole is under threat Berners-Leersquos response to theseproblems is to propose a constitution for WWW inaugurating a lsquoWeb oftrustrsquo This takes the form of a new culture ndash lsquowe have to develop a culture


to help people appreciate how these tools change the way information isorganised how work is organised how life is organisedrsquo This is no lessthan a new culture of memory in which memory is no longer located inspeci c sites or accessible according to traditional mnemonics and is nolonger a stock to which it is necessar y to gain access with all the hierar-chical controls that this entails

Here the stakes are high if linkages are seen in a restricted sense as link-ages between a de ned set of objects then governments will have greatercontrol over information forms of knowledge and power relations If onthe other hand knowledge ceases to be seen as separate pieces of matterbut as relational products of linkages then it can be invented and producedby everybody This is the prospect Lyotard (1984) referred to in The Post-modern Condition when the databases not owned or controlled by any par-ticular sets of interests and information are widely accessible able to oweasily and become recon gured within an open network

The current reality is of course somewhat different The democratic andanarchistic dreams of the early Web pioneers are not just threatened by thecommercialization of the Internet but the development by large corpora-tions of intranets that is re-walled protective networks (Sassen 1999) ndashsomething which is a step along the way towards the dark portrait of thederegulated world of corporate power struggles over information depictedby William Gibson (1986) Yet the situation is by no means a closed oneand there are still grounds to see the Internet as furthering the develop-ment of a virtual public sphere with global scope which is able to develop exible alliances between social movements NGOs foundations andbroader publics10

Whatever the eventual format the Internet takes there remains the ques-tion of its archiving ability If the Internet becomes a major informationaland cultural resource which is central to the modes of governmentalityinterdependencies and power struggles which run through politics workand everyday life then it is important that it too should be archived Giventhe instabilities of electronic data storage and the capacity for material tobe lost or transformed to argue that the storage system should be electronicis by no means conclusive if one wants to achieve completeness of data Yetan Internet archive which is printed off and kept in ling cabinets or card-board boxes would have more than a certain irony Hence an Internetarchive would have to be stored in electronic format to preserve a sem-blance of its workability its capacity to make links and hypertext jumpsbetween and within sites Given the extent and rate of expansion of theInternet ndash the fact that some parts are growing in an unmanageable andchaotic manner while other parts become abandoned and fall into ruins ndashto archive it would be a daunting task Yet this project is being confrontedby the Internet Archive a new organization collecting public materials onthe Internet in order to construct a digital library which will include lsquoallpublicly accessible World Wide Web pages the Gopher highway and the


Netnews bulletin board system and downloadable softwarersquo (Kahle 19961) The project contains considerable technical problems in shifting thecollection to new operating systems that change every ten years along withpreserving the software to read discarded formats and simulating the oldmachines that they ran on The extent of the Web in 1996 was estimated at50 million pages with the average page only online for 75 days ndash and thenumber of pages is doubling every year In 1996 the size was estimated at15 terabytes (or million megabytes)

A further illustration of the problem faced by the archivist in the futureis the fact that many administrative records and informal material and nowproduced through the Internet intranets and email The National Archivesand Records Administration in Washington DC is currently consideringwhether to collectcataloguestore all electronic communications of theClinton and other administrations The NARA will face massive problemsof scope in trying to devise programmes to sift through the material to sep-arate worthless trivia from important les It is estimated that by the end ofthe Clinton administration NARA will have received 16ndash24 million elec-tronic messages With regard to the problem of access and storage oneoption would be to store printed hard copies but this would mean the lossof the original electronic document and the erasure of the histories thatmark the origins of electronic versions and can be an aid to prove that ithas not been overwritten or tampered with (Brown and Davis-Brown 199824) The problem with archiving e-mails is that they are a new form whichin many ways is nearer to ever yday speech in its lack of deliberation infor-mality of expression and rapidity of interchange It is a long way from theart of letter writing by hand which had a very different relationship tothought processes and pace of interchanges E-mail is transforming therelationship between the private the public and the secret (public orprivate) Hence e-mail technology should not be seen as merely a newmoment in the process of recording but rather as something that con-structs or constitutes the archivable event Jacques Derrida (1996 16) raisesthe question what would have been the impact on the archivization ofpsychoanalysis if Freud along with his partners and disciples instead ofwriting thousands of letters by hand had used e-mail Derrida argues thatthis would have

transformed the history of psychoanalysis from top to bottom and in themost initial inside of its production in its very events This is another wayof saying that the archive as printing writing prosthesis or hypomnesictechnique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserv-ing an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case suchas without the archive one still believes it was or will have been No thetechnical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structureof the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in itsrelationship to the future The archivization produces as much as itrecords the event


THE BODY IN THE ARCHIVE

Shifts in archival technology do not merely change the form within whichculture is recorded but very much in uence the future content of thearchive by changing the conditions under which culture is produced andenacted As Derrida (1996 18) remarks lsquowhat is no longer archived in thesame way is no longer lived in the same wayrsquo We are entering a phase ofhistory in which the availability of recording devices to conserve and rep-resent information about human beings their culture and the externalnature abound Hence there is an expansion of the means with whichpeople are recording and archiving their own lives through video-camerasand digital computer editing In some cases it seems that public and privaterituals and ceremonies only become realizable through their enactmentand staging for recording technologies as in the case of the videoing ofweddings births etc These may be used to constitute and reinforce tra-ditional narratives of centred identities At the same time there has alsobeen an expansion in the amount of information held on members of thepublic in government and corporate databases What is interesting aboutthe information collected and stored here is that it is used to constitutepartial or para-identities According to Mark Poster (1995 91) the data-bases seek to gather large comprehensive elds of information from whichrepresentations about individuals can be constructed Hence a person willhave a new form of presence a partial identity de ned for the purposes ofthose who administer and use the databases This suggests a differentrelationship between knowledge and power to the one Foucault arguedoccurred with the panopticon which constituted the modern lsquointeriorizedrsquosubject an individual with a strong sense of centred inner identity In thecase of the lsquosuper-panopticonrsquo or database society individuals are consti-tuted with dispersed identities identities that reside in the database or elec-tronic archive which the person may be completely unaware of (Poster1995 93) Governmentality ceases to only be achieved only through theregimes of lsquobio-powerrsquo which subject bodies to disciplinary control it is alsomade possible through the information which constitutes the virtual bodyin the archive11 One aspect of the struggle for more open access to data-bases will therefore focus on the recovery of this virtual body in the archive

(Date accepted August 1999) Mike FeatherstoneHumanities Faculty

Nottingham-Trent University

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank Mike Hepworth Neal Curtis Harriet Bradley andIrving Velody for their help and support in writing this piece


NOTES


1 As we shall see below the organiz-ing classi catory and unifyingdisunify-ing processes at work in the metropolis andconsumer culture also preoccupied WalterBenjamin (1982) in his Passagen-Werk orArcades Project

2 It is interesting to note that Borges(1999a 276) in lsquoThe Alephrsquo presents aconversation between the narrator and thediscover of the Aleph in which the latterobserves that the modern technologies ofthe great cities ( lm telephone etc) hadrendered the act of travelling supereroga-tory Something which is not only taken upby Virilio but by commentators on cyber-space who point to the end of tourism (SeePenley l992)

3 Caygill (1999 2) reminds us thataccording to Aristotle in The AtheniumConstitution lsquothe archon originated in theancient Greek transition from monarchicto aristocratic rule with the archons unlikethe kings being constitutionally requiredto respect precedentrsquo

4 To attack or destroy the archives isto threaten the basis of a culture an iden-tity a histor y and region In the winter of1992 in the war between Georgia and Abk-hazia members of the Georgian NationalGuard drew up outside the Abkhazia StateArchives threw in incendary grenades andreduced the archives to ashes (see Velody1998 3ndash4)

5 One only has to look at the work ofSaid (1978) on Orientalism or Spivak(1985) on India to see the ways in whichthe Orient as a product of the archivingprocess produced misreadings Indeed ithas been claimed that the process wherebythe archive which is the basis for GermanOriental Studies was arrived at displayed ahigh degree of arbitrariness with scholarspurchasing scrolls from the Cairo archivewhich were selected randomly or cap-riciously and then shipped back toGermany (Schulze 1987)

6 A recent Hollywood movie lsquoTheTruman Showrsquo (1998) starring Jim Careyhas a plot constructed around a televisionsoap opera which focuses on the trials andtribulations in the everyday life of an ordi-nary family man who was surreptitiouslyfollowed everywhere by a TV camera crew

which recorded large chunks of his life Inthis lm ever ything is a set and everyonebut the Carey character is an actor as heeventually discovers when he accidentallybreaks through the backcloth of the setinto the reality of the studio behind

7 For a discussion of the detective inrelation to Benjaminrsquos work on the city seeFrisby (1994) Norman Denzin (1995) hasargued that there has been a shift in theconception of the detective from the nine-teenth and early twentieth century gurewho is able to put together the clues fromthe lsquoarchive which is the cityrsquo and solve thecase to the detective who is always workingwith incompleteness and the impossibilityof resolution

8 It is interesting to note that whileworking on the Archives Project in Paris inthe 1930s Benjamin not only associatedwith surrealist artists but also with thosewho went under the name of the Collegravegede Sociologie such as Bataille CaillosGriaule and Leiris who sought to explorethe potential of surrealism as a method forcritical intellectual and academic studyLeiris for example in his lsquoanti-bookrsquoLrsquoAfrique fantocircme deployed a series ofentries with texts and images taken fromhis ethnographic fieldnotes and othersources which were laid out in montageform without a unifying narrative (seeFeatherstone 1995 140)

9 This seems an apt point to insert afootnote The serendipity of unusual con-nections can of course become short-circuited if the act of hypertext browsing isgiven over to lsquoan intelligent agentrsquo orlsquoknowbotrsquo search device programmedwith the userrsquos particular sense of rel-evance or set of tastes In this case theagent will only nd what it is looking forand if for example it is programmed tosearch for references on Walter Benjaminit will come back with masses of infor-mation on him but not a jot on TheodorAdorno

10 One of the oft-quoted examples ofthe success of Internet politics has beenthe use made of the Web by the Zapatistasin Chiapas Mexico to develop allianceswhich helped in the struggle to attainconstitutional guarantees for minority

Indian rights (see discussion in Castells1997)

11 There is not the space here toconsider the ways in which these twosystems are coming together through arange of technoscienti c processes such aslsquoRealVideo Surgeryrsquo (Thacker 1999) andthe lsquoVisible Human Projectrsquo (Curtis 1999)We also need to consider the ways in whichelectronic information storage is now con-ceived as possible through using living cel-lular structures and the parallels betweenthe information code and the DNA geneticcode In effect the possibilities of the bodyitself being seen as an information archivewhich stores and grounds a particular con-figuration of identy something seen aseither coded at the point of entry into lifeor subjected to recordings and re-codingsas one moves through the life course alsoneed to be explored

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appadurai A 1990 lsquoDisjuncture andDifference in the Global CulturalEconomyrsquo in M Featherstone(ed) GlobalCulture London Sagemdashmdash 1996 Modernity at Large MinneapolisMinnesota University PressArmitage J 1999 lsquoFrom Modernism toHypermodernism and Beyond An Inter-view with Paul Viriliorsquo Special issue onPaul Virilio Theor y Culture amp Society16(5ndash6) 25ndash55Benjamin W 1970 lsquoUnpacking MyLibrar yrsquo in Hannah Arendt (ed) Illumina-tions London Capemdashmdash 1982 Das Passagen-Werk 2 vols Frank-furt SuhrkampBennett T 1995 The Birth of the MuseumLondon RoutledgeBorges J L 1999a lsquoThe Alephrsquo in CollectedFiction London Allen Lane the PenguinPressmdashmdash 1999b lsquoThe Library of Babelrsquo in Col-lected Fiction London Allen Lane PenguinPressBradley H 1999 lsquo The Seduction of theArchiversquo Histor y of the Human Sciences12(2) 107ndash122

Brown R H and Davis-Brown B 1998lsquoThe Making of Memory the Politics ofArchives Libraries and Museums in theConstruction of National ConsciousnessrsquoHistory of the Human Sciences 11(4) 17ndash32Buck-Morss S 1989 The Dialectic of SeeingWalter Benjamin and the Arcades Project Cam-bridge MA MIT PressCastells M 1997 The Information AgeVolume 2 The Power of Identity OxfordBlackwellCavell S 1994 lsquoThe Uncanniness of theOrdinaryrsquo in Quest for the Ordinar y Lines ofSkepticism and Romanticism ChicagoChicago University PressCaygill H 1998 Walter Benjamin the Colourof Experience London Routledgemdashmdash 1999 lsquoMeno and the InternetBetween Memory and the Archiversquo Historyof the Human Sciences 12(2) 1ndash12Chartier R 1995 Forms and MeaningsPhiladelphia Pennsylvania UPCubitt S 1998 Digital Aesthetics LondonSageCurtis N 1999 lsquoThe Body as OutlawLyotard Kafka and the Visible HumanProjectrsquo Special issue on Body Modifi-cation Body amp Society 5(2ndash3) 249ndash67Denzin N 1995 lsquoChan is Missingrsquo in MFeatherstone and A Wernick (eds) Imagesof Ageing London SageDerrida J 1996 Archive Fever A FreudianImpression Chicago Chicago UPErnst W 1999 lsquoArchival action the archiveas ROM and its political instrumentaliza-tion under National Socialismrsquo History ofthe Human Sciences 12(2) 13ndash34Featherstone M 1991 lsquoGeorg Simmel AnIntroductionrsquo Theor y Culture amp Society8(3) 1ndash16mdashmdash 1995 Undoing Culture GlobalizationPostmodernism and Identity London Sagemdashmdash 1998 lsquoThe Flacircneur the City andVirtual Public Lifersquo Urban Studies 35(5ndash6)909ndash25Featherstone M and Burrows R 1995lsquoCultures of Technological Embodimentrsquoin M Featherstone and R Burrows (eds)CyberspaceCyberbodiesCyberpunk Cultures ofTechnologial Embodiment London SageFidler R 1997 Mediamorphosis LondonSageFoucault M 1972 The Archeology of Know-ledge London Tavistock


Frisby D 1994 lsquoThe Flacircneur and SocialTheoryrsquo in K Tester (ed) The FlacircneurLondon RoutledgeGibson W 1986 Neuromancer New YorkFantasia Press [ rst published 1984]Gilloch G 1996 Myth and Metropolis WalterBenjamin and the City Cambridge PolityHevia J M 1999 lsquoThe Archive State andthe Fear of Pollution From the OpiumWars to Fu-Manchursquo Cultural Studies 12(2)234ndash64Hobbs R 1998 lsquoBoltanskirsquos VisualArchivesrsquo Histor y of the Human Sciences11(4) 121ndash40Joyce P 1999 lsquoThe Politics of the LiberalArchiversquo Histor y of the Human Sciences12(2) 35ndash49Kahle B 1996 lsquoArchiving the Internetrsquohttp wwwarchiveorgsciam_articlehtml Also submitted to Scientic Americanfor March 1997 issueKemp S 1998 lsquoThe Archive on which theSun Never Set Rudyard Kiplingrsquo History ofthe Human Sciences 11(4) 33ndash48Lanham R A 1993 The Electronic WorldChicago Chicago UPLash S and Urry J 1994 Economies of Signsand Space London SageLe Goff J l992 History and Memory NewYork Columbia University PressLevinson P 1997 Soft Edge A NaturalHistory and Future of the Information Revol-ution London RoutledgeLuke T 1999 lsquoSimulated SovereigntyTelematic Territoriality the PoliticalEconomy of Cyberspacersquo in M Feather-stone and S Lash (eds) Spaces of CultureCity Nation World London SageLynch M 1999 lsquoArchive in FormationrsquoHistory of the Human Sciences 12(2) 65ndash87Lyotard J-F 1984 The Postmodern Con-dition Minneapolis Minnesota UniversityPressManovich L 1997 lsquoThe Aesthetics ofVirtual Worldsrsquo in A Kroker and M Kroker(eds) Digital Delirium St Martins PressMitchell W J T 1995 City of Bits Cam-bridge Mass MIT PressMorse M 1998 Virtualities BloomingtonIndiana UPNora P l994ndash98 Realms of Memor y Rethink-ing the French Past 3 Volumes New YorkColumbia University PressOsborne T 1999 lsquoThe Ordinariness of the

Archiversquo Histor y of the Human Sciences12(2) 51ndash64Penley C l992 lsquoFuture Travel Anthro-pology and Clultural Distance in an Age ofVirtual Reality Or a Past Seen from a Poss-ible Futurersquo Visual Anthropology Review 8(l)Pieterse J N 1997 lsquoMulticulturalism andMuseums Discourse and Others in the Ageof Globalizationrsquo Theory Culture amp Society14(4) 123ndash46Poster M 1995 The Second Media Age Cam-bridge PolityRichards T 1993 The Imperial ArchiveLondon RoutledgeSaid E W 1978 Orientalism Harmonds-worth PenguinSassen 1999 lsquoDigital Networks and Powerrsquoin M Featherstone and S Lash (eds) Spacesof Culture City Nation World LondonSageSchulze R 1987 lsquoMass Culture and IslamicCultural Production in the 19th CenturyMiddle Eastrsquo in G Stauth and S Zubaida(eds) Mass Culture Popular Culture andSocial Life in the Middle East BoulderCOWestview PressSimmel G 1997a lsquoThe Concept andTragedy of Culturersquo in D Frisby and MFeatherstone (eds) Simmel on CultureLondon Sagemdashmdash 1997b lsquoThe Future of Our Culturersquo inD Frisby and M Featherstone (eds) Simmelon Culture London Sagemdashmdash 1997c lsquoThe Berlin Trade Exhibitionrsquoin D Frisby and M Featherstone (eds)Simmel on Culture London SageSpivak G 1985 lsquoThe Rani of Surmurrsquo inF Barker P Hulme et al (eds) Europe andits Other Volume 1 Colchester Essex UPSteedman C 1998 lsquoThe Space of Memor yin an Archiversquo Histor y of the Human Sciences11(4) 65ndash83Stephenson N 1992 Snow Crash NewYork BantamTabbi J 1997 lsquoReading Writing Hyper-textrsquo in D Porter (ed) Internet CultureLondon RoutledgeTenbruck F 1994 lsquoInternal History ofSociety or Universal Histor yrsquo Theor yCulture amp Society 11(1) 75ndash93Thacker E 1999 lsquoPerforming the Techno-scientific Bodyrsquo Special issue on BodyModification Body amp Society 5(2ndash3)317ndash36


Velody I 1998 lsquoThe Archive and theHuman Sciences Notes towards a Theoryof the Archiversquo History of the Human Sci-ences 11(4) 1ndash15Virilio P 1999 Polar Inertia LondonSage

Wallerstein I 1991 Unthinking SocialScience Oxford PolityWeinstein D and Weinstein M 1990lsquoGeorg Simmel Sociological FlacircneurBricoleurrsquo Theor y Culture amp Society 8(3)151ndash68


Archive keeping is essential for a civilized communityChambersrsquos Encyclopedia Vol I (1959 5701 q in OED)

The archive is also a place of dreams(Steedman 1998 67)

Nothing is less reliable nothing is less clear today that the word lsquoarchiversquo(Derrida 1996 90)

INTRODUCTION

As we enter the new millennium with its prospect of increased cultural com-plexity it should be remembered that we are by no means the rst gener-ation to feel overwhelmed by the speed scope intensity and volume ofcultural production and reproduction Writing in 1911 in an article en-titled lsquoThe Concept and Tragedy of Culturersquo published in the new journalLogos which aspired to create a forum for a new philosophical cultureGeorg Simmel (1997a 73) observed the growing imbalance between objec-tive and subjective culture remarked

There thus emerges the typical problematic condition of modernhumanity the feeling of being surrounded by an immense number ofcultural elements which are not meaningless but not profoundlymeaningful to the individual either elements which have a certain crush-ing quality as a mass because an individual cannot inwardly assimilateever y individual thing but cannot simply reject it either since it belongspotentially as it were to the sphere of his or her cultural developmentOne could characterize this with the exact reversal of that saying lsquoNihilhabentes omni possidentesrsquo which characterized the blissful poverty of theearly Franciscans in their absolute liberation from all things that wouldsomehow still tend to divert the soul from its path through themselvesand thereby make it an indirect route Instead of that human beings invery rich and overburdened cultures are lsquoomnia habientes nihil possidentesrsquo

The condition of potentially having ever ything but possessing nothingsuggests that the stock of objective culture has gone beyond the absorptivecapacity of human beings who must work within the limits of what can beassimilated within a nite life course For Simmel (1997b 102) the indi-vidual could not keep pace with the vast accumulation of lsquoculture of thingsof institutions and objecti ed ideasrsquo which lsquorobs the individual of any con-sistent inner relationship to culture as a whole and casts him back again onhis own resourcesrsquo (Simmel 1997b 102) Hence Simmel draws attention tothe failure of subjective culture to deal adequately with the problem ofselectivity manifest in the arousal of eeting aspirations and the rootlessarbitrary character of modern life

Simmel (1997c 256) also saw this process of the accumulation of objec-tive culture in terms of the development of the world-city in which lsquoa single


























THE ARCHIVE



























































ACKNOWLEDGEMENT



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THE ARCHIVE



























































ACKNOWLEDGEMENT



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BIBLIOGRAPHY

































































ACKNOWLEDGEMENT



NOTES















BIBLIOGRAPHY










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BIBLIOGRAPHY












BIBLIOGRAPHY










Mike Featherstone Archiving Cultures

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Transcript of Mike Featherstone Archiving Cultures