Post on 08-Apr-2018
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Sullivan 1
Rachael Sullivan
Dr. Wysocki
English 742
16 May 2011
Mediating Memories
The most recent How Much Information? study, a recurring UC-San Diego project that
aims to estimate the quantity (in hours and bytes) of information Americans consume yearly,
found a four-fold increase in bytes and a 140 percent increase in words consumed by
Americans from 1980 to 2008 (9). The tally for 2008 came to 3.6 zettabytes, the equivalent of
10,845 trillion words (7). For anyone counting, one zettabyte is the equivalent of 1,026 exabytes,
and one exabyte is equivalent to all words ever spoken by humans since the dawn of time
(Klinkenborg).
The report cites IBMs launch of the first PC in 1981 as the key factor that initiated the
28-year growth pattern. With the proliferation of digital devices and widespread access to the
Internet, one can only the imagine that information consumption has continued since 2008,
perhaps even increasing. For all the information that Americans consume, how do we keep track
of it all? Where does all the information go? As the study notes, data in the 21st century is
largely ephemeralbinary code is constantly being overwritten and updated (10). So, some of
the information just disappears. Anyone who has bookmarked a web site only to find the site
gone a month later, or anyone who has lost an hour of unsaved work on a word processor,
understands the fleeting nature of digital information. The memory industry1 serves an important
function for information consumers who struggle with saving, sorting, and retrieving histories,
1I take this phrase from the title of a symposium that happened in May 2011 at NYU. The symposium
hosted speakers who entertain misgivings of one sort or another as memory and the memorializing
impulse have become increasingly reified, stylized, fetishized, and instrumentalized, hijacked and ossified
[] (http://nyihumanities.org/ ).
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whether personal or otherwise. Memorabilia, souvenirs, storage media, software programs,
digital assistants, data back-up services, and recording devices are all there to help with the
problem. In a 1996 interview, Jacques Derrida expressed anxiety about the fact that it is actually
becoming so easy to save information: Today one can conceive (or dream) of recording
everything, everything or almost everything []. Everything that makes up the national memory
in the traditional sense of the term, but just about anything at all can and often is recorded: the
mass is enormous (74).
The digital archive is another tool for memory storage that helps individuals and
institutions manage the accruing exabytes and zettabytes of human life. It seems that the more
there is to remember, the more complex and centralized the archivization process becomes.
Digital archives sort the important or valuable information and, through an interface and search
mechanism, conjure it for future retrieval. In addition, the spirit of Web 2.02 holds out hope that
digital archives could be sites of genuinely collective and participatory history-making.
However, like their analog predecessors, digital archives can be especially adept at political
moves of repression and exclusion as these memory warehouses mediate historical reality and
shape human identity. Digital archives are doors to the past, but they generate the past we
encounter through their interfaces. At first glance, digital archives are a neutral tool for helping
humans manage a problem. At second glance, they appear to be anything but neutral. Historical
archives on the Internet emerge as places of conflict and as mediators in a collective process of
remembering.
No matter how many bookshelves or servers an archive has (even Google struggles to
build enough data centers to house the millions of servers it needs), there can never be enough
2Tim OReilly (2005) has defined Web 2.0 as any lightweight, web-based (and often free)
platform, designed for hackability and remixability (oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-
20.html). By most accounts, Web 2.0 sponsors collective intelligence, cooperation, and user-generated content. Prezi, Google Docs, Twitter, Wordpress, MediaWiki, Flickr, and Omeka are
examples.
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storage space to record every event and every memory; decisions about what to save and what to
leave out are inevitable. Who decides how to filter the information that consumers can access? A
specific example is illuminating. In May 2011, the Library of Congresss extensive digital
public archive, the American Memory collection, added a new assortment of 10,000 music and
spoken-word audio files recorded between 1901 and 1925. Sony owns the collection and (due to
complex Copyright laws) many of its files will not enter the public domain until 2067, so for
now the music is only available for streaming and not downloading. The National Jukebox
archive, as it is called, is a state-sponsored and corporate-owned endeavor, with control split
between these two powerful authorities and entangled with outdated and sweeping legal
protections for sound recordings. The public cannot know what else is in the collection of nearly
three million Sony-owned audio files; some combination of lawyers, archivists, and executives
decided.
Thus, in a digital age of supposedly open communication platforms, free information,
and participatory structures, it seems that archons, the gatekeepers of the archive, still mediate
literally come betweencitizens and knowledge. Derrida writes that one function of the archive
is gathering together (3). The archons are the gatherers and guardians of the archive, and they
define the archive content at the nexus of legal, political, and commercial interests. Although
Sony is making no immediate profit from the National Jukebox deal, the LA Times reports that in
return for releasing the music, Sony will receive data on which recordings are streamed most
frequently to help determine which may have commercial potential (Lewis). It seems like a
small trade-off, but yet the fact remains: a government archive labels itself as American
Memory and allows a private corporation to essentially track users for the purpose of potential
profit. The archive in this case is hardly a neutral technology. As memory theorist Bernard
Stiegler suggests, To the extent that participation in these new societies, in this new form of
capitalism, takes place through machinic interfaces beyond the comprehension of participants,
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the gain in knowledge is exclusively on the side of producers (67). While in this case the gain is
not exclusively on the side of producerscertainly historians and researchers will gain
knowledge from the National Jukeboxit does make sense to question who or what has agency
behind the machinic interface Stiegler mentions. For each zettabyte that Americans consume
annually, it may be appropriate to question the nature of this information and what mediating
layers are intervening.
At this point, Id like to introduce three basic terms from the field of computer science.
These terms work on a metaphorical and also (as I suggest later) literal and posthuman level. In
relation to computer memory, there are three hierarchical levels of storage. The first level,
primary storage, is the computers Random-Access Memory (RAM) used to execute programs
complete short-term processes. RAM used for primary storage is volatile, meaning that it goes
away when the computer shuts down (Singh 99). Secondary storage, on the other hand, is
non-volatile and long-term memory. It includes the computers hard drive and any external
storage devices such as flash drives and CD-ROMs. In addition, secondary storage often comes
complete with a filing and naming system, as well as a way of recording metadata, or data
about those files such as author, date created, and time last modified (Singh 100).
I compare these first two levels to embodied human memory and externalized human
memory, respectively. Internal memory, or anamnesis in Stieglers terms, is volatile and
fragile. External memory such as lists, calendars, and databaseshypomnesisis more
durable and reliable, within limits. One must remember how to use the sorting system to retrieve
items, and it is always possible that external memory could be corrupted by water, fire, a
software bug, etc. In hypomnesic memory (which Stiegler argues has always existed, as there is
nopurely anamnesic memory), we discover that a part of ourselves, a part of our memory, is
outside of us (66-67). Thus, the computers CPU cannot remember what is on the flash drive
unless that object is present and connected. If the flash drive is gone, then that memory is lost.
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But there is a third level of storage, or another type of hypomnesis that is not quite the
same as individual external memory devices. Tertiary storage, or offline/remote storage, is used
by libraries, massive archives, and staging operations that move large scientific data sets onto
and off of disks for supercomputer computation (Chervenak 2). Tertiary storage systems
typically retrieve memory by deploying a robotic arm to grab and insert the disk that contains the
requested data. Although large tertiary storage systems are not usually visible to the public, one
familiar small-scale example is an analog jukebox.
It is an unintended but significant coincidence that the newly released Library of
Congress archive of sound recordings is named National Jukebox. There is some clue about
how, following the metaphor of tertiary storage, American memory of the past is mediated and
materialized by human and non-human agents, and how decision-making processes predetermine
or at least influence the content that researchers, students, and average citizens have access to.
Tertiary storage, with its robotic retrieval arm, represents the larger state and corporate
mechanism selecting what past is available online to the general public and what memory gets
put offline.
Just as the railway system was not merely a convenient, new means of transportation in
19th-century America, but also the catalyst in a chain reaction of positive and negative effects3,
mnemotechnologies are not simply a means for remembering. These mnemotechnologies, as
apparatuses [that] systematically order memories (Stiegler 67), also order our perception of the
past on the level of secondary storage, in addition to deciding what even gets counted as the past
worth remembering on the level of tertiary storage. As Stiegler argues, what is at stake in
hypomnesis is a combat: a combat for a politics of memory and, more precisely, for the
3Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1977) details the changes initiated by the railroad system in England
and the United States. He discusses an experience of denaturalization as iron and coal took over
the place of animal power, an increase in boredom which led to a rise in bookstores in trainstations, cognitive changes such as an inability to focus, and physiological changes like fatigue
and spinal problems due to the vibration of the train.
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constitution of sustainable hypomnesic milieus (Stiegler 69). In the context of digital historical
archives, it is on the level of tertiary storage, not secondary storage, that this conflict happens
and that a dispute about who has authority over national memory should be waged. The more
that digital archives discourage users from remixing content and producing new artifacts instead
of just consuming information, the more that the sharp line between producer/consumer is
reinscribed.
One attempt at generating a new production out of content in the Library of Congresss
American Memory archive is an experimental, genre-blurring DVD of short videos entitled
(unsurprisingly) American Memory Project (AMP). AMP appropriates and remixes the
Librarys digital content (primarily drawing on the Native American Culture and Slave Narrative
collections), and boldly draws attention to the mediation at work in the Librarys official
presentation of history. While AMP does not entirely circumvent the gap between those who
produce what we call history and those who read and interpret that history, it does offer a new
avenue to critique the massive and widely-appreciated Library of Congress American Memory
archive.
AMP is a creation of Bill Morrison, a music video and documentary film director, and
Justin Bennett, drummer for the Canadian electro-industrial band Skinny Puppy. With help from
the artist ohGr, in 2008 this eclectic collaboration drew from the Librarys content to edit videos
that reassemble and stitch together bits and pieces from the archive, combined with Bennetts
musical compositions. Taken together, the videos, rather than assuming the perspective of
someone living today, imagine the very distant future, long after America is gone. According
to a short abstract appended to the DVD,
A rogue group of artists, scouring the backwater of whatever the net has become,
have discovered the American Memory Archives from the Library of Congress.
They have no context for its meaning, but are intrigued by the sights and sounds.
The group create surreal impressions of the material they find and broadcast it
back through time. (Morrison and Bennett)
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Operating under the premise of this apocalyptic, yet-to-happen temporality, the DVD is divided
into five sections or scenes, each focusing on a different time period or collection from the
Library of Congress archive. The scenes remix documentation of our nations history around the
turn of the century, ranging from recordings of first-person slave narratives, photographs of
Native Americans, footage of steam engines and street traffic, and clips from popular 1920s and
1930s television shows. However, the AMP videos are not remixes in the sense of purely
recycling content, since Morrison and Bennett have added creative cinematic effects, original
music, and new footage shot specifically for the project. The DVD leaves the viewer with a
piecemeal impression. It destructs the organized and streamlined Library of Congress interface
and reconstructs it as an eclectic and critical interpretation of the American Memory materials,
with emphasis on the dark corners of American history.
AMP forms a complex response to the Library of Congresss digital content, which many
view as a national asset, educational resource, and public service. AMP does not necessarily
devalue those traditional roles, but it does suggest an additional and radically different way of
looking at the archive process and product. Starting from the apparently thorough, credible, and
treasured documents in the Librarys digital archive, AMP reveals ethical fissures and raises
potentially controversial provocations regarding the archive.
What Is an Archive?
Derrida, though he offers no definitive response, highlights the grammatical flexibility of
the word: Nothing is more troubled and more troubling today than the concept archivedin this
word archive (90). As both a verb and a noun, an activity and a thing, the word archive
houses a wide array of practices, sites, and materialities. In Marlene Manoffs cross-disciplinary
survey of archival discourse over the last 30 years, she reveals the ambiguity and complexity
associated with the term archive and how it is loosening and exploding in circulation among
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scholars, archivists, and librarians (10). As a verb, it amounts to labor: acquiring, preserving,
organizing, cataloging, editing, digitizing. As a noun, the archive recalls a place of romanticized
discovery laced with tedious constraints of space and time. In either case, the archive has for
centuries denoted an activity closely tied to the materiality of the past.
Those scholars who focus on the archives materiality primarily view the archive as a tool
for research and for preserving history. Historians like Ralph Kingston concern themselves with
practical issues and questions of material history because they have spent many hours in the
dust of the archive (1) and they know and use the archive building full of shelves and boxes of
papers. Rene Sentilles is another historian who assumes this instrumentalist attitude. She writes,
Archives yield the sources that are used as facts, but interpretation fuels the historical argument.
[] As Lorraine Daston so eloquently puts it, evidence might be described as facts hammered
into signpost (140). Of course, history is an admittedly human-centered discipline, but
ultimately this anthropocentric view sees the archive as a tool and memory as a primarily human
faculty.
In contrast to this instrumentalist approach, a deterministic discussion of technology
reminds us that the archive is an event of mediation and never an objective tool or repository of
facts as Sentilles believes. Friedrich Kittler does not see the archive as a place that individual
humans enter, use, and then exit, unchanged in the process. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,
he theorizes a feedback loop between human and technology, prioritizing the technology as
having the most control in the exchange. As he reflects on the archive: What remains of people
is what media can store and communicate (xl). The human is thus constituted by the archive.
It is difficult to locate much human agency in Kittlers writing on the archive. His theory
of mediation situates technology as the determinant of the human. Media define what really
is (3) he writes, and this claim has serious consequences for the archive. If we assume Kittlers
technological determinism in trying to understand how contemporary archives are mixed and
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remixed in electronic media, then we might miss the reasons that people support and create
archives in the first place. Kittler privileges machine subjectivity, and he focuses on how
technologies of reproduction act upon human subjects: For mechanized writing to be optimized,
one can no longer dream of writing as the expression of individuals or the trace of bodies. The
very forms, differences, and frequencies of its letters have to be reduced to formulas (16). For
Kittler, the robotic arm of tertiary storage diminishes human agency even as it appears to be a
transparent means of data storage. However, Kittlers view obscures the human decisions,
protected by politics and institutions in the case of the Sony-owned National Jukebox collection,
that also function on the level of tertiary storage.
Stiegler offers a break in the tension between these theoretical poles of instrumentalism
and determinism. He argues that while memory is technologized from the start and it is never
entirely a human faculty, the Internet creates new platforms for human agency: it constitutes
[] a new economy of memory supporting an industrial model no longer based on disassociated
milieus of senders (or producers) and receivers (consumers) (83). While Stiegler upholds the
notion of anamnesis, or embodied memory, this is not to say that he believes in unmediated
memory. Stiegler does not trust the illusion of unmediated contact with the past, even through
anamnesis. Accordingly, human memory is originally exteriorized, he writes, which means
that it is technical from the start (67). Mark Hansen furthers Stieglers claim: Technology on
this account is not something external and contingent, but rather an essentialindeed the
essentialdimension of the human (65). Human beings are intrinsically prosthetic, from the
time of flint tools to the alphabet to electronic media.
Kittler, on the other hand, sees a transformation with the coming of recording machines,
such as the typewriter and phonograph: Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there has
been writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace (44).
In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler believes that the development of recording devices
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created sudden technological ruptures (Translators Introduction xxxiv) and a constitutive
break on the level of what it means to be human. Whereas for Stiegler, there is no human
memory that is not a technological memory, for Kittler there are clues that a pure human
consciousness existed before it was infiltrated by technologies.
After describing Nietzsches budding relationship with a new typewriter (more
specifically, a writing ball), and proceeding from Jean-Marie Guyaus argument about memory
and the phonograph, Kittler claims that in 1886, during the founding age of mechanized storage
technologies, human evolution, too, aims toward the creation of machine memory (210). Kittler
continues:
Writing in Nietzsche is no longer a natural extension of humans who bring forththeir voice, soul, and individuality through their handwriting. On the contrary []
humans change their positionthey turn from the agency of writing to become an
inscription surface. (211)
Here we see, in Kittlers formulation, the turning point at which communication technologies
can no longer be related back to humans. Instead, the former have formed the latter (211).
Thus, Kittler implies a progression from some possibly unmediated state of humanness to an
entirely technologized human, formed by the machine. In this race to agency, Kittler claims
that with IF-THEN programming logic, computers have finally outpaced and obsolesced their
human competitors: A simple feedback loopand information machines bypass humans, their
so-called inventors. Computers themselves become subjects (258). This vision in some way
crystallizes the culture industry, in which machines dominate their human slaves. Given the
technology of digital archives, hosted on a network that almost everyone in the world can access,
Stieglers hope for a participative economy of free software and cooperative technologies (83)
4
seems like a far cry from Kittlers interpretation.
4Along these lines, the networked public sphere has been exhaustively explored in Yochai
Benklers The Wealth of Networks (2006).
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We need more examples of how institutional archives might reconfigure their mediation
practices and revise the sender-receiver binary. While Stiegler observes that networked digital
media are participative and no longer impose the producer/consumer opposition (83), there is
no law that says the media must be used for participation and that state-owned or corporate-
owned entities must stop imposing the same opposition that Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer described in 1944 as the key tenet of the culture industry. Now that I have built
some theoretical scaffolding to help clarify how archives mediate humans and their history, the
remainder of this essay will outline some important conclusions or provocations that AMP
suggests. I will discuss how these provocations come together to make a unified though not
entirely satisfying critical commentary about official national archives as mediators of identity
and memory.
History in the Making
Representations of history (such as archives, archive objects, and interpretations of these
factual primary sources) are mediations that alter the past and can color an individuals
experience of the present. Thus, there can be no true or naturally occurring historyit is
always a representation, often made to look as realistic, comprehensive, and un-mediated as
possible. As Derrida argues inArchive Fever, archives do not readily disclose their own
mediation. The archive tends to cover its tracks: it leaves no monument, it bequeaths no
document of its own (11). This is one reason that the recording (recording-as-making) of
history and historical subjects is often an opaque process.
AMP encourages viewers to come face to face with the process of making history. The
videos emphasize incoherence and artifice, rather than a realistic or user-friendly presentation.
While the Library of Congress presents fragments to form a wholeto form American
MemoryAMP presents fragments that do not form a whole. The videos are at times disturbing,
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at times confusing, but never complete as part of a logical historical narrative. Jay David Bolter
and Richard Grusin would call the Librarys mediation immediacy and AMPs mediation
hypermediacy.5 In the former, the interface is designed to be intuitive, transparent, and
foreground the archive content. Users are not asked to notice or question the process of making
these archive objects (secondary storage) or selecting them (tertiary storage). AMP, on the other
hand, foregrounds the mediation process so that it comes to the surface and seems unfamiliar or
strange. AMP reveals the framing function of archives, i.e. the way that an archive manages
the past rather than simply depicting it truthfully.
For example, a repeating motif in the videos is a line-drawn animation of a rotating
machine-like apparatus with turning gears and other moving parts (see image above). In the first
5InRemediation (2000), Bolter and Grusin theorize all mediation as a dual logic of making the
medium transparent (immediacy) and simultaneously bringing it to the surface to make viewers
or readers aware of the mediation at work (hypermediacy). Similar to the reality effecttheorized by Roland Barthes, the logic of immediacy erases the medium and emphasizes the
realistic, immersive features of the content represented. In contrast, the logic of hypermediacyinterferes with the reality effect as the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer)
strives to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in thatacknowledgment (Bolter and Grusin 42). The desire for immediacy is thus a desire for reality
as it really is.
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video, this machine animation appears alongside footage of Native Americans dancing in a
theatrical and self-aware manner; they are aware of being filmed. Morrison and Bennett try to
highlight the footage as fabricated and produced by, possibly, the machine of white American
consciousness. In the opening video on the DVD, entitled Ghost Dance, viewers plunge
through a tunnel of streaking lights, illegible text, and split-second flashes of iconic American
photographsAbraham Lincolns portrait, the Statue of Liberty, Neil Armstrongs moon
landing. Yet, as viewers fly through the passage of history, some disturbing images crop up. One
scratchy black-and-white photograph, flickering for only a moment on the screen, shows a
lynched mans lifeless body hanging from a tree (see image below). Thus, the critical comment
is not only on the archived items themselves, but also on the arrangementof the items. While
the Library of Congress separates its content into different collections, so that items classified
together appear on one section of the site without interlinking to other collections, AMP defies
that mediation by emphasizing the fragmentary and chaotic.
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AMP uses many violent images
from the Librarys collection and
combines the violence with pulsing, strong
music and murky colors in the videos. One
of the videos, entitled Artifacts,
explicitly remediates the conventions of
old horror movies. It displays clips of a screaming woman, a shadow on the stairs, creepy eyes
(see image above), and scratchy filmic distortion, all while rhythmic drumbeats and resonating,
murky voices and screams play in the background. The Artifacts video quickly turns from the
fiction of horror movies to the fact of slavery in America when images of lynchings and Civil-
War-era cannons appear (see image below). In depicting aspects of American history in a context
reminiscent of a horror movie, AMP foregrounds an invisible line that the Library of Congress
archive draws between fact and fiction. While the Librarys American Memory collection
purports to deliver facts and actual records, the interface itself weaves a narrative about what the
past was really like. Morrison and Bennett seem to shatter the immediacy of the past.
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AMP reminds viewers that violence is not only inscribed in American history as events
of violence, from slavery to legalized killing to the repression of Native Americans. Violence is
also part ofthe recording process historythe very process that gives the Library of Congress
the right to authorize memories as real. Stiegler agrees with Derrida (his former teacher) in
issuing an entreaty: we must think in terms, not of hierarchies or totalizing systems, but of
processes (Stiegler 69). Taking up Derridas discussion of the archive, we might isolate two
types of violence: the violence of past events, and the violence of recording those events in the
present moment. AMP exposes both types.
When an archive structures a narrative and attempts to cloak it as unmediated truth, it is
guilty of the second kind of violencearchival violence. Benjamin Hutchens disambiguates the
term archival violence by locating the violence in the irresolvable tension between the
archival powers of destruction and preservation: the archive strives to preserve memory from the
destruction of its cultural context; but in so doing, it destroys memory as such, reducing it to
mere documentation (39). The archive salvages memory, but at the same time embalms it as an
inscription housed in a delimited physical or virtual space. The memory is no longer culturally
relevant, no longer [alive] in the hearts and minds of historical subjects (Hutchens 40).
Derrida locates the violence less as an outcome (as in the death of living history) and
more as aprocess. The process of conservationfostered by the archive drive (19)is violent
or unethical for Derrida because it requires the past to conform to the structure of the archive.
Moreover, this conformity becomes an act of creation: The archive produces as much as it
records the event (19). Thus, what we remember is not the unmediated memory-event itself, but
rather the document or inscription which the archive structure hasplayed a role in writing.
Crucially, this active role of the archiving archive is often invisible. As Hutchens paraphrases
Derrida, There is no archive of the archive, of the political forces and historical orientations of
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archivization. The archive is the violent consignment of lived memory, but it cannot record this
violence of consignment and this is the first glimmering of its an-archic aspect (41).
Another way to state the difference between the outcome and the process, or the ends and
the means, is to say that the archive looks both forward and backward. It looks backward to the
past to find issues or subjects worth remembering and historicizing. Many archives, as places of
memory, also honor the past by trying to preserve the original look and order of records as they
came into the archivea principle known to professional archivists as respect des fonds or
provenance (Kingston 2). The archive also looks forward to the future in its desire to seize the
past and preserve it for posterity. The National Archives expresses this forward-looking view in
a recent ban on photography in exhibition areas, a decision that preservation experts defend by
claiming that it will help protect our nations heritage for future generations (archives.gov).
Thus, the archive carefully attends to (or seizes, lays claim to) the past for the sake of the future.
For both Derrida and Hutchens (who builds on Derrida more or less uncritically), the
conservation of memory changes or mediates the content in a serious way. In admitting to
violence, we admit that history or facts are not neutral nails in the sign of interpretation, as
Sentilles would say.
It is almost a commonplace that the violence or tension between recovery of the past and
responsibility to the future is political. Hutchens defines the suspicion that prevents him from
seeing the archive as neutral: The archive [] necessarily implies a certain political authority to
select memories considered worthy of consignment for the purpose of recollection, and the
criteria for selection are often not unbiased (42). Everyone makes choices about how to
preserve (and represent) the past and about how the continuity of lived experience will be
grammatized into archive content. These choices happen all the time, and on a personal and
institutional level. After my trip to Hawaii, I have to choose which lei to keep. Even though all
the leis remind me of places I visited, I dont have the space to keep an entire shoebox of leis.
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Likewise, of the approximately 22,000 items the Library of Congress receives each working day,
it only adds approximately 10,000 items to the collections daily (loc.gov/about/facts.html).
Saving memories means choosing memories.
InEverything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger has argued that there is a fundamental
and transformative shift once archives move to a digital storage medium, since we no longer
have to make decisions about trimming surplus content. We can just keep everything: tag every
item with as many keywords as possible and throw it all into a giant pile. Tags let you
remember thingsyour way (92). Weinberger affirms Stieglers hope for a more participative
method of memory storage, but unlike Stiegler, Weinberger seems to privilege the autonomous,
individuated human. Collective information sorting means that
what you learn isnt prefiltered and approved, sitting on a shelf, waiting to be
consumed. The knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps; it requires
active engagement. Each person arrives through a stream of clicks that cannot be
anticipated. As people communicate online, that conversation becomes part of a
lively, significant, public digital knowledge [and] each person has access to a
global audience. Taken together, that conversation also creates a mode of
knowing weve never had before. Like subjectivity, it is rooted in individual
standpoints and passions, which endows the bits with authenticity. But at the sametime, these diverse viewpoints help us get past the biases of individuals. []
There has always been a plenitude of personal points of view in our world. Now
though those POVs are talking with one another, and we cannot only listen, we
can participate. (Weinberger 147)
Likewise, Stiegler has argued that the suspension of the producer/consumer opposition
constitutes a new age of memory in which the act of collective remembering functions with
contributions from many individuals (83-84). While Stiegler and Weinberger dont completely
agree, Stieglers emphasis on memory as a process of human-machine collaboration refutes the
notion that individual standpoints and passions equate some measure of authenticity as
Weinberger says.
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AMP complicates the notion of point of view and serves as a reminder that historical
memory, as a mediation of the past, does not happen solely through individual humans
possessing and interpreting artifacts, nor solely through technologies reading and writing data.
Rather, memory is a cycle of making and saving on the part of human and non-human agents.
Building on Bruno Latours actor-network theory, anthropologist Stuart McLean explains
cultural memory as a process involving shifting and heterogeneously composed collectives, the
constituent elements of which might include, in no particular order of precedence, human beings,
technologies, philosophies of history, architecture, chemical reactions, animals, plants,
microorganisms, landscape, geology and climate (5). While this definition may seem abstract
and overly comprehensive, it effectively addresses the key instrumentalist and determinist
assumptions. This Latourian definition is also useful in understanding how AMP unsettles a
human centered or machine centered perspective, opting instead for a hybrid archive with human
and machine elements from the past and future.
In the video Time
Dont Steal, viewers are
immersed in the re-enacted
slave narrative of Alison
Gaston (see image at right).
The actress recites the oral
history of Gaston (a former
slave, whose narrative was
actually recorded in the 1950s), and words flash on the screen as she talks. The editing intends to
age the appearance of the film and make it appear very old. This scene draws attention to
mediation because it challenges the timeline of media history. In showing a seemingly real-life
Gaston on video, viewers know that this must be a recreation and the woman is an imposter.
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However, we wonder about the audio track, and in fact the audio comes from the original
interview. We hear Gastons own voice, recorded in 1941.
However, no matter how radically and provocatively Morrison and Bennett have
reassembled the Library of Congresss archive, the artists only have access to the content that
gatekeepers make available. The issue of how to circumvent or resist the level of tertiary
storage, as a metaphor for the posthuman process that writes the human and retrieves our history,
will continue to prevent any meaningful bridge between consumers and producers of archival
information.
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Works Cited
Bennett, Justin and William Morrison.American Memory Project. 2008. DVD.
Bohn, Roger and James E. Short. How Much Information? 2009 Report on American
Consumers. Global Information Industry Center, UCSD. 2009. Web. 11 May 2011.
Chervenak, Ann Louise. Tertiary Storage: An Evaluation of New Applications. Diss. UC
Berkeley, 1994. Web. 12 May 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Print.
Hutchens, Benjamin C. Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-
Archive. SubStance 36.113 (2007): 37-55.Project Muse. Web. 9 May 2011.
Kingston, Ralph. The French Revolution and the Materiality of the Modern Archive.Libraries
& the Cultural Record46.1 (2011): 1-25.Project Muse. Web. 11 May 2011.
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. Trying to Measure the Amount of Information that Humans Create. The
New York Times Company.NYT Online. 12 Nov. 2003. Web. 13 May 2011.
Lewis, Randy. Library of Congress and Sony Music Team for National Jukebox Free
Streaming of Vintage Recordings. LA Times Online. 10 May 2011. Web. 13 May
2011.
Library of Congress Launches, with Sony Music Content, the National Jukebox, an Online
Destination for Historical Sound Recordings.Library of Congress. 10 May 2011. Web.
12 May 2011.
Manoff, Marlene. Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.Libraries and the
Academy 4.1 (2004): 925.Project Muse. Web. 12 May 2011.
McLean, Stuart. Bodies from the Bog: Metamorphosis, Non-Human Agency and the Making of
Collective Memory. Trames 12.3 (2008): 299-308.Academic Search Complete. Web. 14
May 2011.
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Sentilles, Rene. The Archives of Cyberspace. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the
Writing of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 136-156. Print.
Singh, Shio Kumar.Database Systems: Concepts, Design and Applications. New Delhi: Pearson
Education India, 2009. Print.
Stiegler, Bernard. Memory. Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2010.
64-85. Print.
Weinberger, David. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.New
York: Holt, 2007. Print.