Endocepts (and mood) in the prosthetic archive?

I've been involved with Greg Ulmer's work recently (and always) and I keep working over an issue in my mind. When working mystorically (in Ulmer's concept of mystory), we often revisit personal memories as a launching point for constructing a mystory. These memories can be fully developed or mere moments, flashes of an instant, without context, without understanding, but with a vivid or felt flash (these moments are referred to as endocepts--and I forget who coined the term). While these moments in our memories may not be complete (in the sense of structural or place), they often convey strong moods or reflect crucial components that inform our "wide image" (wide image is a guiding/underlying component to our work [and lives]...for Einstein, for example, the wide image was/is the compass [which his father gave to him] which helped him figure out magnetic north, the theory of relativity, and so on).

Moving out to move back, I want to think of the archive in two different forms: one being the internal, bodily, human-organism archive (one's conscious [and unconscious] memories) and the other being the external, prosthetic "human" archive (archives full of "objects") [and yes I am aware that that is not a great division, but the division is only a temporary operative to get to my point]. If many of our memories store mood (as much, if not more than just content/context), does our external archives do the same? Do we have endocepts in the prosthetic archive? And if they carrie/convey/store mood, is the mood (in both internal and external archives) inherent in the flash of memory/stored material or do we bring the (desired) mood to the interpretation or recreation of the memory/archived-moment?

I'm not sure what I want to do with this yet, I just feel some resistance to thinking of the prosthetic archive as storing moods, but feel it is a component of memory.

{These issues/ideas aren't fully thought out yet, but I felt like sharing them with a screen}

Borges: Inventor of the Internets

Noam Cohen writes in today's NYTimes, "The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges might seem an unlikely candidate for Man Who Discovered the Internet." Nevertheless, numerous contemporary commentators are seeing compelling connections between Borges's great Ficciones and various Web 2.0 developments, and his amazing writings seem to be garnering new interest from futurists and web theorists alike. The article's listing of specific arguments for the writings of "Cy-Borges" as prophetic is too good to miss.

The Ethic of the Archive.

In The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, Milan Kundera tries to get a handle on what exactly it is that makes the novel the novel. To the ethics that guide the work of the novelist, he contrasts that driving the researcher, and along the way, he says something important about archives:

The Ethic of the Essential
Bardèche sums up his verdict on Madame Bovary: "Flaubert missed his calling as a writer! And is that not bascially the judgment of so many Flaubert admirers who end up telling you, 'Oh, but if you read his correspondence, what a masterwork, what an exciting man it reveals!'"

I, too, often reread Flaubert's letters, eager to know what he thought about his art and that of other writers. Still, fascinating as the correspondence can be, it is neither a masterwork nor a work. Because "the work," l'oeuvre, is not simply everything a novelist writes--notebooks, diaries, articles. It is the end result of long labor on an aesthetic project.

I will go still further: "the work" is what the writer will approve in his own final assessment. For life is short, reading is long, and literature is in the process of killing itself off through an insane proliferation. Every novelist, starting with his own work, should eliminate what is secondary, lay out for himself and for everyone else the ethic of the essential!

But it is not only the writers, the hundreds and thousands of writers; there are also the researchers, the armies of researchers who, guided by some opposite ethic, accumulate everything they can find to embrace the Whole, a supreme goal. The Whole,
which includes a mountain of drafts, deleted paragraphs, chapters rejected by the author but published by researchers, in what are called "critical editions," under the perfidious title "variants," which means, if words still have meaning, that anything the author wrote is worth as much as anything else, that it would be similarly approved by him.

The ethic of the essential has given way to the ethic of the archive. (The archive's ideal: the sweet equality that reigns in an enormous common grave.)

Perhaps I have been reading too much about the Italian 1930s, but by this assessment the archive sounds almost totalitarian!

Some recent questions floating in my head

Question 1:
Did we ever establish why we need the archive? Is it even necessary? Or more importantly, could humanity exist without it?

Question 2:
Is a blog an archive? On one hand I want to say yes, but on the other I want to say no, and yet on a third hand I'm sure its both yes and no. If it is archive, what does that say about the nature of archive or what is the blog's archiveness?

arcade fever

"Extreme Optimism concerning the promise of the "new" nature of technology, and total pessimism concerning the course of history, which without proletarian revolution would never leave the stage of prehistory--this orientation characterizes all stages of the Arcades project."
Susan Buck-Morss (p. 64).

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history."
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

"Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function. "
Unknown

"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation. "
Tom Stoppard (1937 - )

"Time is that quality of nature which keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working. "
Anonymous

"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity. "
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today. "
Henry Ford (1863 - 1947), Interview in Chicago Tribune, May 25th, 1916

Quotations from www.quotationspage.com

Somewhere between Benjamin and Burroughs

“New forms ‘cited’ the old ones out of context” – Susan Buck-Morss, Dialects of Seeing 110

The destructive nature inherent in the birth of time; each second consumes the previous: all time is a march toward death.

“The exponents of realistic historicism […] agreed that the task of the historian was less to remind men of their obligation to the past than to force upon them an awareness of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from present to future” – Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse 49

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Collecting is a form of practical memory” – Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project 205

In the process of collecting--baseball cards, bottle caps, or memories--one finds an order to them that only makes sense among themselves. The links between them do not obey any particular logic—though they can—but rather is about associative links. We could think of this as conductive logic, to borrow from Ulmer, but it is something more (and less) than this.

The collection allows us to revisit the collected, to go back to reconnect with a previous logic, but also to go back to see what else needs to be included in the collection. In a water proof box, in my closet, is a collection of representative tokens. While my history may be what binds them, they also bind my history. And without them, without their place in the construction of my now, I’m not sure my tomorrow would in fact be my tomorrow, or even tomorrow at all.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Technology, not yet ‘emancipated,’ is held back by conventional imagination that sees the new only as a continuation of the old which has just now become obsolete” – Susan Buck-Morss, Dialects of Seeing 115-116

“‘Every epoch dreams the one that follows it’—as the dream form of the future, not its reality” – Susan Buck-Morss, Dialects of Seeing 116

“We must grant these dreams another fate and different histories depending on whether they have been published or not” Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius 27

“For a significant number of philosophers seem to have decided that history is either a third-order form of science, related to the social sciences as natural history was once related to the physical sciences, or that it is a second-order form of art, the epistemological value of which is questionable, the aesthetic worth of which is uncertain” – Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse 30

“It was fatal for the workers’ rebellions of old that no theory of revolution had directed their course, it was this absence of theory that, from another perspective, made possible their spontaneous energy and the enthusiasm with which they set about establishing a new society” – Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project 25

The Arcades Project Project.

Make a visit to Heather Marcelle Crickenberger's dissertation project on the Arcades Project. You can read here about how the project evolved to its present state.

Our favorite things.

Words from xl, experiencing technical difficulties:

I took this picture last Saturday when I was visiting the Old State House in Boston. This is posted on the wall of an exhibition hall on the third floor. It helps us to see an insider’s view on preserving, collecting, and displaying, which we have been discussing for weeks. As shown here, three reasons for things get displayed: visual tastes; interests in particular historical topics, and personal connections. Of the three, the last one troubles me. I understand that is very important to these individuals. Well, how could general public pick up the connection there? I won’t consider it as good information design because users/ visitors are not considered.

Politics of cultural heritage: The short article from subReal in 1999 intrigues me a lot because it is related to my seminar paper for the course I am going to write. I see the importance to compare and contrast eastern and western views on the nature of archives and the role they should play in the society at a point in history. It is interesting to see how political, social, economical, historical, and ideological factors shape and constrain the existence and development of archives in these countries. Even as the article suggests, in east Germany and Romania (two former socialist countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall), the nature, function, and content of archives changed immediately after the social structure changed. Another point is that the article was published in 1999 and it was before Internet and other information technologies were as widely available to general public in these countries as they are today. The social change was so radical and people were not prepared on how to respond in the 1990s. Besides, it takes time and courage to accept the revolutionary transformation of an institution especially when the institution has traditionally been negatively viewed. Acting upon whim has already caused valuable documents being dumped as trash.

Remembering

"Archives do not carry ethical characteristics; they are in that sense amoral. Moral quality is the input of those who access them; people make sense of the archive; not the other way around." (Dan & Kiraly in subREAL: Politics of Cultural Heritage, 1996, p. 113)

Collage, archives, and memory go hand in hand. Our archive is the memory that allows collage to make sense for us. Take the flower picture created with stamps. Our foreknowledge of stamps and the drawings on them as well as our foreknowledge of flowers and vases are important to understanding the collage. Perloff (1986) suggests (on p.49) that these collages bear both an external reality (what is the image) and a referential reality ( what do the collaged images refer to). For us, then, the collage not only gives us new imagery to see but also reminds us of the imagery from which it was taken.

Does collage then function as an hyponema for that which we knew?

Making things

www.clemson.edu/~hodgson/Archive_CollagePost.wmv

lend me an ear...

Perloff's discussion of collage has interesting resonance for my study of bodies and prosthetics. I see this in a number of places. First, Perloff quotes Boccioni from his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture; he asserts that, in a "sculptural environment,"

"the cogs of a machine might as easily appear out of the armpits of a mechanic, or the lines of a table could cut a reader's head in two, or a book with its fanned-out pages could intersect the reader's stomach (FM 62-63)." (52-53)

Perloff argues that Boccioni's manifesto is not realized in his own work. But perhaps Boccioni was just ahead of his time. The work of the artist Stelarc does precisely what Boccioni calls for, integrating the technological with the physical to create a collage that explodes from the space of the canvas, the pedestal, the separated work of art, becoming a human collage.

Stelarc's projects include attaching an additional robotic arm to his right arm, creating an exoskeleton (within which a person sits), and attaching to/growing an ear on his forearm. This art, much like early experiments in collage, is likely contestable by many, breaking quite definitively from more traditional artistic approaches (like landscape painting). It challenges the boundaries not only of art, but of the human body, calling into question the distinction between human and machine, as well as the ethics of body manipulation. A prosthetic for an amputated limb is not "art" but "medicine", recreating the whole person and restoring function after trauma; breast implants and face lifts enhance beauty, perhaps even restoring (or realizing) prior beauty. Neither of these would be considered collage by general standards, and both are completely acceptable by most of society. Stelarc's work is really and merely an integration of these two perspectives, but taken firmly outside of the medical realm, as well as the realm of that which is considered "normal" for bodies. He performs "unnecessary" operations (certainly not covered by any insurance), taking materials from "other" sources (machinery, electronics, virtual space) and splicing them with the human. His work is temporal, performance pieces that constantly invite revision and revisioning. That is, until he can fully enact his EXTRA EAR project.

Thus far, Stelarc, in collaboration with Tissue Culture & Art, has used human cells to grow a 1/4 scale model of his ear; once this ear can be grown with his own bone marrow cells, he plans to insert it beneath the skin of his forearm, creating a third ear. Stelarc communicates the complications and challenges he proposes with this project:

Tissue Culture & Art are dealing with the ethical and perceptual issues stemming from the realization that living tissue can be sustained, grown and is able to function outside of the body. The prosthesis is now a partial life form - partly constructed and partly alive.

Here the collage becomes self and not self, a potentially permanent collage of outside that is inside placed inside to be seen outside. It is a non-missing part, a non-working part (in our understanding of the job of an ear), a signifier that "refers to a presence that is consistently absent" (63), a sign, in Derrida's words, that "'can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable'" (75).

Perloff turns to Benjamin's concerns for the shift from cult value to exhibition value in art in "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; he writes "Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character....at any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. (Ill 232; GS 493)" (73). * Stelarc has not only broken the boundaries of art, but of composition, of flesh. If Benjamin is concerned about the loss of aura in mechanically reproduced art, what might he say about Stelarc's work? About the "aura" of flesh, of humanity?

Perloff writes:

Indeed, to collage elements from impersonal, external sources - the newspaper, magazines, television, billboards - is to understand, as it were, that, in a technological age, consciousness itself becomes a process of graft or citation, a process by means of which we make the public world our own. (77)

Does Stelarc then make our public world private? Our private public? Or does he entirely reconfigure these boundaries as well? And, as a final thought for this post: what does this have to do with archives?




*Much could be said about this statement, made around 1936, being discussed in a blog, but I'll leave that for another writer.

subREAL

Check out subREAL's website, where you can see images and descriptions of some of their projects.

derridirred

Derrida writes, "[...] Helene Cixous means to leave all or part of her dream memoirs to the BNF" (25). The dream seems a good location from which to spin my reverie on Derrida's reverie on Cixous's reverie, read while I slipped in and out of reverie myself. Well, the first 'reverie' is a stretch of definition, but the spinning of phrasiology is inspired by the master himself. My reading of Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius occured after a weekend of little sleep, leaving me in a state of drifting consciousness. On one hand, this is the precise place from which to read this text, one so slippery in location, twirling around itself, refusing to be pinned down.

The dream as a representation of truth is slippery. It can be an archive of consciousness, translated into an order unbeknownst to us, like Borges' Chinese encyclopedia, with pieces of the day transposed with what was on TV while falling asleep, or the phrases of the text where I dozed, continuing the text in a dream-state (which sounds remarkably like Derrida's voice). I've switched pronouns, gone from collective to singular, self to other.

The notion of genius is equally slippery. If you know you're a genius, you can't possibly be a genius, unless you are trying to be an evil genius. I've heard a similar argument for coolness...

lost in translation

First, I have to admit that I have not read all of Derrida's Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius. Even to say that I have read most of it would be a stretch. But I have read some of it. My thoughts, however, are about the first comment noted with an asterix in the text:

"The original text of this book was the transcript of the opening talk of the symposium, 'Helene Cixous: Geneses Genealogies Genres', organised by Mireille Calle-Gruber and held in the Bibliotheque National de France (French National Library), 22-4 May 2003."

This text is a speech. My question in the presentation I am "giving" Friday in Boston is: how is orality changed when it is transcribed in a different media form. Immediately upon reading this text, I realized that Derrida is playing with words and sounds throughout this text (in French nonetheless). How does this change our reading of it?

Not only does this change from orality to text but also from French to English - which has terrible repercussions for Derrida's plays/turns on the words he chooses.

The pastness of the past, and its presence.

In Archive Fever, Derrida writes that

. . . the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. (36)

Interesting, then, that it is not until page 527 that Saleem seems to bring his narrative to the present moment, making promises about tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

But this passage leads me back to the last paragraphs of Midnight's Children, where Saleem asserts, "I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty . . . What cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place, is that I shall reach my birthday[. . .]" (532).

Is Saleem's treatment of the future, whether as "prophecy" or as emblematized by the empty jar, what Derrida had in mind when he said that the question of the archive is "a question of the future"?

the imperial archive

I have been thinking about the relationship between Richard's The Imperial Archive and Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It is a little odd to be commenting on a piece that involves an analysis of Imperial Britain and comparing it to a narrative about a country transitioning from the rule of Imperial Britain to its own rule.

Here are some of the highlights from our discussion of Richards' piece:

• The British Empire created the most data-intensive empire in history through the unification of knowledge.
• Imperialism, then, becomes the control of knowledge.
• Knowledge is both positive and comprehensive for this system.
• Power draws its breath from knowledge (p. 8).
• Information and Imperialism are connected.

So what does this have to do with Rushdie?

Everything!

Rushdie's piece is written as a fictional memoir of the events surrounding India's separation from Imperial rule. Simply by writing this piece, Rushdie may be making the following comments concerning imperialism.

• The data-intensiveness of the unification of knowledge is flawed because it excludes.
• The control of knowledge only suggests that knowledge can be contained.
• Knowledge (positive and comprehensive) cannot take into account narrative.
• India/Rushdie, by creating knowledge in a way different from the imperial archive, gains power.
• Information and imperialism are connected. The story must be told.

Note the direct relationship between these points and Richards' points. Are these accurate?

Midnight's Structure

How can we understand Midnight’s Children in light of Foucault’s understanding of the archive? Let’s start with Foucault.

Foucault considers the construction of the archive from the bottom – the base of structure that organizes and creates order. In the introduction to The Order of Things, Foucault states:

[...]I am concerned here with observing how a culture experiences the propinquity of things, how it establishes the tabula of their relationships and the order by which they must be considered. (xxiv)

He writes here of understanding the archaeology of culture, that which is used to create order and thus understanding within a culture. The tabula is the ground from which items can be compared/contrasted/discriminated, thus establishing order and meaning. In this exploration of archaeologies, Foucault turns to two works of fiction as exemplars of both the arbitrary construction of this order and the way in which it is transmitted. In Order, he begins by considering Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia with its seemingly odd categorization of creatures, emphasizing the archive as arbitrary and constructed. In Language, counter-memory, practice, he explicates Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, paying particular attention to the construction of the fantastic and the positioning of Temptation among, within, and encompassing other books/works. Here, he considers the construction of the library through repetition:

Only the assiduous clamor created by repetition can transmit to us what only happened once. The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is a phenomenon of the library. (91)

Thus repetition also works as establishing a ground for order, reasserting events or concepts to create new meaning in the spaces between.

Foucault is concerned throughout with the places where things touch, the intervals that exist between theses spaces, and how these delineations then create order and meaning for a culture. Juxtaposing this structure with Rushdie’s novel both establishes and validates Saleem Sinai’s assertions, offering clarity – a map or path – through the winding narrative.

Determining the archeology of culture is precisely the task of Saleem Sinai as narrator of Midnight's Children. His story is quite literally that of India, both in his telling (allowing ownership and shaping of the story) and in the intertwining of his life (and the lives of his family members) with the political developments of his country. This order is established in the first lines of the novel when Sinai outlines several important incidents in the story of his life - his birth at the stroke of midnight; the synchronicity of this with the rebirth of India as an independent nation; the importance of his nose, nicknames, and snot. This moment passes almost immediately into the past, with the retelling of his grandfather's history, again, with special emphasis on the nose.

In and of itself, this is not a terribly unusual beginning for any story; in Foucauldian terms, though, this lays the first table, establishing some categories for understanding the novel. Autobiographical stories are also often begun with the very beginning - the moment of birth, perhaps even the circumstances of that moment, which later serve to reveal something of someone's life. But this structure is repeated throughout the novel, both through the recurring themes (of noses, progeny, snot) and in the literal structure of preview (and later repetition of these important points).

Thus the winding narrative which constantly folds back upon itself is, in a Borges-ish way, very much an ordered archive.

Archival making.

Images related to collage and bricolage, in terms of the archive.

Pablo Picasso:
Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)
Glass and Bottle of Suze (1912)
Still Life with Bowl and Fruit (1912)
Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Vieux Marc (1914)

Joseph Cornell:
Untitled [Cockatoo and Corks] (1948)
Untitled [Soap Bubble Set] (1936)
L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode cours elementaire d'histoire naturelle (1940)
Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery (1943)
Untitled [Paul and Virginia] (1946-48)

Marcel Duchamp:
L.H.O.O.Q.
Fountain (1917)
Bicycle Wheel

Umberto Boccioni:
Development of a Bottle in Space (1913)

Raiders of the Lost Archive

I watched National Treasure this weekend, which, while overall a standard Hollywood blockbuster, does reveal interesting attitudes towards archives.

The general plot is that long ago, a treasure was discovered - one which includes the library of Alexandria and innumerable treasures from around the world. It was believed to be too large for any one man to have, so it was hidden. Initially protected by the Knights Templar, the secret of the treasure's location was passed to the American founding fathers (freemasons), and then down through the family of Benjamin Franklin Bates (Nicholas Cage), our fearless protagonist. This secret, transmitted through multiple codes and ciphers, is heavy on the conspiracy theory, and thus, his educated family has been reproached by the academic community (portrayed as seekers of undeniable truth, not creative whims).

While searching for the treasure, Ben and his team realize that the back of the Declaration of Independence holds the next clue. Knowing that the National Archives will not allow them to test the document (since that could damage the document, and since Ben has no professional standing), Ben's partner suggests stealing the document. Ben does not agree with these techniques, and subsequent rift is the springboard for the action flick.

As Ben pursues his lofty goals, four camps of perspectives about archives become evident. The first is Ben's - he sees this treasure/archive as something tremendous and historical, worthy of great respect, and needing discovery, both for the world as a whole and in order to reclaim his family's good name. The second is Ben's former employer, who does plan to steal the Declaration; without Ben, his nefarious and money-hungry motivations are revealed (thus, the treasure/archive is something for individual gain of power and fortune). Third is the National Archive, whose job it is to protect and preserve archival materials; these materials are for the people, but in very specific contexts and with extremely limited access. Fourth is the Templars (and their descendants), who strive to hide the archive to protect it from greed and spoil, saving it for - well, that's never made entirely clear - but protecting and saving it all the same.

These positions are in constant interaction, revealing tensions about the purpose of archives, particularly those with monetary value: are they for the people? To be owned by individuals/organizations? To be protected or "exposed"? The movie's conclusion offers the "correct" position, one advocated by other treasure-hunting movies like Indian Jones or The Mummy. This position is that of the noble individual scholar, fighting against the greed of the individual and the desires for secrecy/protection of the academy. This (romantic) rogue will face any danger to protect the integrity of the archival material, respecting its intrinsic value like the academy; he is also not afraid to use the material when necessary - carefully, of course, but with brave disregard for the stuffiness of the academy. This individualism reflects that of the greedy enemy, but the rogue's intentions are pure; in NT, Ben declares that the treasure should be shared with the whole world, as it belongs to the whole world. He does, of course, take a modest 1% of the profit (still amounting to millions), which he splits with his goofy sidekick - because our rogue is kind, not a fool.

So is this the "proper" stance towards archives? Some Americanized middle-ground that leaves everyone satisfied?

Silent (silencing?) Genius

I'm not exactly sure what to do with or make of this work. Derrida is both more engaging and more disengaging in this than in the previous work of his we read for the class (Archive Fever)--meaning that in this text I find myself "discovering" nuggets of information that seem like tiny lumps of gold all the while swimming in a market where coal is the predominant currency.

The text, as it unfolds itself to itself (as well as to others) seems to provide many of the answers and insights to the issues that I want to provide, that I want to "find," that I want to share...as such, its genius silences most attempts (at genius insights?) because you realize that you can never be the first to discover and share what the author has set up for you (to be the first?) to discover and share.

As such, my(unspeakable/ unutterable?) thoughts linger essentially on the following passage:
Genius that is a gift of nature is not genius. Genius that gives out of natural generosity gives nothing. A gift that knows what it is giving to someone who knows what it is he [sic] is receiving is not a gift. It repossesses itself and cancels itself out in awareness and in gratitude, in the symbolic, the contract, economic circulation, in the symbolic. Silent genius surpasses both the symbolic and the imaginary, it grapples with the impossible. (75, my emphasis).

Derrida, Jacques. Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.

Please believe that I am falling apart.

Do you think that this is what Saleem had in mind? (via BoingBoing)

Brought to you by the letters G, L, and B.

Derrida's Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive references Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and plays a bit with its fascinating architecture. You can take a photographic tour of the library here.

Rushdie and Borges: threads, trust, and whatnot

Rushdie carries and weaves threads across 500+ pages and Borges does so predominantly within chapters, but both are amazing at setting up 'ethereal' threads: ideas, concepts, issues, or statements that don’t physically exist in other parts of the story but have perpetual effects on the way one reads or interprets. For example, in the beginning of Midnight’s Children Saleem says, “I must commence the business of remaking my life” (4). So, from the outset we know there is the possibility of this not being entirely truthful—that he is “remaking” things. But another line, “In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts” (131) implies a sense of unavoidable truth…indicating that he (they) would have it different if they could. Similarly, the opening story in Labryinths is about a conspiracy to create a fictional world and make it part of the “real”. Plus, the story of The Garden of Forking Paths tells us about a book/labyrinth. Both give us uncertainties to work with throughout their texts, perhaps knowing that the uncertainty would/could point us to some other understanding.

In addition to these things, Borges’ narrators as well as Rushdie’s Saleem have similar styles—a perpetual uncertain trustworthiness. You want to believe them, need to believe them, but know you can’t believe them in totality. That uncertainty, and their awareness of it, produces similar authorial tones.

But more than that, they have direct correlations; in the chapter Funes the Memorious Borges writes, “The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things” (92 in my text). This seems to me to echo the actions of the narrator of Rushdie’s work: Saleem, always trying to put off things—to put off telling parts of the story—as well as his own awareness of immortality. Plus, Funes creates his own system for classifying all the information he takes in—one which is not based on any preexisting system—and Saleem works similarly once he gains his incredible sense of smell (one that allows him to categorize smells that not everyone can smell—i.e., anger).

Any number of connections can be drawn between these two authors and we can examine their works in a variety of lights, but it seems to me that what stares at me the most is that I’m not sure how (or from what lens) to approach these two texts. They tend to work in the spaces between literature, history, philosophy, social commentary, and such. It’s a merging of styles to create.

A gaping hole in the middle of digital archives

The sheet that allowed the meeting of Aadam and Naseem is hardly the only historical fabric defined by its holes. Note this from the business section of the NY Times, 11 March:

As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes.

"There's an illusion being created that all the world's knowledge is on the Web, but we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries," said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. "Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users."

The article adds later:

The ultimate fate of information relating to potentially valuable but obscure people, places, events or things like the Silenus highlights one of the paradoxes of the digital era. While the Internet boom has made information more accessible and widespread than ever, that very ubiquity also threatens records and artifacts that do not easily lend themselves to digitization -- because of cost, but also because Web surfers and more devoted data hounds simply find it easier to go online than to travel far and wide to see tangible artifacts.

How do we respond to this situation? Have we been infected with a disease of digital optimism, where we see only the hopes of democratization that digitization advertises, paying no attention to the tyranny behind the curtain? Or does this aspect of digitization simply emphasize again the extent to which a digital archive is, like any other archive, defined as much by its holes as its fabric?

Check out this demo video on Jeff Han's Multi-touch User Interface...both because its cool and because the section where he manipulates the photos into an order made me wonder about digital archiving (and/or mobility/fluidity)

http://www.thelastminuteblog.com/2007/03/19/new-jeff-han-video-multi-touch-ui/

Authorial Trust...can/should we?

I made it in, again, finally!!!

***********************************************************************************

I think the most important (and profound) statement in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children occurs on page 242:
‘I told you the truth […] Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.’
This passage, along with many others moments throughout, put us in a position of questioning the reliability of our narrator. On the one hand, we should trust the narrative because it is a truth—a memory’s truth, but a truth nonetheless. The narrator is not trying to deceive us, but rather positioning himself as being aware of the potential faults of memory, or story, or autobiography, or history.

On the other hand, the fact that it is ‘creat[ing] its own reality’ should raise caution flags. Lines like ‘Sometimes legends makes reality, and become more useful than the facts’ (47) and ‘because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe’ (310) tend to lead one onto a path of skepticism. The narrator leaves these types of moments, along with open admission of mistakes in his ‘history’ or ‘chronology’ of events, and in doing so the trust is shaken.

The question for me, then, becomes does it matter? As we read this narrative—whether as historical commentary, social criticism, fiction, autobiography, philosophy, allegory, and so on—is trust necessary to take away what one needs? More importantly, is the uncertainty of trust exactly what the narrator needs? If we trusted him completely, would we possibly expect less meandering and uncertainty in the writing? If we didn’t trust him, would we need more moments of ‘proof?’

memory and witness and testimony

Rushdie's story and Agamben's book (Remnants of Auschwitz) have inspired me to think about my memory of the Tiananmen Incident happened in 1989. Though I was not in Beijing at that time, there were similar movements in my city to support students in Beijing. I have read quite a few books written by Chinese expariates and westerners concerning or documenting that incident. I have read a short article written by the AP photographer Jeff Widener who shot the famous the Tank Man on June 4, 1989 in Beijing. Last year PBS produced a Frontline program The Tank Man. It was beyond my imaganization the impact this one image produced. I wish I had taken more pictures in 1989. All the readings, images I have seen so far have enriched my memory of the incident and my understanding of the incident.
No one knows where the tank man is now, who he is, where he has been. The Chinese President told 20/20 host Barbar Walter that the tank man was not killed. One British newspaper claimed that the tank man is living in Britain now, but without showing his picture, without hearing his voice, no one believes. He lives without an inditity. If he is going to bear the witness of the Tiananmen Incident, will people believe him? I doubt he realized what he did in 1989 could produce such an impact. I am also wondering whether he himself is able to conceptualize what he did without being "coached' in front of video camera now. For some reason I still believe he acted out of a passing whim.
Since the Iraq war started, ABC has been following an Iragi doctor who is trying his best to save as many lives as possible in Baghdad. Once the war is over, if that does happen, his testimony will be very powerful because many people have already known who he is and what he is trying to do.

A Nose by any other name

Rushdie's imagery of the nose throughout the text Midnight's Children really struck me.. I read this novel not seeing it as an archive but rather looking for evidence of archives within it. The first thing that stuck out to me in a "triumphal arch" (p. 8) was the nose of Aadam Aziz. This was not the first reference to the olfactory organ. On the first page, Saleem Sinai, our narrator, lists among his nicknames "Snotnose" and "Sniffer"; and finishes the first paragraphe with "And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time." This imagery carries throughout much of the work as we see Saleem's history being told. Thick descriptions of his predecessors reveal that this nose is "a nose to start a family on" (p. 8) because the shape of the nose was an unmistakable of having been born a descendant of Aadam Aziz. This kind of archive, an archive of genetics and physicality, is one that we found our histories upon. As his mother commented at his birth: "look, janum, the poor fellow, he's got his grandfather's nose" (p. 131).
This nose resurfaces throughout the text and grounds Saleem Sinai's connection to and belonging to his family. This has interesting implications for the book which is about the senses in the physical and extra-ordinary ways.
The nose of Saleem Sinai, we come to discover, is not the nose of Aadam Aziz, but rather of a French grandmother from whose family Saleem was switched at birth. Two archives brought together and similar enough that they could be switched without recognition - even by the two sets of parents upon whom such deception was committed.
And yet, Saleem still identifies this nose with that of his grandfather. For him its similarity is such that the truth behind the archive does not matter as much as the archive itself, or what a reading of the archive itself might imply.

I <3 Salman Rushdie

First, let me just note the joy I experienced in returning to my roots and reading some literature - a whole book, nonetheless! - for this week. Midnight's Children is a gorgeous twisting path, ever turning back on itself while pushing forward. As an example of 'writing the archive', it's also quite brilliant. One interesting aspect of this is the consideration of what counts as knowledge, history, memory - essentially, "archive." When Saleem develops the ability to hear others' thoughts, he reflects:

Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen...which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. "I can find out any damn thing!" I triumphed, "There isn't a thing I cannot know!" (199).

This is intriguing on a number of levels. Saleem becomes an archivist in this moment. He has access to, perhaps, the dream archive - one which will reveal everything one could every possibly need to know. Out of this archive, he also creates the archive (very Derridian), as he has control over what happens with this information, setting the boundaries for what follows inteh collection. As he claims the thoughts as "mine," he also reflects the potential imperiality of the archive as a collection/space which can gather others' artifacts, shape/write history, and simply own others' (mental) landscapes. He is Methwold, he is the British rewriting the land and lives of the Indians (especially relevant as this is a book in part about colonialism and independence).

Additionally, this moment is doubly self-reflexive. Saleem "entered into the illusion of the artist," becoming a composer or writer of others' lives. But he is already that, as the narrator of this story of himself - he is always already entering others' thoughts and remaking them for his purposes, or "making them happen." Mirroring that is Rushdie as author - the ultimate artist who creates all of the text, characters, thoughts, ideas. This questions the relationship between author and narrator; Rushdie comments on this in his introduction to the 25th anniversary addition of the novel. He explicitly thanks "the original people from whom my fictional characters sprang," demonstrating the connection between "real life" and fiction (xi). However, his father, the source for Ahmed Sinai, was "so angry" about the fictional portrayal he inspired that, Rushdie says, "he refused to speak to me for many months" (xii).

This conflation of artist and archivist implicitly questions, challenges, informs conceptions of the archive itself. Plus, it's just damn sexy.

museum of natural history

We visited the Museum of Natural History on 81st St. and Central Park West last week during the trip to New York. The intent was to see how the museum was designed. As it turns out, if one starts on the top floor and works a way around and down, the museum progresses through the evolutionary chain, to a point -- a very cool concept. Implementation of this concept leaves a little to be desired. No one was following the design. No one. There was no signage to direct people to the orientation center on the 4th floor (we entered from the lower level). One you arrived at the fourth floor, if you go to the right (as most people tend to do) you go the wrong way. Users had to realize that going into the Orientation center (to the left) was the appropriate choice, but the majority of folks during our visit were moving against this design. Maybe they were just there to see the pretty dinosaur bones.