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}
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3 comments:
These are really interesting questions.
In some ways, the prosthetic archive that you're discussing (or archive as hypomnema, in Platonic terms) reminds me of collections more generally: those things that people amass around them. They are generally more personalized than we might think of an archive being (though, as you note, we can talk about individual as well as state or institutional archives), and whereas archives at least pretend to be systematic, collections can be more scattershot--whoever is amassing them gets to determine the criteria of collection.
Studies of collections and collectors show that they can incredibly emotional things, in all sorts of ways. In this way, I think the collection is a very moody thing, but of course the moods of collected objects are so subjective, as a person who is not the collector may feel little of the emotion that the collector does.
Think of associations between objects and the person who gave them, or objects and the places they were acquired, or objects that are associated with particular experiences. All of these associations very inflected with feeling, which is why sometimes we cannot throw something away.
As to your question about whether the mood is inherent in the collected thing or subject to interpretation/recreation at later moments (if i understand your question), well, that seems harder, because mood, like so many emotional things, is hardly a static thing.
Write more about this: I am keen to read it.
These are really interesting questions.
In some ways, the prosthetic archive that you're discussing (or archive as hypomnema, in Platonic terms) reminds me of collections more generally: those things that people amass around them. They are generally more personalized than we might think of an archive being (though, as you note, we can talk about individual as well as state or institutional archives), and whereas archives at least pretend to be systematic, collections can be more scattershot--whoever is amassing them gets to determine the criteria of collection.
Studies of collections and collectors show that they can incredibly emotional things, in all sorts of ways. In this way, I think the collection is a very moody thing, but of course the moods of collected objects are so subjective, as a person who is not the collector may feel little of the emotion that the collector does.
Think of associations between objects and the person who gave them, or objects and the places they were acquired, or objects that are associated with particular experiences. All of these associations very inflected with feeling, which is why sometimes we cannot throw something away.
As to your question about whether the mood is inherent in the collected thing or subject to interpretation/recreation at later moments (if i understand your question), well, that seems harder, because mood, like so many emotional things, is hardly a static thing.
Write more about this: I am keen to read it.
I guess the question is, "do the 'objects' in the prosthetic archive (or archive as hypomnema) have moods of their own?" Or are they devoid of mood and only the "subject" can imbue them with mood (either as the mood of [in] the "object" when placed into the archive or the mood brought to [bear upon] the "object" when retrieved from the archive)?
The thing most interesting to me is the potentialities of mood, specifically in terms to its functions/connections to mystory--and a mystorical archive, both private and public (though Ulmer may argue that mystory only has private/personal archives).
For example, if we were revisiting the archive (essentially opening up the past) to see, touch, feel (find) the bullet(s) that killed JFK, I would assume part of its archival importance and value could be construed in the mood that accompanies that bullet (a mood brought to bear upon that bullet by the archival researcher and a mood put on [in] that bullet by the collective emotional outpouring of a nation at a single instant in time--a flash). Through this particular mood (in its plurality as structured above), we could then launch our work or make connections to/from this mood for further exploration of the archive.
This exploration would not be to delve further into the JFK horizon (as those approaches would be traditional, historiographical) but rather to pursue other "objects" in the archive (and generally other types of archives) that we could link to via mood: both those with similar moods and those with similar archived "objects."
It's about using the mood in particular social/cultural endocepts as a (re)beginning point.
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