R H's List: ARK - The Archive beyond the Archives

Derrida Today vol. 17 (2014), pp.21-43

ABSTRACT: This essay explores three deconstructive concepts – archive, anthropocene, and auto-affection – across two registers. The first is the register of what counts as readability in general, beyond reading in its narrow and actualized sense. (This would include the reading of non-linguistic systems and traces, including the stratigraphic reading of the planet earth's sedimented layers of time that are archived in the geological record, and the reading of human monuments ranging from books to buildings). The second register applies to Derrida today, and what it means to read the corpus of a philosopher and how that corpus is governed by (and governs) proper names. I want to suggest that the way we approach proper names in philosophy and theory is part of a broader problem of our relation to what it is to read, and how readability intertwines with the human.

History of the Human Sciences 26(4) 2013, pp.67-83

ABSTRACT
The archival turn in 19th-century historical scholarship – that is, the growing tendency among 19th-century historians to equate professional historical studies with scholarship based on archival research – not only affected the profession’s epistemological assumptions and day-to-day working manners, but also changed the persona of the historian. Archival research required the cultivation and exercise of such dispositions, virtues, or character traits as carefulness, meticulousness, diligence and industry. This article shows that a growing significance attached to these qualities made the archival turn increasingly contested. As the case of the German-Austrian historian Theodor von Sickel and his critics shows, it was not the necessity of archival research as such on which historians in late 19th-century Europe came to hold different views. Sickel’s critics were rather concerned about the potentially detrimental effects that the increasingly philological ethos of archival studies could have on the historian’s character. What was primarily at stake in late 19th-century debates on the gains and losses of increased commitments to archival study was the persona of the historian – his character traits, his dispositions and the virtues and skills in which he excelled.

Journal of Asian Studies / FirstView Article

EXCERPT: "The idea of the archive continues to be an undeniable force and organizing structure in exhibitions today. Here we break down the basics of this complicated yet intensely contemporary genre, which easily elides from the hyper-researched to the totally surreal."

"'Matched' is a Dystopian young adult novel ... what makes this novel special is the attention that it gives to artifacts and archivists"

Archivaria 66 (2008)

"The image and stereotypes of archivists are topics that nag at the back of every archivist’s mind. What do people think of us? What do they think we do? Do they genuinely think that we are covered in dust, aging, and unhappy? This exploratory study aims to investigate issues surrounding the image and stereotypes of archivists as presented in films. A content analysis of nineteen films was performed to determine how archivists are portrayed, both physically and behaviourally. Based upon previous literature in the fields of archivy and librarianship, a checklist was created to appraise the characteristics of the films, the role of the archivists within each film, and the archivists’ physical and behavioural characteristics. A preliminary assumption concerning the portrayal of archivists as librarians in the films was hypothesized and proven to be false. Results of the study indicate that, within the context of film, physically and behaviourally, archivists follow generally accepted stereotypes. It is suggested that this study could provide the basis for future research into archival stereotypes found in other forms of popular culture."

Aperture, Winter 2013
"The [A]rchive [of Modern Conflict] hovers somewhere between the status of a museum with a strict historical remit and a private collection that ramifies according to visual and conceptual lines of inquiry as much as accident and whim. It was founded, and is still funded, by Canadian businessman David Thomson, owner of the Thomson Reuters media empire."

Photographies 3(2) (2010) 127-138

"This special issue aims to consider some of the ways in which memory has become a tool for critically theorizing photography and the archive. We recognize that there is nothing new in claiming the significance of memory, but the nexus of photography, archive and memory is yet to be fully explored. The essays presented here attempt in their own way to elucidate how memory as a concept can become useful in further understanding photography and the archive."

Routledge 2013.

Not only does the library have a long and complex history and politics, but it has an ambivalent presence in Western culture - both a site of positive knowledge and a site of error, confusion, and loss. Nevertheless, in literary studies and in the humanities, including book history, the figure of the library remains in many senses under-researched. This collection brings together established and up-and-coming researchers from a number of practices - literary and cultural studies, gender studies, book history, philosophy, visual culture, and contemporary art -with an effective historical sweep ranging from the time of Sumer to the present day.

In the context of the rise of archive studies, this book attends specifically and meta-critically to the figure of the library as a particular archival form, considering the traits that constitute (or fail to constitute) the library as institution or idea, and questions its relations to other accumulative modes, such as the archive in its traditional sense, the museum, or the filmic or digital archive. Across their diversity, and in addition to their international standard of research and writing, each chapter is unified by commitment to analyzing the complex cultural politics of the library form.

Not open access, unfortunately.

This double issue looks at archives as calls to action. Rather than stable repositories, archives are examined as acts and practices in transit that mobilize different media and are mobilized by them.

Vilariño Picos, T. (2011) 'The Library and the Librarian as a Theme in Literature', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13(5) Article 15
 
Abstract
In her article "The Library and the Librarian as a Theme in Literature," Teresa Vilariño Picos explores in several languages and genres (literature, cinema, television), the image of the library and the librarian. Vilariño Picos argues that the image of the library and the librarian often refer the reader or viewer to a perception where the space of books represents universal humanity and knowledge despite the often negative view depicted. In Vilariño Picos's discussion particular attention is paid to the works of Elias Canetti, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, and David Lodge in literature and Alain Resnais film and Manolo Valdés in art. As well, she explores the theme in videogames and television series.

"Mnemoscape is an online platform and network dedicated to contemporary art practices exploring issues of memory, history and the archival impulse. The blog is intended as a resource, a space to collect, spread and share knowledge about such practices. In particular, we are interested in featuring artworks, curatorial projects and writing that are concerned with these issues. As such, Memoscape is structured to enable participation.

The contemporary art panorama is characterized by an increasing obsession with the past and the physical objects in which it materializes: monuments, ruins, archives, old photographs, found-footage, abandoned items, obsolete technologies, debris and trash of interrupted lives. Historiographical turn, ruin aesthetic, archival impulse, are some of the labels which have been coined to define the new trend. Mnemoscape intervenes in this scenario and acts as a map, a tool to chart an ever-expanding and ever-changing, almost ungraspable territory: the contemporary landscape of memory.

Mnemoscape is born out of a collaboration between Elisa Adami and Alessandra Ferrini."

"The conference is organised by Mnemoscape with the support of the University of Westminster, the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture and The International Association for Visual Culture."

Global Review: A Biannual Special Topics Journal 1(1) 2013 —Themed issue on Archives & Networks of Modernism

"Modernism as a movement and period has been defined by its networks and its archives. Perhaps even uniquely so, although Romanticism remains a disruptive precursor. Modernism exists for us only as an archive or window to the past: an ostensibly stable perspective through which we can understand and comment on its fragments and remainders. Under the spectre of authenticity, the archive dubiously attracts attention, yet foreclosing on the range of viable texts is equally suspect. Schools and networks exist in a similar tension, uncovering while also generating meaning. In actuality, these archives bespeak shifting networks, contexts, and politics, moving in parallax with interpretive agency and critical interventions. They offer a theoretical richness to challenge the bounds of intertextuality and question the limits of any text. ..."

Build me a city: an exploration of the archives of the Architecture Museum, UniSA by seven artists. A collaboration between the Architecture Museum, School of Art, Architecture and Design, UniSA, the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, curator Vivonne Thwaites with Christine Garnaut, Julie Collins and writer Ruth Fazakerley

Paper given at "Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: In Memory of Richard Rorty" A Symposium to Celebrate Richard Rorty's Archive (UC Irvine).

Shawn Clover's mashups of photographs of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake with contemporary photographs of the same locations.

"To put these photos together, I first create a catalog of historical photos that look like they have potential to be blended. Unfortunately most of these photos end up on the digital cutting room floor because there’s simply no way to get the same photo today because either a building or a tree is in the way. Once I get a good location, I get everything lined up just right. My goal is to stand in the exact spot where the original photographer stood. Doing this needs to take into account equivalent focal length, how the lens was shifted, light conditions, etc. I take plenty of shots, each nudged around a bit at each location. Just moving one foot to the left changes everything."

"BELA is directly inspired by the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). It aims to unite the efforts of several existing bodies—English Heritage, Subterranea Britannica, the Airfields of Britain Conservation Trust and even the Department for Transport, among dozens of others—in a project of national landscape taxonomy that will combine catalogues created by distinct organisations into one omnivorous, searchable archive of human-altered landscapes in Britain... From military bases to abandoned factories, from bonded warehouses to national parks, by way of private gardens, council estates, scientific laboratories and large-scale pieces of urban infrastructure, BELA’s listings are intended to serve as something of an ultimate guide to both familiar and esoteric sites of human land use throughout the United Kingdom."

… My dissertation … asks why the postmodern, perhaps posthuman archive in contemporary archival discourse must now, at this moment, be defined. While contemporary archival discourse has only recently explicitly identified the archive as feverish, archival fiction, fiction wherein the “archive functions as a semiotic frame that structures [a] text’s content and meaning,” has long indicated that the archive’s dis-ease can be attributed to the burn of a kind of fever (Codebò 13). Although such dis-ease has provoked uneasy fascination in philosophical narratives from Franz Kafka to Jorge Luis Borges to Italo Calvino to Umberto Eco, I am more interested in this project in reading contemporary archival discourse through a strain of archival fiction I call redemptive romance … the desire-driven efforts of critical theorists, casual archive readers, and fictional characters alike to redeem from the archive the “highly significant fragment.” ... I consequently look to fiction to explain contemporary archival discourse’s current emphasis on the archive’s liminal … status. ... I consider this project particularly necessary … first because contemporary archives … are increasingly invested with a political, and specifically pan-democratic significance, … and second, … the imminence of archival digitization … means that contemporary archives, and their critical apparatus, face unprecedented instability, and thus offer unprecedented opportunity for exploration in regards to their future form, content, and status. …