fall 2003 | The Culture Issue
The Dream of an Archival Genesis Bomb Cjadwick T. Smith
In the opening to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt remarks that technology plays catch-up to our fantasies in fiction.[1] She was writing of Sputnik and space flight as potential realizations of science fiction, and wonders whether a new desire to “escape from Earth” marks a change in the condition of our existence. I have a similar curiosity regarding humans and archiving–another endeavor that has recently seen rapid and revolutionary technological change, an activity which, like transportation, is fundamentally linked to its technology. Our satellite will be the computer, and, as a model for changes in our condition, I will take Italo Calvino’s short story “World Memory.” The extraordinary archive in this story points toward a coming relationship to computers and memory, fantasies of and anxieties about changes realized with new types of archives. The way in which we organize information and relate to it are governed by models, and Calvino’s archive (though not alone in this—both Borges and Pynchon immediately come to mind) depicts the new, the moment of a new metaphor emerging in the skin of the old. Hubert Dreyfus usefully names the previous archival models “Old Library Culture,” and what is now forming in contemporary society “Hyperlinked Culture.” The difference between these conditions might also be described as the modern and the postmodern, and, though I feel Dreyfus’ terms are more focused for the purposes of this paper, the final transition between them is what this paper anticipates. It is an anxious moment in thinking about information and our relation to it, a moment coming to the foreground as computer technology comes into prominence. The condition of the story is still the condition in which we live; the technology is catching up, but we are still working on the “World Memory.” We’re still waiting, in the eschatological spirit of the story, for the cataclysmic change, perhaps a new genesis. In Calvino’s vision, this coming change is a poignant march to the ends of humankind as we know it.
Part I: Beginnings Calvino’s story is of an archiving project that will represent all of human civilization after its imminent extinction. Since it will be all that remains, it will also be all that is real. This leads the project’s director to record an idealized version of his wife and to destroy any and everything that may contradict this record–including the people involved. As the drama revolves around an archive, we will begin with one. The project is to be “the greatest document centre [sic] ever conceived, an archive that will bring together and catalogue everything that is known about every person, animal, and thing…”[2] Though the concept of the archive is a difficult one to pin down, this sentence begins to lay the foundation of its essential characteristics. First, it is both a place and a thing: the collection of documents and the building or site where they are held. Jacques Derrida explains this distinction in context of the Greek word arkheion. He explains that it is “a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. . . On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their home, in that place which is their house (private house, family house, or employee’s house), that official documents are filed…. They also are accorded the hermeneutic right and competence.”[3] The archive thus is also archiving, an act committed at the place of the archive. Furthermore, there are archivists, elite persons who are responsible for maintaining the archive. More important than simple security, however, is their role in interpreting the archive: it is a point of hermeneutics. It is a place where meaning is produced at the origin of a narrative. As Calvino even addresses the story to one “of the young elite” involved in the World Memory,[4] his archive embodies these traditional characteristics: it is the place where the archive is produced and stored, a place where it is then interpreted. Regardless, it is problematic from the start. Later in these opening sentences, he also proclaims it will be “a general inventory not only of the present but of the past too, of everything that has ever been since time began, in short, a general and simultaneous history of everything…”[5] and also “a centralized archive of human kind.”[6] Here, the World Memory begins its subtle drift away from that Greek household and its elite interpreters, away from the Museum of Modern Art and its equally elite history-makers. An archive has always had an organizing principle inscribed into the collection that determines what is admitted and how it is to be interpreted. Derrida calls this Consignation. It is a function which “aims to coordinate a single corpus… in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.”[7] The activity of the archive is this hermeneutic exclusion of that which does not fit into its principle since there is, as he writes, “No archive without outside.”[8] Calvino’s catalog, however, is all encompassing. We move from the inclusion of libraries, museums, and newspaper annals, which are based on this model, to information collected ad hoc, chaotically whenever and wherever. All of this will be thrown together in a collection whose interpretation is not even certain, “whether because of disturbances in transmission, or some malevolence on the part of the decoder…”[9] Further, “World Memory” successfully complicates the category of the elite interpreter, even as it reproduces it. With the story’s second-person address, any reader becomes one of “the elite.” You become an archon. You are already in its presence; the power to interpret and produce is given to you. This is the populist dream of the Internet, taken from the elite with “publicly recognized authority,” and inscribed in a simple gesture of address. This foundation-laying, this substrate, of the story finally ends with the anointing of the computer system to take the roles of human brains, completing a summary of what will be the salient points of this investigation. The two poles toward which the World Memory stretches are what Dreyfus, in his book about the Internet, names “Old Library Culture” and “Hyperlinked Culture.”[10] The model of information organization presented by the Internet runs contrary to that of the system that precedes it: it is lateral, not hierarchic; it is synchronic, not progressive; it is additive, not exclusionary; it is dynamic, not permanent. Rather than semantic, it is syntactic. There is a movement in the World Memory undeterred between these systems of organization. The character of this shift and its consequences are the subject of the remainder of this paper.
Part II: The Archive, Memory, and History Plato feared writing. He worried that it promoted forgetting, that when a speech backed by the living being was pressed into concrete record we would leave it there, dead, and forget about it. He was correct. An archive does function in this way. It is prosthesis. It becomes the memory “along the lines of the individual memories in our brains,”[11] but held externally. This function can be seen in a simple scrapbook, but the “document centre [sic]” will be a world memory, it is a “history of everything.” Memory and history are used almost interchangeably in the story, and “archive,” too, is subject to such metonymy. The joint is that through the archive, memory is accessible for reference, and the information is consulted as history. Ostensibly, Calvino’s archive acts this way, recording a story of history. In fact, the plot of Calvino’s story depends on it; its driving force lies with the archive’s director and his manipulations of its information. At first it is the omissions and slight lies he writes into the archive that give it only a “slightly subjective slant,”[12] but this role ultimately leads him to kill off the living versions of people who appear in the archive. The Director’s real project is one of murder for memory. To preserve a memory of his wife, Angela, that he created to live on in the archive, “the first thing that must be done was to stop the living Angela from constantly superimposing herself on that image.”[13] We are trafficking in the supremacy of the recorded story: history. In this, Calvino’s archive still exists in a tension. The way in which the information will be interpreted, by whom and where, more resembles the type of non-differentiated and additive mass of information we see in the hyperlinked archive, in a variety of “optical or acoustic media”[14] or other codes and material. The Director is fighting the capacity of the archive to include increasing amounts of information, a proliferation that engenders his escalating violence. It is this proliferation that marks the World Memory, like the Internet, as a revolutionary model of archive. The narrative of history loses its exclusionary ability and admits anything into a mass of information that may be viewed simultaneously and in any order. This is a vital consideration since we, in the Enlightenment mold, define events and ourselves historically. The “Old Library Culture” of the archive is a narrativized progression, a comparison of differences that supports the idea of “consignation,” excluding any outside that would undermine it. It organizes, interprets, and most importantly, integrates. This is a mirror of Enlightenment Man. Our archives are records of human knowledge, and both the archive and the knowledge are itself arranged in gathered, coherent, and contained units. This is the Dewey Decimal System; this is our natural history museum. The Internet is different. Perform a search on the Internet—your results are huge lists, arranged however you wish to sort them, and they all link to each other laterally through associations, not hierarchical structures; the Internet-archive operates by being open-ended and additive. There is always room for another link, another document, another Archon. Does a change in the method of conceiving and handling documents become the harbinger of a significant change in ourselves? The World Memory may be in its inception a child of Enlightenment man, but to Calvino, this is a mankind that will soon be extinct. We can return to Plato for a moment on a note of death. We put an integrated memory into the archive and forget it. To Plato it is a dead thing, a poor prosthetic and a threat to the living Logos of voice. In this way, it is a leap toward the dead, archivization as an action of the death drive. We must address Freud; it is, after all, in his name that The Director justifies his “subjective slant,” stating simply “that in many cases—the patient’s lies to the psychoanalyst, for example—are just as revealing as the truth, if not more so.”[15] As such, psychoanalysis provides the model for The Director’s archive. Here he agrees with Derrida, who claims that psychoanalysis, in many ways, “aspires to be a general science of the archive, of everything that can happen to the economy of memory and to its substrates, traces, documents, in their supposedly psychical or techno-prosthetic forms.”[16] But “World Memory” still seems to me something radical. Did Freud perhaps inscribe in psychoanalysis its own end, figured here in the extinction of its subjects? The World Memory is a grand march toward death. It is a drive toward a beyond, but beyond what? The “Old Library Culture” is an ego model. As Freud counseled us, however, the ego is a bodily ego. If indeed an archive must have an outside to function, what the Internet-archive and the World Memory will remainder is the body, drawing a margin for the beyond by killing off this subject-ego based wholly in and originating from the body. When The Director sets about the project of murder, the World Memory preserves the meaning of the archive as both a thing and a place. Imminent annihilation, however, already points beyond; the Internet-archive is that step beyond. Though one may be tempted to consider that the Internet-archive is indeed a physical thing, to consider its portals—the computers—as places, it is not so in itself. If there were a Delphic Oracle in every home in antiquity, would it be such a place? A thing of pilgrimage? The oracles would rather be like computers, and value would be shifted from the delivery device to the information of the gods. Would we still be murdered on the road to one of a million oracles? Could we still be trapped in the complex of Oedipus if the place wherein the prophecy originates is dissolved and dispersed? The oracle moves beyond, to a space among the gods where our bodies cannot travel. Never are you situated spatially in its place. This is what leads to the exclusion of the body in the Internet-archive and the possible extinction of the type of subject psychoanalysis diagnoses. The story takes this prescient step; it excludes the body in its functioning model of the archive. It is not a “techno-prosthesis” of memory, but of the human being itself. Up to this point, I have briefly outlined the foundations of my conclusions about the new archive emergent in this brief fiction. Once our archives become Dreyfus’ “Hyperlinked Culture,” the humans that build and use them will be something other than those that envisioned the project of “World Memory.” Dreyfus sees this change in libraries. He succinctly states: “Clearly, the user of a hyper-connected library would no longer be a modern subject with a fixed identity who desires a more complete and reliable model of the world, but rather a postmodern, protean being…”[17] This connection is the crux of my paper. It is also the anxiety felt in Calvino’s characters. The shape of our information organization is in direct correlation not only with how we view the world, but also ourselves, and this correlation extends to the archive and history, and, ultimately, the groundings and origins of what we know of ourselves. Taking the Internet as our example, we can see that “Web surfers embrace proliferating information as a new form of life” [author’s emphasis].[18] The scientific classification and gathering of the Enlightenment may give way to the diversification and dissemination of the Internet-archive, and with it goes the Enlightenment/humanist mankind. It does away with its system of organization centered around an ordinal point–it does away first with the privileged individual, and then with the body as a ground and an organizing principle. Calvino poignantly symbolizes this anxiety and prescient apprehension in the premature extinction of the species.
Part III: Extinction, Revolutions, and New Models We call it the digital revolution, but secretly wonder if such a thing is possible. Is revolution—and this is the salient point when discussing technology—a real break or simply a transition, the gradual play of differences? Is there really a change? In these preceding pages we have seen what I would posit as an outline for a destabilization of extant forms, slowly acting to implode structures of information to form a hyperlinked primordial soup. This allows for the possibility of newness and revolution. To Walter Benjamin, the new always presents itself in an inappropriate, older form; the confrontation between the two creates the new. Benjamin writes, “To the forms of the new means of production which is in the beginning dominated by the old one (Marx), there correspond in the collective consciousness images in which the new is integrated with the old…”[19] In this way, the movement of Calvino’s archive from “Old library” to “Hyperlinked” culture is a dialectic one. The working of the dialectic machinery will, however, always retain an element of what it negates. Since the drive is to archive as much information as possible in the Memory, we see a dialectic change in the human condition transferred to informatics rather than through its material produce. The change could also be to something called post-industrial, in that we’re not dealing with “work” as something that produces material change in the world but rather with information. Benjamin wrote of these stages in terms of iron construction of the nineteenth centurym, when people built in iron using forms appropriate for stone or wood. But just as the iron greenhouse contained within it the Crystal Palace and the international style skyscrapers that would rise from cities’ skylines, the World Memory contains in it the coming new, the Internet—and its corresponding—in his computer-memory, the information, like iron, the surviving element. Thus, we can view Calvino’s archive as something of a Janus-Head, looking both forward and backwards. It grows out of the pre-Internet archival structure and purpose, it also serves to kill off the body and question the mass of information that comprises the human race’s identity. What might be the prophecy of this story? Where does “World Memory” draw its margin? Calvino has a pretty good idea. He wonders, “What will the human race be like at the moment of its extinction?”[20] and answers, “A certain quantity of information about itself and the world…”[21] Through the extinction of the race, through the murders inspired by the reading of the archive, Calvino is able to bracket off and define the human race exclusively in its relation to information—exclusively in its relation to the archive. What’s at stake in the story is Humanism itself. We see in Calvino’s “World Memory,” like our desire to leave Earth, a tension felt as we live with a revolutionary form of archive and the vision of a new way to view information. If the archive is no longer a repository to record origins, to store or repress memories and their interpretations, but rather a “certain quantity of information,” synchronic and unsure, then what is it? What happens when, as it is in “World Memory,” the entirety of our memory gets put into this digital, networked archive? The fact is, in “World Memory,” the archive is built to eventually become not only a prosthesis for memory, but also a prosthesis for the species. It is meant to last in a relationship with someone or thing in the future, even “extra-galactic archaeologists”[22] (which are perhaps dramatized post-humans). Clearly there will be some type of relationship to this information. Given this scenario, how long until the sci-fi dream (or nightmare) comes true, and we truly are simply operators, organic information processors with no storage capacity and perhaps no objective of our own separate from that of the archive’s? The question this story really raises is: what is the minimum amount of memory required for us to remain the type of “human” we are now? The World Memory represents a consuming project for its workers. The result: a collection of records which are themselves the only reality of a program of which the workers are functionaries. No longer is it a matter of interpreting a collection of documents/memories past and amassed; it is a matter of producing them, and, in the act of producing, simultaneously archiving them—as when The Director catalogs his yawns. If this relationship is extrapolated to the Internet these documents ignite: all of it is provided and instantaneously available to an exploding set of people. The interpretive role of a select few is replaced by a production/archivization function of a group of people. These qualities lead me to apply a relationship between human and machine posited by Vilem Flusser—that of the apparatus and operator.[23] An apparatus mimics a function of human thought—in the archive’s case,” the individual memories in our brains.” The human, now relieved of this application of thought, must work with the apparatus. They work together in a complex, without cause to distinguish between the two. Apparatus and operator only exist by the definitions of each other’s functioning, and this functioning, according to Flusser, is determined by the program of the apparatus. He explains this arrangement in terms of photography. The camera and operator work to fulfill a program, in this case, of making every possible photograph a reality. As an apparatus is not fully automatic, it cannot do this itself; the technology establishes the program of what is possible (what can be photographed), and the operators acquire their identity in proficiently using the apparatus to accomplish the goal. This is what replaces the interpretive gesture, guidelines, or organizing principles of the archive, and with no principle directing its expansion and production, the Internet only plays by the rules of its own possibilities. Because activity takes place only within the program, “the world is only a pretext for the states of things to be produced, but amongst the possibilities contained within the camera’s program.”[24] Only the photograph is real; the signifier, the information, is real, not the world being photographed. The program of the Internet-archive is precisely what the common off-handed remark about it says: to make everything “available online,” published for anyone to see. The Director is aware of this: “The final result of our work will be a model in which everything counts as information, even what isn’t there.”[25] No longer the “consignment” of the “Old Library Culture,” it is the pleroma of a hyperlinked world. The consequence of this scenario in Calvino’s imagination, the very focal point of the plot, is that only what is documented (within the program) is real. This is the logic by which the physical bodies of the archive are eliminated. As Derrida writes,
These are facets of the same phenomenon. To put it another way, when and if we can feel that that which transpires in our electric or “virtual” fields of existence as more valuable and more real than physical phenomena, the distinction between virtual and real will turn gossamer-thin or disappear completely. As The Director kills Angela and all those associated with her, there will be no troublesome intrusions from the real bodies exclusive of the information. Reality, as such, gets transferred from bodies to the archive. And then their work will be done; and then a certain species will be extinct. By bracketing off this relationship, I follow the lead of an image in Benjamin’s collective consciousness, and do not mean to suggest that this will be the only relationship available. Every apparatus and its program is ruled by the “metaprogram” that produced it (such as the socio-industrial complex that designs and produces the camera, for example), and, as Flusser writes, “The hierarchy of programs is open at the top.”[27] In Addition, this relationship must be considered from a somewhat phenomenological view, through use and surface. The actual construction of the hyperlinked archive, for example, is in a programming code, which is extremely hierarchical and linear. In Flusser’s model, however, one of the defining characteristics of the apparatus is that “the functionary controls the apparatus thanks to the control of its exterior (the input and output) and is controlled by it thanks to the impenetrability of the interior.”[28] This is, however, the condition of the Internet, of which I write for a crucial reason. It is the most visible example of this emerging relationship, and at the same time, an example of an archive, to which I posit our very self-concept is inextricably tied. In the relationship of apparatus to operator all reality, and thus all origins of truths, are generated through his relationship, through the program. A full reckoning of the relationship described by Flusser would describe many pieces of technology, all governed by interconnected programs. Where the interstices are, where the freedom may exist, is the subject for another paper. I only wish here to propose a possible future for the archive, one that seems to be coursing along beneath the skin of the World Memory, conceived and waiting to emerge. I have organized much of this paper around the death of the “modern” subject, a topic on which I may seem a bit late. Reports of its death, however, have been greatly exaggerated. Its death is fetal, waiting to be born from that modern subject. Calvino’s “World Memory” is an ultrasound appearing at a revealing moment. One of Benjamin’s images of the collective consciousness, this archive figures information as expanding network—one in which each user may be an archon, producing documents, each of which is not a representation of something absent but rather the thing itself, the only reality in the system. It is a continual production of new meanings and foundations—an explosion of origins, none of which are more privileged than another by any authority. This would, perhaps, amount to an erasure of origins and a clean slate; figurally, this is the birth of a new species in a new world. This may be the real dream of the “democratic” Internet, the promise Calvino senses in emergent computers and infused into his fictional archive, eradicating extant barriers and hierarchies. A genesis bomb.
Notes: 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
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Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought