2014
(NEEDS EDITING)
On the Archive
Modern memory, is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. No longer living memory’s more or less intended remainder, the archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life – itself often a function of its own recording – a secondary memory, a prosthesis memory. (Pierre Nora, 1984, p.13)
Whether or not our memories can be physically archived undoubtedly changes our perception of them and our ability to remember. Our reasons for taking photographs depend on the archive – the process of storing and recording what Pierre Nora calls the ‘materiality of the trace’. It is the archive that allows us to reflect on past memories in a way that does not require a naturally strong internal image.
The physical archive has been a key structure in the nature of memory ever since mankind started collecting. It not only came into play when we became able to basically reproduce an image, but arguably started through the exteriorization of internal thoughts. Writing on paper and filing away became the archive – simply an accumulation of material to be kept as a physical parallel to time. In Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, he describes the archive in its simplest form as an ‘accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’. (1998, p.15) Taking the fragility of memory outside of an internal and personal space and storing it outside from its original context automatically displaces it and changes how we view the memory, particularly if it is on a public scale.
Museums and galleries can be viewed as public archives – bringing particular items or images out of a collection to be put on display for the public to see. This not only adds to the sense of constructing a collective memory as described earlier, by introducing new fragments from which histories can be pieced, but it institutionalizes the memory, if the object or image holds a memory. The memory and its true meaning is defined through its situation, and thus although the public gallery may act as a more selfless means of sharing the memory in allowing the growth of public knowledge, it also and importantly separates it yet again from its origin.
It is, however, the personal archive that is most interesting in exploring our current relationship to memory images. At the time of its advent the camera allowed a once-real scene to become a two-dimensional physicality; the analogue image had a certain novelty in that only through finishing the entire film and getting it developed were we faced with the initial scene we had once encountered, there was always a delay between real moment and captured moment. This image ultimately had (and still has) two destinies – in the life of the archive or in its destruction. Even in its forgetting, shoved to the back of a drawer or lost behind bookshelves, can it still be considered to be part of some sort of abandoned archive? Not destroyed but in a sense preserved, the image still exists as a certificate of time. The traditional personal archive comes in the form of photo albums, images placed in books to be referred back to time and again. This personal act of accumulation could be seen as an act of self-preservation, the very process of taking photos as a means of marking presence in time and place – documenting our travels and life events. These intimate testimonies of being hold qualities of reminiscence, looked back on to entice memory and to stop the natural processes of forgetting. There is something extremely sacred about the physical archive, they are purely sentimental constructions for the maker, and perhaps in their eyes there is a concern that the demise of the photo album would be the demise of the memory as they know it. The photograph could be seen as the life support for the memory, the most pictorial means of accessing the past and the person we once were. Barthes suggests that ‘when we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave; they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies’ (1993, 57). Is there, then, something quite morbid in the physical archive? Indeed the very process is intrinsically unnatural, replicating a visual scene through a non-living agent and storing it in a book to be placed on a shelf. Is this due to us not trusting our own natural memories, aware of our human weaknesses, or as a means of proof not just to ourselves but to other viewers – passing on our stories as we would like them to be remembered?
Indeed the same could be said for the digital archive – the archive that we are perhaps more used to using in our day-to-day lives. What is interesting about the digital archive is that the archive is still internalised, simplified and formatted for life in a digital memory rather than human memory. The life of the photograph in the digital sphere is endless, there is a seemingly infinite amount of storage available that goes far beyond the confines of bound pages, and we have learnt to use this to our advantage. The photo album no longer relies on a long process of waiting for images to develop and the labour of love in attaching each individual photograph to a page and annotating it; we can now view the image moments after it was taken, and, more importantly, we can digitally delete the image instantly if we deem it unsatisfactory, meaning it will no longer exist in physical or digital form. With photo editing software, we now have the godlike ability to aesthetically change a scene that was once before us; surely this capacity completely undermines the authenticity of the image that we now see as memory?
The memory image that we used to have to search for, or more likely come across by chance through a chronological system, can now be located at the click of a button. ‘The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen’ (Huyssen, 1994: 253.) Huyssen talks of the ‘simultaneity of all times and spaces readily accessible in the present’ (ibid.), this sense of a dual reality and being able to access a whole range of time periods at the same time. With the conversion of physical two-dimensional images to a digital existence made up of pixels on a screen so comes this sense of instantaneity. Photographs as an aide-memoire can appear to us at our wish, and more importantly, can be showcased on social media sites. The once revered photo album, in a book format that only a small number of people could view at a time can now be accessed by millions of strangers without us noticing. Due to the rise of the digital, could it be argued that our memories in this format have become far less personal? Do they not hold for us the same sentimentality? Instead of having a set number of possible images on film that we had to save for the ideal moment, we can now take thousands of digital snapshots at a time and instantly view them. With our known ability to edit, destroy, reproduce endlessly and broadcast to an unlimited audience we have surely become detached from the original printed image that we once so carefully preserved and cherished. However, it could be argued that the digital image now holds more power due to these very capabilities. As we are aware of the potential audience our image could be viewed by, are we therefore more likely to select and edit more carefully as a way of determining the way others will perceive us? These digital photographs can define us entirely; even those who know us outside of the online world will no doubt form an opinion which is based on our digital presence and the way in which we broadcast ourselves. The digital platform allows us to reinvent ourselves as we wish, ‘for the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity’ (Barthes, 1993, p. 12).
Could the act of archiving, both physically and digitally be seen as inauthenticity in itself? The collection of photos to piece together our lives both on a personal and public scale is far from the natural accessing and remembering of memories, and of course requires a degree of biased and artificial selection. We seem to be driven by this desire to archive, a means of documenting and preserving and as a means of beating our human cerebral weaknesses. In Archive Fever Derrida writes:
There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destructive drive (1998, p.19).
Derrida claims that we seem to be concerned with a ‘death drive’. In this sense, our current relationship to technology in terms of the archive means that we are still bound up with our original human fear of mortality, and the archive is therefore a desperate bid for the past; putting power in images that now construct our history for us and believing in their authenticity. However, the archive always works against itself. While we may see the archive as a solid base for our memories, an inner sanctum for sentimentality and a key basis of our identity, it is in fact encouraging the accumulation of artificial, staged and edited images that broadly deny and overwrite our own human limitations.
(NEEDS EDITING)
On the Archive
Modern memory, is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. No longer living memory’s more or less intended remainder, the archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life – itself often a function of its own recording – a secondary memory, a prosthesis memory. (Pierre Nora, 1984, p.13)
Whether or not our memories can be physically archived undoubtedly changes our perception of them and our ability to remember. Our reasons for taking photographs depend on the archive – the process of storing and recording what Pierre Nora calls the ‘materiality of the trace’. It is the archive that allows us to reflect on past memories in a way that does not require a naturally strong internal image.
The physical archive has been a key structure in the nature of memory ever since mankind started collecting. It not only came into play when we became able to basically reproduce an image, but arguably started through the exteriorization of internal thoughts. Writing on paper and filing away became the archive – simply an accumulation of material to be kept as a physical parallel to time. In Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, he describes the archive in its simplest form as an ‘accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’. (1998, p.15) Taking the fragility of memory outside of an internal and personal space and storing it outside from its original context automatically displaces it and changes how we view the memory, particularly if it is on a public scale.
Museums and galleries can be viewed as public archives – bringing particular items or images out of a collection to be put on display for the public to see. This not only adds to the sense of constructing a collective memory as described earlier, by introducing new fragments from which histories can be pieced, but it institutionalizes the memory, if the object or image holds a memory. The memory and its true meaning is defined through its situation, and thus although the public gallery may act as a more selfless means of sharing the memory in allowing the growth of public knowledge, it also and importantly separates it yet again from its origin.
It is, however, the personal archive that is most interesting in exploring our current relationship to memory images. At the time of its advent the camera allowed a once-real scene to become a two-dimensional physicality; the analogue image had a certain novelty in that only through finishing the entire film and getting it developed were we faced with the initial scene we had once encountered, there was always a delay between real moment and captured moment. This image ultimately had (and still has) two destinies – in the life of the archive or in its destruction. Even in its forgetting, shoved to the back of a drawer or lost behind bookshelves, can it still be considered to be part of some sort of abandoned archive? Not destroyed but in a sense preserved, the image still exists as a certificate of time. The traditional personal archive comes in the form of photo albums, images placed in books to be referred back to time and again. This personal act of accumulation could be seen as an act of self-preservation, the very process of taking photos as a means of marking presence in time and place – documenting our travels and life events. These intimate testimonies of being hold qualities of reminiscence, looked back on to entice memory and to stop the natural processes of forgetting. There is something extremely sacred about the physical archive, they are purely sentimental constructions for the maker, and perhaps in their eyes there is a concern that the demise of the photo album would be the demise of the memory as they know it. The photograph could be seen as the life support for the memory, the most pictorial means of accessing the past and the person we once were. Barthes suggests that ‘when we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave; they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies’ (1993, 57). Is there, then, something quite morbid in the physical archive? Indeed the very process is intrinsically unnatural, replicating a visual scene through a non-living agent and storing it in a book to be placed on a shelf. Is this due to us not trusting our own natural memories, aware of our human weaknesses, or as a means of proof not just to ourselves but to other viewers – passing on our stories as we would like them to be remembered?
Indeed the same could be said for the digital archive – the archive that we are perhaps more used to using in our day-to-day lives. What is interesting about the digital archive is that the archive is still internalised, simplified and formatted for life in a digital memory rather than human memory. The life of the photograph in the digital sphere is endless, there is a seemingly infinite amount of storage available that goes far beyond the confines of bound pages, and we have learnt to use this to our advantage. The photo album no longer relies on a long process of waiting for images to develop and the labour of love in attaching each individual photograph to a page and annotating it; we can now view the image moments after it was taken, and, more importantly, we can digitally delete the image instantly if we deem it unsatisfactory, meaning it will no longer exist in physical or digital form. With photo editing software, we now have the godlike ability to aesthetically change a scene that was once before us; surely this capacity completely undermines the authenticity of the image that we now see as memory?
The memory image that we used to have to search for, or more likely come across by chance through a chronological system, can now be located at the click of a button. ‘The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen’ (Huyssen, 1994: 253.) Huyssen talks of the ‘simultaneity of all times and spaces readily accessible in the present’ (ibid.), this sense of a dual reality and being able to access a whole range of time periods at the same time. With the conversion of physical two-dimensional images to a digital existence made up of pixels on a screen so comes this sense of instantaneity. Photographs as an aide-memoire can appear to us at our wish, and more importantly, can be showcased on social media sites. The once revered photo album, in a book format that only a small number of people could view at a time can now be accessed by millions of strangers without us noticing. Due to the rise of the digital, could it be argued that our memories in this format have become far less personal? Do they not hold for us the same sentimentality? Instead of having a set number of possible images on film that we had to save for the ideal moment, we can now take thousands of digital snapshots at a time and instantly view them. With our known ability to edit, destroy, reproduce endlessly and broadcast to an unlimited audience we have surely become detached from the original printed image that we once so carefully preserved and cherished. However, it could be argued that the digital image now holds more power due to these very capabilities. As we are aware of the potential audience our image could be viewed by, are we therefore more likely to select and edit more carefully as a way of determining the way others will perceive us? These digital photographs can define us entirely; even those who know us outside of the online world will no doubt form an opinion which is based on our digital presence and the way in which we broadcast ourselves. The digital platform allows us to reinvent ourselves as we wish, ‘for the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity’ (Barthes, 1993, p. 12).
Could the act of archiving, both physically and digitally be seen as inauthenticity in itself? The collection of photos to piece together our lives both on a personal and public scale is far from the natural accessing and remembering of memories, and of course requires a degree of biased and artificial selection. We seem to be driven by this desire to archive, a means of documenting and preserving and as a means of beating our human cerebral weaknesses. In Archive Fever Derrida writes:
There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destructive drive (1998, p.19).
Derrida claims that we seem to be concerned with a ‘death drive’. In this sense, our current relationship to technology in terms of the archive means that we are still bound up with our original human fear of mortality, and the archive is therefore a desperate bid for the past; putting power in images that now construct our history for us and believing in their authenticity. However, the archive always works against itself. While we may see the archive as a solid base for our memories, an inner sanctum for sentimentality and a key basis of our identity, it is in fact encouraging the accumulation of artificial, staged and edited images that broadly deny and overwrite our own human limitations.
