The Power of Archival Thinking: Documents that Change/ Challenged the World
INSTRUCTORS
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course investigates the genealogies of the archives’ powers from their inception as state building projects to their metamorphosis into counter-sites of opposing authoritarian power and politics. The course does not offer a panoramic overview of different archival institutions or paradigms, but rather analyzes, through certain key case studies ranging from 19th century archives to secret police, counterinsurgency, colonial and identity archives, the changing interaction between influential documentary practices, (counter-)state politics and history writing.
It investigates, for example, how comprehensive record – keeping (commonly problematized as “information “information overload”) has, in fact, produced ontological mutations between phenomena and evidence by the creation of self-generating economies of power and writing. It has also led to the co-production of archival and culture wars. It also discusses the current enchantment with “counter-archives” as a by-product of an identitarian movement which opposes itself to the state but builds on the magnetic powers of archives to progressively shape and authenticate histories and existences.
The challenges for the future [public] historian would be complex. On the one hand, he/she would have to know the general challenges that archives face (with regards to what to select, how to preserve and how to make accessible documents from the past for increasingly broader and distant publics). On the other, he/she will deal with the ethical, professional and political aspects of any historical intervention in the public realm. How to preserve the documentary legacies of the past while critically engaging with its hegemonic truth regimes? How to make “legible” artifacts which were part of technologies of power, or how to recontextualize archival facts belonging to a logic of surveillance to curated data necessary for building democratic societies? The course therefore combines insights from media archeology, archival ethnography, history of law and historiography in order to address current questions about the interventionist (and yet truthful) powers of archives in the public realm.
In May 2015 Rick Prelinger, meta-archivist and founder of the Prelinger Library and Prelinger Archives, wrote, via Twitter, that “the ‘archive’ is overtheorized; ‘archives’ (where the labor of record keeping takes place) are undertheorized and underfunded. This course is designed to delve more closely into the workings of the archives, the deployment of energies, ideas and practices which both relied on and constituted the archives’ powers. The course goes beyond both a purely discursive or a purely practical intake on archives and rather shows how fantasies about the archive had their concrete correspondence in the – not easy and imperfect – making of archives.
LIST OF CLASSES
CLASS 1
The Enchantment with the Archive: The Organic Idea of Historical Memory
CLASS 2
Archiving as Labor and Historical Intervention
CLASS 3
The Bureaucracy of Annihilation
CLASS 4
Counter-archives: Collecting and the Control of Knowledge
CLASS 5
From Archives of Oppression to Truth and Justice Archives: How to Make the Conversation?
CLASS 6
Too Much Digital Impetus? Three Important Cautionary Tales