Sullivan 1

Rachael Sullivan

Dr. Wysocki

English 742

16 May 2011

Mediating Memories

The most recent “How Much Information?” study, a recurring UC-San Diego project that

aims to estimate the quantity (in hours and bytes) of information Americans consume yearly,

found “a four-fold increase in bytes and a 140 percent increase in words ‘consumed’ by

Americans from 1980 to 2008” (9). The tally for 2008 came to 3.6 zettabytes, the equivalent of

10,845 trillion words (7). For anyone counting, one zettabyte is the equivalent of 1,026 exabytes,

and one exabyte is “equivalent to all words ever spoken by humans since the dawn of time”

(Klinkenborg).

The report cites IBM’s launch of the first PC in 1981 as the key factor that initiated the

28-year growth pattern. With the proliferation of digital devices and widespread access to the

Internet, one can only the imagine that information consumption has continued since 2008,

perhaps even increasing. For all the information that Americans consume, how do we keep track

of it all? Where does all the information go? As the study notes, “data in the 21st century is

largely ephemeral”—binary code is constantly being overwritten and updated (10). So, some of

the information just disappears. Anyone who has bookmarked a web site only to find the “site”

gone a month later, or anyone who has lost an hour of unsaved work on a word processor,

understands the fleeting nature of digital information. The memory industry1 serves an important

function for information consumers who struggle with saving, sorting, and retrieving histories,

1
I take this phrase from the title of a symposium that happened in May 2011 at NYU. The symposium
hosted speakers who “entertain misgivings of one sort or another as memory and the memorializing
impulse have become increasingly reified, stylized, fetishized, and instrumentalized, hijacked and ossified
[…]” (http://nyihumanities.org/).
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whether personal or otherwise. Memorabilia, souvenirs, storage media, software programs,

digital assistants, data back-up services, and recording devices are all there to help with the

problem. In a 1996 interview, Jacques Derrida expressed anxiety about the fact that it is actually

becoming so easy to save information: “Today one can conceive (or dream) of recording

everything, everything or almost everything […]. Everything that makes up the national memory

in the traditional sense of the term, but just about anything at all can and often is recorded: the

mass is enormous” (74).

The digital archive is another tool for memory storage that helps individuals and

institutions manage the accruing exabytes and zettabytes of human life. It seems that the more

there is to remember, the more complex and centralized the archivization process becomes.

Digital archives sort the important or valuable information and, through an interface and search

mechanism, conjure it for future retrieval. In addition, the spirit of Web 2.02 holds out hope that

digital archives could be sites of genuinely collective and participatory history-making.

However, like their analog predecessors, digital archives can be especially adept at political

moves of repression and exclusion as these memory warehouses mediate historical reality and

shape human identity. Digital archives are doors to the past, but they generate the past we

encounter through their interfaces. At first glance, digital archives are a neutral tool for helping

humans manage a problem. At second glance, they appear to be anything but neutral. Historical

archives on the Internet emerge as places of conflict and as mediators in a collective process of

remembering.

No matter how many bookshelves or servers an archive has (even Google struggles to

build enough data centers to house the millions of servers it needs), there can never be enough

2
Tim O’Reilly (2005) has defined Web 2.0 as any lightweight, web-based (and often free)
platform, designed for “hackability and remixability” (oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-
20.html). By most accounts, Web 2.0 sponsors collective intelligence, cooperation, and user-
generated content. Prezi, Google Docs, Twitter, Wordpress, MediaWiki, Flickr, and Omeka are
examples.
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storage space to record every event and every memory; decisions about what to save and what to

leave out are inevitable. Who decides how to filter the information that consumers can access? A

specific example is illuminating. In May 2011, the Library of Congress’s extensive digital

public archive, the “American Memory” collection, added a new assortment of 10,000 music and

spoken-word audio files recorded between 1901 and 1925. Sony owns the collection and (due to

complex Copyright laws) many of its files will not enter the public domain until 2067, so for

now the music is only available for streaming and not downloading. The “National Jukebox”

archive, as it is called, is a state-sponsored and corporate-owned endeavor, with control split

between these two powerful authorities and entangled with outdated and sweeping legal

protections for sound recordings. The public cannot know what else is in the collection of nearly

three million Sony-owned audio files; some combination of lawyers, archivists, and executives

decided.

Thus, in a “digital age” of supposedly open communication platforms, free information,

and participatory structures, it seems that archons, the gatekeepers of the archive, still mediate—

literally come between—citizens and knowledge. Derrida writes that one function of the archive

is “gathering together” (3). The archons are the gatherers and guardians of the archive, and they

define the archive content at the nexus of legal, political, and commercial interests. Although

Sony is making no immediate profit from the National Jukebox deal, the LA Times reports that in

return for releasing the music, “Sony will receive data on which recordings are streamed most

frequently to help determine which may have commercial potential” (Lewis). It seems like a

small trade-off, but yet the fact remains: a government archive labels itself as “American

Memory” and allows a private corporation to essentially track users for the purpose of potential

profit. The archive in this case is hardly a neutral technology. As memory theorist Bernard

Stiegler suggests, “To the extent that participation in these new societies, in this new form of

capitalism, takes place through machinic interfaces beyond the comprehension of participants,
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the gain in knowledge is exclusively on the side of producers” (67). While in this case the gain is

not exclusively on the side of producers—certainly historians and researchers will gain

knowledge from the National Jukebox—it does make sense to question who or what has agency

behind the “machinic interface” Stiegler mentions. For each zettabyte that Americans consume

annually, it may be appropriate to question the nature of this information and what mediating

layers are intervening.

At this point, I’d like to introduce three basic terms from the field of computer science.

These terms work on a metaphorical and also (as I suggest later) literal and posthuman level. In

relation to computer memory, there are three hierarchical levels of storage. The first level,

primary storage, is the computer’s Random-Access Memory (RAM) used to execute programs

complete short-term processes. RAM used for primary storage is volatile, meaning that it goes

away when the computer shuts down (Singh 99). Secondary storage, on the other hand, is

non-volatile and long-term memory. It includes the computer’s hard drive and any external

storage devices such as flash drives and CD-ROMs. In addition, secondary storage often comes

complete with a filing and naming system, as well as a way of recording “metadata,” or data

about those files such as author, date created, and time last modified (Singh 100).

I compare these first two levels to embodied human memory and externalized human

memory, respectively. Internal memory, or “anamnesis” in Stiegler’s terms, is volatile and

fragile. External memory such as lists, calendars, and databases—“hypomnesis”—is more

durable and reliable, within limits. One must remember how to use the sorting system to retrieve

items, and it is always possible that external memory could be corrupted by water, fire, a

software bug, etc. In hypomnesic memory (which Stiegler argues has always existed, as there is

no purely anamnesic memory), “we discover that a part of ourselves, a part of our memory, is

outside of us” (66-67). Thus, the computer’s CPU cannot remember what is on the flash drive

unless that object is present and connected. If the flash drive is gone, then that memory is lost.
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But there is a third level of storage, or another type of hypomnesis that is not quite the

same as individual external memory devices. Tertiary storage, or offline/remote storage, is used

by libraries, massive archives, and “staging operations that move large scientific data sets onto

and off of disks for supercomputer computation” (Chervenak 2). Tertiary storage systems

typically retrieve memory by deploying a robotic arm to grab and insert the disk that contains the

requested data. Although large tertiary storage systems are not usually visible to the public, one

familiar small-scale example is an analog jukebox.

It is an unintended but significant coincidence that the newly released Library of

Congress archive of sound recordings is named “National Jukebox.” There is some clue about

how, following the metaphor of tertiary storage, American memory of the past is mediated and

materialized by human and non-human agents, and how decision-making processes predetermine

or at least influence the content that researchers, students, and average citizens have access to.

Tertiary storage, with its robotic retrieval arm, represents the larger state and corporate

mechanism selecting what “past” is available online to the general public and what memory gets

put offline.

Just as the railway system was not merely a convenient, new means of transportation in

19th-century America, but also the catalyst in a chain reaction of positive and negative effects3,

mnemotechnologies are not simply a means for remembering. These mnemotechnologies, as

“apparatuses [that] systematically order memories” (Stiegler 67), also order our perception of the

past on the level of secondary storage, in addition to deciding what even gets counted as the past

“worth remembering” on the level of tertiary storage. As Stiegler argues, “what is at stake in

hypomnesis is a combat: a combat for a politics of memory and, more precisely, for the

3
Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1977) details the changes initiated by the railroad system in England
and the United States. He discusses an experience of denaturalization as iron and coal took over
the place of animal power, an increase in boredom which led to a rise in bookstores in train
stations, cognitive changes such as an inability to focus, and physiological changes like fatigue
and spinal problems due to the vibration of the train.
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constitution of sustainable hypomnesic milieus” (Stiegler 69). In the context of digital historical

archives, it is on the level of tertiary storage, not secondary storage, that this conflict happens

and that a dispute about who has authority over national memory should be waged. The more

that digital archives discourage users from remixing content and producing new artifacts instead

of just consuming information, the more that the sharp line between producer/consumer is

reinscribed.

One attempt at generating a new production out of content in the Library of Congress’s

American Memory archive is an experimental, genre-blurring DVD of short videos entitled

(unsurprisingly) “American Memory Project” (AMP). AMP appropriates and remixes the

Library’s digital content (primarily drawing on the Native American Culture and Slave Narrative

collections), and boldly draws attention to the mediation at work in the Library’s “official”

presentation of history. While AMP does not entirely circumvent the gap between those who

produce what we call “history” and those who read and interpret that history, it does offer a new

avenue to critique the massive and widely-appreciated Library of Congress American Memory

archive.

AMP is a creation of Bill Morrison, a music video and documentary film director, and

Justin Bennett, drummer for the Canadian electro-industrial band Skinny Puppy. With help from

the artist ohGr, in 2008 this eclectic collaboration drew from the Library’s content to edit videos

that reassemble and stitch together bits and pieces from the archive, combined with Bennett’s

musical compositions. Taken together, the videos, rather than assuming the perspective of

someone living today, imagine “the very distant future, long after America is gone.” According

to a short abstract appended to the DVD,

A rogue group of artists, scouring the backwater of whatever the net has become,
have discovered the American Memory Archives from the Library of Congress.
They have no context for its meaning, but are intrigued by the sights and sounds.
The group create surreal impressions of the material they find and broadcast it
back through time. (Morrison and Bennett)
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Operating under the premise of this apocalyptic, yet-to-happen temporality, the DVD is divided

into five sections or scenes, each focusing on a different time period or collection from the

Library of Congress archive. The scenes remix documentation of our nation’s history around the

turn of the century, ranging from recordings of first-person slave narratives, photographs of

Native Americans, footage of steam engines and street traffic, and clips from popular 1920s and

1930s television shows. However, the AMP videos are not remixes in the sense of purely

recycling content, since Morrison and Bennett have added creative cinematic effects, original

music, and new footage shot specifically for the project. The DVD leaves the viewer with a

piecemeal impression. It destructs the organized and streamlined Library of Congress interface

and reconstructs it as an eclectic and critical interpretation of the American Memory materials,

with emphasis on the dark corners of American history.

AMP forms a complex response to the Library of Congress’s digital content, which many

view as a national asset, educational resource, and public service. AMP does not necessarily

devalue those traditional roles, but it does suggest an additional and radically different way of

looking at the archive process and product. Starting from the apparently thorough, credible, and

treasured documents in the Library’s digital archive, AMP reveals ethical fissures and raises

potentially controversial provocations regarding the archive.

What Is an Archive?

Derrida, though he offers no definitive response, highlights the grammatical flexibility of

the word: “Nothing is more troubled and more troubling today than the concept archived in this

word ‘archive’” (90). As both a verb and a noun, an activity and a thing, the word “archive”

houses a wide array of practices, sites, and materialities. In Marlene Manoff’s cross-disciplinary

survey of archival discourse over the last 30 years, she reveals the ambiguity and complexity

associated with the term “archive” and how it is “loosening and exploding” in circulation among
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scholars, archivists, and librarians (10). As a verb, it amounts to labor: acquiring, preserving,

organizing, cataloging, editing, digitizing. As a noun, the archive recalls a place of romanticized

discovery laced with tedious constraints of space and time. In either case, the archive has for

centuries denoted an activity closely tied to the materiality of the past.

Those scholars who focus on the archive’s materiality primarily view the archive as a tool

for research and for preserving history. Historians like Ralph Kingston concern themselves with

practical issues and questions of material history because they have spent many hours in “the

dust of the archive” (1) and they know and use the archive building full of shelves and boxes of

papers. Renée Sentilles is another historian who assumes this instrumentalist attitude. She writes,

“Archives yield the sources that are used as facts, but interpretation fuels the historical argument.

[…] As Lorraine Daston so eloquently puts it, ‘evidence might be described as facts hammered

into signpost’” (140). Of course, history is an admittedly human-centered discipline, but

ultimately this anthropocentric view sees the archive as a tool and memory as a primarily human

faculty.

In contrast to this instrumentalist approach, a deterministic discussion of technology

reminds us that the archive is an event of mediation and never an objective tool or repository of

facts as Sentilles believes. Friedrich Kittler does not see the archive as a place that individual

humans enter, use, and then exit, unchanged in the process. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,

he theorizes a “feedback loop” between human and technology, prioritizing the technology as

having the most control in the exchange. As he reflects on the archive: “What remains of people

is what media can store and communicate” (xl). The human is thus constituted by the archive.

It is difficult to locate much human agency in Kittler’s writing on the archive. His theory

of mediation situates technology as the determinant of the human. “Media ‘define what really

is’” (3) he writes, and this claim has serious consequences for the archive. If we assume Kittler’s

technological determinism in trying to understand how contemporary archives are mixed and
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remixed in electronic media, then we might miss the reasons that people support and create

archives in the first place. Kittler privileges machine subjectivity, and he focuses on how

technologies of reproduction act upon human subjects: “For mechanized writing to be optimized,

one can no longer dream of writing as the expression of individuals or the trace of bodies. The

very forms, differences, and frequencies of its letters have to be reduced to formulas” (16). For

Kittler, the robotic arm of tertiary storage diminishes human agency even as it appears to be a

transparent means of data storage. However, Kittler’s view obscures the human decisions,

protected by politics and institutions in the case of the Sony-owned National Jukebox collection,

that also function on the level of tertiary storage.

Stiegler offers a break in the tension between these theoretical poles of instrumentalism

and determinism. He argues that while memory is technologized from the start and it is never

entirely a human faculty, the Internet creates new platforms for human agency: it “constitutes

[…] a new economy of memory supporting an industrial model no longer based on disassociated

milieus” of senders (or producers) and receivers (consumers) (83). While Stiegler upholds the

notion of anamnesis, or “embodied memory,” this is not to say that he believes in unmediated

memory. Stiegler does not trust the illusion of unmediated contact with the past, even through

anamnesis. Accordingly, “human memory is originally exteriorized,” he writes, “which means

that it is technical from the start” (67). Mark Hansen furthers Stiegler’s claim: “Technology on

this account is not something external and contingent, but rather an essential—indeed the

essential—dimension of the human” (65). Human beings are intrinsically prosthetic, from the

time of flint tools to the alphabet to electronic media.

Kittler, on the other hand, sees a transformation with the coming of recording machines,

such as the typewriter and phonograph: “Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there has

been writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace” (44).

In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler believes that the development of recording devices
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created “sudden technological ruptures” (“Translator’s Introduction” xxxiv) and a constitutive

break on the level of what it means to be human. Whereas for Stiegler, there is no human

memory that is not a technological memory, for Kittler there are clues that a “pure” human

consciousness existed before it was infiltrated by technologies.

After describing Nietzsche’s budding relationship with a new typewriter (more

specifically, a “writing ball”), and proceeding from Jean-Marie Guyau’s argument about memory

and the phonograph, Kittler claims that “in 1886, during the founding age of mechanized storage

technologies, human evolution, too, aims toward the creation of machine memory” (210). Kittler

continues:
Writing in Nietzsche is no longer a natural extension of humans who bring forth
their voice, soul, and individuality through their handwriting. On the contrary […]
humans change their position—they turn from the agency of writing to become an
inscription surface. (211)
Here we see, in Kittler’s formulation, “the turning point at which communication technologies

can no longer be related back to humans. Instead, the former have formed the latter” (211).

Thus, Kittler implies a progression from some possibly unmediated state of humanness to an

entirely technologized human, formed by the machine. In this “race” to agency, Kittler claims

that with “IF-THEN” programming logic, computers have finally outpaced and obsolesced their

human competitors: “A simple feedback loop—and information machines bypass humans, their

so-called inventors. Computers themselves become subjects” (258). This vision in some way

crystallizes the culture industry, in which machines dominate their human slaves. Given the

technology of digital archives, hosted on a network that almost everyone in the world can access,

Stiegler’s hope for “a participative economy of free software and cooperative technologies” (83)4

seems like a far cry from Kittler’s interpretation.

4
Along these lines, “the networked public sphere” has been exhaustively explored in Yochai
Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (2006).
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We need more examples of how institutional archives might reconfigure their mediation

practices and revise the sender-receiver binary. While Stiegler observes that networked digital

media are participative and “no longer impose the producer/consumer opposition” (83), there is

no law that says the media must be used for participation and that state-owned or corporate-

owned entities must stop imposing the same opposition that Theodor Adorno and Max

Horkheimer described in 1944 as the key tenet of “the culture industry.” Now that I have built

some theoretical scaffolding to help clarify how archives mediate humans and their history, the

remainder of this essay will outline some important conclusions or provocations that AMP

suggests. I will discuss how these provocations come together to make a unified though not

entirely satisfying critical commentary about official national archives as mediators of identity

and memory.

History in the Making

Representations of history (such as archives, archive objects, and interpretations of these

“factual” primary sources) are mediations that alter the past and can color an individual’s

experience of the present. Thus, there can be no “true” or naturally occurring history—it is

always a representation, often made to look as realistic, comprehensive, and un-mediated as

possible. As Derrida argues in Archive Fever, archives do not readily disclose their own

mediation. The archive tends to cover its tracks: “it leaves no monument, it bequeaths no

document of its own” (11). This is one reason that the recording (recording-as-making) of

history and historical subjects is often an opaque process.

AMP encourages viewers to come face to face with the process of making history. The

videos emphasize incoherence and artifice, rather than a realistic or user-friendly presentation.

While the Library of Congress presents fragments to form a whole—to form American

Memory—AMP presents fragments that do not form a whole. The videos are at times disturbing,
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at times confusing, but never complete as part of a logical historical narrative. Jay David Bolter

and Richard Grusin would call the Library’s mediation “immediacy” and AMP’s mediation

“hypermediacy.”5 In the former, the interface is designed to be intuitive, transparent, and

foreground the archive content. Users are not asked to notice or question the process of making

these archive objects (secondary storage) or selecting them (tertiary storage). AMP, on the other

hand, foregrounds the mediation process so that it comes to the surface and seems unfamiliar or

strange. AMP reveals the “framing function” of archives, i.e. the way that an archive manages

the past rather than simply depicting it truthfully.

For example, a repeating motif in the videos is a line-drawn animation of a rotating

machine-like apparatus with turning gears and other moving parts (see image above). In the first

5
In Remediation (2000), Bolter and Grusin theorize all mediation as a dual logic of making the
medium transparent (immediacy) and simultaneously bringing it to the surface to make viewers
or readers aware of the mediation at work (hypermediacy). Similar to the “reality effect”
theorized by Roland Barthes, the logic of immediacy erases the medium and emphasizes the
realistic, immersive features of the content represented. In contrast, the logic of hypermediacy
interferes with the reality effect as “the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer)
strives to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that
acknowledgment” (Bolter and Grusin 42). The desire for immediacy is thus a desire for reality
“as it really is.
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video, this machine animation appears alongside footage of Native Americans dancing in a

theatrical and self-aware manner; they are aware of being filmed. Morrison and Bennett try to

highlight the footage as fabricated and produced by, possibly, the “machine” of white American

consciousness. In the opening video on the DVD, entitled “Ghost Dance,” viewers plunge

through a tunnel of streaking lights, illegible text, and split-second flashes of iconic American

photographs—Abraham Lincoln’s portrait, the Statue of Liberty, Neil Armstrong’s moon

landing. Yet, as viewers fly through the passage of history, some disturbing images crop up. One

scratchy black-and-white photograph, flickering for only a moment on the screen, shows a

lynched man’s lifeless body hanging from a tree (see image below). Thus, the critical comment

is not only on the archived items themselves, but also on the arrangement of the items. While

the Library of Congress separates its content into different collections, so that items classified

together appear on one section of the site without interlinking to other collections, AMP defies

that mediation by emphasizing the fragmentary and chaotic.

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AMP uses many violent images

from the Library’s collection and

combines the violence with pulsing, strong

music and murky colors in the videos. One

of the videos, entitled “Artifacts,”

explicitly remediates the conventions of

old horror movies. It displays clips of a screaming woman, a shadow on the stairs, creepy eyes

(see image above), and scratchy filmic distortion, all while rhythmic drumbeats and resonating,

murky voices and screams play in the background. The “Artifacts” video quickly turns from the

fiction of horror movies to the fact of slavery in America when images of lynchings and Civil-

War-era cannons appear (see image below). In depicting aspects of American history in a context

reminiscent of a horror movie, AMP foregrounds an invisible line that the Library of Congress

archive draws between fact and fiction. While the Library’s American Memory collection

purports to deliver facts and actual records, the interface itself weaves a narrative about what the

past “was really like.” Morrison and Bennett seem to shatter the immediacy of the past.
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AMP reminds viewers that violence is not only inscribed in American history as events

of violence, from slavery to legalized killing to the repression of Native Americans. Violence is

also part of the recording process history—the very process that gives the Library of Congress

the right to authorize memories as “real.” Stiegler agrees with Derrida (his former teacher) in

issuing an entreaty: “we must think in terms, not of hierarchies or totalizing systems, but of

processes” (Stiegler 69). Taking up Derrida’s discussion of the archive, we might isolate two

types of violence: the violence of past events, and the violence of recording those events in the

present moment. AMP exposes both types.

When an archive structures a narrative and attempts to cloak it as unmediated truth, it is

guilty of the second kind of violence—archival violence. Benjamin Hutchens disambiguates the

term “archival violence” by locating the violence in the “irresolvable tension between the

archival powers of destruction and preservation: the archive strives to preserve memory from the

destruction of its cultural context; but in so doing, it destroys memory as such, reducing it to

mere documentation” (39). The archive salvages memory, but at the same time embalms it as an

inscription housed in a delimited physical or virtual space. The memory is no longer “culturally

relevant,” no longer “[alive] in the hearts and minds of historical subjects” (Hutchens 40).

Derrida locates the violence less as an outcome (as in the death of living history) and

more as a process. The process of conservation—fostered by the “archive drive” (19)—is violent

or unethical for Derrida because it requires the past to conform to the structure of the archive.

Moreover, this conformity becomes an act of creation: “The archive produces as much as it

records the event” (19). Thus, what we remember is not the unmediated memory-event itself, but

rather the document or inscription which the archive structure has played a role in writing.

Crucially, this active role of the archiving archive is often invisible. As Hutchens paraphrases

Derrida, “There is no archive of the archive, of the political forces and historical orientations of
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archivization. The archive is the violent consignment of lived memory, but it cannot record this

violence of consignment… and this is the first glimmering of its an-archic aspect” (41).

Another way to state the difference between the outcome and the process, or the ends and

the means, is to say that the archive looks both forward and backward. It looks backward to the

past to find issues or subjects worth remembering and historicizing. Many archives, as places of

memory, also honor the past by trying to preserve the original look and order of records as they

came into the archive—a principle known to professional archivists as respect des fonds or

“provenance” (Kingston 2). The archive also looks forward to the future in its desire to seize the

past and preserve it for posterity. The National Archives expresses this forward-looking view in

a recent ban on photography in exhibition areas, a decision that preservation experts defend by

claiming that it will “help protect our nation’s heritage for future generations” (archives.gov).

Thus, the archive carefully attends to (or seizes, lays claim to) the past for the sake of the future.

For both Derrida and Hutchens (who builds on Derrida more or less uncritically), the

conservation of memory changes or mediates the content in a serious way. In admitting to

violence, we admit that history or “facts” are not neutral nails in the sign of interpretation, as

Sentilles would say.

It is almost a commonplace that the violence or tension between recovery of the past and

responsibility to the future is political. Hutchens defines the suspicion that prevents him from

seeing the archive as neutral: “The archive […] necessarily implies a certain political authority to

select memories considered worthy of consignment for the purpose of recollection, and the

criteria for selection are often not unbiased” (42). Everyone makes choices about how to

preserve (and represent) the past and about how the continuity of lived experience will be

grammatized into archive content. These choices happen all the time, and on a personal and

institutional level. After my trip to Hawaii, I have to choose which lei to keep. Even though all

the leis remind me of places I visited, I don’t have the space to keep an entire shoebox of leis.
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Likewise, of the approximately 22,000 items the Library of Congress receives each working day,

it only “adds approximately 10,000 items to the collections daily” (loc.gov/about/facts.html).

Saving memories means choosing memories.

In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger has argued that there is a fundamental

and transformative shift once archives move to a digital storage medium, since we no longer

have to make decisions about trimming surplus content. We can just keep everything: tag every

item with as many keywords as possible and throw it all into a giant pile. “Tags let you

remember things your way” (92). Weinberger affirms Stiegler’s hope for a more participative

method of memory storage, but unlike Stiegler, Weinberger seems to privilege the autonomous,

individuated human. Collective information sorting means that

what you learn isn’t prefiltered and approved, sitting on a shelf, waiting to be
consumed. The knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps; it requires
active engagement. Each person arrives through a stream of clicks that cannot be
anticipated. As people communicate online, that conversation becomes part of a
lively, significant, public digital knowledge [and] each person has access to a
global audience. Taken together, that conversation also creates a mode of
knowing we’ve never had before. Like subjectivity, it is rooted in individual
standpoints and passions, which endows the bits with authenticity. But at the same
time, these diverse viewpoints help us get past the biases of individuals. […]
There has always been a plenitude of personal points of view in our world. Now
though those POVs are talking with one another, and we cannot only listen, we
can participate. (Weinberger 147)
Likewise, Stiegler has argued that “the suspension of the producer/consumer opposition

constitutes a new age of memory” in which the act of collective remembering functions with

contributions from many individuals (83-84). While Stiegler and Weinberger don’t completely

agree, Stiegler’s emphasis on memory as a process of human-machine collaboration refutes the

notion that “individual standpoints and passions” equate some measure of “authenticity” as

Weinberger says.
 Sullivan 18

AMP complicates the notion of “point of view” and serves as a reminder that historical

memory, as a mediation of the past, does not happen solely through individual humans

possessing and interpreting artifacts, nor solely through technologies reading and writing data.

Rather, memory is a cycle of making and saving on the part of human and non-human agents.

Building on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, anthropologist Stuart McLean explains

cultural memory as a “process involving shifting and heterogeneously composed collectives, the

constituent elements of which might include, in no particular order of precedence, human beings,

technologies, philosophies of history, architecture, chemical reactions, animals, plants,

microorganisms, landscape, geology and climate” (5). While this definition may seem abstract

and overly comprehensive, it effectively addresses the key instrumentalist and determinist

assumptions. This Latourian definition is also useful in understanding how AMP unsettles a

human centered or machine centered perspective, opting instead for a hybrid archive with human

and machine elements from the past and future.

In the video “Time

Don’t Steal,” viewers are

immersed in the re-enacted

slave narrative of Alison

Gaston (see image at right).

The actress recites the oral

history of Gaston (a former

slave, whose narrative was

actually recorded in the 1950s), and words flash on the screen as she talks. The editing intends to

age the appearance of the film and make it appear very old. This scene draws attention to

mediation because it challenges the timeline of media history. In showing a seemingly real-life

Gaston on video, viewers know that this must be a recreation and the woman is an imposter.
 Sullivan 19

However, we wonder about the audio track, and in fact the audio comes from the original

interview. We hear Gaston’s own voice, recorded in 1941.

However, no matter how radically and provocatively Morrison and Bennett have

reassembled the Library of Congress’s archive, the artists only have access to the content that

gatekeepers make available. The issue of how to circumvent or resist the level of tertiary

storage, as a metaphor for the posthuman process that writes the human and retrieves our history,

will continue to prevent any meaningful bridge between consumers and producers of archival

information.
 Sullivan 20

Works Cited

Bennett, Justin and William Morrison. American Memory Project. 2008. DVD.

Bohn, Roger and James E. Short. “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American

Consumers.” Global Information Industry Center, UCSD. 2009. Web. 11 May 2011.

Chervenak, Ann Louise. “Tertiary Storage: An Evaluation of New Applications.” Diss. UC

Berkeley, 1994. Web. 12 May 2011.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Print.

Hutchens, Benjamin C. “Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-

Archive.” SubStance 36.113 (2007): 37-55. Project Muse. Web. 9 May 2011.

Kingston, Ralph. “The French Revolution and the Materiality of the Modern Archive.” Libraries

& the Cultural Record 46.1 (2011): 1-25. Project Muse. Web. 11 May 2011.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.

Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “Trying to Measure the Amount of Information that Humans Create.” The

New York Times Company. NYT Online. 12 Nov. 2003. Web. 13 May 2011.

Lewis, Randy. “Library of Congress and Sony Music Team for ‘National Jukebox’ Free

Streaming of Vintage Recordings.” LA Times Online. 10 May 2011. Web. 13 May

2011.

“Library of Congress Launches, with Sony Music Content, the National Jukebox, an Online

Destination for Historical Sound Recordings.” Library of Congress. 10 May 2011. Web.

12 May 2011.

Manoff, Marlene. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” Libraries and the

Academy 4.1 (2004): 9–25. Project Muse. Web. 12 May 2011.

McLean, Stuart. “Bodies from the Bog: Metamorphosis, Non-Human Agency and the Making of

Collective Memory.” Trames 12.3 (2008): 299-308. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14

May 2011.
 Sullivan 21

Sentilles, Renée. “The Archives of Cyberspace.” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the

Writing of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 136-156. Print.

Singh, Shio Kumar. Database Systems: Concepts, Design and Applications. New Delhi: Pearson

Education India, 2009. Print.

Stiegler, Bernard. “Memory.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2010.

64-85. Print.

Weinberger, David. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New

York: Holt, 2007. Print.