Places apart: Archives in dissolving space and time

Archivaria

Volumn 44, Issue , 1997, Pages 118-131

  Dodge, Bernadine ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 23944442099     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Very early on, Teny Cook suggested the uses of intellectual history for archivists. See, for example, such vigorous and thoughtful articles by Cook as: "Nailing Jelly to a Wall: Possibilities in Intellectual History, " Archivaria 11 (Winter 1980-81). pp. 205-218.
2. Dick Hebdige, "After the Masses, " in Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sheny Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History (Princeton, 1994), p. 226.
3. Douglas Kellner, "Jean Baudrillard in the Fin-De-Millennium, " in Douglas Kellner, ed., Baudrillard (Oxford, 1994). p. 8.
4. Herbert I. Schiller, "The Global Information Highway: Project for an Ungovernable World, " in James Brook and Iain A. Boal, eds., Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (San Francisco, 1995). p. 21.
5. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism (Minneapolis, 199 I), p. 115.
6. Chris Rojek, "Baudrillard and Politics, " in Bryan S. Turner and Chris Rojek, eds., Forget Baudrillard? (London, 1993), p. 121.
7. An expression used by Fritz Machlup, quoted in Robert Everett-Green, "Information Please, " in Queen's Quarterly 104, no. 2 (Summer 1997). p. 206.
8. Jim Uny, "How Societies Remember the Past, " in Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums (Oxford, 1996), p. 46. David Roberts writes about museums without walls, as space and time are obliterated by technologies of reproduction which allow the promiscuous mixing of all art of all eras: David Roberts, "The Museum and Montage, " in Mike Featherstone, ed., Theory, Culture and Society 5, no. 2-3 (June 1988), p. 552.
9. Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial To Post-Modern Society: New Theories of the Contemporary World (Oxford, 1995). p. 10.
10. Claudia Donh, "Invisible Design, " in John Thackara, ed., Design After Modernism (London, 1988). p. 158.
11. Bridget Fowler, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (London, 1997), p. 11.
12. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, 1996). Readings describes the movement of the modem university from its position as an ideological apparatus of the nation-state to a new role as a market-driven bureaucracy devoid of its "modern" cultural raison d'stre. Also, in Roll Over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife (Hanover, 1993), Stanley Aronowitz looks at the culture wars in universities "not merely in the ideological terms in which they are framed, but in connection with the breakup of the old knowledge paradigms that have been ineluctably linked to economic and state institutions. " Chapter 7, "The Authority of Knowledge, " pp. 203-243, is an especially useful overview of the crisis in knowledge. Aronowitz analyzes this crisis as a crisis generated by postmodern thought within a modem state, while Readings pictures a crisis of postmodern thought in a postmodern state within global society.
13. Zygmunt Bauman, "Is There A Postmodern Sociology?'in Mike Featherstone, ed., Theory, Culture and Society 5, no. 2-3 (June 1988). p. 222.
14. Readings, The University in Ruins, p. 45.
15. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
16. Bauman, "Is There A Postmodern Sociology?'p. 218.
17. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
18. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
19. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
20. Mike Featherstone, "In Pursuit of the Postmodern, " in Mike Featherstone, ed., Theory, Culture and Society 5, no. 2-3 (June 1988). p. 206.
21. Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London, 1991), p. 94.
22. Jean Baudrillard, "The System of Objects, " in John Thackara, ed., Design Afier Modernism (London, 1988), p. 181.
23. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Eric henowitz, trans.) (Chicago, 1996). p. 17.
24. See the article by Carolyn Heald, "Is There Room for Archives in the Postmodern World, " American Archivist 59 (Winter 1996), pp. 95-96, which re-presents the cultural role of archivists as a discursive practice.
25. I purposely resist using the Kuhnian term "paradigm shift" and prefer to understand suggestions for methodological reorientations in less dramatic terms which leave open the possibility of reconciling the new with past practices. I think that juxtaposing methodologies as "eitherlor" is unnecessarily restrictive when managing in times of accelerated rates of change, which require the utmost flexibility. Further, by de-emphasising the differences between methodologies, it may be easier to move our attention from the issue itself (in this case, appraisal) to the site(s) of discourse and, by this means, more clearly understand what is being proposed and the circumstances in which it is being proposed, and then consider how we might adopt, or adapt, such proposals to specific situations.
26. A phrase used by Terry Cook in "The Tyranny of the Medium: A Comment on 'Total Archives', " Archivaria 9 (Winter 1979-80), pp. 14149.
27. This term was first used by Claude Uvi-Straw, The Savage Mind (London, 1962), pp. 17-18, to describe a way of thinking and acting which is directed by practical problems: the "science of the concrete. " I do not mean to suggest by using the term, however, that our practices need not be anchored in sound archival theory. Quite the contrary, though our methodology may be flexible, our body of archival theory must be uncompromised.
28. Stephen Katz, Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge (Charlottesville, 1996), p. 140. Katz is using the term "nomad science" which originated with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Paul Feyerband has also criticized a flawed conception of science as "scientism" in Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London, 1975), p. 23: "The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. " He further notes that firm rules, planted in epistemology, when violated, often result in new knowledge.
29. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York, 1986). p. 84.
30. This paper does not in any way presume to address the issues raised by others concerning custodial/post-custodial archival practices. Within the context of this paper, which deals with archives in the larger context of the social, I am obviously arguing for physical archival structures and the removal of records to these physical places for permanent preservation. The. concept of bricolage however, should prompt one to retain the flexibility to deal responsibly and confidently with those records which cannot be dealt with in the traditional manner.
31. Robert Hollinger, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: A Thematic Approach (London, 1994), p. 31.
32. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society, " in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and Its Discontents (London, 1988), p. 20.
33. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1990), p. 86.
34. Georg Stauth and Bryan Turner, "Nostalgia, Postmodernism and the Critique of Mass Culture, " in Mike Featherstone, ed., Theory, Culture and Society 5, no. 2-3 (June 1988), p. 509.
35. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
36. Useful discussion of archives as actual, rather than virtual, places is to be found in the literature surrounding the custodiaVpost-custodial debates. See especially, Luciana Duranti, "Archives As A Place, " Archives and Manuscripts 24.2 (November, 1996). pp. 242-55, which emphasizes the importance of place vis-ri-vis accountability, authenticity, and guardianship.
37. Marc Augk, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (John Howe, trans.) (London, 1995). p. 78. AugC uses the term non-places to refer to places of imagined and imaginary references.
38. The concept of "heterotopia" was developed by Michel Foucault and reworked by Kevin Hetherington in "The Utopics of Social Ordering-Stonehenge as a Museum Without Walls, " in Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums (Oxford, 1996), pp. 153-76. Edward W. Soja, "Heterotopologies: A Remembrance of Other Spaces in the Citadel-LA, " pp. 13-34, and Benjamin Genocchio, "Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of 'Other' Spaces, " both in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, eds., Postmodern Cities and Spaces (Oxford, 1995) are other useful examples of analysis using the idea of "heterotopia. "
39. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces, " Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986). p. 26.
40. Noted in Alex Collinicos, Theories and Nurrutives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Durham, 1995), p. 49.
41. Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, 1996). p. 55.