Archives, life cycles, and death wishes: A helical model of record formation

Archivaria

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 235-269

  Brothman, Brien ^a  

^a Bristol College in Massachusetts   (United States)

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EID: 57349169824     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (149)

1. Plato, Timaeus
2. New South Wales, Australia, Government Recordkeeping Manual, available at: (accessed on 23 September 2003).
3. We could add many more examples. The InterPARES Authenticity Task Force (p. 5) refers to "fixed documentary form, a stable content, an archival bond with other records... and an identifiable context."
4. See Authenticity Task Force Report, available at: (accessed on 4 March 2006).
5. th National Convention, 15-17 September 1997, Perth, 1997.
6. The ubiquitousness of the life cycle concept in the archives and records management communities hardly needs demonstration. Amongst archivists, the life cycle idea is often traced to Theodore Schellenberg. A small sample of prominent items from the literature on the life cycle includes
7. Jay Atherton, "From Life Cycle to Continuum: Some Thoughts on the Records Management Archives Relationship," Archivaria (Winter 1985-86), pp. 43-51
8. Ira Penn, "Understanding the Life Cycle Concept of Records Management," Records Management Quarterly (July 1983), pp. 5-8
9. Yves Perotin, "L'administration et les trois âges des archives," Seine et Paris 20 (1961), pp. 1-4
10. Society of American Archivists, A Glossary of Archival Terminology, entries on completeness, record continuum, life continuum, life cycle, disposition, and disposal, available at (accessed 6 March 2006)
11. Zawiyah M. Yusof and Robert Chell, "The Records Life Cycle: an Inadequate Concept for Technology-Generated Records," Information Development, vol. 16, no. 3 (2000), pp. 135-41
12. Philip Bantin, "Strategies for Managing Electronic Records: A New Archival Paradigm? An Affirmation of Our Archival Traditions?" available at: (accessed 4 March 2006)
13. National Archives and Records Administration, Records Management Guidance for Agencies Implementing Electronic Signature Technologies (Government Paperwork Elimination Act) 3.1 Records Life Cycle vs. System Development Life Cycle, available at: (accessed 4 March 2006)
14. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, "The Social Life of Documents," First Monday 1 (May 1996), available at: (accessed 4 March 2006).
15. Sue McKemmish et al., "Describing Records in Context in the Continuum: The Australian Record-keeping Metadata Scheme," draft for comment, August 2003.
16. This is not to say that record-keepers are unique in resorting to the metaphor of life and life cycles to analyze and explain various phenomena. Apart from the obvious example of the system development life cycle, numerous professions turn to the life cycle to articulate theories, methods, and processes.
17. A recent striking example is architect Neil Harris' recent monograph proposing that conception and birth, growth and maturity, aging and death (as well as many other social milestone events including baby showers, birthdays, life support) are not only important moments in the human life story, but they also correspond to moments in the life of buildings.
18. See Harris' Building Lives. Constructing Rites and Passages (New Haven, 1999).
19. See the second and third sections below.
20. Indeed, the archival community's selectivity involves what might be called a "politics of afterlife," where the lives and identity of the dead, or absent, are at stake.
21. See Armando Petrucci, Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in the Western Tradition, trans. Michael Sullivan (Stanford, 1998).
22. Another, perhaps more pertinent example that alters the conventional structuring of temporal reality can be seen in the illustration on the cover of Jacques Derrida's The Postcard. There, Plato is seen standing behind and leaning over a seated figure.
23. The figure is Socrates, who is bent over a scribe's desk writing down what Plato is dictating. This presentation, of course, reverses conventional historical wisdom that tells us that Socrates came before Plato, that Socrates was the teacher, and Plato the student. Furthermore, Plato was the writer (since all we know about Socrates is what Plato wrote of him in The Republic and other books), and Socrates was known for his (oral)
24. Socratic dialogues described by Plato. Indeed, we are forced to ask here who is sending and who is receiving, who is author and who is reader, who is author and who is scribe? Who comes (came) first, and who second?
25. See Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago, 1987)
26. Richard J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA, 1972).
27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used the term "rhizome" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. "A rhizome doesn't begin and doesn't end, but is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo."
28. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minnesota, 1987), p. 25.
29. I will argue below that the identification of records as archival is a kind of death sentence, and claims of permanent preservation a form of destruction.
30. The term "multivalent" is an adaptation of the current concept of multivalent documents that regards documents as compositions of intimately related but distinct layers of content and behaviours. "Multivalent temporality," then, refers to the simultaneous presence of multiple chronologies and contexts in a single document or body of documents.
31. Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York, 1980).
32. It is interesting to note that software developers and information architects have not hesitated to appropriate the concept of ontology from philosophers recently to cope with the issue of object identity in their system designs.
33. "Tion" suffixes, in other words, frequently function to transform verbs (action, change, movement, flux) into nouns (stable objects with fixed, immoveable properties).
34. However, the "tion" ending can reflect the frequent indeterminacy of relations between process and final product. "[T]ion" endings often embody the paradox of stasis and transformation.
35. Union, confederation, transformation, production, creation, disposition, and construction, for example, allude simultaneously, and ambiguously, an end result or end product, and also to a project in progress, incompleteness, to an on-going process toward completion (another "tion" word).
36. "Formation," or, for example, a "rock formation" simultaneously conveys the sense of a final state or product in space, but also an on-going process through time.
37. Similarly, in the sense we use it here, "record formation" refers to a final state "recordness," but also to an uncompleted process record creation or record disposition that, of course, raises the same issues.
38. A deconstruction of the crucial concepts of "sending" and (final) "destination" as it pertains to ideas of records and record-keeping is conducted
39. Brien Brothman, "The Limit of Limits: Derridean Deconstruction and the Archival Institution," Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993), pp. 205-20.
40. On time as a narrative structure featuring beginnings, middles, and endings.
41. see David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Indianapolis, 1991), passim.
42. It is important to note the emerging ambiguity between a narrow meaning of "record creation" that refers to the initial, actual writing of a document, and a steadily broadening meaning that can encompass everything from creation to classification and capture (filing in a filing system), to metadata wrapping and container placement, system trustworthiness development, and more.
43. This archival view of localization, as we will see, is based on a fundamental misconstruction that philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, reminiscent of Roland Barthes' distinction between the "work" (materiality of the object and "text" [methodological field]), called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness."
44. It fixes on the object the record, the container, the file as an ultimate reality instead of heeding the process of flux and transformation over time. In this regard, the record continuum is more in keeping with Whitehead's perspective. In effect, a record is nothing more and nothing less than an occasion in a process, an occasion during which a human agent encounters a document and engages in the document's "first" ever reading.
45. On each of these occasions the record is the same as and different from itself. "There are no brute, self-contained matters of fact, capable of being understood apart from interpretation as an element in a system."
46. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York, 1929), Chapter 10.
47. Interestingly, Whitehead uses the term perishing to refer to objects to which individuals ascribe a final, fixed identity. When a subject reaches "satisfaction" - "completion," - the subject ceases being a subject and becomes an "immortal object."
48. Ibid., pp. 50-51.
49. Whitehead's critique of the "creative process" offers striking parallels with some accounts of documentary creation and the attainment of a final state that some record-keepers have hopefully named "recordness." The creative process involves a series of phases starting with "subjective creation" of novelty and ending with "perpetual perishing" and entry into a state of "objective immortality" upon so-called completion and positioning in public time and place.
50. See Ibid., p. 320, passim.
51. See also his critique of the notion of "enduring substances," p. 77.
52. In this frame records are not definable as enduring objects. Rather, they are definable in terms of a series of "occasions" involving continual activity. Whitehead's view is akin to Richard Cox's suggestion that documentary reality is best described as an event, a singular encounter of human and object, and not as an entity.
53. McKemmish E., "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," p. 4.
54. Scare quotes appearing around the word "frozen" later in the same article reveal a similar perplexity. Records are "frozen" yet, as with the linearity of the life cycle, they are carried "forward."
55. Elsewhere, McKemmish similarly places frozen in quotation marks, and, again, depicts records as moving forward. "Managing documents as evidence of social and business activity involves developing records and archives systems that can carry them forward with their "fixed" content..."
56. McKemmish E. et al., "Describing Records in Context in the Continuum," p. 4.
57. Again, this brings to mind Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," the belief that the identity of objects and events is simply bound to a single spatial and temporal context. It has also been referred to as the perspective of "simple location."
58. Donald J. Wilcox, Measure of Times Past, p. 49.
59. Record creators and subsequent users, however, may each place the time and place of record creation and other events in radically differing temporal and spatial positions.
60. See David Carr, "Place and Time: On the Interplay of Historical Points of View," History and Theory 40 (December 2001), pp. 153-67.
61. Similarly, Cornelius Castoriadis addresses "authentic" temporality's introduction of otherness, difference, and alterity into being. Thus, the "unity and unicity of being is fragmented and stratified." This leads to the conclusion that the identification of "one temporality as the only originary and authentic one" is illusory.
62. See Cornelius Castoriadis, "Time and Creation," in John Bender and David Wellbery, eds., Chronotypes: The Construction of Time (Stanford, 1991), pp. 62-64.
63. On the issue of judging temporal distance and the problems associated with the establishment of an absolute conception of temporal distance, see
64. Mark Salter Phillips, "Histories, Micro-and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance," New Literary History, vol. 34, no. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 216-18.
65. The twentieth century is replete with examples of the use of organic, biological models and mechanisms to buttress industrial, engineering, management, and organizational process development. The ideas of cybernetics and systems theory are among the best known examples.
66. The works of William Cannon, Stafford Beer, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Norbert Wiener are particularly noteworthy. Of course, there is also evidence that the "business" direction of records management theory is partially determined by strategies for professional advancement.
67. See Ira Penn, "Records Management: Still Hazy After All These Years," in Records Management Quarterly 27 (January 1993), p. 3.
68. "Sentence" and "sentencing" are terms some Australian archival institutions use to refer to the establishment of records retention conditions.
69. See National Archives of Australia, at .
70. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (London, 1991).
71. Archivists and record-keepers have remained oblivious to the issues of the constitution of object identity. For the most part, they remain mired in legal perspectives on object records and people - identity. It is individuals outside the profession who have been showing the way, most interestingly, software designers and information modelers. Individuals in these fields have turned to such philosophical notions as "ontology" and "mereology" to develop a more sophisticated understanding of such concepts as "object," "document," and "context," and part-whole relationships.
72. Among the few records professionals who have at least glimpsed the ontology of information objects, though without benefit of philosophical perspectives, are David Bearman, "Reality and Chimera in the Preservation of Electronic Records," D-Lib Magazine, vol. 5, no. 4 (April 1999)
73. Terry Cook, "Mind Over Matter: Towards A New Theory of Archival Appraisal," in Barbara L. Craig, ed., The Archival Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh A. Taylor (Ottawa, 1992), pp. 38-70
74. Richard Cox, "The Record: Is It Evolving?," The Records and Retrieval Report: The Newsletter of the Information Managers, vol. 10, no. 3 (March 1994), pp. 1-16
75. Sue McKemmish, "Are Records Ever Actual?," in Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott, eds., The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives' First Fifty Years, Monash Occasional Papers in Librarianship, Record-keeping and Bibliography No. 5 (Melbourne, 1994), pp. 187-203
76. James M. O'Toole, "On the Idea of Permanence," American Archivist, vol. 52, no. 1 (Winter 1989), pp. 10-25.
77. On the pervasiveness of metaphor and multivalent plural meaning in ordinary language use, see
78. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980)
79. George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago, 1989).
80. Even writing that is meant to be more ordinary than poetic, more literal than figurative, and more scientific and rational than literary and stylized, propels texts along paths of meaning that often remain hidden to unsuspecting authors, to individuals whose intention it is to set up simple relations between word and world. To be sure, people also deliberately use tropes, for they offer rhetorical power, freshness of perception, and manageable abstraction, in other words, a means of persuasive communication, innovative thinking, and effective instruction.
81. However, consciously chosen metaphorical figures, too, harbor an excessive content, a network of associations that can draw texts along pathways their authors never knowingly or willingly would have wished them to go. Indeed, it has been suggested that "rhetoric is integral to the very structure of discourse, that the displacement of ordinary language by rhetoric and metaphor is integral to any intellectual act such that there is no pure sense datum."
82. Emmanuel Levinas, "Everyday Language and Rhetoric Without Eloquence," in Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, 1994), p. 135.
83. Louis Marin, "On the Interpretation of Ordinary Language: A Parable of Pascal," in Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY, 1979).
84. Other individuals, however, believe that all everyday conventional language is literal, and none is metaphorical. Literalists believe that: 1) all subject matter can be comprehended literally, without metaphor; 2) only literal language can be contingently true or false; 3) all definitions given in the lexicon of a language are literal, not metaphorical; and 4) the concepts used in the grammar of a language are all literal; none are metaphorical.
85. Continuing in the Platonic and Hobbesian tradition of suspicion of metaphor's deceptiveness and lapse into irrationality, Dutch professor of archivistics Eric Ketelaar briefly alludes to the "risks" of importing into archival science metaphors from other domains, and cites the life cycle as a prime example of a misleading metaphor.
86. See "The Difference Best Postponed: Cultures and Comparative Archival Science," Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997), pp. 21-27.
87. Unlike some literary theorists, then, Ketelaar appears to believe it is possible for writers and readers to neatly distinguish and choose between ordinary, literal language and literary or metaphorical tropes, and to control or eliminate the deleterious effects of the latter.
88. Heidegger talks about "falling" to describe being as man's "groundedness" in day-to-day anxieties, caring, preoccupations, and "historicality."
89. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, 1962), pp. 320-30.
90. Thierry Hentsch, Raconter et mourir: Aux Sources de l'imaginaire narratif en occident (Montreal, 2002).
91. Along with the story of Adam and Eve, numerous ancient epics of gods and heroes pondered the relationship between the quality of life and the nature of mortality. To live heroically was to risk death in exchange for an honourable life and legacy.
92. At least, this is what one often finds in Homer, Virgil, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, among many others. One might also mention the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
93. One immediately thinks of the Socratic dialogues in Plato's Phaedo and Aristotle's De Anima, that have served to channel much subsequent thought about these issues.
94. Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994)
95. Philip Aries, The Hour of Our Death (New York, 1981).
96. Joshua Schuster, "Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida," Other Voices, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1997).
97. For example, religious and social values, and technology and scientific knowledge have given rise to pro-life and pro-choice abortion debates concerning the beginning of life, and debates on euthanasia and the withdrawal of medical life support have centred on how best to define life, and its end. Notions of quality of life have complicated the issue.
98. See Fernando Vidal, "Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of the Body," Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 4 (Summer 2002), pp. 930-74.
99. For example, we have seen Sue McKemmish's choice of language to describe the life cycle: "The life cycle model sees records passing through stages until they eventually 'die', except for the 'chosen ones' that are reincarnated as archives" (see footnote 3).
100. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York, 1995), passim
101. Jonathan Strauss, "Preface: The State of Death," Diacritics, vol. 30, no. 3 (2000), pp. 3-11.
102. Another study that explores the medieval view of mortal transience and change is Joseph J. Mogan Jr., Chaucer and the Theme of Mutability (Paris, 1969).
103. One might also mention, in passing, the significance of changing attitudes to the dissection of the human body. During the Middle Ages, the Church frowned on the study of anatomy, and especially the performance of autopsies.
104. The Renaissance evinced a more permissive attitude, as both artists and physicians performed dissections on cadavers to gain anatomical knowledge. However, this same permissive attitude to the use of corpses to advance medical knowledge and artistic acumen also served to affirm a scientific, material view of human existence.
105. Caroline Walker Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, p. 137.
106. Applying Gilles Deleuze's insights, Jeffrey Cohen suggests that thinking of humans in biological terms is unsatisfactory for understanding the medieval construction of human identity.
107. See Cohen J., Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, 2003).
108. See also Giovanna Borradori, "The Temporalization of Difference: Reflections on Deleuze's Interpretation of Bergson," Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 34, no. 1 (March 2001), pp. 1-20.
109. The seventeenth-century Vanitas paintings (that the Dutch called Still Leven and the French, Nature Morte) were done precisely during the epoch of the Scientific Revolution and the rising prosperity of Holland, and expressed the transience of earthly pleasures and depicted the ephemeral quality of accumulated material objects. As we have seen, artists of the time drew on a standard inventory of symbols to express this.
110. Among the best-known artists are Frans Hals, Hans Holbein, Pieter Claecz, and Barthel Bruyn. Today Audrey Flack and a number of other artists have revived Vanitas painting.
111. Jonathan Strauss, "The State of Death," Diacritics, vol. 30, no. 3 (Fall 2000), p. 3.
112. See also Aries P., Hour of Our Death.
113. On this notion, see Brien Brothman, "Making Up People: The State, Records, and Bureaucracy in Jose Saramago's All the Names," Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 30, no. 2 (November 2002), p. 124.
114. Jacques Derrida examines the relationship between individual men's end (finite existence) and the infinitude implicit in man's "ends." Derrida denies the end, maintaining that the End is an open-ended question.
115. See Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy (Chicago, 1989), pp. 123-25.
116. "The closer we get to the end," one interpreter of Derrida remarks, "the closer we get to the beginning."
117. See Joshua Schuster, "Death Reckoning."
118. See note 20.
119. Heidegger's thoroughly modern assessment of death reflects this perspective: "Death is Dasein's ownmost possibility. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue." Dasein entails "Being-towardthe-end."
120. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 307, 425.
121. "Somewhat paradoxically, then, death must be postulated as the imaginary end point, the final event, of the story of my life. If there were no death (i.e., the annihilation of my self) to be expected, I could not even realize that I am leading a specific, spatio-temporally discernible human life.
122. The fact that death is awaiting me, even if I cannot fully understand what it is all about, enables me to think about my life as a coherent whole with a beginning and an end. Only with respect to such a life can the question of 'meaning' or 'significance' arise."
123. See Sami Pihlstrom, "Narrativity, Modernity, and Tragedy: How Pragmatism Educates Humanity," Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, Massachusetts, 10-15 August 1998, available at: (accessed 4 March 2006).
124. This essay, then, shifts our attention from the records management life cycle and its focus on the actions people take with respect to products (documents) to a focus on the interaction between people and documents. Arjun Appadurai explains: "... even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context."
125. Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. (Cambridge, 1998), p. 5.
126. In his history of communication, John Durham Peters dwells at length on the relationship between the concepts of media and communication, and the dead. Communication media "put us in a circuit of communication with the absent." "Communication with the dead," Peters later observes, "is the paradigm case of hermeneutics. In fact, all communication is ultimately indistinguishable from communication with the dead." Communication is, he says, the transcendence of mortal form.
127. John Durham Peters, Speaking Into The Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago, 1999), pp. 158, 177, 229, and passim.
128. In a radically different way, the late Gilles Deleuze's exploration of Henri Bergson's notion of "duration" explains how linguistic expression, preserved writing, and record-keeping open up the possibility for humans to think beyond the human condition.
129. For Deleuze, writing lends humans a potentially superhuman power to overcome their mortal physical condition. His inquiry into how language use might vitiate our biologically anchored conception of the beginning and end of human existence raises questions concerning the temporal limits of the meaning of "human."
130. See Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London, 1999).
131. See also Giovanna Borradori, "Temporalization of Difference."
132. On the significance of "tion" suffixes, see note 16.
133. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), pp. 172-73.
134. Foucault differentiates between change, which is taken as a law of historical process, and the archeological notion of transformation, which accommodates the coexistence of continuity and change. On the notion of the existence of "different dates and speeds" in a single information object
135. see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 3-4, 107-10, and chap. 10 passim.
136. The term "firstness" is taken from Charles Sanders Pierce, father of the American philosophy of pragmatism.
137. See James O'Toole, "On the Idea of Uniqueness," American Archivist, vol. 57, no. 4 (Fall 1994), pp. 632-58.
138. It can also be argued, however, that even records that have been destroyed (especially institutional records) always fall short of complete disappearance. Records destroyed in accordance with currently recommended procedures leave, or should leave, a lingering documentary residue.
139. This residue that describes the record, and justifies and even attests to its utter elimination, also has an opposite effect: it gives birth to a lingering documentary record of its "non-existence."
140. On the difference between "through time" and "in time"
141. see Borradori G., "Temporalization of Difference."
142. Hofstadter D., Godel, Escher, Bach, p. 15 and passim.
143. I hasten to add that recursion and strange loops are not the equivalent of tracing the history of the record. The helical model stresses the illusory or partial view of linear perspectives on record-keeping.
144. The process is not simply one that involves records accumulating histories of their own. The simultaneity of record phases is not explicable within a simple linear framework. Rather, records are temporally multivalent.
145. They reside simultaneously in multiple "time zones," at once occupying a place in a linear framework but then also caught in a helical process where beginning and ending, creation and destruction for example, depart from the usual linear sequence.
146. Even as it seems to emerge at a distance from the moment of creation along the horizontal axis, use constitutes or re-occupies a point of origin, and embodies a sameness with, and difference from, the original record. But then, the original record is not original until a moment of return occurs.
147. In an historical time frame the records life cycle is a linear process that puts distance between a beginning point and an end point. Here, however, the end point of record-keeping somehow ends up as a point of origin and completion, even as it distances itself from that starting point.
148. Hofstadter D., Godel, Escher, Bach, p. 148.
149. Without being explicit, an early proposal by David Bearman opens up these issues in "Documenting Documentation," Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh, 1994).