The Utopian Ambition of the Archive

This quote, which appears in a footnote of Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future has been central to my thinking about the contemporary (utopian) relevance of memory for cultural heritage in the wake of digital technologies:

“The presumption is that Utopia, whose business is the future, or not-being, exists only in the present, where it leads the relatively feeble life of desire and fantasy [...] Utopia is philosophically analogous to the trace, only from the other end of time. The aporia of the trace is to belong to past and present all at once, and thus to constitute a mixture of being and not-being quite different from the traditional category of Becoming [...] Utopia, which combines the not-yet-being of the future with a textual existence in the present is no less worthy of the archaeological paradoxes we are willing to grant the trace.”

Jameson's structural comparison with the trace, calls to mind the notion of the 'archive', a central metaphorical construct in questions relating to human knowledge, memory, and power, largely based on the work of philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Drawing upon Foucault and suggesting that information, like power, “does not exist in a vacuum,” Thomas Richards, in The Imperial Archive, discusses the archive as “a utopian space of comprehensive knowledge [...] not a building, nor even a collection of texts, but the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable,” and seeks to demonstrate how “the imperial archive was a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and Empire.” Here, a link is suggested to another of Foucault's famous concepts, the heterotopia, a concept elaborated in 'Of Other Spaces'.

Hal Foster is similar in his description of the archive as a place of creation, part of the embodiment of its utopian ambition:

"Its desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of utopia. This partial recovery of the utopian demand is unexpected: not so long ago this was the most despised aspect of the modern(ist) project, condemned as totalitarian gulag on the Right and capitalist tabula rasa on the Left. This move to turn "excavation sites" into "construction sites" is welcome in another way too: it suggests a shift away from a melancholic culture that views the historical as little more than the traumatic."

While Derrida does not mention utopia directly the mechanism of the promise works in a similar way for him in 'Archive Fever' (and through this we come back almost full circle to Jameson, see Ian Buchanan's essay 'Metacommentary on Utopia, or Jameson's Dialectic of Hope'):

"This is not the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in the times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise" (pp. 27-28).

Importantly, Derrida writes not only about the archive as a site of power and authority but also about the ambiguous and fragmentary nature of its contents – the ‘presentness’ and absence of traces that make up archives, the fact that they record only what is written and processed, not what is said and thought. This incompleteness and instability of archives, however, can be overlooked if we focus too much on the archive’s exercise of power and not enough on the principles which underpin its approach to any construct, document or text.

Is there a correlation between memory and the archive with regard to the fallibility of  both?

Prime Minister's Holocaust Commission calling for Digital Solutions

The Prime Minister’s Commission on the Holocaust is a national, cross-party commission, established to investigate whether further measures should be taken to ensure Britain has a permanent and fitting memorial and meaningful educational resources for generations to come.

Preserving survivor testimony and developing the best educational resources for future generations are likely to depend heavily on ensuring the most cutting-edge digital approaches. The Commission wants to hear from digital experts and educators.

For more info, visit: https://engage.number10.gov.uk/contact-the-holocaust-commission/