“Archiving cultures”

Mike Featherstone
Archive Reason
• Para entender la legitimidad de una cultura hay que estudiar su
relacion con el archivo, el sitio de acumulacion de registros
Gran Expo Lectura errada de La imposibilidad de
Benjamin y volver, la subjetividad del
Borges, ahistorical Aleph (Guillermo
y universalista Martinez) y lo racial en la
exposición de Paris

Conexión entre principios de siglo XX con preocupaciones contemporaneas

Overload of cultural production Loss of a sense of cultural bound-ness,

Fragmentation of life over form
centricity and order
and fragmentation
 Who will archive cultures, the state, the corporations, or the public?

• El archivo: “the site for the accumulation of primary sources from which history is constructed”
+
Politics of the archive Legitimated a kind of
(Grounding of authority) expertise
+
Mediating role of the historian or researcher
(a resource?)
The Electronic Archive (the city of bits) …there is, in theory,
little reason why
one could not
“Unaware of the writing that precedes our own possibilities of writing” access any aspect of
this world of
culture”.
Digitalized contents Hypertext

Statephobia
Mitchell Dean
Hence, a person will have a new form of presence, a partial and Kaspar
identity defined for the purposes of those who administer and Villadsen
use the databases…the “super-panopticon”, or database society,
individuals are constituted with dispersed identities, identities
that reside in the database or electronic archive, which people “Burnout
may be completely unaware of. Society”, Byung-
Chul Han