The weavers of memories (07)

IV. Critical archival sciences. Searching for new patterns (B)

[This post is the seventh of a series in which I will share a text entitled Los tejedores de memorias (“The weavers of memories”), which I produced as the final work for my master’s degree in Historical Archives and Memory at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota (Colombia). All posts can be viewed on my website, while the original text, complete with quotes and notes, can be downloaded here].

According to De Kosnik, memory has ceased to be the record of a society’s cultural production and has been transformed, today, into a common base that allows the generation of an enormous amount of goods and documents, and the implementation of countless processes.

Digital technologies allow what Lawrence Lessig (2008) and other authors have called remix culture: the possibility of appropriating and transforming knowledge (understood as an enormous repository or archive of narratives, characters, worlds, images, graphics and sounds) and giving rise to new documents. The existing record is exploited as raw material, and is used for the creation of new cultural, artistic and intellectual products, reinterpretations, innovative analyses, customizations…

The idea is by no means original or novel: most of the planet’s indigenous and traditional societies understand their memory precisely as a spring from which current generations drink to quench their thirst for knowledge and nourish their new dreams, creations and actions. Memory is not something dead, closed, left behind and visited by historians and those nostalgic for the past: on the contrary, it is (or should be) at the very core of the social life of any community.

Rogue archiving recovers and proposes the possibility of using each document as a source for new productions, reflections and deviations. In this way, collective memory rebels against the place it has been forcefully assigned in the order of things. Interacting with memory is no longer what comes after its production: it can also be what comes before, or what happens in the middle.

Memory thus ceases to be an end in itself and becomes a springboard for other processes. Processes that are more democratic, more open, more horizontal, more creative, more plural.

Adjectives that are not usually applied to the work of more traditional archives.

***

The creative and critical use of collections managed by institutions of knowledge and memory favors a series of values, especially in today’s world: an “information society” with data always at one’s fingertips. In Speculative collections and the emancipatory library, a text included in the compilation on new GLAMs practices produced for Routledge by Hannah Levi in 2020, the American librarian Bethany Nowviskie mentions some of these values:

Reproducibility. Openness. Transparency. Rationality. Interoperability. And an orientation towards interdisciplinary problem-solving. Mine is a non-exclusive list, to be sure, but you may recognise it as one accounting of the values that shape data management in the sciences and social sciences, and underlie the creation of collections, interfaces and infrastructure.

From a perspective as critical as it is creative, the author echoes discussions, debates and claims raised within the disciplines of information and memory (including some reflected in the pages of De Kosnik herself), and argues that libraries, archives and museums are often designed as closed, conservative and bounded spaces, suggesting a linear (and sometimes single, monolithic) view of history and events, rather than being thought of, created and managed as places of problem solving, branching options and generating proposals.

These spaces have been built to be seen and used by the public as lenses for retrospection, when they could be scenarios from which the creators of future histories gain momentum. They are not the spaces for projection, planning, performance and speculation that they should be. A passive, backward gaze is encouraged over an active view of the present and future possibilities. Heritage is seen as narratives about what was, rather than as tools and resources for what could be; as material that was received, rather than as technology to be used.

Nowviskie points out that…

…if we mean to address the grand challenges of the 21st century, we have a pressing need for humanistic knowledge and patterns of work to interweave more fully with scientific understanding and practice, and for both to be opened to a vastly wider array of people who can apply their various lived experiences and intellectual perspectives — and their future- and freedom-oriented turns of mind — to the problems we share.

The institutions of knowledge and memory management have not been designed or intended to activate imaginations. Nor to emancipate themselves from linear and hegemonic discourses and ways of thinking. In this sense, Nowviskie points out that groups relegated to “subaltern” positions (those that the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos locates on the other side of the “abysmal gaps”, and who need not necessarily be a poor or dispossessed collective, but simply “other” within the hegemonic scheme) must not only be able to access their own contents and regulate access to them. They must be able to set the conditions of the infrastructure, actively shaping classification systems, search and discovery interfaces and visualization tools, all in pursuit of expressing independent theories of the world: the world as it is for them. The world as it should be.

The author quotes Michelle Caswell to call for the possibility of contesting, renegotiating and redefining the collective memory of the past by all kinds of groups, and as independently of institutional control and hegemonic power as possible. She points to the need to use records and memories to serve as a counterweight or resistance to dominant ways of managing libraries, archives and museums.

In short, Nowviskie expresses a strong and determined commitment to dare to try. Although she does not use the adjective rogue in her paragraphs, she clearly adheres to the ideas of this current, and proposes imaginative and emancipatory positions for libraries, archives and museums: options for creation, regeneration, openness. For alternative and different paths. For possibilities.

[To be continued…].