(No)Memory

The Archive as Metaphor

From Archival Space to Archival Time
Wolfgang Ernst

Essay – September 30, 2004

The archive has become a universal metaphor for all conceivable forms of
storage and memory. Seen from the media-archaeological perspective of the
German theorist Wolfgang Ernst, however, the archive is not dedicated to
memory but to the purely technical practice of data storage: any story we add
to the archive comes from outside. The archive has no narrative memory, only
a calculating one. In a digital culture, Ernst says, the archive in fact changes
from an archival space into an archival time, in which the key is the dynamics
of the permanent transmission of data. The archive then become literally a
‘metaphor’, with all the possibilities this entails.

The German Military Archive under construction (Potsdam, 1939) from:

Archivalische Zeitschrift, vol. 45 (1939).

First of all, let us take the archive in its non-metaphorical use, as a memorizing practice of
administrative power. Let us then face the digital challenge to traditional archives:
residential, static memories are being replaced by dynamic, temporal forms of storage in
streaming media. Ironically, when the predominance of cultural storage is being replaced
by the emphasis on transfer, we return to the literal ‘metaphorization’ of the archive. 1

The ‘archive’ has become one of the most popular metaphors for all kinds of memory and
storage agencies. But let us not forget, first of all, that the archive is a very precise (and

p
  age: 1 / 8 — The Archive as Metaphor onlineopen.org
thus limited) institution. The archivist knows that he operates in the arcana imperii, the
hidden realms of power. There is a well-defined juridical purpose in keeping spatially and
temporally away from public inspection documents which are relevant in administrative
contexts; everything else being subject to discourse. The archive literally started by
administrative definition – as archeion in ancient Athens once it became alphabetized,
related to the new forms of commandment.

Archival space is based on hardware, not a metaphorical body of memories. Its operating
system is administrative; upon its stored data narratives (history, ideology and other kinds
of discursive software) are being applied only from outside. Non-discursive practices are
the reality of archives under a given set of rules – thus somewhat analogous to the transfer
protocols in the Internet or the codes behind computer software.

The silence of the archive: a media-archaeological point of view

The archive is not the place of collective memories in a given society 2 but rather the place
of classifying, sorting (out) and storing data resulting from administrative acts,
representing a kind of cybernetic feed-back option of data back to present procedures.
Archived data are not meant for historical or cultural but for organizational memory (such
as the state, business or media); real archives link authority to a data storage apparatus.

Starting out from the theory of cultural semiotics developed by Jurij Lotman, culture is a
function of its memory agencies. Lotman has defined culture as a function of its inherent
media, institutions and practices of storing and transferring cultural knowledge. Media
archaeology looks in a non-anthropocentric way at memory culture; it takes the presence
of the archive, not narrative history as its model of processing ‘past’ data. Media
archaeology – being concerned with signal processing rather than with semiotics – directs
attention to the technological addressability of memory, discovering an archival stratum in
cultural memory sedimentation which is neither purely human nor purely technological,
but literally in between: symbolic operations which analyse the phantasms of cultural
memory as memory machine.

In the sense of the ancient notion of katechon (deferral), the archive suspends the
merciless thermodynamic law of physics that all things tend to dissolve into disorder until
death occurs. The archive manages to maintain order through a heavy investment of
organizational energy. One function of the cultural archive is to ensure that improbable
(that is, seemingly useless) data is preserved for future possible information (according to
information theory, such as Claude Shannon’s). What remains from the past in archives is
the physical trace of symbolically coded matter, which in its materiality is simply present
in space. The more cultural data are processed in electronic, fugitive form, the more the
traditional archive gains authority from the very materiality of its artefacts (parchment,
paper, tapes) – an archival retro-effect.

p
  age: 2 / 8 — The Archive as Metaphor onlineopen.org
 Counting by numbers: media, memory and the archive

The archive does not tell stories; only secondary narratives give meaningful coherence to
its discontinuous elements. In its very discreteness the archive mirrors the operative level
of the present, calculating rather than telling. In the archive, nothing and nobody ‘speaks’
to us – neither the dead not anything else. The archive is a storage agency in spatial
architecture. Let us not confuse public discourse (which turns data into narratives) with
the silence of discrete archival files. There is no necessary coherent connection between
archival data and documents, but rather gaps in between: holes and silence. It is this
which makes the archive an object of media-archaeological aesthetics: like archaeologists,
media archaeologists are confronted with artefacts which do not speak but operate. This
silence is power at work, unnoticed by narrative discourse. This power is analogous to the
power of media, which depends on the fact that media hide and dissimulate their
technological apparatus through their content, which is an effect of their interface. The
syntactical power of the archive becomes visible only from a perspective which resists the
desire for semantics.

Archival memory is monumental; it contains forms, not people. Whatever is left of a

person is a collection of papers or recorded sound and images. Here the emphatic
subjects dissolves into a text of discrete bits. Whoever reads personal coherence into
archival papers performs fiction, figuring dead letters in the mode of rhetorical
prosopopoietics (naming dead things ‘alive’). Historical imagination, applied to archival
readings, mistakes hallucinations for absence. Against the phantasmatic desire to speak
with the dead, archival awareness faces the past as data.

Counting is related to telling, but in an antagonistic way. When it comes to the question of
memory in the age of digital computing, I refer to Lev Manovich’s essay on ‘Database as a
symbolic form’: 3 data models become dominant, dictating the narrative; databases invert
the traditional relation between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic. The non-narrative
belongs to the archival regime. Archival information corresponds to the media
archaeological mode, whereas narrative corresponds to discourse.

Literary narrative (according to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 treatise Laokoon) is an

art of organizing temporal experience; Henri Bergson insisted on human perception of
time (conscience) as against chrono-photographic registering of temporal processes. Time
itself is now being organized by technologies. 4 The spatial metaphor of the archive
transforms into a temporal dimension; the dynamization of the archive involves time-
based procedures.

Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay ‘Der Erzähler’, states that experience, when cut of from
epic traditions, can no longer be communicated in a narrative way. 5 In contrast to this we
can argue that information has to be immediately consumed through real-time analysis –
which belongs to computing and signal processing, and is no longer narratable. From a
media-archaeological view, instead of ‘narrative memory’, a digital culture deals with
calculating memory. The evidence of files in archives knew it already: data-based memory
cannot tell but only count, in accordance with the administrative logic which produces
such files. Narrative may be the medium of social memory; the medium of archives,
though, is the alphanumerical mode in conjunction with materialities (of data support) and
logistical programs (symbolic operators). Power is the area where narratives don’t take
place; the rest is interpretation. The archive registers, it does not tell. Only metaphorically
can it be compared to human memory – unless taken neurologically.

If there are pieces missing in the archive, these gaps are filled by human imagination 6 .
The desire of historiography stems from a sense of loss. 7 The archive is not the basis for
historical memory, but its alternative form of knowledge. If all that is left from the past is
paper (scripta manent), then reading should be taken as an act of recollection in its most
literal sense – as a symbolic cultural technology, resulting in a paratactical form of

p
  age: 3 / 8 — The Archive as Metaphor onlineopen.org
presentation. Let us not write on the basis of archives or about archives, but write the
archive (transitively).

Archive versus collective memory

To mistake the archive for a place of social memory is to divert attention from becoming
aware of its real memory power: the mechanics of storage media which operates
asymmetrically compared to human remembrance. In Halbwachs’s writings on the social
framework of individual memory the archive significantly does not figure. The (hidden)
power of the archive relies on its materialities (the physical storage engineering) and its
symbolic operations, resulting in a non-organic body of evidence. This systemic read only
memory fundamentally differs from what Marcel Proust described as involuntary memory
in the human subconscious (mémoire involontaire). The archive starts with acts of
crystallisation, with reducing the disorder of processes into coded, grammatological
structures – a mediatic in-between of loose coupling and rigid form. Here, the real takes
place.

The archive is not about memory but storage practices, a functional lieu de mémoire. 8
Remembrance is external to the archive. But having become a universal metaphor for all
kinds of storage and memory in the meantime, the ‘archive’ is defaced; its memory
technology is being dissimulated in favour of discursive effects, just as multimedia
interfaces dissimulate the internal, operative procedures of computing. What is required is
a media-critical theory of the archive, pointing at its definition as coded storage.

From spatial to time-based archives From a media-archaeological point of view, the

traditional archive (as indicated above) becomes deconstructed by the implications of
digital techniques. Since antiquity and the Renaissance, mnemotechnical storage has
linked memory to space. But nowadays the static residential archive as permanent storage
is being replaced by dynamic temporal storage, the time-based archive as a topological
place of permanent data transfer. Critically the archive transforms from storage space to
storage time; it can deal with streaming data in electronic systems only in a transitory way.
The archival data lose their spatial immobility the moment they are provided with a purely
temporal index (‘data’, literally). In closed circuits of networks, the ultimate criterion for the
archive – its separateness from actual operativeness – is no longer given. The essential
feature of networked computing is its dynamic operativeness. Cyberspace is an
intersection of mobile elements, which can be transferred by a series of algorithmic
operations. In electronic, digital media, the classical practice of quasi-eternal storage is
being replaced by dynamical movements ‘on the fly’ as a new quality. Classical archival
memory has never been interactive, whereas documents in networked space become
time- critical to user feed-back.

The traditional spatial, that is, archival order which still continues in institutionally and
physically remote places is thus being accompanied by a dynamic archival practice of data
mapping, by temporal, dynamic, process operations which differentiate traditional from
electronic archives. Trace routers are not spatial, but temporal scouts. With the archive
itself being transformed from an agency for spatialization of time into an in-between
ordering (arresting) of dynamic processes (deferring change by a momentary arrest),
spatial architectures of the archive transform into sequentializing, time-critical,
synchronous communication.

p
  age: 4 / 8 — The Archive as Metaphor onlineopen.org
 From location to addressability

Conservatively considered as an ‘archive’, the Internet has not yet even arrived the
mediation of its own past. Cyberspace is a transversive performance of communication;
thus ‘cyberspace has no memory’. 9 Only data which are provided with addressable meta-
data can be accessed in the cultural archive; in the case of the Internet, this archival
infrastructure itself becomes temporally dynamic with the need for access data at a given
moment in a virtual text. Memorial space is being replaced by a limited series of temporal
entities. Space becomes temporalized, with the archival paradigm being replaced by
permanent transfer, recycling memory.

Only what can be addressed can be located. In this sense the Internet generates a ‘new
culture of memory, in which memory is no longer located in specific sites or accessible
according to traditional mnemonics, and is no longer a stock to which it is necessary to
gain access, with all the hierarchical controls that this entails.’ 10 Addressability remains
crucial for mediated memory. In Plato’s dialogue Meno it appears as if the matter of
memory is but an effect of the application of techniques of recall. When the indication of
temporal ‘access’ data becomes the dominant feature in Internet research, the traditional
archival order liquefies: ‘Informational goods require access, not possession.’ 11 The
networked storage model turns electronic archives into a generative agency; the traditional
classificatory indexing (by meta-data) is replaced by dynamic (though still rule-governed,
protocol-governed) sorting. 12 The archival does not reside in the content of its files, but in
logistic cybernetics (the cyberarchive which is the object of ‘media archivology’). When
parallel distributed processing in computers replaces traditional computer memory, data
become temporally rather than spatially locatable. Considered as ‘une opération technique
’, the archive becomes a cybernetic memory machine, a play of data latency and data
actualization, retentions and protentions of the present. As long as documents remain
within the reach of actual administrations, they are part of a powerful regime. Within the
digital regime, all data become subject to realtime processing. Under data processing
conditions in realtime, the past itself becomes a delusion; the residual time delay of
archival information shrinks to null.

In cyber ‘space’ the notion of the archive has already become an anachronistic, hindering
metaphor; it should rather be described in topological, mathematical or geometrical terms,
replacing emphatic memory by transfer (data migration) in permanence. The old rule that
only what has been stored can be located is no longer applicable. 13 Beyond the archive in
its old ‘archontic’ quality, 14 the Internet generates, in this sense, a new memory culture.
Digitalization of analogous stored material means trans-archivization. Linked to the
Internet rather than to traditional state bureaucracies, there is no organizational memory
any more but a definition by circulating states, constructive rather than re-constructive.
Assuming that the matter of memory is really only an effect of the application of
techniques of recall, there is no memory. The networked data bases mark the beginning of
a relationship to knowledge that dissolves the hierarchy associated with the classical
archive.

p
  age: 5 / 8 — The Archive as Metaphor onlineopen.org
 Data migration

The archive – while institutionally ongoing as an administrative and juridical memory of

state or other corporations – on an epistemological level is transformed from an
mechanism of adressability (read-only memory) into an arché in Foucault’s sense: a
generative, algorithmic, protocol-like agency, literally programmatic. The digital (instead of
analogue) archive is related to sampling in that respect. Already the traditional, text-based
archive consists of digital elements, elementary letters of the alphabet. But in the digital
age, the alphabet is reduced to a binary code which, in the Von Neumann architecture of
the computer, no longer separates stored data and processing rules (as in traditional
archives, where the files are kept in depots while the archival rules of procedures are kept
in books or administrative meta-documents). When both data and procedures are located
in one and the same operative field, the classical documentary difference between data
and meta-data (as in libraries, where books and signatures are considered as two different
data sets) implodes.

Digitalized memory undoes the traditional supremacy of letters in paper-based archives;

instead, sound and images enter as well which can be addressed in their own medium:
melodies can be retrieved by similar melodies, images by images, patterns by patterns.
Thus a new type of cultural-technolocial memory is being generated. What can be digitally
‘excavated’ by the computer is a genuinely media-generated archive. This opens new
horizons for search operations in the Internet: digital images and texts can not only be
linked to alphabetical addresses, once again subjecting images and sound to words and
external meta-data (the archival classification paradigm), but they can now be addressed
down to the single pixel from within, in their own medium, allowing for random search –
literally ‘bit-mapping’, mapping (by) bits.

Images and sounds thus become calculable and capable of being subjected to pattern
recognition algorithms. Such procedures will not only media-archaeologically ‘excavate’
but also generate unexpected optical statements and perspectives from an audio-visual
archive that can, for the first time, organize itself not just according to meta-data but
according to its proper criteria – visual memory in its own medium (endogenic). The
generative archive, the archival paradigm, in genuinely digital culture, is being replaced by
sampling – direct random access to signals.

From storage to transmission

There are different media memory cultures. European cultural memory is traditionally
archive-centred, with resident material values (libraries, museums, 2500-year-old
architecture), whereas the trans-Atlantic media culture is transfer-based. This is what
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri appropriately called Empire. 15 In a media-
archaeological analysis of power today, we (re-)turn from a territorial notion of empire to
the original meaning of the Latin word imperium which means reaching out, extension, a
dynamic transfer. When it comes to heritage, the archives of the us federal government do
not simply store documents that according to the old archival tendency should preferably
be kept secret, but instead ensure a memory imperative, a very mobile offering of its
contents to the public, even advertising to make this memory circulate. If there were no
copyright, every online user might take advantage of the fact that in digital networks the
separation between archival latency and present actualization of information has already
collapsed. There will be two bodies of memory in the future: analogue, material storage
and digital information memories – translucent technologies of permanent data transfer.
The archive is no longer the message of multi-media memory.

p
  age: 6 / 8 — The Archive as Metaphor onlineopen.org
Wolfgang Ernst is a professor of media theory at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.

p
  age: 7 / 8 — The Archive as Metaphor onlineopen.org
 
Footnotes
1. The Ancient Greek word ‘metaphorein’ means ‘transfer’.
2. See Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres Sociaux de la mémoire,
Librairie Félix Alcan, Paris 1925, Les Presses universitaires de France,
Paris 1952.
3. Lev Manovich, ‘Database as a symbolic form’, 1998.
4. See Dieter Thoma, ‘Zeit, Erzahlung, Neue Medien’, in Mike
Sandbothe / Walther Ch. Zimmerli (ed.), Zeit – Medien –
Wahrnehmung, Wiss. Buchges, Darmstadt 1994, pp. 89–110.
5. Walter Benjamin, ‘Der Erzäler’, in Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt
1972, p. 439 onwards.
6. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, ‘Working in the Archives’, in Yale French
Studies 77, theme issue ‘Reading the Archive: On Texts and
Institutions’, Yale University Press, New Haven 1990, pp. 103–116 (103).
7. Michel de Certeau, L’absent de l’histoire, Mame, Paris 1973.
8. Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, Gallimard, Paris 1984.
9. Christoph Drosser, ‘Ein verhangnisvolles Erbe’, in Die Zeit, 23 June
1995, p. 66.
10. Howard Caygill, ‘Meno and the Internet: Between Memory and the
Archive’, in History of the Human Sciences, vol. 12, no. 2 (1999), pp.
1–11 (10).
11. N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Coding the Signifier: Rethinking Processes of
Signification in Digital Media’. Lecture at Humboldt-Universität,
Berlin, 11 May 2001.
12. See Elena Esposito, Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des
Gedächtnis der Gesellschaft, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2002, p. 43.
13. Harriet Bradley, ‘The Seductions of the Archive: Voices Lost and
Found’ in History of the Human Sciences, vol. 12, no. 2 (1999), pp.
107–122 (113).
14. Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive, Gallimard Paris 1985.
15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2000.

Tags
Media Society, Memory

This text was downloaded on June 26, 2018 from

Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain
www.onlineopen.org/the-archive-as-metaphor

p
  age: 8 / 8 — The Archive as Metaphor onlineopen.org