More than a sliver, more than a job

Our Acting CEO Verne Harris delivered the keynote address at Information on the Sea 2023 in Ostend, Belgium on Thursday, October 19, 2023. This is his lecture.

When I embarked on an archival career and began to do activist memory work in the spaces around career in the 1980s, I believed that the work of archive was justice. Today, I feel more strongly about this than ever before. That belief, and that feeling, are rooted in a notion of calling. This notion, for me, signifies not a single call, but rather an incessant reverberation of calls – to work out one’s personal journey and take responsibility for it; to understand that that personal journey is always imbricated in collective journeys, before which one stands more or less responsible; and, of course, the call of and to justice. In this reverberating space, to be a worker in archive, to do memory work, involves far more than simply doing a job. It is a calling. A personal calling and a social calling.

Of course, archive reaches beyond profession. It is bigger than all of us, and eludes those clumsy cudgels "property" and "ownership" which, sadly, still define professional archival terrains and what goes on in them. And I’m not thinking here exclusively about institutions, legal departments, chief executives, deeds, bequests and all the other paraphernalia. I’m thinking of the specialists and the professionals, the elders and the anointed ones – the authorised ones. Enough, I say. We humans are all agents of archive, work with and are worked on by archive every day, no matter how often andvhow insistently we are told by some that it is a space prescribed by authorisation. Enough. Archive resists belonging to anyone. If anything, we humans belong to archive. Hannah Arendt made this argument a very long time ago – in fact, in the year that I was born: 1958. For her, human society was inconceivable without archive: 

“The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance, and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfillment ... the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been. The materialization they have to undergo in order to remain in the world at all is paid for in that always the ‘dead letter’ replaces something which grew out of and for a fleeting moment indeed existed as the ‘living spirit’.”¹

In other words, we archive because we have to. Needless to say, Arendt was writing in a pre-digital era, but the human need she identifies – to reify, to record, to imprint a trace on a substrate exterior to the psychic apparatus of an individual – remains as strong as ever. We human beings need archive. And therefore we need capacity for what Jacques Derrida calls "archivation" – that working with trace which is about ensuring exteriority² and positioning it within the more or less formal processes of what Derrida calls "consignation" and what Carolyn Hamilton calls "deeming"³.

In an age of virtual realities, big data, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), logarithmic matrices and artificial intelligence, the human capacity for archivation has grown exponentially. Archive, it seems, is everywhere. So that the idea of ‘belonging to archive’ registers very differently now. Both the possibilities and the dangers are endless in a context where, it seems, capacity and desire are outstripping need. It is difficult to avoid the experience of vertigo.

In the 1990s this age of what we could call archive ubiquity was but a glimmer on the horizon, and what I was experiencing then was what I would call fever, rather than vertigo. In 1998 I participated in a seminar series at the University of the Witwatersrand during which I presented a paper titled "The Archival Sliver" – in its published form still, ironically, my most cited piece of writing.⁴ I want to read a passage from that piece: 

“I would argue that in any circumstances, in any country, the documentary record provides just a sliver of a window into the event. Even if archivists in a particular country were to preserve every record generated throughout the land, they would still have only a sliver of a window into that country’s experience. Of course, in practice, this record universum is substantially reduced through deliberate and inadvertent destruction by records creators and managers, leaving a sliver of a sliver from which archivists select what they will preserve. They do not preserve much. Moreover, no record, no matter how well protected and cared for by archivists, enjoys an unlimited lifespan. Preservation strategies can, at best, aim to save versions of most archival records. So, archives offer researchers a sliver of a sliver of a sliver. If, as many archivists are wont to argue, the repositories of archives are the world’s central memory institutions, then we are in deep, amnesic trouble.”⁵

In a footnote to that passage I also named the limitations of archival description, alluding to the endless layers of context – or, to use another language, layers of metadata – always already beyond the reach of routine, conventional archival intervention.

At one level I was debunking what I saw as an archival professional hubris at the time. But at another I was describing a broader societal reality. One that has changed dramatically in the quarter of a century since I presented that paper. At the time, and for at least a decade afterwards, my experience was one of archive fever. Feverishly desiring more, rationalising the utility of keeping less, feeling – nonetheless – overwhelmed by the volume and the demands of that ‘less’, and holding a suppressed desire to simply burn it all and be done with
impossible complexity … and be done with fever.

Today what I called a “window into the event” feels like something more than a sliver of a sliver of a sliver. Those daunting manual metadata capture processes have been transformed by automation. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already demonstrating how archival description can be turned into a terrain of almost instant multi-layered creativity. Unimaginably vast and distributed storage capacity has, for many, rendered appraisal and disposal programmes redundant. Unlimited lifespans are achievable. Apparatuses of archivation multiply apace, vouchsafing a density of recording unimaginable a quarter of a century ago. Back then I could go for a mountain hike with a couple of friends, and return with a clutch of memories and maybe a handful of photographs. Nowadays those friends have technologies to tell us our exact position and course throughout, how many steps we took, exactly how long our rest breaks were, how many calories we burned, and so on. And within hours of the hike, apparatuses like WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram are full of images (still and moving) and reflections (written and voiced). Almost immediately – certainly before I can finish drinking a celebratory beer or two – the living spirit of the mountain hike has been wrapped, captured and muffled by Hannah Arendt’s "dead letter". Archive ubiquity. And a hint of the vertiginous. 

But untrammelled vertigo is unleashed for me by what I call today’s spectral apparatuses of power which are wielded by the big tech archons using systems that are built on archive. These apparatuses are part of what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’⁶, and involve the extraction of unimaginable volumes of personal information from individuals, the processing of that information, and its sale to customers who use it in order to modify the behaviours of those individuals to their benefit in monetary and other forms. It is no accident that those who stumbled on this new apparatus of power as the twentieth century came to an end and became its architects over the next two decades wield a power that is fundamentally archontic, nor that today they are the wealthiest and the most powerful people and organisations in the world. The big tech archons. Billions of people around the globe willingly give up vast caches of personal information to the service providers who give them very cheap or free access to an array of what they regard as essential tools – email, social media platforms, internet search engines, online GPS systems, apps, online purchasing and so on. These billions of people, in the language of an older form of capitalism, are users, clients, customers. Except they are not. Without knowing it, they are the source of the ‘behavioural surplus’ – data on human behaviour – which is crunched by big data and algorithmic instruments in processes of archivation for sale to the real customers – the corporations, governments, think tanks, and so on which use the "product" to predict behaviour and, increasingly, to modify it. This predicting and this modifying still has in the main to do with consumer patterning, but we now know that it can be deployed to influence election and referendum results.

The more connectivity we enjoy, the more connected we are, the more archived we become. That ‘device’– whether a smartphone or smartwatch – has become the quintessential human prosthesis. It gives us what we think we need, all the while giving the big tech archons exactly what they want. Their window into our lives
is far more than a sliver.

Perhaps the most sinister uses of these spectral apparatuses of power are described by Jackie Wang in her 2018 book Carceral Capitalism. Her starting point is that the racial logics produced by the genocide of First Nations and by slavery in the United States “persist to this day”.⁷ While she provides an account of the corporatised industrial-style mass incarceration system which underpins America’s neoliberal democracy, her focus is on a closely connected but much bigger, much less visible (in fact, almost invisible) carceral system without physical structures. This system targets certain populations, categorises them, keeps them under surveillance, demobilises and manages them. She demonstrates how Black Americans, people of colour and the poor are confined, restricted and in other ways controlled through what she calls algorithmic forms of power, predictive policing in particular.⁸  What she calls hyper-policing in targeted urban areas makes residents reluctant to leave their homes. And at great length she shows how methods of municipal revenue extraction – fee and fine farming for instance – have been used to “target vulnerable populations, particularly poor black Americans.”⁹

So that the daily experience of many Americans who might never have been behind the walls of a physical prison nonetheless is one of incarceration. They live in spectral prisons.
I hear echoes of that Sting song:

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you

It is not only that humanity has at its disposal more and more surveillance technologies. It is also that it has found ways to hyper-connect them and to enhance them through ever more sophisticated archivation processes. Zuboff warns of what she calls "ubiquitous computing", where the reach of the big tech archons is not only online, but through machine processes in things like cars and fridges. So that, for example, already there are systems capable of “shutting down your car engine when an insurance payment is late.”¹⁰

Archive ubiquity. And a reality where the trace is everywhere. In recent years we have started discovering it in places and spaces not thought of before. The human capacity to perceive it, process it, archive it, has grown exponentially.

Let’s talk about the human brain. Now, I have no expertise in neural science, so I am drawing on a beautiful little book by neuroscientist Rebecca Schwarzlose, titled Brainscapes: The Warped, Wondrous Maps Written in Your Brain - And How They Guide You. She shows how every human being has a unique imprint of what she calls brain mapping and coding, a kind of representational embedding, or what I would call an "architrace", which determines what that human being perceives and how they make sense of the world.¹¹ The science demonstrates that this form of trace, this neural embedding, is shaped in significant ways by early life experiences, including those in vitro. A sobering thought. A lifetime of perception, cognition and action determined fundamentally by early life experiences.¹²

Today science enables us to see neural embedding, read it in all kinds of ways, and engage with it: “Knowledge about a representation is a powerful thing. That’s because once you know how something is represented, you can eavesdrop on or manipulate what is being represented … Scientists, physicians and corporations have the knowledge and technology required to perform at least some forms of mind reading.”¹³

Brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs), Schwarzlose goes on to point out, enable “reading from or writing to the brains of others.”¹⁴ They are being used in exciting and creative ways in the service of medical and other sciences. But does it make you as nervous as it makes me? It makes me very nervous when I hear about Elon Musk exploring a symbiosis between BCIs and AI. And when I read about other big tech archons developing technologies to interface
directly with the brain.¹⁵ It’s not enough, it seems, to extract data from a person’s devices and interpret from that what’s going on in their brain, it’s better to actually get into the brain.

Now the implications of all this are enormous, of course, but I’m making a simple point about archive. What is held inside the psychic apparatus of an individual – that vast and complex interior tracing – lacks the exteriority required for us to be talking about archive. (Unless, of course, we regard the unconscious as having the attributes of an exterior substrate deep in the interior of the human psyche.) But when what is inside becomes accessible to others – even manipulable by others – and finds imprint on exterior substrates, then we are potentially talking about archivation. We are talking about archive ubiquity. We are talking about humanity’s interior interior being invaded by archive. And we’re probably feeling the vertigo which results from a fear of belonging to archive.

What I’ve been describing in this paper is the world in which archive and memory workers find themselves. And the world to which people are being called to archive and memory work. I trust that I haven’t come across as alarmist. For in the space of archive ubiquity there is enormous opportunity. What I call the magic of the trace becomes so much more accessible, in principle, to both individuals and communities. The possibilities for dense recording and contextualisation of process, of event, are endless. And the spaces for connectivity and connectedness are boundless. They can be thrilling.

These same spaces, of course, can be terrifying. Listen to Kim Samuel for a moment: 

“The factors that contribute to social isolation are wide-ranging and include something as commonplace and seemingly harmless as social media and digital technology … Recent studies have confirmed what many of us may feel intuitively when we use social media: Often, it creates connectivity, but not necessarily connection … on the whole, these platforms have failed to deepen our connections to ourselves, to the people around us, and to the places we inhabit.”¹⁶

Her book is titled On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation. Is this what happens when need is outstripped by desire? When having a device turns into belonging to that device?

So, thrill and terror. In the realm of AI alone, a kaleidoscoping of new, vertiginous spaces, all full of possibility. But bringing with them a myriad of questions around authenticity and reliability.And creating a scary new ethical complexity. 

The importance of calling to archive work, to memory work, in these contexts is greater than ever. We need thinkers and practitioners in this space who are drawn to complexity and possibility. More than ever, we need thinkers and practitioners with strong moral compasses, and a thirst for far more than just a job. And we need those who are drawn to the work of justice.

Humans have understood the power of archive for a very long time. We have seen how it can be used to devastating effect by tyrants and totalitarian states, and we have seen how it can be used in liberatory ways by activists and special instrument institutions for restitution and reparation. In an age of archive ubiquity, where archontic power is unimaginable and the stakes are incredibly high, I have no doubt that were archive to be harnessed to the work of justice, then humanity would be finding sustainable solutions to the plethora of intractable challenges facing us.

A luta continua.

I thank you.

First published in: META, tijdschrift voor bibliotheek & archief 99, 8 (December 2023), pp.38-41