The project, which has yet to acquire a decent working title in english, grapples with the somewhat broad theme of user contribution to digital archives. How do we harness user interaction with digital cultural heritage archives and convert it into information or metadata about the archived objects? Especially when the objets in question are poorly indexed temporal media?

The primary objects of my study are a digital research infrastructure granting access to 1 million hours of Danish national radio material, aptly named the CHAOS platform, and a national cultural heritage website that serves the dissemination of both auditive and audiovisual material, danskkulturarv.dk.

My project aims to provide quantitative data to allow for platform and practice evaluation and the development of a best practice model for user contribution to digital cultural heritage archives. This best practice model is based on a comparison of the primary objects of study with comparable international projects: research infrastructures and media archives that work at the intersection of the humanities and technology as well as commercial tools and services that employ different forms of user tracking to enrich digital archives or databases.

This practical focus then provides the foundation for certain considerations from the perspective of cultural theory and philosophy of technology: How does the new digital paradigm and its practices affect the relations of the researcher and the ”common” user as well as the notions of ”cultural heritage” and ”democratization of knowledge”?

The underlying assumption of the project is that cultural research is currently facing a new digital paradigm: Its research objects to a still larger degree consist of digital corpora, i.e. digital texts, visual and auditive material in digital form, digitally documented artifacts and digitally logged human behavior.

The assumption of a new digital paradigm, however obvious from a common sense perspective, needs some measure of evidence in order to be acceptable. I have thus dedicated this early stage of my project to the reading of the ongoing debates within the digital humanities as well as both optimists and pessimists regarding our new technological situation, its perils and its opportunities: Nicholas Carr, Clay Shirky, Evgeny Morozov, Joseph Turow and others. They all describe the consequences of certain technological developments and what this means culturally, intellectually, commercially and politically.

Next, I will place the views presented by the aforementioned authors within a theoretical framework that allows for the conceptualization of the current situation on three levels: On the ontological level, the level of the medium, and on a political level:

- The ontological implications of technology: Heidegger’s lecture on technology as a point of departure for revealing the inherent danger and saving power of digital networks, archives and related practices.

- The perspective of media and media archaeology: Mcluhan’s description of the personal and social consequences of the medium as extension of man and related media archaeological perspectives on the ”new media.”

- The digital network as “apparatus”: Foucault’s notion of “dispositif”, i.e. the strategic functionings within a network of heterogenous elements and the resulting regimes within discourse and knowledge, as a way to describe the political consequences of the current technological developments.

These approaches intersect, interact and intertwine but hopefully provide an initial grasp of the intricacies of possibilities and challenges within digital networked archives.

One such desperate voice belongs to Marie Krarup, daughter of long time member of parliament for the Danish People’s Party (DF) Søren Krarup. He is retiring this year but the next generation is ready to take over, to continue the fight for “true conservatism.”

Klaus Wivel interviewed her for Weekendavisen and her statements played in a similar key to that of the Zizek quote brought up in Che vuoi? A spinning top made out of pork:

One becomes a full member of a community not simply by identifying with its explicit symbolic tradition, but only when one also assumes the spectral dimension that sustains this tradition, the undead ghosts that haunt the living, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted “between the lines,” through the lacks and distortions of the explicit symbolic tradition […]

In my own sloppy translation, Marie Krarup said the following:

The values represented by my father and Jesper [Langballe] are a well considered conservatism, where you feel rooted in Denmark and want to fight for God, King and country, and where you have the arguments to support it. The value of my father’s and Jesper’s presence in parliament has sprung from their ability to precisely formulate the feelings of the silent majority that we do not want to be a multicultural society; we do not want to lose our identity; and we do not want to be shut down by the EU. […] What the Danish People’s Party represents is the ordinary danishness that people are unable to specify.

Do these repeated references to a lacking ability of the silent majority to precisely formulate a national identity not revolve around the spectral dimension sustaining an explicit symbolic tradition? Or some sort of desperate necromantic conjuring of ancestral ghosts to revive a faded symbolic tradition that no longer seems so explicit and coherent? A necromantic conjuring that turns into hysterical cries of an obscurantist hocus pocus when realising that it has forgotten the proper incantation?

“My father and Jesper” were the ones able to communicate with the ancestral ghosts and Marie Krarup is ready to assume the role of shaman. But she seems daunted by the task and aware of her own impotence. The paternal generation was supposedly able to speak for the “silent majority” but, at the same time, the vast majority is brainwashed. Not to be brainwashed is to be an exception, part of the resistance:

Luckily, not everyone is brainwashed. Not everyone finished their higher education in Denmark

“Not everyone…” The few, those happy few, who are not brainwashed but persecuted by the inhabitants of Denmark. Where does the silent majority fit in? They are the real Danes, the ones not brainwashed by the globalised, multicultural elite, the one who feel that “What is Danish is not great enough. We have to be international, global, and such fancy stuff.” The silent majority was silenced by the elite nomenclature, the journalists, the scholars, the artists.

This blurred opposition of silent majority versus cultural elite nomenclature is felt all through the interview:

We also have communists. It is also a part of Danish culture to be convinced by such atrocities. Of course, Danish culture is many things. But luckily, the dominant mood is to support Denmark and its flag – a community surrounding the flag, the church and the queen. We still have that. It is just that only few appreciate it.

The dominant mood is only appreciated by the few. The true essence of Denmark – the flag, the queen and the church – still persists, but only among the few. She acknowledges that this is because Denmark has changed:

Yes, and I want to fight it. I want to fight the brainwashing, the internationalization and multiculturalism that seeks to demonise danishness.

The silent majority shall be liberated from the reigning majority, the crushing elite nomenclature and its brainwashing demonising of all things Danish. This demonising, perhaps, consists not in the active disavowal of the spectral dimension but the refusal to sacralize it. Not revering the tabu and its flag totem, this multicultural internationalist heresy, turns the protective paternal ghosts into demons. No wonder, then, that the “next generation” seeks to revive the shamanic powers of the fathers, the ability to talk to ghosts, revive the spectral foundation, vanquish the dominant heretical blasphemy and liberate the unseen, silent majority of true believers. Believers in what? The flag, God, Queen, the Church and country? They are but the fetishist’s stand-ins for the spectral dimension. Believers in what, then? Only the ghosts know.

One such fragment is the following:

One becomes a full member of a community not simply by identifying with its explicit symbolic tradition, but only when one also assumes the spectral dimension that sustains this tradition, the undead ghosts that haunt the living, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted “between the lines,” through the lacks and distortions of the explicit symbolic tradition […]

This passage can be read twice in the 2008 edition of The Fragile Absolute (pp. vii-viii and 58) and once in The Puppet and the Dwarf (p. 128).

In all three instances, the text adequately describes “Judaism’s stubborn attachment to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order…” (ibid.). Zizek’s goal is to rid society of this spectral haunting and its obscene superego legal supplement, which is why he hails Christianity as the revelation that “there is nothing – no secret – behind it to be revealed” (Puppet p. 127); that “with this “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?,” it is God-the-Father who, in effet, dies, revealing His utter impotence, and thereupon rises from the dead in the guise of the Holy Spirit [the community of believers = communism] (Puppet p. 126).

The problem, of course, is not that “One becomes a full member of a community […] only when one also assumes the spectral dimension” but that, from time to time (and the time is now), “One” is required to become a full member of society in order to avoid austricism. This scenario is inherently comical as the spectral dimension to be assumed remains disavowed. This is why the Danish People’s Party, apart from its more overtly violent gestures, tend to think of weird stand-ins for the special “it” that will make you authentically Danish.

The greatest of these fantastic ideas was the proposal that municipal institutions such as kindergardens and retirement homes should serve a diet containing a minimum of 20% pork, as pork is supposedly a cornerstone of the Danish culinary tradition. The idea was not to indicate that any decent Danish person naturally abides by this peculiar requirement, but that pork is an integral part of Danish culture and as such, anyone unable to assume this random stand-in for the disavowed spectral dimension would provably have disavowed Danishness itself.

It was a hysterical demand for a Shibboleth: “Say the word and say it right or we will know that you are not one of us!”

Requiring not that you abide by the Law but by its hidden spiritual content, its spectral supplement, is developed even further when the same party states that all criminal foreigners should be deported. Such an argument hinges on the crime not being an act of legal trespass but an act of desecrating the spectral essence of the community.

What is the reason for these hysterical attempts at elevating the obscene superego injunction of the spectral dimension to capriccious acts of Law? Could it be that the Law is losing its validity, its symbolic coherence, and thus relies on hysterical evocations of its disavowed foundation for survival? If so, does the pork proposal not constitute the obsessional neurotic’s ritualistic attemps at avoiding complete symbolic disintegration, the spinning top in Inception that guarantees the continued existence of reality?

Introduction

I would like to begin by stating that in no capacity do I have an officially recognized or funded research project. The present paper is thus sort of a hobbyist overture to this panel, evoking certain perspectives on digital archives.

Curation and communication

The topic of today’s rendition of my yet absent project is the productive and constitutive aspects of cultural memory media. Or more specifically, the productive and constitutive aspects of cultural memory media in the digital age.

However tentatively, I would like to approach this subject by looking at certain archival and communicative practices.

Foucault and the writing of self

The conceptual pairing of archival and communicative practices is my somewhat clumsy extrapolation of Foucault’s essay ”Writing the self” (1983). Here, Foucault describes two distinct practices:

1. Curating a personal archive as the constitution of the self by appropriation of selected fragments of the statements of others – the hupomnemata (substantivized or artificial memory).
2. Letter-writing as the communication of this constituted self to others. It is the attempt to let the gaze of the other and one’s own perception of one self coincide.

Foucault references Plutarch in saying that the constitution of self by reading, rereading and meditating on a selection of the ”already-said” of others is an ethopoietic function, i.e. the text as authoritative other instructs you and thus becomes the basis for your own personal ethos.

He doesn’t provide a corresponding term for the practice of letter-writing but I propose to see it as a negotiation of values. Not only do you want the other to see what you see, you also want the other to accept, acknowledge and appreciate your individual constitution. The horizon of any such negotiation of values is the community of values, which is why the communication of self by letter-writing is a praxis characterized by what I would like to call doxopoesis, the creation of doxa (doxa being the community of values).

Fig. 1. My illustration of the two practices analyzed by Foucault in “The Writing of Self” (1983)

Stiegler and psychic and social individuation

I would like to transpose to a larger scale these notions of a constitution of the self and the communication thereof. Or rather, I would ask French philosopher and former bank robber Bernard Stiegler to do it for me.
From Stiegler’s point of view, which in this regard is thoroughly influenced by French philosopher and not-so-much bank robber Gilbert Simondon, the ethopoietic relation would perform a psychic individuation, i.e. the individual subject’s development as individual subject, what Plato would call the anamnesis of self. Correspondingly, what I would call the doxopoietic communication of the self would contribute to what Stiegler/Simondon calls social individuation, namely the development of societal structures.

Fig. 2. My illustration of psychic and social individuation

Whither transindividuation?

So, what is the state of psychic and social individuation in the present era of digitized hypomnemata and their filing in and distribution through social and mobile media? Or to put it in another way: What are the individuational consequences of digital mnemo-technologies? Or yet more succinctly and annoyingly: Whither transindividuation? (transindividuation being the functional interrelation of individual and social individuation via hypomnemata).

Compare and contrast: We have three sorts of archive:

• The analog archive.
• The digitized archive.
• The digital archive (born digital).

Derrida and archival spectrality

For Derrida the archive is above all hypomnemotic. It is unstable, ever dissolving. It is neither present nor absent, neither visible nor invisible, it is a trace always leading somewhere else. The archive can never be contained in a single narrative, fully understood, it changes with any interaction, it cannot satisfy the painful desire for the authentic and singular origins, the return to primordial enlightenment.

This archival striptease, enticing but veiled, is the spectrality of the archive. The archive as ghost. It speaks but doesn’t give a straight answer, you see it but it doesn’t meet your eye.

It is this openness of the archival constitution that renders it productive. It is the ghostly call of the past from the future that enjoins you to conduct yourself as well as your search in a specific way (ethopoiesis). It is the acceptance that

”With the irreplaceable singularity of a document to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its original uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction.” (Derrida: Archive fever)

This openness of the archive is probably what makes German media archeologist Wolfgang Ernst say ”The most informative archive is the one which does not produce what we are looking for exactly.” The spectrality of the archive, is conducive to the production of information. This is why the scholar should never try to force a straight answer out of the archive, try to burry the ghost, and why Derrida hopes for the coming of a new scholar: ”[a] scholar of the future, a scholar who would dare to speak to the phantom. A scholar who would dare to admit that he knows how to speak to the phantom, even claiming that not only does this neither contradict nor limit his scholarship, but will in truth have conditioned it.”

Digitized spectrality

Supposedly, the digitized archive brings an end to all this spectrality. According to Wolfang Ernst, ”with its massive going online the archive loses its traditional power: its secrecy.” I think we should distinguish between a going online of digitized archival content and a going online of the archives born and maintained within a purely digital sphere.
Does the digitized archive entail the exorcism of spectrality? The forgotten anarchic document in the far corner of the analog archive, which escaped the archival order, can easily be retrieved and reassigned. Additional views are provided such as audio spectograms. It is mobile and accessible from anywhere via your laptop or smartphone.
But as we shall hear in Heidi’s presentation, digitization does not banish the ghost. The digital archive is just as haunted as its analog predecessor. The most obvious case being the ghost of an absent document or the ghost of authentic decaying materiality calling out form beyond the celestial eternity of zeros and ones, insisting that indeed something was lost in translation.

Accessibility & Individuation

The accessibility of hypomnemata in the digitized or digital archive, of course, facilitates individuation. Digitized newspaper archives such as the British Library’s newspaper collection will – over time – move its 750 million newpapers from Colindale, North London to your personal computer thus creating what head of collection Ed King calls a ”national memory”. Ubuweb brings you Schwitters performing his Ursonate, and Broodthaers interviewing his cat, documents not previously accessible to the casual browser. Academic journal archives such as Jstor or Muse let the scholar browse and access an unfathomable amount of scientific articles without waiting for the university library to dig up an old issue of Yale French Studies which, after all, he may not even need. Finally, the LARM Audio Research Archive – soon holding about 1 million hours of digitized radio on its servers – provides a hereto undreamt of accessibility to Danish radio history and its cultural heritage.

By its mere accessibility, of course, this going online of analog documents facilitates individuation. It is conducive to the development of the ”I” and the ”we” which again is a necessary condition for the production of new meaning.

Digital meta-archives

The fundamental difference between the digitized and the digital object must be that the digitally born object is free from the spectral cry of negated materiality, which makes it easier to pretend that the ghost is gone.

For me, the dubious ambiguity of the purely digital arises when our interactions with the archive become not an inscription into the very same archive but a contribution to a meta-archive that governs our access to the archive. For Derrida the meta-archive does not exist:
”the interpretation of the archive […] can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself in it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place in it. There is no meta-archive.”
What seems to be happening in the purely digital realm is exactly the development of behavioral meta-archives.

When accessing the archive of the internet via Google, your search behavior is archived, compared to similar behavioral patterns and the results are filtered accordingly. And it is Google’s explicit goal to index all of the information of the world. When streaming music from Spotify you can have LastFM archive your listening behavior, compare it to its database and recommend yet unheard music that would be consistent with similar profiles. Sense Networks claim that access to the GPS on your mobile phone will let them determine your age, gender, social and educational level by comparing your urban navigation with their database.

Of course, this is extremely useful, for researchers as for everybody else. But it is not without its dangers.

Whither transindividuation?

The shift from the productive transindividuational potentials of omnipresent accessibility to digital archives to the more ambigous potential of the automatic communication or tracking of our interactions with them form the crux of the matter of contemporary cultural memory media. I use the term crux emphatically in that the spheres of contemplation and communication of the archive seem to collapse into one (there is no otium). And this collapsed archival sphere is inscribed into our very cybernetic bodies via our mobile communicational prostheses.

What happens in the shift from the Foucaultian practices of hypomnemotic contemplation and communication to omnipresent consulting and meta-archival logging of behavior is the transformation of personal curation into machine-calculated customization. Again, I use both terms emphatically: Curation, of course, comes from the latin ”cura”, care, whereas digital customization is the automatic modification of archival renderings based on a comparative computational analysis of your customs and those of your peers.

This computational analysis, the goal of which is the prediction of your every desire, is a marvelous tool but also the impatiant exorcist that forces a clear relevant answer from spectral obscurity.

Conclusion

Digital cultural memory media allow an unprecedented detail, depth and accuracy in cultural research. They indicate forgotten documents and it shows you aspects of the documents only difficultly discernible by the naked eye. It is capable of presenting data otherwise only detectable over a yearlong attention span in a single synchronous instant. Be it the use of bird imagery in the novels of Turgenev or urban movements of a given social segment, these technologies give us a clear archival rendition.

But this clarity comes at a price. Archival efficiency in the digital realm is achieved by behavioral meta-archives. This is not necessarily bad, in many ways it is tremendously good, but if there is a specifically digital heideggerian/stieglerian peril, it is the meta-archival determination of ethopoietic curation and doxopoietic communication (Stiegler’s entire project is about threatened transindividuation).

Analog, digitized or digital, the archive remains a constitution of the spectral injunction to produce new knowledge, new constitutions, to individuate, ”to illuminate, read, interpret, establish ones object, by inscribing oneself in it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place in it.”

Structurally, the temporalities of the archive remain out of joint, even though meta-archival prediction strives to move from ghostly archival striptease to instantaneous informational gratification and the consequent possibilities of commodification. In Derrida’s analysis of spectrality, Hamlet is the tragic figure who, suffering from archive fever, oh cursed spite, feels ever born to set it right. The new Horatio though – image of the scholar, artist, man, woman or community of the future – when enjoined by his fellows to speak to the fantom and make it account for itself, should insistently curate, take care of, even digital ghostly ramblings and reply as J.Alfred Prufrock in the poem by TS Eliot: ”No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…”

What one should avoid here is the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity which arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power.

The thing is, that this is not an adequate rendition of Foucault. It might be ascribed to Althusser for whom the subject was constituted solely by the interpellation of ideology but for Foucault the remainder is exactly what characterizes the subject.

One indication of this remainder is found in Foucault’s desciption of his attempt to analyze power:

It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.²

In order to understand power as well as subjectivation we should study resistance, the remainder. Foucault, of course is althusserian, and he acknowledges the transition from the individual to the subject as a a result of power but even then, there are two meanings to the word ‘subject’:

It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.³

Both meanings suggest power and the production of the subject by power but in one, power takes the role of agent whereas the second is a matter of subjective response. The remainder is completely immersed in various power structures but, nonetheless, it remains a remainder.

This is exactly what constitutes Foucault’s notion of Freedom:

Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole, there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains.⁴

Subjectivity according to Foucault is precisely characterized by some splinter of freedom, by what Zizek calls “its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power.” The foucauldian misreading turns out to be Zizek’s misreading of Foucault.

Of course, such a thing is not to be done lightly. I pondered and schemed and finally decided to follow the Rumsfeld doctrine. Or a variation of it at least.

I have a couple of public lists containing tech and digital humanities stuff, but then I have three additional lists based on a famous statement about the search for weapons of mass destruction ¹ in Iraq given by former secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There are Known unknowns, Unknown knowns and unknown unknowns.

As Zizek rightly pointed out, Rumsfeld never referred to the category of unknown knowns ². He did however talk of Known knowns. What Zizek found amusing was the fact that Rumsfeld tried to evoke the terror of the unknown threats that we can’t even imagine – the unknown unknowns – without even considering taking a look at the disavowed ideological background for his statements.

I am not completely faithful to the Rumsfeld doctrine as he imagined it. The known unknowns within my Twitter universe are not the ever elusive dangers I know about but am unable to confront and terminate. They are not the objet petit a. Nor are they people I know who are not famous. The list contains people that I know – friends and acquaintances – but it acknowledges that they will remain forever ‘other’, you can never fully know the people you know.

The unknown knowns are the almost famous people that I do know, but not quite. More specifically they are the people that I do not know personally, which is exactly why I know them. I know them in their spectacular presence, their imaginary existence as whole consistent entities, I know them as being one with their name and character.

Unknown unknowns lists the information that I didn’t know that I didn’t know, i.e. news. Different news services inform me on a daily basis of things I had no idea would happen or the existence of which I had never guessed. The terror of Rumsfeld is transformed into the pleasant pursuit of learning.

Just as Rumsfeld left out one of the four possible combinations of the two terms known and unknown, I have left out the known knowns. Because who on earth would follow a stream of data you are already familiar with?

I am very happy with my modified Rumsfeld doctrine. I hereby present it to public use.

All is well.

MG Siegler on iMessage: ”

MG Siegler:

And again, while this may be iOS-only, guess who else is going to have to match this feature now? Android. SMS is about to become a cross-platform messaging platform only.

I hadn’t thought about that, iMessage will have a big impact in the mobile world. Especially because, as Siegler notes, it is built into the current SMS app and defaults to iMessage with SMS being a backup only (or so I hear).”

When reading both of them the obvious question is: Will it really? Will it really have a have a big impact in the mobile world? Will a one platform messaging service really gain any traction? How is that working out for Facetime?

I see that John Gruber of Daring Fireball has enough iPhone-using friends to cancel his SMS plan as soon as this launches. First of all, I haven’t got an SMS plan. I have unlimited text messages as a non optional part of my subscription. Also, and more importantly, most of my friends are still on old candy bar phones. I have noticed a worrying reluctance among Modern Culture graduates to engage in frivolous digital pursuits. Most of them have finally given in to the global group pressure of Facebook but Twitter still holds no apparent purpose to them and smart phones are not worth the investment. I mean really!

By deciding to declare von Trier persona non grata for the current competition, the festival loses much of its credibility. Treating von Trier’s remarks as a political position to be taken seriously and drawing extensive consequences from it misjudges the situation in which von Trier made the remarks, as well as his work as aesthetic context.

I completely agree. Yes, Trier said foolish things, he has apologized, now let’s get on with it. Anyone taking his remarks at face value and thus considering him a true Nazi is a blithering idiot. So there.

But now, according to Danish newspaper Politiken, French/German television channel Arte threatens to pull further sponsorship for von Trier’s movies. They have financially supported several of his films but, apparently, they now feel that the remarks, although acknowledged as a failed joke, enter into conflict with their overall identity and purpose.

From Politiken:

“We know it was said for fun. But it was simply not funny. We found Trier’s statements crude and very shocking. We need to reconsider whether we can continue to support his films,” says Arte Film Director Michel Reilhac.
[…]
Arte was originally created by the then French President François Mitterand and Germany’s Helmuth Kohl as a way of signalling an end to historical enmity and in order to show through culture that European countries share the same ideals about humanity and generosity.

“Lars von Trier’s statements do not fit in to that perspective,” Reilhac says.

Arte hereby loses all credibility as a producer of quality cultural content. This reaction reminds me of the time Janet Jackson showed a not quite naked breast during a Super Bowl performance. To be shocked by Trier would require the same nervous frailty as the woman who claimed substantial psychic damage three years after being inflicted by Jackson’s breast. It is a feigned shock, designed to show… I have no idea! Does it demonstrate moral superiority to say “We know he didn’t mean it but, nonetheless, we were profoundly hurt”? This is the reaction you would expect form the tabloids, from the small town idiots who gossip about their new next door neighbour, not from what is supposed to be a powerhouse of cultural television.