In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault retroactively sets out the methodology that shapes his early work, which excavates discursive formations that he here idiosyncratically terms "the archive," defined as:
In his book Archive Fever, Derrida more fully unravels the theory of the archive, including the subjective and political strata that remain more submerged in Foucault. Psychoanalysis as an archival framework is Derrida's starting point, in its constitutive reliance on "representational models of the psychic apparatus as an apparatus for perception, for printing, for recording, for topic distribution of places of inscription, of ciphering" (15). Just as, for Lacan, subjectivity is a radical exteriority, produced in a heteronomous relation with what is irreducibly outside the subject and yet most intimate to him, "[the archive] is entrusted to the outside, to an external substrate" (8) — elementally, "there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression" (11). Thus, media technologies and the mechanism of desire are irrevocably linked, in that both require inscription in a substrate which in turn necessitates absence and deferral. The archive, as the fulcrum between discursive organization and embodied record, also articulates both media and the psyche with systems of power. As Derrida explains, etymologically the word references the house of the superior magistrates: the place itself, but also and unavoidably the site of their ideologically constructed institutional sovereignty. This is why Derrida can posit that archives are located at the "intersection of the topological and the nomologicial, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the authority" (2-3) – I would call this locus hybrid. In keeping with both psychoanalytic and Foucauldian theories of resistance, and with the operation of hybrids at large, the archive as pivot, as boundary or "passage," as "the unstable limit between public and private, between the family, the society, and the State... between oneself and oneself" (90), unhinges such oppositions even as it constitutes them. As precisely the possibility of repeating, recalling, recording (and thus externalizing, distancing, deferring) knowledge, the archive "always works, and a priori, against itself" (12). Archaeology thus mobilizes the archive not to impose order or transparency, but as a technology of theory, to cross-index media, discourse, and subjectivity. It is one approach to reconciling the structuring economies of domination with deconstruction's challenge to any absolute arrival or fixity.
I am setting aside, for the moment, more granular debates about whether particular new media formations qualify as reconfigured archives or whether, rather, they constitute a radical transformation in the relationship of information with power. Certainly there is much to be gained by enumerating historical and formal specificities, but from this vantage on the archive as a fantasmatic topology, I am skeptical of claims that the internet (for example) is a more perfect, more complete, more enduring archive, as if the former deficiencies were incidental rather than intrinsic. I also remain unconvinced by Wolfgang Ernst's contrasting proposition that computer networks open up certain liberatory possibilities, since the virtualization of archival space does away with barriers to access, which depend on the literal sequestering of knowledge, and the fluidity of digital information thwarts methods of capturing it in static hierarchies. Ernst suggests that if we can extricate ourselves from the nostalgic "metaphor of archival spatial order" (109) to which internet discourse clings, we have the opportunity of "dealing with the virtual an-archive of multi-media in a way beyond the conservative desire of reducing it to classificatory order again" (120). He offers a detailed diagnosis of the internet's qualities: the ecumenical capacity of multimedia, which "emulates" any medium (words, sounds, images) in code; the shift from fixed, "space-based" material storage to dynamic, "time-based" streaming storage; rhizomatic, interactive, ephemeral memory; a decentralized, non-hierarchical "machinic net of finite automata... defined rather by the circulation of discrete states" (119). This catalogue problematically minimizes the importance of physical hardware to both storage and access, and moreover even Ernst notes that "although the Internet still orders knowledge apparently without providing it with irreversible hierarchies (on the visible surface), the authoritative archive of protocols is more rigid than any traditional archive has ever been" (120). It is not so easy to transcend the strictures of substrates and regularities embodied in the archive.
Alexander Galloway offers another fruitful blueprint for the architecture of the internet in his book Protocol, a term he defines as "conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system... [and] a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment" (7), which "facilitates peer-to-peer relationships between autonomous entities... engenders localized decision making, not centralized... is robust, flexible, and universal" (82) and "operates largely outside institutional, governmental, and corporate power" (244). This technique is not merely technological, but describes a new configuration of control that is characteristic of late capitalism at large, one which is just as horizontal, localized, and networked as the field of production on which it operates. Rather than enforcing prohibitions, it organizes possibilities and enables free movement within them -- often mobilizing technology to do so. Galloway suggests that today we commonly experience hybrid grids of control, and offers the anatomy of the internet an as example: governed by a "dialectical tension" wherein "one machine [exemplified by TCP/IP] radically distributes control into autonomous locales, [and] the other machine [exemplified by DNS] focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies" (8). Protocol, then, is radically effective in a postmodern environment not because it fully supplants vertical models of discipline with horizontal and flexible management, but because it marries them in a composite system in which their contradiction is precisely what is most productive – again, my definition of hybridity. We could identify an analogous strategy at work in BitTorrent, for example, which compromises between contrasting trends -- indexing hubs allow for cooperative moderation of submissions, which ensures their accuracy and quality, but are also vulnerable to downtime from system failures or legal crackdowns, whereas distributed networks are resilient and adaptive but provide no guarantees of reliability -- by combining centralized (torrent sites and trackers) and decentralized (collective uploading of fragmented files) elements. Likewise, in proprietary fan-driven content initiatives, top-down and bottom-up tactics are combined when the constraining threat of legal muscle is overlaid on a structured platform for creative license.
Even as Galloway continually asserts the "special existence of protocol in the 'privileged' physical media of bodies" (12), though, the status of this materiality in his text remains, in my opinion, ambiguous. Because protocols "encapsulate information inside a technically defined wrapper, while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of information" (7), they veer perilously toward information theory's symptomatic indifference to medium in favor of aspects that can be modeled as universal. Galloway seems far more interested in protocol's cross-platform facility across heterogeneous components than in the vagaries of this hardware, whether technological or organic -- it's hard to grasp how, when he claims that "the key to protocol's formal relations is in the realm of the immaterial software" (72), he isn't contradicting his insistence on materiality elsewhere. Ultimately, Galloway tries to steer a hybrid course here too, concluding that "protocol is not a theory of mind. Nor... is protocol a theory of the body... protocol is a theory of confluence of life and matter" (103). What the body of work on archives, as I've glossed it here, suggests is that materiality will always appear as a more or less overdetermined, slippery, and highly compromised category in studies of media. As such, Galloway's equivocation may be a constructive move, akin to the difficulty of holding the statement-event in focus in Foucault's account of the archive as "the law of what can be said" (as, dare I say, a protocol). This semiotic heritage leads us toward discursive hybrids that are crucial to understanding media reproduction as a complex system.
first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events... [that] are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities; ...it is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability (129)Rendering the archive as a the structuring apparatus for "statements," the historically contingent framework of what can be conceived and articulated, may seem like a counterintuitive reappropriation of a commonsense expression. In its colloquial usage, "archive" denotes a localized arrangement of files, "a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept," according to the OED (my emphasis). For Foucault, however, the material dimension is not absent – "statements" only exist as "events," inscribed in a particular time and space – it is folded into the systematicity that is also a defining characteristic of archives, which require a rubric for indexing and retrieval to be anything more than a meaningless accumulation. Another dimension that might seem underrepresented in Foucault's Archaeology is subjectivity: who is generating these statements, and by what mechanism? I would propose that Foucault is not excluding subjectivity from his account, but rather repudiating a specific model of the transcendental subject: "the promise that one day the subject... will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode'' (12). While conventional wisdom marks a break in Foucault's work between the archaeologies and the subsequent genealogies, which theorize the subject much more concertedly, in The Archaeology of Knowledge (as the above passage demonstrates) he is already conceptualizing subjectivity as dispersed, discontinuous, heteronymous (all the characteristics he claims more explicitly for discourse). Archaeology arguably depends on this poststructuralist model of subjectivity for its coherence, and thus it's not purely due to a coincidence or rupture that it is Foucault (eminent theorist of sexuality) who founds archaeology as a discipline. Foucault does diverge openly from psychoanalysis, most crucially in understanding subjectivity as an exteriority materialized in bodily practices and disciplines (like speech acts, sex, or punishment), rather than as an interiority (the depth model of the unconscious, repression and so on). Nonetheless, his work in this area depends fundamentally on psychoanalysis as the first field to posit that subjects are necessarily fragmentary and self-absent (which is precisely why they invent compensatory fantasies of plenitude like transcendental subjectivity). At its inception, the archaeological method searches for the intersection of discursive regularities and material bodies, while insisting on the irreducibility of difference and desire.
In his book Archive Fever, Derrida more fully unravels the theory of the archive, including the subjective and political strata that remain more submerged in Foucault. Psychoanalysis as an archival framework is Derrida's starting point, in its constitutive reliance on "representational models of the psychic apparatus as an apparatus for perception, for printing, for recording, for topic distribution of places of inscription, of ciphering" (15). Just as, for Lacan, subjectivity is a radical exteriority, produced in a heteronomous relation with what is irreducibly outside the subject and yet most intimate to him, "[the archive] is entrusted to the outside, to an external substrate" (8) — elementally, "there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression" (11). Thus, media technologies and the mechanism of desire are irrevocably linked, in that both require inscription in a substrate which in turn necessitates absence and deferral. The archive, as the fulcrum between discursive organization and embodied record, also articulates both media and the psyche with systems of power. As Derrida explains, etymologically the word references the house of the superior magistrates: the place itself, but also and unavoidably the site of their ideologically constructed institutional sovereignty. This is why Derrida can posit that archives are located at the "intersection of the topological and the nomologicial, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the authority" (2-3) – I would call this locus hybrid. In keeping with both psychoanalytic and Foucauldian theories of resistance, and with the operation of hybrids at large, the archive as pivot, as boundary or "passage," as "the unstable limit between public and private, between the family, the society, and the State... between oneself and oneself" (90), unhinges such oppositions even as it constitutes them. As precisely the possibility of repeating, recalling, recording (and thus externalizing, distancing, deferring) knowledge, the archive "always works, and a priori, against itself" (12). Archaeology thus mobilizes the archive not to impose order or transparency, but as a technology of theory, to cross-index media, discourse, and subjectivity. It is one approach to reconciling the structuring economies of domination with deconstruction's challenge to any absolute arrival or fixity.
I am setting aside, for the moment, more granular debates about whether particular new media formations qualify as reconfigured archives or whether, rather, they constitute a radical transformation in the relationship of information with power. Certainly there is much to be gained by enumerating historical and formal specificities, but from this vantage on the archive as a fantasmatic topology, I am skeptical of claims that the internet (for example) is a more perfect, more complete, more enduring archive, as if the former deficiencies were incidental rather than intrinsic. I also remain unconvinced by Wolfgang Ernst's contrasting proposition that computer networks open up certain liberatory possibilities, since the virtualization of archival space does away with barriers to access, which depend on the literal sequestering of knowledge, and the fluidity of digital information thwarts methods of capturing it in static hierarchies. Ernst suggests that if we can extricate ourselves from the nostalgic "metaphor of archival spatial order" (109) to which internet discourse clings, we have the opportunity of "dealing with the virtual an-archive of multi-media in a way beyond the conservative desire of reducing it to classificatory order again" (120). He offers a detailed diagnosis of the internet's qualities: the ecumenical capacity of multimedia, which "emulates" any medium (words, sounds, images) in code; the shift from fixed, "space-based" material storage to dynamic, "time-based" streaming storage; rhizomatic, interactive, ephemeral memory; a decentralized, non-hierarchical "machinic net of finite automata... defined rather by the circulation of discrete states" (119). This catalogue problematically minimizes the importance of physical hardware to both storage and access, and moreover even Ernst notes that "although the Internet still orders knowledge apparently without providing it with irreversible hierarchies (on the visible surface), the authoritative archive of protocols is more rigid than any traditional archive has ever been" (120). It is not so easy to transcend the strictures of substrates and regularities embodied in the archive.
Alexander Galloway offers another fruitful blueprint for the architecture of the internet in his book Protocol, a term he defines as "conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system... [and] a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment" (7), which "facilitates peer-to-peer relationships between autonomous entities... engenders localized decision making, not centralized... is robust, flexible, and universal" (82) and "operates largely outside institutional, governmental, and corporate power" (244). This technique is not merely technological, but describes a new configuration of control that is characteristic of late capitalism at large, one which is just as horizontal, localized, and networked as the field of production on which it operates. Rather than enforcing prohibitions, it organizes possibilities and enables free movement within them -- often mobilizing technology to do so. Galloway suggests that today we commonly experience hybrid grids of control, and offers the anatomy of the internet an as example: governed by a "dialectical tension" wherein "one machine [exemplified by TCP/IP] radically distributes control into autonomous locales, [and] the other machine [exemplified by DNS] focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies" (8). Protocol, then, is radically effective in a postmodern environment not because it fully supplants vertical models of discipline with horizontal and flexible management, but because it marries them in a composite system in which their contradiction is precisely what is most productive – again, my definition of hybridity. We could identify an analogous strategy at work in BitTorrent, for example, which compromises between contrasting trends -- indexing hubs allow for cooperative moderation of submissions, which ensures their accuracy and quality, but are also vulnerable to downtime from system failures or legal crackdowns, whereas distributed networks are resilient and adaptive but provide no guarantees of reliability -- by combining centralized (torrent sites and trackers) and decentralized (collective uploading of fragmented files) elements. Likewise, in proprietary fan-driven content initiatives, top-down and bottom-up tactics are combined when the constraining threat of legal muscle is overlaid on a structured platform for creative license.
Even as Galloway continually asserts the "special existence of protocol in the 'privileged' physical media of bodies" (12), though, the status of this materiality in his text remains, in my opinion, ambiguous. Because protocols "encapsulate information inside a technically defined wrapper, while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of information" (7), they veer perilously toward information theory's symptomatic indifference to medium in favor of aspects that can be modeled as universal. Galloway seems far more interested in protocol's cross-platform facility across heterogeneous components than in the vagaries of this hardware, whether technological or organic -- it's hard to grasp how, when he claims that "the key to protocol's formal relations is in the realm of the immaterial software" (72), he isn't contradicting his insistence on materiality elsewhere. Ultimately, Galloway tries to steer a hybrid course here too, concluding that "protocol is not a theory of mind. Nor... is protocol a theory of the body... protocol is a theory of confluence of life and matter" (103). What the body of work on archives, as I've glossed it here, suggests is that materiality will always appear as a more or less overdetermined, slippery, and highly compromised category in studies of media. As such, Galloway's equivocation may be a constructive move, akin to the difficulty of holding the statement-event in focus in Foucault's account of the archive as "the law of what can be said" (as, dare I say, a protocol). This semiotic heritage leads us toward discursive hybrids that are crucial to understanding media reproduction as a complex system.
