Archiving cultures

This paper argues that to understand the legitimacy of a culture we need to investigate its relation to the archive, the site for the accumulation of records. Archive reason is a kind of reason which is concerned with detail, it constantly directs us away from the big generalization, down into the p articularity and singularity of the event. Increasing lv the focus has shif ted fi-om archiving the lives of the good and the great down to dir detail of mundane everyday life. One implication here is that rather than see the archive as a specific place in which we deposit records, documents, photogr aphs, film, video and all the minutiae on which culture is inscribed, shoul d we not seek to extend the walls of the archive to place it around the eve ryday, the world?, If everything can potentially be of significance shouldn 't part of the archive fever be to record and document everything, as it co uld one day be useful? The problem then becomes, not what to put into the a rchive, but what one dare leave out. Some of the implications of these ques tions were considered by Georg Simmel, in his argument that there has been a build up and overload in the production and circulation of objective cult ure. This is now beyond our subjective capacity to assimilate and order, gi ven the finite limits of the human life course we all face. It is something which confronts die individual with irresolvable dilemmas ol-er selectivit y, with each particular choice amounting to a wager which inevitably closes off others. Related questions about the difficulties of handling cultural completeness, were also addressed by Jorge Luis Borges in his discussion of the Library of Babel and the, Aleph. Yet both could hardly have anticipate d the full implications of die electronic archive: the development of new t echnologies for storing, searching and communicating information through th e Internet with its databases and hypertext links. The electronic archive o ffers new possibilities for speed, mobility and completeness of access to c ultures which have become digitalized, which raise fundamental questions ab out ownership, intellectual property rights, censorship and democratic acce ss. The implications for culture are clear: the new electronic archives wil l not only change tilt: form in which culture is produced and recorded, but the wider conditions under which it is enacted and lived as well.