Panel E.

4 Abstracts

Kathryn Harvey, Head, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph What Archives Are and Do: A History Abstract: A rather presumptuous paper title one might say, but if we are to think of archives within the context of everyday life, especially in a political sense, expansiveness is almost inevitable. The necessity for such breadth was pointed out in the 1992 UNESCO publication Manuals and Textbooks of Archives Administration and Records Management: A RAMP Study which was unable to identify any publications that provide a general survey of the history of archival theory and principles across the globe. It notes AThe history of archives and archival institutions is usually discussed in a rather general way in the manuals and textbooks. The 3rd International Symposium on Archival Training expressed the need, in the interest of both teachers and searchers, to put more emphasis on the study of the history of record keeping and archives at both national and international levels.@ 1 Sadly, the assessment of 17 years ago remains largely accurate today. This paper will attempt to articulate both the stable principles and the changing character of archives, predominantly in Europe and North America from the earliest archives of Rome. My examination starts from the premise that archives are fundamentally social institutions that change as society does; nonetheless, certain principles remain predominantly unchanged over the centuries. Questions to be addressed include: Is the very definition of what an Aarchives@ is stable through time and place? Has the principle of provenance changed over the years? Has our application of this principle changed? What should we make of the proliferation of specialized archives and the emphasis on communities participating in the selection and description of their own records? This paper draws on works as diverse as the Encyclopedia Britannica=s famous 11th edition and the writings of theorists such as Brien Brothman, Terry Cook, Jacques Derrida, Luciana Duranti, Terry Eastwood, Michel Foucault, Paul Ricoeur, Roy Schaeffer, and others in order to demystify the concept of Aarchives@ as it pertains to deliberately constructed institutions of documentary heritage (as opposed to museums, photograph albums, personal libraries, or art installations, etc.). The ultimate goal of the paper is to foster a better historical understanding of archives as social institutions and thus educate users about what to expect from the materials they find or don=t find inside.

Pirko Rastas, Manuals and Textbooks of Archives Administration and Records Management: A RAMP Study. UNESCO, 1992. Available: http://www.unesco.org/webworld/ramp/html/r9211e/r9211e0a.htm#8.1.%20The%20hist ory%20of%20archives%20and%20basic%20archival%20principles.

Paper Proposal: The Archival Subject of Modernity: Memory and Everyday Life Russell J. A. Kilbourn, Assistant Professor, English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University Abstract: In his study of German author W.G. Sebald, Jonathan Long identities what he calls the archival subject of modernity: one who compensate[s] for his lack of memory by substituting the archive for interiority (Long 162). For Long, modern subjectivity is ineluctably dependent on external mnemotechnical prostheses (Long 163). This does not produce so much as it attenuates what I call the de-ontologization of memory in modernity; its grounding in social reality and its representations rather than in an extracinematic, subjective interiority. For Pierre Nora, similarly: [m]odern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. [] The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs (237). For Nora, in a conclusion reminiscent of Platos Phaedrus, modern memory delegates to the archive the responsibility of remembering (237). In this view modern memory is a collective, thoroughly artificial or prosthetic technology, constituted through and by means of primarily visual media, most significantly cinema; memory as representation in a perpetuation of a Euro-centric privileging of the visual over other faculties and senses. But it is also marked by the ethical dilemma implicit in this off-loading of the burden of memory to an external prostheses, but one which is already unreflectively re-naturalized as memory per se. How did this profound shift (exemplified in Alison Landsbergs prosthetic memory or Marian Hirschs post-memory) from interiority properly speaking to an exteriorized interiority come about? As I have argued elsewhere (Kilbourn 140-54), its origins are likely not in the recent but in the much more distant cultural past. In a contemporary visually based culture, memory as technology, technique or art (Gk. techn) all but takes the place of a natural memory by supplementing and augmenting it, hypomnesically, prosthetically, in a telling homology with the classical art of memory (mnemotechnics). I trace in this brief paper a path across the (admittedly) vast cultural-epistemological distance from classical mnemotechnics, with its emphasis on memory as a practical tool within the art of Rhetoric, to contemporary and everyday notions of memory as visually based, prosthetic, external, and archival. On the basis of examples drawn from contemporary literature (e.g. Sebalds Austerlitz) and film (Wings of Desire; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), I will sketch a model of subjectivity, with attendant ethical and epistemological contradictions, amenable to the late or postmodern, post-psychoanalytic and ironically post-subjective world.

Works Cited Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames and Mourning and Postmemory. Family Frames Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 1997 Kilbourn, R.J.A. Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in

W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz. W.G. Sebald A Critical Companion. Eds. J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. 140-54; reprinted in the U.S. and Canada by Washington UP, Seattle: 2004 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture. Memory and Popular Film. Ed. Paul Grainge. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2003. 144-61 Long, Jonathan. W.G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2007 Nora, Pierre. Between Memory and History. The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader. Eds. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblinksi. Routledge: New York and London, 2004. 235-37 Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001 Yates, Francis. The Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art of Memory. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. 1-26

Russell Kilbourn is Assistant Professor in Wilfrid Lauriers Department of English and Film Studies, specializing in film theory. His current obsession is with the representation of memory in film, which is the focus of a forthcoming book: Cinema, Memory, Modernity (Routledge 2010). Russell has published in the areas of film, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as contributions to three book collections on German author W.G. Sebald. Another article, Re-writing Reality: Reading The Matrix, has just been reprinted in a Cultural Studies anthology from Blackwell Press. Russell is also a series editor for the Film and Media Studies series at WLU Press.

Joshua Synenko, Department of Humanities, York University, Toronto Memory and Historicism in Andreas Huyssens Twilight Memories Abstract: This paper analyzes Andreas Huyssens concept of forgetting in Twilight Memories. Huyssens reflections on literature and the contemporary culture of museums suggest that todays continuing predicament of so-called postmodernity is due at least in part to a symptomatic relationship between the present and the past in the guise of amnesia. He claims that it may no longer be possible to recuperate a sense of hope and optimism as Europe did in the fin de sicle during the nineteenth century. Moreover, the impossibility of recuperation stems from the growing ubiquity of media and technologydriven environments, producing a distortion or dissonance in human relationships to time. Contemporary memory practices are equally set apart in their misplacement of the futureoriented utopian thought that was intrinsic to an earlier modernity. For Huyssen, the historical consciousness of the bygone era is no longer sustainable as amnesia infiltrates our cultural, political and territorial moorings. Huyssens diagnosis precedes an investigation into the cultures of amnesia and their relation to the compensatory explosion of memory projects during the last two decades, aiming for a theory of postmodernity that challenges the received avant-gardist notions that continue to be associated with that term. I critique Huyssens reading of

history and memory with the claim that amnesia is not, as he says, an emblem of desire to be showcased by museums and related institutions, but rather that diagnosing amnesia forecloses possibilities with regard to forgetting and resisting todays apolitical liberal pluralism. Though this melancholia of foreclosure finds its cultural articulation in recent memory-based literatures, it also raises methodological issues between museum studies and archival theory that I address in the paperin the work of Peter McIsaac and his appropriation of W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin. However, I would also like to indicate a strong critique of Huyssens historicist arguments as an ironic exemplar of cultural translation, comparing his approach to Jacques Derridas in Archive Fever, and perhaps also The Work of Mourning. This very different approach allows for a stronger consideration of the aporias between memory and language, materiality and narrative.

BIO: Joshua Synenko studies political philosophy, cultural theory and memory in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto. His masters thesis, Uncommon Singularities: Event, Politics and Representation (2007, UWO Theory and Criticism), explores concepts of politics in selected canonical works of European philosophy. Joshua has a forthcoming publication scheduled in an edited volume, Translating Cultures, entitled Systematization and Memory in Kittler and Foucault. He is presently researching for a dissertation on the topic of memory, disciplinary thought and politics in the university.