Monday, March 17, 2008

Document, Delineation + Violence

The Kujundzic article in particular makes the argument, connected to Derrida/Freud and the Death Drive, for the association between the archive and violence. I guess I'll have to study Freud's death drive, and then read Archive Fever to really get it - but this is how I'm reading it right now:

Kujundzic's description of the dehumanization in Auschwitz - "there are no names, their names were their numbers" - brings to mind the mechanics of the archive. It's always about discreet units, clean separations that can be cataloged, sorted and represented on a grid. Maybe this process is so unlike nature that it's application is violent. I'm thinking of an analogy like a latticework and a vine - except the lattice is made from the vine. It's chopped up and arranged into a grid. It's violent, but living vines grow around the lattice, incorporate it, are structured by it.

"The document" is discussed a lot in these chapters, Raqs Media Collective and Zaatari in particular. So, again the document is something with very clearly delineated borders. For me "document" associates with webpages, which are typically treated as "pages" of information in analogy with paper documents. What's interesting in this context is that there's a strong push away from this model to a "small pieces loosely joined" model where the connections are emphasized over the delineations.

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