'The Total Archive: Dreams of Universal Knowledge from the Encyclopaedia to Big Data'
CRASSH, Cambridge, 19 March 2015
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20 March 2015
The complete system of knowledge is a
standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an
aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the
Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and
absolute governance.
Far from ending the dream of a total
archive, twentieth-century positivist rationality brought it ever
closer. From Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum to Mass-Observation, from the Unity
of Science movement to Isaac Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica, from the
Whole Earth Catalog to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies
hard. These projects triumphantly burst their own bounds, generating
more archival material, more information, than can ever be processed.
When it encounters well defined areas – the sportsfield or the model
organism – the total archive tracks every movement of every player, of
recording every gene and mutation. Increasingly this approach is
inverted: databases are linked; quantities are demanded where only
qualities existed before. The Human Genome Project is the most famous,
but now there are countless databases demanding ever more varied input.
Here the question of what is excluded becomes central.
The total archive is a political tool.
It encompasses population statistics, GDP, indices of the Standard of
Living and the international ideology of UNESCO, the WHO, the free
market and, most recently, Big Data. The information-gathering practices
of statecraft are the total archive par excellence, carrying the
potential to transfer power into the open fields of economics and law –
or divest it into the hands of criminals, researchers and activists.
Questions of the total archive they
engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of
the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of
information retrieval. What are the social structures and political
dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the
temporalities implied by such projects?
In order to confront the ideology and
increasing reality of interconnected data-sets and communication
technologies we need a robust conceptual framework – one that does not
sacrifice historical nuance for the ability to speculate. This
conference brings together scholars from a wide range of fields to
discuss the aesthetics and political reality of the total archive.
Full details here.
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