This is a rather interesting interview with Eric Kluitenberg who applies Foucault’s work to the creation of online archives. You can find the full interview on the Institute of Network Cultures blog
Extract from interview
Eric Kluitenberg is a well-traveled theorist, writer, and lecturer who has produced media events in The Netherlands, Moscow, and Estonia, and also currently heads the media program at De Balie, a cultural and political hotbed in Amsterdam…
EK: The Living Archive is a really a theory, founded on the problem that most traditional archives are organized through selection, inclusion and exclusion. There is a strong tendency in these traditional models to leave out what is called ephemera, for instance flyers or temporary productions, like the Prelinger Archive’s industrial films that’s made for one particular purpose then expected to disappear. Ephemera are considered noise, irrelevant, and as a result, a large aspect of living culture is often excluded.
This is the topic of The Order of Things by Foucault, who says that dominant powers ultimately determine the structures of discourse and consequently what should be preserved in the archive. Everything that falls out is automatically irrelevant. This classical notion of archiving excludes too much, a problem increasingly recognized within the archiving world itself and even more pressing now that digital media allows countless people to put weird stuff online. The official archiving world doesn’t have an effective way to deal with all this ephemera. Foucault also critiques the archive as a static collection of dead phrases no longer a part of living culture, because it’s already enshrined in a system of power. You have to dig out the power structures underneath, figure out who created the rules, the political motives and material conditions behind it all. That’s why he calls it archeology. A static archive is a completely closed thing, in contrast to the multiple, dispersed discourses of present, living culture. To Foucault there are dominant forces that try to control this dispersal and order it in a particular way, making the archive immutable.
The Living Archive, then, is a theoretical model that makes discursive practice its active component. It refuses the canon of collected statements that Foucault critiqued and doesn’t accept any kind of necessary outcome. It emphasizes active discursive production, a continuous discussion and debate about everything in the archive, using the archive as a material for the discussion itself. Wikipedia is an example of this, maybe the best at it so far.
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