epistemological + political subjects

Stoler and Taylor both contextualize archives in the power imbalances and systemic oppressions imposed from colonization and its enduring legacies. Taylor separates the archive from the repertoire, the latter for embodied and lived forms of knowledge. She argues that Western epistemologies are founded on the equation of writing to memory and knowledge. The dominance of language and writing means these mechanisms for knowledge come to stand in for meaning itself. Yet it is not perfectly clear that written forms of knowledge are archived versus embodied knowledge being repertoire-d. Even through colonization, writing did not entirely displace embodied practice. Even colonizers bring (and enforce) their own embodied practices too. But writing became the dominant mechanism of legitimization of over other epistemic and mnemonic systems. This is how, as Stoler argues, we should think of the archive as the supreme technology of late 19^th century imperial state.

So what happens to our understanding of “knowledge” (and whose knowledge) as we have moved from dominance of technologies based on written texts to digital ones? Videos and images are not the same as performances and acts, though we may treat them as alike. Robertson identifies this tension in digital archiving of lesbian porn/erotic publications from 1984-2004. It was both documented and embodied, though was very likely intended for a small and time-bound audiences of queer zine-readership, before anyone could imagine reverse image search engines and permanent googleability.

Foucault reminds us again that the realm of thinkable thoughts available to any one of us is limited by our discourses and our ability to determine something as knowledge. The archive functions both as the “law of what can be said” and the rules by which these delineated “unique events” accumulate into understood patterns. We can neither exhaustively archive all of a given society, culture, time period, nor can we adequately describe our own from within. What gets recorded in archival institutions passes for collective memory on the side of the powerful, and “structural amnesia” for those memories that do not serve them (Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard). History reminds us of the importance in looking to the form of archive, as well as the content. In my research on voice recognition technologies, looking to the mechanisms of digital archiving itself hopefully provides one avenue to do this.