Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 01:31:04 +1100
From: "geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>
Subject: <nettime> Interview with German media
archeologist Wolfgang
Ernst

Archive Rumblings
Interview with German media archeologist Wolfgang
Ernst
By Geert Lovink

German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst (1959) is a
member of the Berlin
circle
inspired by Friedrich Kittler and currently fouding
the Seminar for
Media
Studies at Humboldt University. He is contributing to
the'media
archeology'
school in which new media are traced back to earlier
concepts.
Following
this methodology one reads traces of digital
technologies into history,
not
the other way round. The idea is that there is no
teleology in which
media
unfold themselves in time. Against the usual
chronological reading of
media,
from photo and radio to television and the Internet,
Wolfgang Ernst
utilizes
the Foucaultian 'archeological' approach that aims to
unveil active
power
relationships. But whereas Foucault looked into social
formations,
today's
media archeologists are primarily interested in the
(hidden) programs
of
storage media. Following McLuhan Ernst poses that
"cyberspace is not
about
content, but rather a transversive performance of
communication.
Without the
permanent re-cycling of information, there is no need
for emphatic
memory."

In his 2002 book 'Das Rumoren der Archive' (Archive
Rumblings) Wolfgang
Ernst points out that archives are no longer
forgotten, dusty places.
The archive as a concept has gained universal
attention and reached metaphorical glance. In this era
of storagemania everything is on record. Repositories
are no longer final destinations but turn into to
frequently accessed, vital sites. For instance,
East-German secret police archives, opened after
1989 and frequently visited, show how contested data
collections can become.
Wolfgang Ernst signals a shift from the
political-military (secret) meaning
of (national) archives towards a broader cultural
understanding in which the archive stands for
'collective memory'. For Ernst archives are defined
by their 'holes' and 'silent' documents. Ernst's
annals look like crashing operating systems that
should not be taken by face value. In short: archives
are cybernetic entities. These days everyone is
painfully aware that archiving equals careful
selection. Chronicles are anything but neutral
collections. Instead they reflect the priorities and
blind spots of the archivists and the Zeitgeist they
operate in. By now that's common sense.
What can we expect from 21st century archive theory,
beyond digitization and database architectures? Will
the elites establish safeguarded 'islands in
the Net' where essential knowledge is stored, leaving
the wired billions floating in their own data trash?
Has tactical silence and the aesthetics of
forgetfulness got to be all-too-obvious responses to
storagemania? The following email interview took place
in February 2003.

GL: One would associate the theoretical interest in
archives with Foucault, Derrida and other French
authors. You make many references to them. Is that
the destiny of our generation, to get stuck in the
postmodern canon? Or is there another, more personal
reason for your interest in archives and the
'French' approach? Do you keep an archive yourself and
which archive is your favorite one?

WE: When Peter Gente and Heidi Paris from the
Berlin-based Merwe
publishing
house asked me to write an essay on archives with
special regards to
French
theories, I took that chance since it gave me a
possibility to work
through
my own intellectual past. Having been extremely
affected by French
post-structuralist theories in the 80s and actually
trying to
de-construct
the notion of text-based history myself, my research
year at the German
Historical Insitute in Rome then made me "convert" not
to Catholicism,
but
to the acknowledgement of real archives. I then
discovered that no
place can
be more deconstructive than archives themselves, with
their relational,
but
not coherent topology of documents which wait to be
reconfigurated,
again
and again. The archival subject thus is a way out of
the one-way
postmodern
aesthetics of arbitrary "anything goes" - without
having to return to
authoritarean hermeneutics (a point made as well by
the "new
historicists"
in literary studies, f. e. Stephen Greenblatt). The
simple fact is that
archives do not only exist in metaphorical ways as
described by
Foucault and
Derrida, but as part of a very real, very material
network of power
over
memory.

Do I keep an archive myself? Have a look at my
homepage
(www.verzetteln.de/ernst) …In fact, I keep nothing
but an archive at
home:
no book-shelves, no library, but a modular system of
textural,
pictorial or
even auditory information in movable boxes. That is,
among others,
fragments
of books, distributed according to diverse
subjects-liberated from the
restrictive book-covers.

GL: How would you describe the methodology of media
archeologists? Is
it
useful to speak of a school in this context? Media
archeologists can be
found in places such as Cologne (KHM), Berlin
(Humboldt University) and
Paris. Then there is for instance Lev Manovich who
'reads' film history
as
an episode in the coming into being of new media
story. How to look at
the
field and what interesting approaches have you come
across lately?

WE: I owe the term to Siegfried Zielinski, who-as the
former director
of the
Academy of Media Arts in Cologne-once hired me for a
research and
teaching
job called "Theory and Archaeology of Media in the
Context of the Arts"
(a
world-wide premiere as an academic field?). Zielinski
himself, of
course,
owes the term to Michel Foucaults "Archaeology of
Knowledge", but has
given
it a technological turn in cultural anlaysis, with his
brilliant work
on the
video recorder (Berlin 1986). In his most recent work,
literally called
"Media Archaeology" (2002), Zielinski advocates an
an-archical history
of
forgotten or neglected media approaches. Different
from that
liberitarean
approach, my version of media archaeology tries to
carry further
Foucault