The total archive: Data, subjectivity, universality

Abstract

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, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political tool, the total archive encompasses population statistics, gross domestic product, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. Questions of the total archive 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? This introduction and the articles that follow describe and place in historical context a series of concrete instances of totality. Our analysis is arranged according to four central themes: the relationship between the Archive (singular) and archives (plural); the image of the archive and the aesthetics of totality; pathologies of accumulation; and the specific historical trajectory of the total archive in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Archives, promises, values: Forensic infrastructures in times of austerity

“…The vision of the archive as an aggregative and productive apparatus supports the idea of the 'total archive' (Lemov, 2015(Lemov, , 2018 and 'total access' (Reardon, 2018), that is, of an archival infrastructure that can contain totality and can exist across disparate fields. Jardine explores multiple iterations of the 'total archive' in relation to social structures and social fictions about the archives as 'concrete instances of totality' in the 19th and 20th centuries (Jardine and Drage, 2018; see also Kaplan, 2018). In this context, the centrality of computational processes, adding levels of abstraction that afford forms of aggregation and analysis, has been understood to transform knowledge through distance (Berry, 2017).…”

Digital epidemiology, deep phenotyping and the enduring fantasy of pathological omniscience

“…Fuelled by the technological feasibility to repurpose all data, the fantasy of a universally applicable standardization for medical diagnostics returns once again. Despite decades of growing scholarship from sociology, the history of science, from STS and data studies, 'images of universal policy and encyclopaedic knowledge' (Bowker and Star, 1999: 158) continue to invoke a 'rhetoric of completeness' (Jardine and Drage, 2018), in which the historical contingency and political thrust of classification schemes remain neglected.…”

Comparative Analysis of Flash Fiction by A.P. Chekhov and J. Joyce: The Narrator and the Main Character in the Structure of Narrative

“…Late 19 th -early 20 th century was marked by fundamental changes in all spheres of life and society. The crisis of rationalist-positivist ideology, the discovery of the unmanifest and unconscious world, and the revival of the mythological model of life shifted the world order that had been established during the relatively "calm" 19 th century (Jardine and Drage, 2018). A global worldview revolution took place: the "philosophy of thought" was replaced by the "philosophy of life" with its affirmation of the precedence of spirit, "organic matter", reconsidering the role of the spontaneous and irrational foundations of being (Zolotukhina-Abolina, Lysikov 2021).…”