The total archive: Data,subjectivity,universality

The archive – Archives

Our first contention is that, in writing the history of the ways in which radical acts of accumulation have played a role in the formation of the modern subject, it is necessary to attend to both the visionary, overweening ideology of the Archive and the reality of actually existing archives. The relationship between these two ‘levels’ of analysis has often been strained, with those writing from the perspective of archive studies lamenting over-theorisation, and those interested in the authority of the archive having little time for the realities of paperwork. This situation has been eloquently and productively summarised by Terry Cook, writing in The American Archivist:

The ‘archive’ (singular) is usually engaged by […] scholars as a metaphoric symbol, as a representation of identity, or as the recorded memory production of some person or group or culture. But there seems little awareness (with rare exceptions) of the history of the archive, from after that initial creation or inscription to its appearance in the archival reference room, or of real archives (note plural), or of the distinct body of professional ideas and practice those archivists follow, or of the impact all this has on shaping both the surviving record and historical knowledge. (Cook, 2011: 601)

The crucial notion here is that archivists themselves ought to be placed into historical narratives. Crucial, not just in the straightforward sense that archivists play an obvious but often unacknowledged role in the formation and nature of archives, but also in the more subtle sense that there is a politics of ignorance at work in the theoretical Archive. Archival labour has often been gendered – and simultaneously made invisible – and this has been interwoven in problematic ways with the perceived neutrality of archives themselves. This dynamic emerges most clearly in the following essays in Jardine’s discussion of the kinds of critique made by Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson in the battle over the nature of Mass-Observation, and in Laemmli’s recovery of the work of Irmgard Bartenieff and Forestine Paulay, alongside the typically domineering persona of Alan Lomax. In these two cases the gendering of archivist–archive–subject is particularly complex: amongst its various achievements Mass-Observation recorded and made legible, with some false-steps along the way, work typically undertaken by women, and the Choreometrics project was specifically designed to give a systematic account of dance, which had been seen as both trivial and feminine. There is a double recovery, then, in bringing out the archival labour involved in these projects – though we might also remark that the totalising urge has typically been a way in which masculinity can be preserved or re-asserted against the notion of feminised archival practice. ²

In addition to these and other acts of recovery, Cook’s suggestion is that both the historian and the archivist can meet in analysis and rethinking of the concept of ‘appraisal’: ‘Archival appraisal decides which creators, functions, and activities generating records will be represented in archives, by defining, identifying, then selecting which documents and which media become archives in the first place’ (Cook, 2011: 606). This act of determining the historical record can, for Cook, become both an object of inquiry for historians (how has appraisal acted in this way?) and for archivists (how does appraisal generate its own kind of knowledge?). There is plenty at stake: the very authority of the historian still rests, in some sense, on the ‘distancing’ of choices made in appraisal, i.e. in the idea(l) of a pure archive. However, Cook notes, this distance is not caused by the kind of theorising that followed Derrida’s Archive Fever; rather it is a direct consequence of historians not following Derrida far enough in the deconstruction of the archive, which would necessitate a more thoroughgoing critique of the ways in which archives are consulted, cited and comprehended.

A focus on appraisal is just one method by which historians can make more thoughtful use of the metaphor of the Archive and engage with the realities of archives. In relation to the essays collected here, however, there are limitations to this approach. The archives that we are considering are heterodox, and were not typically amassed within the set of norms and procedures understood as the precursors to current archival practice. Another way of applying archival studies to the cases presented here, therefore, is to ask in what sense we are dealing with ‘archives’ at all (Caswell, 2016). Descending from the Derridean heights, an archive can be straightforwardly thought of as a collection of records that contain information and provide evidence of some or other action, or that can be called upon to provide this evidence. This is clearly the sense in which Mass-Observation was, from the beginning, an archive: it was a collection of documents that recorded observations and opinions that could be mobilised in a number of contexts. Drawing on a wider concept of the record, Alan Lomax’s collection of records of human movement and Melford Spiro’s collection of anthropological researches clearly constitute relatively traditional archives. The mortality data considered by Daniel Wilson and the linguistic data in Judy Kaplan’s articles are a different case, in that the archives they consider are essentially digests of other sources of data. The Archive in the metaphorical sense, meanwhile, is treated by Cadence Kinsey in her analysis of Grosse Fatigue. Here the crucial archival concept is representation, in the dual sense of the means by which archives are made legible to their users, and the central problematic of modern subjectivity as a mediated phenomenon.

The image of totality

One reason that the issue of archival practice is so important in the present context is that here we are dealing with archives that are directly related to the ideology of the universal. This, moreover, is an ideology that has not typically had any practical relation to accumulation or archival management at all. In this respect we are dealing not only with heterodox archives, but heterodox totalities. In order to understand this, it is necessary to recall that, just as the work of Derrida and Foucault lies at the origin of a particular kind of thinking about the Archive/archives, it also lies at the end of a particular kind of thinking about totality. This tradition stretches back to early-modern classifications of knowledge, to the later Encyclopaedists, and through the universalising metaphysics of Hegel to the influence of the latter on 19th and early-20th century thought (Jay, 1984: 21–80). Owing to the predominance of images of totality in this tradition (the Panopticon, for instance), one way to examine this complex history is through the question of figuration, i.e. the tropic representation of totality or universal knowledge, for example, through a diagram relating the disciplines, a figure or personage attempting to synthesise all learning, or an (imagined or real) object or system that stands for or provides access to (at least) a vast number of other things (Haraway, 1997: 8–11; Schaffer, Tresch and Gagliardi, 2017).

We have already mentioned John Tresch’s notion of cosmograms – ‘[representations] of everything all at once in one space’ – and within this notion the visual plays a special role. Tresch contends that images are useful as a solution to methodological problems in history and the social sciences: where we would otherwise be forced to talk about ideology, or perhaps even discourse, focusing in the images of knowledge and knowledge-making allows us to look at the history of knowledge through its ‘objectifications, externalisations [and] material renderings of […] overarching order by people in specific places in specific times’ (Tresch, 2017: 138). As we discuss at length below, however, images are also useful as schematic, narrative and poetic representations of the types of subjectivity that are required by, and produced within, total-archival schemes. Not only do such images reveal the ways in which those schemes sought to assemble a totality of particulars; they also show us what it is like (or, at least, what it is supposed to be like) to do so. Tresch is talking specifically of single images – but we understand his point in relation to the broader aesthetics of totality. To illustrate this, in this section we offer brief readings of three figures of totality, roughly correlating to the chronological range of the essays: Borges’ famous story ‘Aleph’, the short films of Alain Resnais, and the figure of Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Borges is, of course, the most consistent poet of universal knowledge. ‘Funes, His Memory’ tells the disturbing story of a boy who can recall everything and therefore loses the ability to think; ‘The Library of Babel’ describes a dizzying collection of all possible books. For Borges the figure of totality is always one of baffling experience; and often, though not always, something to be kept away from the light of day. In ‘The Aleph’, an entry into a simultaneous view of all space and all time is kept, secretly, under the floorboards of the family home of a lost lover. Encountering the Aleph as a child, Carlos Argentino Daneri grows up obnoxious, pompous and self-aggrandising. Like fame come too early, the universal perspective of the Aleph leads Carlos Argentino to lose all perspective. Borges too, as narrator, views the world through the Aleph for a few moments, and decides that this ‘pernicious metropolis’ is nothing more than a kind of vulgar metaphysical pornography that ought never to be seen by anyone. Just like the alphabetical arrangement of the Encyclopaedia, any hint of systemacity is lost in the Aleph, which can only provide bewildering sequences of apparently disordered sense data.

The uneasy relationship between humanity and ordered knowledge is also Alain Resnais’ theme, explored in his 1956 Toute la mémoire du monde [All the World’s Memory]. The film is ostensibly a celebration of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – and for much of its running time the narrator and camera are indeed focused on the way in which the library manages its beautifully catalogued holdings, which are separated into different departments and organised by a seamless combination of machines, paper technologies and administrative staff (Resnais, 1956). Yet the film’s subversive ending makes clear Resnais’ preference for the order of the card catalogue over the disorder of the world of which the library is part – the world of learning, of disciplines, of knowledge – which is brought into the reading room by ‘paper-crunching pseudo-insects’ (‘pseudo’ because, unlike real insects, humans are incapable of working communally). Prior to being consulted, each book is ‘part of a universal, abstract, indifferent memory where all books were equal, and together basked in attention as tenderly distant as that shown by God to men’ (ibid.).

Resnais is, of course, making a parable of the ‘incomplete project’ of Enlightenment – delicately ironised in Toute la mémoire du monde but savagely attacked in his other short films of the 1950s, especially the collaboration with Chris Marker, Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die). Here that other bastion of modernity – the Museum – is torn apart through the juxtaposition of studio shots of African sculptures at the Musée de l’Homme and scenes from the sub-Saharan world in which they once lived. While Toute la mémoire du monde presents a Borgesian reductio of systems for the accumulation and preservation of ‘the world’s’ (i.e. the West’s) knowledge, Les Statues meurent aussi inverts this and presents a critique of colonialism by rejecting the logic of collection, cataloguing and display. In both films, the image of totality is split: a hopeless ideal, a failed utopianism, the violence of the card catalogue. It seems inevitable that completing Resnais’ early trio of short films is a treatment of the true total institution, the concentration camp (Nuit et brouillard, 1956; see Unger, 2012).

Nor should we be surprised that imaginative treatments of universality turn so dark so quickly. The much debated link between totality and totalitarianism is one aspect of this (Jay, 1984: 21). Another is the obvious political, geographical and cultural limitations to schemes for ‘universal’ knowledge, which quickly come to look all too local from our lofty post-modern, post-colonial vantage point. Then there is what could be termed the pathology of the universal: the way in which those who conceive schemes for the organisation of universal knowledge enter into an uneasy bargain with the future. The canonical figure here is Casaubon, the ossified visionary of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, whose life’s work is an attempt to synthesise the entirety of world religious myth in a projected but unwritten book, The Key to All Mythology (Eliot, 1871–72). The contents of this project are not divulged by Eliot, but its malignancy is explored by the interaction between Casaubon and his wife Dorothea – a wealthy, beautiful, sensitive and intelligent 19-year-old with an inclination to religious ardour, mysticism, philosophy, the classics and questions of political economy. Taking Casaubon’s pallor, reticence and drudging academic pedantry to be signs of deep religious feeling, wisdom and scholarly rigour, Dorothea enters headlong into Causaubon’s body of knowledge, believing with him that ‘We must keep the germinating grain away from the light’ (ibid.: 29) The archive of all mythology in which Dorothea finds herself is haunted by phantasms that are in fact mocking visions of its limits.

It should now be clear that our concern is not simply a play on the paradoxes of universality – the system that must contain itself; the order that can have no beginning – but rather on the complex experience of universal knowledge and its diminished subjects. Between them, Borges, Resnais and Eliot diagnose the peculiarly modern pathologies of totality – pathologies that have also been analysed in more recent histories of the human sciences. Lorraine Daston, for example, finds Casaubon-like tendencies in 19th century projects in the ‘Big Humanities’, particularly the archive of all ancient Latin inscriptions started by Theodor Mommsen (Daston, 2017b). Only such vast enterprises could (or so it was thought) break the bounds of time and transcend the ephemerality of all knowledge. Hence Resnais’ anti-humanist point about the order that is disrupted when readers come to the library: it is the information that persists, even as knowledge and wisdom fail. The post-WWII moment that Resnais occupies is also strangely bound to the positivist project, though the political circumstances had by then changed drastically. In an era of international co-operation, exemplified by the establishment of UNESCO and the WHO, scientists attempted to craft a ‘view from everywhere’ by providing standardised technical instruments to workers in diverse fields, spread across distant lands (Selcer, 2009). Again, the project was essentially archival: new collections of data – on standards of living, public health, happiness, cultural heritage, geographical, geological, ecological and biological diversity – were to bind the fortunes of countries whose separate trajectories had been cast into sharp relief by the brutalities of war. What ‘The Aleph’, Toute la mémoire du monde and Middlemarch also help us to remember is that this historical proposition manifests itself not in ‘worldviews’, or in utopian speculation, but in the interplay of a pragmatics of totality and the particular people who are bound and enticed by practices of accumulation and representation.

In this issue, bringing the story up to date, Cadence Kinsey provides a particularly rich case study of the visual (dis)order of totality. In her analysis of Grosse Fatigue Kinsey uses the image of the screen to stand for the dialectic of aspiration and entropy in late-20th century network-technological projects. Grosse Fatigue, which Henrot developed as part of an artist’s fellowship programme at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, is an attempt to tell the entire history of the universe, ‘from the big bang to the atomic bomb’ in an ‘inchoate chain of association: we see hands flick through the pages of books showing indigenous body markings alongside Keith Haring graffiti, museum staff rifle through drawers of dead parrots while people in white coats conduct experiments’ (Kinsey, 2019: 154–82). A poem, narrating the Creation, links these images into a single narrative, while at the same time the images cut against the poem’s meaning. Grosse Fatigue is inspired by a variety of knowledge systems that Henrot investigated during her time at the Smithsonian: the museum’s physical archives, the structure of electronic databases, and, perhaps most importantly, hypertext/hypermedia. The video is shown against the background of a computer desktop, with the Milky Way as wallpaper, and browser windows and pop-ups emerging to show fragmentary episodes in a universal history. According to Kinsey, to watch Grosse Fatigue is to experience density: ‘the whole of time collapsed into a single artwork’ (ibid.).

In Gross Fatigue, Henrot’s presentation of the history of everything pushes at the limits of the World Wide Web’s original conception as an ideal community of knowledge. Drawing on the Web’s capacity to link inchoate phenomena through the position of the subject in relation to a screen, Gross Fatigue shows that if we take the apparent limitlessness of the Web at its word – if we make the error of taking literally its promise to save us from the deleterious effects of time and distance on information – the urge will backfire and bring the user unmanageable chaos. Kinsey points out that, in the Internet as it is now used, a complex assembly of measures are in place to prevent the free-wheeling autonomy of the online subject whilst giving the impression of heightened choice. As in the Hayles quotation given above, here the subject of the total archive interacts, perhaps unknowingly, with the apparatus of control. In each of the case studies that follow there is an encounter of this sort. For this reason, in pursuing the ideology of the universal and the practice of the particular, we must also pursue the malady of the particular and the pathology of the universal.

Archival subjectivities

Rebecca Lemov’s article here guides us in wonderful narrative detail through the fraught subjective field of colonial epistemic hyperextension, exposing problematics that are more overt than those lying behind the screen of the online user experience. At the same time, Lemov turns to a question never quite asked in Grosse Fatigue, namely, what is the relationship between total archivists and their subjects? What kinds of subjectivities bind the two in and through the attempt to make and represent total knowledge?

Lemov focuses on an encounter between a south-western Pacific islander, Tarev, and the anthropologist Melford Spiro. The post-war generation of Culture and Personality anthropologists, Spiro among them, were technologically minded, deploying tools from psychoanalysis, psychometrics and biometrics to gather data in an attempt to answer publicly debated questions about the biological determination of race, the effects of culture on upbringing, the limits of cultural relativism. Spiro, studying the small Micronesian island of Ifaluk, found himself faced with Tarev, an individual who seemed not to respond properly to his battery of tests. Within the system that Spiro deploys Tarev exhibits only an ‘exorbitant singularity’ (Lemov, 2019: 80–105), and becomes a symptom of Spiro’s blindness to the pressures that his totalising project placed on a repeatedly colonised and brutalised Micronesian population. As total knowledge projects reach their limits, it seems, pressure is applied at the edges, even if this is not necessarily felt back at the (metropolitan, Western) centre. Spiro’s determination to face down Tarev’s singularity, while failing to consider the effects of the territory’s colonial past on its inhabitants, means that he must also confront the violent imperfection in his total perspective, inscribed upon and extracted from the bodies and dreams of Micronesians. Through this analysis, which works outward from a point of conflict within the total archive, we are led to see not only the historical situation of Spiro’s project, but also the way in which its internal paradox (Tarev) is also caught in the web of that historical situation. Lemov insists we see what Spiro could not: that Tarev’s condition – and the strange relationship he forges with Spiro – is also a result of the USA’s modernising, utopian, neo-colonial activities.

What the case of Tarev makes clear is the uncanny ability of the total archive to record evidence of the real, lived experience of the archival subject while simultaneously encoding the perverse illogic of radical empiricism and the historical situation of the inquirer. While this happens spatially in Lemov’s analysis of the world of post-war anthropology, it happens temporally in Judy Kaplan’s examination of the history of the Global Lexicostatistical Database (GLD). Kaplan gives a vivid account of the subjectivities that emerge as a result of the temporal tendencies of 20th century totalising archival projects to reach into the past in order to fix the future, i.e. to produce stable knowledge of the ‘outer limits of scientific knowability’ while also producing ‘an imagined community [of scientists] that transcends time’ (Kaplan, 2019: 106–28). Here we see a surprising connection between Kaplan’s linguists and the situation at CERN when the World Wide Web was developed. Kinsey suggests that the Web was motivated by a utopian desire to create a transcendent community: a community that would negate the inevitability of information loss by forging links (hyperlinks) between the associative thought networks of user-subjects in the present, and information created and stored in the past.

The scientific community that Kaplan studies attempted (and are attempting) to localise ‘proto-World’, a hypothetical common ancestor to all extant human languages. This idea has its own ancestry in the evocatively named ‘Nostratic hypothesis’. Through a combination of ‘disciplinary consensus and bootstrapping at the controversial outer limits of scientific knowability’ (Kaplan, 2019: 106–28), proponents of the GLD sought to pick out similarities among languages that could only be explained in terms of shared descent, and by doing so project backwards towards a linguistic singularity. What is so striking about this case is the way in which questions of origins are subverted: the object of inquiry is the deepest remnant of human language, but this will necessarily be conjured from the ‘products of disciplinary consensus and bootstrapping’ (ibid.). The issue is not so much that the new language will be so ancient, but that this dialectic is maintained alongside another one, whereby the singular language is pursued by a process of radical accumulation:

The GLD, an online database that draws from both published works and ongoing original research, is characterized by a three-tiered structure moving from micro- to macro-level analysis. Extending from established language families (e.g. Germanic) to contested macro-families (e.g. Nostratic), it ultimately offers a ‘global’ iteration of totality. (Kaplan, 2019: 106–28)

Kaplan draws particular attention to the affective nature of the tendency to gather together in search of the distant past by quoting a poem by V.M. Illich-Svitych, the founding father of the Nostratic approach, who wrote (originally in proto-Nostratic):

Language is a ford through the river of Time,

It leads us to the dwelling place of those gone ahead;

But he does not arrive there

Who is afraid of deep water. (Kaplan, 2019: 106–28)

It is in this context that we can understand some of those endeavours of the 20th century that worked to touch the absolute through the empirical. William James, when exploring the metaphysical implications of his ‘radical empiricism’ in practice, sought out the religious experience of mystics and clairvoyants. To embrace the idea that the entirety of the knowable is to be found in the senses sets the subject adrift in a sea of sense data, and, at the same time, suddenly makes the subject central. Eschewing the pre-set categories of rationalism to define our relationship with the world of objects, radical forms of empiricism demand that we take the fleeting and uncertain phenomena of consciousness to be continuous with, and prior to, ‘objective’ reality. In turn, this renders external reality, in its totality, accessible to subjective consciousness. Subjective experience becomes the archive of all possible archives. As James puts it,

We with our lives are like the islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and Conanicut and Newport hear each other’s fog-horns. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together on the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fence, and into which our several minds plunge. (James, 1986: 374)

Towards a history of scale

Formal (and even theological) problems, as we have shown, are eminently historically located in the experience of the archival subject. But they are also implicated in dominant ideologies, which are themselves shaped by the pressures of large-scale accumulation. This is most clearly evident in Daniel Wilson’s discussion of Charles Babbage and Thomas Rowe Edmonds and their views on the collection and use of life assurance data. Here central questions about the merits of life insurance turn on issues of the ownership, origin and quality of data. Owing to the peculiar nature of the ‘insurance archive’, actuaries found themselves working at the boundaries of the natural and human sciences, the limits of mathematical techniques for dealing with large numbers, and in the borderlands of corporate and state interest. To bring order to these murky areas they martialled arguments about this strange concept of the ‘public interest’ – perhaps an aggregation of private interests, or something more profoundly civic and civilised. Once this concept had been formulated it led to its own logic of accumulation, ultimately lying behind the range of ‘public’ institutions (zoos, libraries, museums) that came to populate the urban and occasionally provincial locales of the mid-19th century (Bennett, 1995). In both the public collections that brought the riches of the Empire to the heart of colonial power, and the data by which the ‘law of mortality’ was formulated, a complex process of selection and representation was involved in forging communal identity. We are dealing with an unusual archive, to be sure, but we are also dealing with familiar questions of governance and authority.

With the formalisation of the archive – as a source of historical authority – came the formalisation of public collections. The guiding concepts, especially after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, were the organic and natural status of the represented collection, and its genealogical role in relation to the public. Archives were described using metaphors from evolutionary theory, and the great natural history displays showed nature as an interconnected whole (Cook, 2011: 616). The total archives of the early 20th century are clearly the inheritors of this position: the modernism of Paul Otlet’s informatic-paradise the ‘Mundaneum’ is not the destructive, anti-systematic modernism of Dada or Surrealism, but the constructive, evolutionary modernism of H.G. Wells and Le Corbusier (who was commissioned to design the never-built Mundaneum at Geneva (Rayward, 2010; Wright, 2014)). The ideal of universal knowledge, in this sense, requires absolute distance between the knower and the known, a faith in the security and completeness of knowledge, and a concept of development unsullied by cultural relativism or the uncertainties of post-modernity.

This is why there is such a peculiar tension in the Mass-Observation project (Jardine, 2019). Here we see the radical combination of the constructive and destructive forces of modernity, linked not by an argument, manifesto or artwork, but by an archive: a collection of documents with an organising principle and a connection to the everyday lives of the Mass-Observers. Hence the problem of modernity – of the overcoming of past certainties and systematic thought – is given bathetic reality in the figure of the archivist Charles Madge, perpetually failing to control his observers, who began to reflect not only on their own daily routines but on the practice of observing itself. This quite natural urge, however, could not be contained in Mass-Observation’s archive, and interfered with participants’ ability to conduct meaningful social interactions. The desire to collect and represent, it transpires, had bound the Mass-Observers – the organisers and the participants – together in a way that had already rendered the project’s organising principles troublingly visible.

There is an uncanny parallel between the case of the insurance archive and the paperwork of Mass-Observation: in both, the fact of collecting social data binds new social collectives together, oriented around practices of surveillance (Jardine and Kelty, 2015). The social contract of insurance relies on two things: longevity, encouraged through temperance in the Victorian period and monitored by self-tracking devices today; and a jittery faith in data, alternating between ‘safety in numbers’ and an almost reckless wager against what insurance companies (claim to) know. The social contract of Mass-Observation was even more ambiguous, based as it was on liberal, humanist, anti-fascist sentiment while also sowing the seeds of paranoia (Purdon, 2016).

What the case of Mass-Observation makes most abundantly clear is that the total archive is a dual image, of modernisation and preservation. For the Mass-Observers superstition was something to be examined, collected, catalogued and transcended. Science, in the end, would win out over folklore – but it would do so through the compilation of an archive of folk knowledge and practice. After the Second World War this project became systematic, as the twin realities of reconstruction and modernisation were linked to the new phenomenon of ‘Big Science’ – not just scientific instrumentation that would command the might of states and scientific planners, but data-collection projects that were international in their scope and universal in their ambition. In projects like the International Geophysical Year and International Biological Programme, scale was linked to a genetic conception of scientific inference: surveys would record regional difference in order to produce temporal accounts of development – of long-range geological phenomena and of the evolutionary adaptation of human beings (Aronova, Baker and Oreskes, 2010).

It is in this context that Lomax’s choreometric project needs to be understood. As Whitney Laemmli (2019: 23–51) writes, ‘for Lomax, Choreometrics was more than a methodological means to a scholarly end. At its heart, the project was rooted in a quintessentially modernist faith in the power of the right kind of archive to remake the world’. Though records of dance and human movement may seem far removed from post-war modernisation theory, Lomax and his colleagues understood their project to be part of a re-evaluation of the role of social science in understanding broad historical trends. As Lomax himself put it:

The productivity of human subsistence systems, for which archeology and the study of living cultures provide the record, has progressively increased from simple extractive systems to systems with an ever-increasing ability to transform large portions of the environment into food and energy. (Laemmli, 2019: 23–51)

Both Mass-Observation and Choreometrics were attempts to create scientifically literate citizens, transforming their experience of everyday life. Once schooled in Choreometrics, ‘A trip to the grocery store might teach as much as an afternoon at a natural history museum’ (Laemmli, 2019: 23–51). For Lomax this was ‘like looking […] through a microscope for the first time’ (ibid.). The development of the ‘democratic personality’ was a matter of self-surveillance as much as of learning to see. To gamble on life insurance was a bet on one’s own physical and moral worth, and to join a newly forming public; to become a Mass-Observer was to be a modern citizen operating without prejudice; to learn Choreometrics was to turn the world into a place of manifest human adaptability, to witness human evolution and avoid the perils of modernity. In each case personal transformation is a political act mediated through a third entity: the archive. To trace this history is to trace a history of scale, in which bold pronouncements about morality (and mortality), the public good, new forms of ‘human organisation’ (Mass-Observation), and ‘democratic personalities’ (Choreometrics) are given a concrete instantiation. As Nikolas Rose has wryly commented, these kinds of collection are in fact far more concrete than the fleetingly ‘real’ archival subjects: ‘Individualizing observation […] makes the person stable through constructing a perceptual system, a way of rendering the mobile and confusing manifold of the sensible into a cognizable field’ (Rose, 1988: 188).

This leaves us more or less where we began, with Daston’s observation about ‘third nature’ – the nature of the archive, which is projected back onto and as ‘first nature’. This kind of archival positivism thrived in the 19th century, and grew paradoxical in the middle of the 20th century, when criticism of the empirical project dovetailed with criticism of modernisation itself: the preservation of cultural difference in a single, homogenising archive eventually came to be understood as a neo-colonial act in its own right, just as the logic of data-driven science was undermined at the level of metaphysics. Tarev’s lament, the uneasy fate of Choreometrics and the breakdown of Mass-Observation all speak to these broad historical changes. And yet as Kinsey and Kaplan remind us, the age of instant recall and Big Data is upon us, and a kind of hyper-positivism grips at least some areas of the human sciences. Yet in the humanities there is a healthy scepticism of empiricism’s new clothing, and of the attempt to render any kind of totality at a glance. Two examples of this critical tendency resonate with the themes developed here.

First, this analysis of the connection between archives and totality – and the failure of the latter – reminds us that we are not simply detailing the procedures by which records were selected and filed. We can see this clearly by looking at the ways in which the archives dealt with here do not fit well with the insights of archival studies. For instance, the principle of provenance, which has long been central to archival practice, has little meaning for the records amassed by Mass-Observation, or the records of dance in Lomax’s collection. Provenance concerns the origin or source of a collection, information that often takes priority over the content of the documents it contains. It is perhaps a curious fact that within the totalising schemes explored here there are vanishingly few examples of this principle at work. ³ Intriguingly, recent challenges to the principle of provenance from within archival studies have begun to look like totalising gestures in their own right. For example Tom Nesmith has called for a new conception of provenance to include ‘the social and technical processes of the records’ inscription, transmission, contextualization, and interpretation’ (Nesmith, 1999: 146), i.e. for the original and subsequent history of records to be used as organising principles within archives. This, appropriately enough, emerges directly from the very real ‘total archives’ project that has long been policy in Canada and entails a diverse range of sources and media in formal archival acquisition:

The National Archives had acquired the records of various federal government departments which presented an official perspective on Canadian government operations and activities and on Canadian history generally. On the other hand, the acquisition of records from private individuals and organisations provided a different historical perspective on the development of Canada, often in strong contrast to the federal government perspective and interpretation. This approach to develop a ‘balanced record’ was the core of the ‘total archives’ concept of archives acquisition. (Momryk, 2001: 151)

Second, the image of totality is denied. As Frederic Jameson (1992) has argued, representing Capital, and specifically any one person’s place within it, is an impossible task, requiring as it does an absolute rejection of the God’s-eye perspectives of prior attempts to represent all knowledge. An uncertain hope is contained in the very tracking systems that perpetuate the total archive and undermine workers’ and citizens’ autonomy and privacy: these very same technologies do permit a fragmentary and partial representation of Capital, as the data and gig economies ‘disrupt’ more and more of our daily lives. Might these and allied changes – and the obsession with data-centric practices like genomics, AI, ‘the quantified self’ – allow us to see and even challenge processes and power structures that were previously concealed by the reification of old technologies? If so, the concept of ‘Nature’ is key: Daston’s ‘third nature’ – that of the sciences of the archive – now finds its mirror in a very different ‘third nature’, described by Anna Tsing as that which ‘manages to live despite capitalism’ (Tsing, 2017: viii). For Tsing, this is a fundamentally plural, temporally muddled world without ‘progress stories’. Now two parallel lines of inquiry suggest themselves: the question is not, how do accumulations of data come to represent the world? but rather, what forms of life exist within ecologies of data? And the point is not to show how the aggregated set of concepts making up third nature map or do not map onto first nature, but rather what ethical and aesthetic issues arise from the inevitability of that mapping. Examples from the present issue abound, for example in Wilson’s discussion of the relationship between data and insurance, Lemov’s account of Tarev, and Kinsey’s description of the freedom and constraints of life online. Similar reasoning to Tsing’s lies behind Donna Haraway’s recent rejection of the ‘Anthropocene’ label in favour of the less totalising ‘Capitalocene’ – the world of entanglement, hybridity and making-do that is captured in many of her works, and which resists singular representation (Haraway, 2015). We might recall that Borges’ wonders, at the end of his story, whether he has in fact looked into a ‘false Aleph’ – his reason being that the true Aleph is not an ‘optical instrument’ but rather an inaccessible point inside a pillar ‘at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo’. ‘No one, of course, can actually see it,’ he concludes, ‘but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum’ (Borges, 1970: 16–17).