Review: Daniela Agostinho et. al., ‘(W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art’
Review of Daniela Agostinho, Solveig Gade, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Kristin Veel’s (eds.) (W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2021), 416 pages.
Abstract
This anthology covers an expansive exploration of the generative knowledge of digital archives in the context of war. Throughout this collection, the (w)archive is recognized as a node of extensive, material, and embodied relations, countering a discursive approach toward the digital as immaterial. The interdisciplinary approach of the analyses collected here addresses the intractable phenomenon of contemporary, digitized warfare including contributions from a diverse array of scholars, artists, and practitioners, where aesthetics figures predominantly as both a theoretical source and a source for articulating a pervasive “archival imaginary.” This ambitious anthology joins a broader emergence of interdisciplinary analyses from the field of cultural studies, which address the ethical implications of digitisation and how aesthetics as artistic practice may respond and counter the violence that is generated through forms of meaning production in the sociopolitical realm of global conflict.
Reviewed by Lila Lee-Morrison
The anthology, (W)archives, recently published by Sternberg Press, covers an expansive exploration of the generative knowledge of the digital archive in the context of war. Through this collection, the digitisation of war and engagement becomes a key inflection point for cultural analysis. This anthology, edited by a group of scholars with extensive research knowledge in the field of cultural perspectives on big data, counters a prevailing discursive approach toward the digital as immaterial, instead highlighting the digital archive as a node of extensive, material relations. Conscious of warfare as an originating context for the development of many of today’s pervasive digital technologies, the book addresses how the digital archive is embedded with a martial logic that extends beyond the exclusionary space of the battlefield. It particularly elevates the role of aesthetics as a primary source of inquiry and critique, producing an in-depth analysis of the archive as it functions in the arena of conflict, with special regard to its effect on the sensorial. Art practices figure predominantly as a theoretical source as well as a source for creating an alternative “archival imaginary” through articulations on the material and sensorial relations of warfare. W(archives) includes contributions from a diverse array of scholars and artists including Ariella Azoulay, Kevin McSorley, and Heba Y. Amin. This ambitious anthology joins a broader emergence of interdisciplinary analyses from the field of cultural studies, which address the ethical implications of digitisation and how aesthetics as artistic practice may respond and counter the violence that is generated through forms of meaning production in the sociopolitical realm of global conflict.
The book itself is beautifully printed and designed, replete with visual supplements of detailed illustrations, artworks, maps, graphs, photographs, and historical documents. This is not merely an aesthetic choice: these visual supplements also well display how the archive is discursively approached through analyses that focus on the specific units of the archive, regarding it as “a repository of evidence, testimony and images,” and further problematising the notion of truth which underlies them (xxxi). This anthology approaches the digital archive as a key techno-cultural form, exploring the way it is operationalised through engagements in war and political conflict and its capacity to reorganise and disrupt society. Organised into four chapters, W(archives) covers the subject of spatial and temporal reconfigurations of the archive on a mass scale, the techno-aesthetics of drone technology (which is regarded here as an archival machine), an entanglement of the sensorial with the archive, and lastly, the constructs of archival notions of truth and evidence. As can be evidenced from these directions, there is considerable attention placed on the theoretical formulations that underscore them. There is an attention placed on the order of contributions within each chapter, with the last often leading to and opening the discussion of the next chapter. Certain pertinent topics are revisited in different contributions and from different critical vantage points. For example, the operative temporality of maps in conflict as discussed by Anders Engberg-Pedersen in projecting “imaginary futures” is brought up again in the interview by Anthony Downey with Heba Y. Amin, albeit from an historical perspective. Another topic concerns the instrumentality of contemporary art practices, discussed with nuance by Solveig Gade and brought up again in the aforementioned interview with Amin. The topical connections found across the anthology strengthen its contribution to adjacent discourses such as the aesthetics of war and art theory.
The anthology updates theoretical inquiries into the role of the archive set forth by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and its transformation in the digital realm and in the intensified arena of warfare. An underlying argument that is made throughout the collection is that the material extensions of digital technologies are nowhere more exposed than in the context of warfare, where the stakes of technological implementation result in life or death and the unmaking of entire social worlds. The commencing article by Kevin McSorley comprehensively outlines the implications of the digitisation of the archive and how it functions as a totalising apparatus in war. He describes the emergence of its massive scale in its ability to record the actions and behaviours of entire populations. Furthermore, he describes how the digital (w)archive is generative of new forms of knowledge and of subjectivities through the structures of its logic. Primary here is the logic of pattern recognition as it replaces intentionality to construct enmity, leaving targets to be defined based on activities rather than on identities. The problem as McSorley defines it is that the system of the digital archive — and of big data in general — churns out endless recommendations for targets, committing to an endless expansion of warfare. This contribution by McSorley is well-placed at the start of the anthology, establishing the centrality of the digital archive in war as a source of meaning and knowledge.
The following chapters expand upon a critical engagement with aspects of the (w)archive. This is done primarily through aesthetics and aesthetic practices of inquiry utilised as sources of critique, reveal, and refusal toward the particular kinds of violence that are waged through archival operations in conflict. The role of aesthetics is described as inherent to digitised warfare in the introduction: “…with digital technology permeating all levels of warfare from communications to weapons technologies, the means of representing war can almost be collapsed with the means of waging war” (xvi). In this way, the anthology takes up the work heralded by scholars like Paul Virilio in examining aesthetics through war logic and vice versa. Yet the approaches taken by the contributions in this anthology update this discourse through addressing issues of wide-scale datafication with special regard to the realm of the sensorial and embodiment (210). For example, in the artistic contribution by Aimee Zito Lema, her artwork utilises photographs of members of revolutionary movements under the Argentinian dictatorship (1966–1983) and transforms these into life-size sculptures made from molds of the artist’s body (271–284). The work approaches the notion of the body as an archive communicated both photographically, through the representation of physical gesture as well as sculpturally, through the casting of figurative forms. And foregrounds the corporeal memory of trauma in political conflict, shaped by and through the body.
There is particular attention given to the production of alternative constructs of a (w)archive and a practice of producing new vocabularies to account for and critique the aesthetic shifts brought about through the digitisation of war. For example, in the contribution by Azoulay titled, “The Imperial Condition of Photography in Palestine: Archives, Looting, and the Figure of the Infiltrator,” she revisits an archive of photographs recording the Palestinian expulsion of 1948 and disentangles the subjects within these images from the categories and taxonomies provided by the archive’s captions, all set forth by an imperialist agenda (309–335). In so doing, she intervenes with an alternative archival reading that disrupts a narrative of imposed violence that naturalises and justifies expulsion of Palestinians through a categorisation of the individuals as “infiltrators." Alternative imaginaries of the (w)archive are also addressed in the conversational essay from Svea Bräunert, Sarah Tuck, and Louise Wolthers titled, “Watched by Drones: Photographic Surveillance in Art, War and Protest.” In it they address the archive from the perspective of their curatorial practice and in regard to contemporary art that engages with big data and surveillance by producing “alternative” knowledge through the collection of traces that are left out of the official archives (198). In Sophie Dyer’s contribution titled, “A Probable Female, A Probable Child: Civilian Casualties, Remote Monitoring, and Recognition Work in the Air War Against ISIS,” she addresses the lack of archival evidence of civilian casualties in the conflict in Iraq and Syria against ISIS by the RAF as a disruption of the sense of visual perception. She coins the term, “mis/seeing,” which she describes as the act of “seeing but not seeing,” to describe a duplicity of misrecognition and denial — both evidential as well as sensorial— that occurs when the wrong person has been targeted (233).
A primary stated aim of the anthology is to produce new “epistemic alliances” which can “more capaciously register, account for, and oppose war” (xxxi). Some of these alliances are merged at the gate, as reflected in the title’s coining of the term, (w)archive, as well as in the directions that organise the chapters. This adds to an initial confrontation with the material as opaque. At times, analysis of the “digital” gets lost in these formulations and not all contributions necessarily reflect back upon this aspect. This is not to say that each entry needs to do so, but that it can cause the direction of the anthology to, at times, entropy. The anthology would benefit from additional entries that ground and describe the role of the digital archive in contemporary conflict outside of a purely aesthetic analysis — providing, in other words, more attention toward the “archive” before the production of its “imaginary.” This inclusion of wider practical contexts would help make the material and direction of its formulations more transparent.
(W)archives takes risks with more than a few entries that experiment with the written format, merging text with genres of artistic practice. As a reader, one is confronted with modes of text that shift and rearrange themselves, repositioning the reader as audience member to a play or of a philosophical treatise. The risks — both textually and epistemically — taken by this anthology contribute to the way it passionately addresses, answers to, and indeed at times prescribes solutions for a much-needed, expanded understanding of the extensive material relations that coalesce around contemporary digital phenomenon. In providing counter-readings of the material units of the archive, this book itself functions as a counter-archive. At the heart of this anthology is a motivation to “mak[e] sensuous the experience of living with war” and as such centralise the body as a source of knowledge production in contemporary warfare, including how an aesthetic experience is transformed through the technologies of its record. These experimental approaches explore the constructs of an archive expanding its understanding as a multimodal medium which is generative of diverse and durational subjectivities. W(archives) provides a rich discourse on the material relations of the digital archive in martial conflict, both historically as well as contemporarily. This anthology centralises the digital archive as a node of extensive material relations extending out toward the everyday relations in society, covering important directions of inquiry that span a wide range of study in critically questioning the generative logic of digital archives. In its aim to not only account for but to oppose war, this collection contributes to emerging cultural theory analyses that actively fill in a discursive gap in a call for ethics in implementation. As this anthology shows, aesthetic analyses of contemporary war and engagement are necessary in this digitised age to understand the wider cultural trends of our time because of the increasing disappearance of exclusionary spaces that discern between the parameters of a battlefield and the arenas of the private and public.
Further Reading
Cantor L and Watlington E (eds) (2021) Relative Intimacies, Intersubjectivity Vol. III. London: Sternberg Press.
Ferguson H (2004) The Sublime and the Subliminal: Modern Identities and the Aesthetics of Combat. Theory, Culture & Society 21(3): 1–33. DOI: 10.1177/0263276404043618.
Ibrus I and Ojamaa M (2020) The Creativity of Digital (Audiovisual) Archives: A Dialogue Between Media Archaeology and Cultural Semiotics. Theory, Culture & Society 37(3): 49–70. DOI: 10.1177/0263276419871646.
Liljefors M, Noll G and Steuer D (eds) (2019) War and Algorithm. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
McSorley K (2019) Predatory War, Drones and Torture: Remapping the Body in Pain. Body & Society 25(3): 73–99. DOI: 10.1177/1357034X18822085.
Lila Lee-Morrison is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests include investigating the cultural implications of machine vision at the intersection of contemporary art and critical theory. She is currently investigating the topic of machinic modes of perception in relation to the genre of landscape imagery and an aesthetics of the Anthropocene. She completed a PhD at the Division of Art History and Visual Studies in Lund University with a published dissertation titled, “Portraits of Automated Facial Recognition: On Machinic Ways of Seeing the Face” (Transcript Verlag, 2019). She has written on the visual politics of drone warfare, biometric systems, and media images of the European immigration crisis. She has published with MIT Press, Liverpool University Press, and Brill Publishing.
Email: lile@sdu.dk
