Re: [microsound] [ot] Derrida

[Aaron Ximm <ghede@xxxxxxxx>]

Sometime ago someone on this list mentioned Derrida's Archive Fever, the
title of which struck a chord ~ so I recently got a copy used and have
just begun to read it.

Can anyone provide a contextual framework for me for this book? Is it in
response to something, or situated in some specific dialog, that I should
be aware of --- ?  My Freud is rusty, but so far I haven't hit anything
that treats psychoanalytic theory directly.

(It is the text (expanded on or at least footnoted I believe) of a lecture
D. gave at the Freud archive.)

The chord struck was: I wanted to see what he had to say about the process
of making an archive: which for me seems relevant to my own focus, making
field recordings (and working with them), and also, perhaps even more
direclty, a sub-project of mine ~ I'm documenting my life by taking at
least 30 [digital] pictures every day, with the intention to compile them
into video at 30 fps: so each day equals one second of film. The ultimate
goal is to compile a nearly exactly one-hour film over ten years:

 http://www.quietamerican.org/related.html

I just completed the first year, and am most of the way through selecting
out the pictures for each day ~ I'd intended to do this as I went, but
fell behind...

The coincidence of doing this sorting, observing the first real cut (of
the first six months, which flash by in three minutes), and the arrival of
this book is fortuitous.  I am highly aware of the way my attention drifts
and focuses during this project, and looking back in a condensed period
over the year it is easy to start to see pecadillos and patterns that I
more or less unconsciously regularly produce in the process of documenting
each day.

The question I am trying to put to myself is one that I imagine D. asking,
in fact already think I hear him asking in the first pages (perhaps
naively, it's been a long time since I read one of his books): what is
left out of this archive of images?  What is represented primarily through
its absence?  Which images catch the attention because they seem (seem!)
to want to draw attention exactly to something that could have been left
out, and are they hiding something -- else?

Incidentally the reasons I am doing this project are many, but one
visceral source of appeal is the chimerical, quicksilver quality of the
stroboscopic film: nominally a step towards a comprehensive record of what
is visible in my life, it is in fact a media object right at the edge of
what the medium is capable of (full resolution, full frame rate) -- and it
exhibits all of the perils of subjective memory. It is too much, too quick
changing, and there is quite literally no hope of catching more than a
fraction of what passes by, even on repeated viewings.

I have humored myself that I am therefore realizing a self-immolating
archive, a my-brary that sacks itself, and one that therefore seems very
Derridean...

Comments on the book, and on my (mis)reading of my own project, welcome.

  aaron

  who is posting,
   for once,
     something other than a show promo

  ghede@xxxxxxxx
  http://www.quietamerican.org

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