From global search engines to local smart cities, from public health monitoring to personal self-tracking technologies, digital technologies continuously capture, process, and archive social, material, and affective information in the form of big data. Although the use of big data emerged from the human desire to acquire more knowledge and master more information and to eliminate human error in large-scale information management, it has become clear in recent years that big data technologies, and the archives of data they accrue, bring with them new and important uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors, and, as a result, new ethical challenges that require urgent attention and analysis. This collaboratively written article outlines the conceptual framework of the Uncertain Archives research collective to show how cultural theories of the archive can be meaningfully applied to the empirical field of big data. More specifically, the article argues that this approach grounded in cultural theory can help research going forward to attune to and address the uncertainties present in the storage and analysis of large amounts of information. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, we reveal a set of different, albeit intertwined, configurations of archival uncertainty that emerge along with the phenomenon of big data use. We regard these configurations as central to understanding the conditions of the digitally networked data archives that are a crucial component of today’s cultures of surveillance and governmentality.
This article sets itself against the bulk of scholarship on surveillance, which is characterized by emphasis either on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon, or on Gilles Deleuze’s too-brief “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” In contrast to these dominant critical paradigms, the article recuperates a mode of governmentality proposed in Foucault’s last lectures on “Security,” in order to draw out the latent instabilities that beset contemporary surveillance systems and hence reveal the possibility of resisting them. The article’s recuperation of “Security” proceeds by way of close readings of workplace documentaries by radical filmmakers Harun Farocki (Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten, Ein neues Produkt, and other films) and Carmen Losmann (Work Hard Play Hard). When analyzed in concert with Foucault’s neglected late lectures, and in a final move with the post-Freudian theory of perversion, these films prompt new reflection on complicity with surveillance and, importantly, the unexpected potential of that complicity as an error in the systems of contemporary workplaces and leisure-spaces.
This article turns its attention to the accounts that Foucault and Derrida made following their encounters with archives, and it relates these accounts to the files of the former East German secret police. Derrida and Foucault located differing qualities of authority in the archives that they consulted, yet they are shown here to converge around a problem of non-integrity in the structuration of the archive as supposed guarantor of epistemological sovereignty. A terminology of sovereign integrity dominates the Stasis files, so that they sit in stark contrast with the literary and cinematic texts that grapple with the Stasi's legacy-texts that are beset with images of inconsistency and perforation. When read in dialogue with the poststructuralist accounts of the archive, these spy files and the cultural works that emerged after their o p e n in g enable new reflection on the ethics of visiting archives, as an act of doing justice that nonetheless risks collapsing the fragments of complex pasts into the narrative wholes of the political present.
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