Archiving beyong the Archive

GARCÍA, MIGUEL ANGEL

Almaty

Simposio; 23rd International Symposium of the Study Group on Historical Sources; 2021

Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Kurmangazy Kazakh National Conservatory

With the release of Michel Foucault?s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Hayden White?s Metahistory (1973), Dominic LaCapra?s History and Criticism (1985), Jack Derrida?s Archive Fever (1997) and of a plethora of works which emerged as a reaction to these works, the term ?archive? has diversified its meaning and occupied a prominent place within the concerns of social sciences and the humanities. At present, the debates question the archive less as a reservoir and memory and more as a process and locus of knowledge and power generation. Generally, these debates refer to archiving practices proper of an institutional environment ?mainly to the academic one and, within this one, to the archives which are the product of fieldwork? and to persons and routines which are found in the academic borders, as those associated with private collecting and with business and cultural diffusion activities. The situation is not different in the particular case of sound archive studies.However, the widening of the term ?archive? suggests that archiving is an activity which is not circumscribed to institutional environments, but which has a ubiquitous presence in everyday life. Seeing and/or hearing, selecting, representing, storing ?whether it is in terms of memory, exomemory or the unconscious?, categorizing, classifying and arranging that information in such a way that it can be reactivated always with circumstantial exegeses, but in the belief that an original sense is recovered, are omnipresent archiving practices nowadays. To a certain extent, we are archiving machines as any life project requires archiving. An environment where this can be appreciated is that of music file downloading. The paper will precisely refer to how cyberspace offers ?the illusion of being? sound chaos to be ordered, classified and archived, and to how these practices occur within the framework of tension between personal taste and desire, on the one hand, and the conditions which the music industry establishes, on the other.