Order is no longer assured
by MJ Thompson

“All that remains of people is what media can store and communicate.”—Kittler
“Order is no longer assured.”—Derrida 

January 30, 2024

It’s days into the new year. The news cycle still recovering from the tech story of the year: Open AI now punting CEO Sam Altman, now bringing him back and punting his critics. The coup ended quickly; in a few days, Altman was back at the helm, and the battle for what or who would control the development of artificial intelligence had been decided. The tech bros—and big money—won. I write from a perch overlooking the city, sending a message out to any still making language, as machine-life breathes deeper into the corners of our day-to-day, infecting history and memory.

The archive.

Derrida starts with the word’s root in the Greek arkhe, meaning beginning; and moves on to the arkheion, as the building which houses the magistrate, those figures who hold the “right to make or represent the law.” In a formative essay that maps so many of the tensions inherent to the archive—beginning/end; revealing/concealing; public/private; living/dead—he speculates on a technologized future wherein the boundaries of public and private are forever compromised. More, he observes the following:

“What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives.”

That media shapes the message may be clear to any who’ve noted how YouTube dance clips—fast, catchy, abbreviated, flattened—have appeared citationally over the last two decades across different theatrical productions. Here, the conundrums of the archive dilate—at once, abundant, proliferating and producing; then again, conservative, incomplete, “violent.” What does the archive look like in the age of passwords, paywalls, algorithmic biases and the generalized flattening of possibility forged by AI as collective average?  

Dance, as it does, helps flip the question: not the archive, but which archive? The archive as singular institution, curated by nation, corporation or artistic company, tends towards control and selection; slow to change, they are nonetheless in motion and changing over time. But this is only the most familiar association with the term. It’s not a small thing to note, too, that there are different kinds of institutions: for example, the highly idiosyncratic Arcmtl, which collects ephemera and artefacts from the independent scene in downtown Montreal, is not the BANQ, which houses the national collection for Quebec. Alternately, the archives made possible by the internet, proliferating and multiple, have energized so much making and thinking since the 1990s, offering unprecedented levels of access and variations of design, content and valuation. At least, til now. 

Communications theorist Friedrich Kittler may not have been thinking about the body as media, but dancemakers know how bodies are always already archives, by other terms. Housed in flesh and bone rather than stone architecture, the body holds and shares its knowledge most readily through its techniques: acquired through mimetic transfer, affective encounters, representation and media, and more. Taking seriously the body’s role as bearer of history and knowledge, performance scholar Rebecca Schneider argues that what remains within performance’s ephemeral ontology is “flesh in a network of body-to-body transmission of enactment—evidence across generations, of impact.” Training, learning techniques, finding moves, rehearsing, performing—all testify to dance as, among other things, a “repeated act of securing memory.” There’s hope in that.

We learn by doing, but also—famously—by watching movies. The archives, then, are bodies and all manner of documents, acts and representations—and the mix is continuous and ongoing. To the extent that AI will generate our documents, reshape our cultural artefacts and revise our abilities to make sentences, the content and temporal mix of the history we carry will change. Of course, different archives allow different kinds of readings, and stable meanings are never guaranteed. Part of the linguistic, historical socio-cultural mix that surrounds us, the archival virus has always been within and without: vanity project, artesian well, tool box, icebox, haystack, landfill, magic encyclopedia, Rancierian-pedagogic prop, graveyard. But the human body—flesh and bone—is sacred; singular and shared, live and living, beautiful and apparently fearsome. It’s what we have, it’s what state power is terrified of, and it’s the terrain most affected by the rise of AI-generated artefacts and archives. Typing in the dark this early January morning, the digital seems friendly, a means of talking to those out of sight or reach. Yet, if we are archives, what new hell awaits as the fiscal-corporate take-over continues, and deep learning is ruled by boy-kings X-saboteur Elon Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella…?

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques (1995). “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics. Vol 25, No 2; 9-63.

Mauss, Marcel (1979/1934). “Techniques of the Body.” Sociology and Psychology. London: Routlege and Kegan Paul; 97-123.

Schneider, Rebecca (2001). “Performance Remains.” Performance Research. 6:2; 100-108.