In the introduction to Jacques Derrida’s printed lectures on the concept of archives, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Derrida offers a tantalizing hypothetical. He wonders how the discipline of psychoanalysis might have been born in the crucible of contemporary digital cultures. Derrida says:
One can dream or speculate about the geo-techno-logical shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, Freud, his contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to MCI or AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail.
(16)
Derrida laments that while he “would have liked to devote [his] whole lecture to this retrospective science fiction,” the time and space allowed him in his medium of dissemination – a public lecture limiting in a way Derrida describes as “the still archaic organization of our colloquia” – placed on him unhelpful and artificial constraints. Instead of expanding, in detail, on his hypothetical, as he desires, Derrida instead offers only a few brief thoughts before continuing his lecture, suggesting that:
This archival earthquake would not have limited its effect to the secondary recording, to the printing and to the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.
(16-17)
For Derrida, digital technologies would have reshaped the discipline of psychoanalysis’s entire development. These technologies would have done more than simply change the way the history of psychoanalysis was recorded; they would have altered the fundamental ways in which psychoanalysis existed.
This project, Digital Textuality, accepts Derrida’s pronunciation that digital technologies would have changed the history of psychoanalysis. In accepting that history, it also accepts (and expects) that these same technologies have altered the developments of all cultural activities. This altered development creates an unanswerable but intriguing question. In the same way Derrida wonders how psychoanalysis would have developed differently in a digital age, this project wonders how cultural events would have developed differently in a non-digital age. While this question cannot be answered, it does emphasize Derrida’s final pronunciation on the subject of technology and archives. It underscores the claim that, “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.” No, archivable content cannot be re-imagined in the ways it might have developed before the digital age; however, the new technical structures of archiving made available as a result of the digital age have enabled a “coming into existence” of cultural production and a “relationship to the future” that, prior to the digital age, could not have existed.
While Derrida, in his lectures, did not have the time or space to expound on the influences of digital technologies in archives, I do (thanks, in part, to these very digital technologies helping this project come “into existence”). In particular, this project will unpack Derrida’s final suggestion about how the technical structure of the archives facilitates its archived content’s coming into existence, as well as how these technical structures preserve that content for the future. The new technical structures available have fashioned a new kind of archives — digital archives — and these digital archives achieve a kind of cultural archivization never before available. Digital archives have produced and are producing a unique and unprecedented cultural recordation, making the Internet a digital archive of human culture.
