Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory

6. Agencies of Cultural Feedback: The Infrastructure of Memory

6 Agencies of Cultural Feedback The Infrastructure of Memory WO L F G A N G E R N S T These fragments I have shored against my ruins. —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land Recycling instead of finality: the linearity of production—accumulation— consumption—devaluation—waste is being replaced by closed circuits, forcing memory-based culture to decode itself anew. We have to get used to the fact that the possibility of recycling now applies to everything—no longer annihilation, but recycling. All historical relics—empires , the Church, communism, democracy, ethnic identities, conflicts, ideologies —can be endlessly recycled. History has not only materially stepped out of cyclical time to enter the economic order of recycling (as in the recycling of industrial and nuclear waste), but the form of history itself—with its narratives implying linear development—has lost its compulsory evidence. Art is aesthetic recycling; postmodernism provided the complementary cultural theory. The infrastructure of recycling, though, is less discursive, less apparent, and less symbolic ; its nonimaginary memory is the archive.1 A R C H I V E S The practice of history provides a given society with the tools and institutions for processing its documentary relics (books, texts, narratives, registers, records, techniques, architectures, rituals, etc.) in organized forms of remanence, 107 monumentalizing them by law and with structures that transform the experience of time in protest against its passing.2 The idea of accumulating everything in a kind of general archive is a product of Modernity. Nevertheless, the archive is born of disorder;3 the disorder of images that once characterized the sales rooms, artists’ studios, and dépôts of old galleries makes sense once again from the perspective of chaos theory (the concept of entropy, as the second law of thermodynamics, has found its way into cultural analysis). Under the roof of a then-deserted (now burned down) warehouse on the Quai de la Seine, the studio of Parisian artist Pascal Kern represented such an interim step in the transition from art to archive: “A disorder of sorts reigns in the images Pascal Kern shows us, a disorder of objects, materials, allusions, in the image of the surroundings in which he lives and works upon memories of wandering and drifting in derelict places, like waste sites, abandoned houses, and factories.”4 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the ruptures of tradition brought on by political and economic revolutions, a sense of loss created the discursive need for history in its emphatic sense. As a result of Napoleon’s secularization of church property, vast archives were opened to the European public, which—like the delayed opening of the Vatican State Secret Archives around 1880—led to a sudden mass output of past data. Much of this data, decontextualized from its former surroundings, was immediately turned into waste paper; in fact, parchments were occasionally used as food packaging. As late as 1855, the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung (no. 124, May 25) announced, under the rubric of “Miscellanea,” the trial of an archivist at Nuremberg who had sold historic documents as waste paper and kept valuable parergonal, or supplementary, materials such as seals, copper, and wax. Attached to the immateriality of philological information is a material margin, which we tend to consider in the monumental terms of value, rather than in a documentary way. By concentrating hermeneutic attention on the meaning of the texts and channeling their semantics historiographically, that is, by mediating it in typography, the materiality of manuscripts, as writing supports, became, in a sense, redundant.5 To counter-balance the loss of contextualized meaning, a philosophical construct of an emphatic idea of history was needed, together with pragmatic institutions , such as the post–Napoleonic source-editing enterprise Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Berlin, sites for the storage of material artifacts, such as the Germanisches Nationalmuseum at Nuremberg, and magazines for all kinds of printed matter, such as the German Library at Leipzig (Deutschen Bücherei, from 1916). These institutions subjected desemioticized artifacts to a process of resemiosis ,6 transforming the archaeological status of both texts and objects as monuments into documents of a history prefigured mainly in the narrative of the nation. At the same time, this symbolic registration and transformation made 108 Wa s t e - S i t e S t o r i e s originals, in a sense, superfluous, once more condemning them to waste, since they would be...