Digital Memory and the Archive by Wolfgang Ernst (review)

Digital Memory and the Archive contains the first English-language assemblage of writings from German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst. Compiling writings from 2002 to 2013, the text seeks to bridge both ideological and language barriers between the German and Anglo-American schools of media theory. In this work, Ernst defines and advocates for a particular brand of media archaeology, a theoretical approach to studying media history through a media-technical, mathematically driven “cold gaze.” Ernst’s media archaeology considers media as “active ‘archaeologists’ of knowledge” (p. 55) themselves, emphasizing the effect of media structure on epistemology while rejecting the value of political and social contexts, deemphasizing content-driven analyses (influenced by Marshall McLuhan), and renouncing traditional narrative structure in writing media histories (influenced by Hayden White).

The concept of the archive is central to Ernst’s work and is defined broadly, ranging from a physical repository to “[the internet’s] system of technological protocols” (p. 85) rooted in Michel Foucault’s notion of archives to a collection of “archived” digital objects. Other common threads that permeate the text include the Kittlerian notion of technology’s objectivity in communicating history, the significance of “discontinuities, gaps and absences, silence and ruptures” (p. 196) in studying media, and the notion of modern information transfer as a continuous flow rather than a storage and retrieval process.

The first of three major sections of Ernst’s work is devoted to the introduction and contextualization of these principles. The author’s analysis of the epistemological differences between artwork and lithograph/photography in documenting history visually and their effect on historical representation is a highlight, providing a persuasive argument for media-rooted analysis. Ernst then examines the notion of the archive and its temporality in media contexts ranging from television to digital art. The third section provides a series of quasi–case studies of media archaeology examining computing and sonic media both philosophically and mathematically.

Ernst’s scholarship is firmly rooted in a visionary reading of scholarly influences from the fields of history, philosophy, and media studies. However, his work suffers from an indifference toward applied disciplines highly relevant to media and archives and an unwillingness to re-contextualize his media-driven analyses into more human contexts once his metaphorical media-archaeological “digs” are completed. While the text frames itself as a “transatlantic bridge,” it often operates as an unfettered rejection of the interpretation of media and archival history as developmental rather than ruptured, leading Ernst to ignore developments by practitioners in the fields of archival and information sciences.

His dissociation of the “classical archive” and the digital archive disregards the work being done by classically trained archivists in the fields of media preservation and web archiving. Ernst writes that “the traditional function of the archive is to document an event that took place at one time and in one place, the emphasis in the digital archive shifts to regeneration, (co-)produced by online users for their own needs” (p. 95). Traditional archives do not document events so much as they preserve the relationship between records and their creators. Moreover, the notion that digital archives are committed to information transfer rather than long-term preservation of cultural memory disregards the scholarly and practical work of actual archivists working in media and digital preservation. Here, Ernst is forcing a rupture where continuities clearly exist. Furthermore, his discussion of the meaning of archiving in a web context ignores the work of many major web archiving projects, including the Internet Archive, a major oversight that diminishes credibility of the book.

More broadly, Ernst misses an opportunity to examine the ways in which the technological and epistemological changes he observes affect ways of perceiving history and culture. In one of the strongest parts of the text, Ernst highlights the work of art historian Stephen Bann who “emphasizes the role of media changes in the early nineteenth century as a driving force in the development of historical representation” (p. 41). Here, the end product of...