The origin of the archive is always already linked to destruction. Something is preserved in order to avoid destruction. And vice versa, something is destroyed in order to abolish knowledge and memory. The destruction of books is as old as the book.
The Great shard⁄Library of Alexandria, the most famous historical attempt at a universal repository of human memory, vanished in flames. Yet, immediately after destruction, “daughter libraries” were established and the transmission of knowledge continued.
More than two centures earlier, around 213 BC, China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the first book burning in recorded history. Anticipating the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine who said “where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too”, he also buried alive some 460 scholars for owning forbidden books.
Later would come the Inquisition and the Nazis who would perfect the method of burning books together with burning people.
During the early days of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was burned to the ground together with some 3 million books and artifacts. With this event Sarajevo didn’t just lose a building, it was dispossessed and deprived of its memory, including of original documents from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires that were a testimony to various aspects of Bosnia’s centuries-old history and a proof of peaceful coexistence and multiculturalism even before the term was invented by the so called “West”.
Around the same time, during the 1990s, almost 2,8 million books or 13.8% of total books were removed from Croatian libraries. Not in flames, but in a seemingly more “civilised” process of “writing off books” – not only books about socialism and marxism, but also classics like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and others who were considered to be on the “Yugoslav” = “Serbian side”.
Thirty years later, we have witnessed a similar process in Ukraine that has “withdrawn” from its libraries around 19 million Russian and Soviet-era copies of books.
Since October 7th, 2023 until spring 2024, besides the destruction of public libraries, every single university in Gaza was bombed and more than 396 UNRWA and public schools were destroyed or damaged, which left more than 600,000 students without access to education. The Edward Said library, with its English language collection, is likely be ruined too.
As we can see, a new order, which usually comes after or during a war, is always connected to epistemicide, the systematic eradication of education and knowledge of those you want to destroy. Since war seems to be as old as humanity, we must consider epistemicide – along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s famous remark that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" – as old as “progress”.
In his book Archive Fever, based on a lecture given in London two years after Bosnia’s national library was destroyed, Jacques Derrida notably linked the compulsion to archive with Freud’s death drive: “right on that which permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction.”
Derrida calls this death drive the archive drive or archive fever (mal d’archive), claiming that there would be no archive desire without radical finidute. In other words,
the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.
If every archive is inevitably caught in this apocalyptic paradox, what is the use and meaning of archive in our (post-)apocalyptic times? Where does our contemporary archive fever come from if not from the realization that extinction, as the most radical finitude that we can imagine, also means the final death of the archive. Or not? What if the archive has to be pointed not only towards some possible future humans, but also other species that might be a receiver of the memory of the world in some near or distant future?
What is at stake today is not simply extinction and destruction of the biosphere, but also the semiosphere – namely the universe of signs that we created. The question is the following one: who and how is going to interpret these signs after the end of the world as we know it? While today everyone is occupied by the short-term perspective and destroying the world as quickly as possible, it is precisely these sorts of questions that need to be raised – how to communicate something to the future while preserving it even if the (semiotic) context of the archive might be completely destroyed? If even 4,500 years after the famous Giza Pyramids were built, we are still not able to fully comprehend them, what guarantee is there that some future archaeologist will be able to understand our contemporary semiotic systems and archives?
Interestingly, these kinds of questions were posed in 1981 by the US Department of Energy and the Bechtel Group, the conglomerate in charge of maintaining and securing several nuclear facilities in the United States. Their main concern was how to communicate the Apocalypse (as revelation) about the dangers of buried or leaking radiocactivity to future generations. So, they invited a team of linguists, semioticians, anthropologists and nuclear physicists into The Human Interference Task Force to explore how to reduce the likelihood of future interference in radioactive waste repositories.
The prime objective of this grand initiative of applied “nuclear semiotics”, which had to take into account also the possibility that over such a long period spoken and written languages might go extinct, was to come up with concrete proposals of how to transmit knowledge about the repositories to future generations. To put it simply, how do we prevent some future archaeologists from thinking that they have found the Giza pyramids of our time instead of nuclear waste?
The Human Interference Task Force concluded that significant reductions in the likelihood of human interference could be achieved, for perhaps thousands of years into the future, if appropriate steps are taken to communicate the existence of the repository. Consequently, the Task Force directed most of its study for two years towards the field of long-term communication. Around the same time, in order to determine how to convey such a message to a distant future, the German Zeitschrift für Semiotik carried out a survey in 1982 asking the following question:
How would it be possible to inform our descendants for the next 10,000 years about the storage locations and dangers of radio- active waste?
The responses, even though the period of 10,000 years seems a rather optimistic projection of how long nuclear waste would stay radioactive, were highly original and thought-provoking, even from today’s perspective. And the more we head out into the one-way street of planetary catastrophe, the more interesting – and important – they are becoming. Because they open up the terrain of the shard⁄long-term perspective that is so absent today, and, at the same time, a sense of urgency and necessity to widen our shard⁄sense of shard⁄imagination.
For instance, the American semiotician and linguist Thomas Sebeok, one of the founders of “zoosemiotics” and “biosemiotics”, who was a member of the Human Interference Task Force in the early 1980s, proposed the creation of what he called an “Atomic Priesthood”, a panel composed of scientists (physicists, anthropologists, semioticians) that would, like the major religious institutions (for example, the Catholic Church), have the obligation to preserve and chronicle the ‘warning’ over the next 2,000 years (in this case, not the biblical “revelation”, but the message about the dangers and locations of the radioactive waste). How would they do it? In his detailed report for the US Office of Nuclear Waste Management, titled “Communication measures to bridge ten millennia”, Sebeok proposes a “folkloric relay system”, basically suggesting that the ‘Atomic Priesthood’, after dividing the 10,000-year frame into manageable segments of shorter periods, should deal with creating annually renewed rituals and legends retold year-on-year.
The Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem, famous for his novel Solaris (1961), proposed the creation of artificial satellites that would transmit the warning from their orbit to Earth for millennia and, just in case, would encode information about the nuclear waste into the DNA of flowers to be planted near the repositories. The German physicist and author Philipp Sonntag went a step further and suggested constructing an artificial moon that would last for 10,000 years engraved with the warning message. And certainly, one of the most thought-provoking proposals, based on evidence of the long history of coexistence between cats and humans, a French author together with an Italian semiotician proposed breeding “radiation cats” that would change colour when they went near radioactive sites.
In 1984, after two years of interdisciplinary deliberation across the world, the Human Interference Task Force published a substantial technical report for the US Department of Energy containing their final proposal. None of the above proposals entered the final report, and instead of zoosemiotics or engineering a new religion to protect nuclear waste repositories, the Task Force proposed an architectural – or rather “place- making” – solution, namely, the creation of a large monument at the site formed out of several gigantic stone monoliths inscribed with the information in all human languages. It is an interesting solution, but the same question remains: how to communicate the Apocalypse (the “revelation”) across millennia so that it could be read and decoded, and what if – in that distant future – there is no one to communicate it to?
This brings us, finally, to public shadow archives and libraries. Aren’t the contemporary shadow librarians a sort of a Human Interference Task Force? With an important difference: they want interference, they don’t want to warn some future recepient of the archive to leave it alone, they want her to interfer, to dive into the archive. Yet, there is also a similiarity, as glassblower⁄Nick Thurston has pointed out by comparing the nuclear “archive” with the “public library”. The “radioactivity” of UbuWeb – and other archives, including the pioneering work and tragic fate of Aaron Swartz – consists in its mission to make knowledge publicly available and free, thus subverting the prevailing model of intellectual property and the highest semiotic order that organizes our present, namely, capital – and profit.
So, are the custodians and those involved in shadowing and mirroring some sort of preppers? On the contrary, while the Silicon Valley billionaires are building nuclear shelters on New Zealand and preparing escapes to Mars with their own private archives, shadow librarians are interested in spreading, decentralizing and decolonizing archives, creating conditions for “autonmous life” [shard: Saša Savanović, Autonomous life] in the here and now, while “becoming parasitic” [shard: Saša Savanović, Becoming parasitic] and “barbarian” [reflection: Olga Goriunova]. Their strength is not in acceleration and growth, but in slowness. Like Michael Ende’s Momo. While hacking temporality, they rehabilitate and reinvent the vernacular. They are embracing the inevitable: namely the possibility of post-linguistic communication that is not ashamed of being absurd, on the contrary, they take the absurd as the means of survival.
Shadowing, mirroring, copying, permacomputing, combining low-tech and sustainable technology, using systems that are easily constructed and deconstructed, might seem a bit absurd in a world on the verge of biospheric and semiotic collapse, but as the Custodians remind us in their solidarity letter with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub [shard: Custodians.Online “In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub]:
This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective disobedience.
The “public library” as an institution for survival [shard: Tomislav Medak, Libraries against the separation from the common], or the archive as barbarian and parasitic – is indeed an act of collective disobedience. It is the contemporary response to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in which firemen burn books, while so called “drifters” become living archives – each of them having memorized books in order to rebuild society after the dystopian nightmare.
More recently, the science fiction film Leave the World Behind ends with a girl finding an underground bunker with shelves filled with DVDs, including, the final season of Friends which she watches while the world is ending. “If there’s any hope left in this fucked-up world, I want to at least find out how things turn out for them”, says the girl, meaning the six principal characters of Friends.
You could say this is another ironic proof of the contemporary escapism, but it reveals an important insight about archiving – there is always something, connected to a particular pleasure (or even: jouissance). It is both Thanatos and Eros, destruction and preservation, apocalypse and the archive, which is at play here.
And it brings us back to the starting paradox which obviously can’t be resolved but has to be accepted as the fundamental precondition and – destiny of the archive. If we will never escape the “archive fever”, we should embrace it.
“Everything is temporary”, anyhow.