Sas Mays (English and Linguistics, Westminster)
Documents, Accumulation, and the Politics of Unfinishedness
My paper will engage with different ways of understanding what ‘unfinishedness’ might mean, in the context of documents and their collections, from a philosophical and critical-theoretical standpoint that is informed by interest in the professional practice of archiving.
As a number of theorists in a variety of disciplines have argued, the politics of contemporary life is significantly determined by the massive accumulation of digital documents and archival institutions. The hyperbole of such arguments is often characterised by a rhetoric of infinite excess, producing an image of an endlessly accumulating and ultimately inaccessible accumulation of documents. Indeed, the idea of the unfinished nature of texts and documents has always had, since the origins of Western culture, a link to the idea of an unfinished collection of documents—an unfinished archive.
While such antipathy marks much Western thinking up to structuralism, it can be seen to be subject to something of an inversion in some poststructuralist thought. In this context, the unfinishedness of the archive is positively valorised as the opening for interpretation, access, and the possibility of new knowledge and social and political forms. However, poststructuralism and postmodernism have recently been under pressure from a variety of contemporary discourses—by the contemporary continental philosophy of Alain Badiou for example, which has its own antipathy toward the unfinished archive.
Thus, there are questions concerning the conceptualisations of unfinishedness within and between philosophy, critical theory, and other disciplines, which are political not only in the sense that they may be aligned to politics in the cultural or party sense, but also in the sense of academic competition. Since we appear to be at a moment where the academic hegemony of postmodernism may be beginning to wane, questions concerning the possible necessity of endless conflicts between disciplinary conceptions of archival unfinishedness appear particularly apt for our times.
Sas Mays lectures in Critical Theory and Aesthetics at the University of Westminster and is Principle Investigator for an AHRC Beyond Text project entitled ‘Spiritualism and Technology in Historical and Contemporary Contexts’. His major area of research is in the gender politics of the archive in historical and contemporary culture, with particular emphasis on the history of photography, nineteenth century prose fiction, and the histories of philosophy and critical theory. Publications relevant to this paper include ‘Ansel Adams: the Gender Politics of Literary-Philosophical and Photographic Archives’, in Cunningham, Fisher and Mays (eds), Twentieth Century Literature and Photography (2005) and ‘Consigning Badiou to the Past: the Encyclopaedia and Philosophy’s Gendered Relation to the Endless Archive’, Cultural Politics 5:1, March 2009.
