The December 2018 issue of The History of the Human Sciences presents a collection of essays dedicated to understanding the historical, political, moral and aesthetic issues in totalizing projects of late modernity – ‘The Total Archive: Data, Identity, Universality.’ Here the issue’s editors, Boris Jardine and Matthew Drage, discuss the origins of the project and some of their ideas about the image and pragmatics of universal knowledge.

Matthew Drage (MD): Boris, tell me a bit about how the idea for this special issue came about?

Boris Jardine (BJ): I was visiting the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the History of Science (Berlin) in 2014, as part of the working group ‘Historicizing Big Data’ – but I was only at the MPI briefly, and when I was back in Cambridge I wanted to do something that drew on what I’d learnt there, involving some of the fantastic scholars I’d met. It seemed to me that the idea/reality of ‘The Archive/archives’ supervened on notions of ‘data’, and that there were philosophical, ethical and historical issues around classification, privacy and knowledge that became pressing when the concept of ‘totality’ came into play. I was also talking to historians in different fields – economic history, history of bio-medicine, art history/aesthetics – and wanted to do something that connected those. With some colleagues I proposed a conference at CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) in Cambridge, which happened in March 2015. So this has been a while germinating!

MD: I know might be is a slightly strange side of the story , but my recollection is that it was also connected to an art project that we were both involved in.

BJ: Yes, ‘UA’, or ‘Elements of Religion’ as it was originally known. That was how I/we got to the idea of the aesthetics of totality, as a (quasi) religious idea. I wrote about that in the special issue of LIMN that came out soon after the conference. But you’re better placed to explain what that project was…

MD: I’ll do my best! So at the same time that Boris was thinking about the historical questions surrounding the emergence of the first really huge data projects of the 21st century – we were both part of an Arts Council project which aimed to consider totality from a rather different perspective. We were thinking and talking about the ways in which religions sought to encompass totalities, and how the productive modes that religions often house (text-writing, ritual, song, architecture, healing practices, contemplation) are arranged to create all-encompassing institutional wholes. And we were trying to produce our own productive systems styled on religion, as a way of making and viewing artworks. John Tresch, a historian of science who influenced mine and Boris’s introduction to the special issue, writes at length how the Auguste Comte sought to create a ‘religion of positivism’ – a religion built entirely on the ideal of total human knowledge. Our work on the aesthetics of total knowledge as parts of ‘Elements of Religion’ gave us a perspective on the emergent debates about big data that we then went on to explore in the conference in 2015, and then the special issue.

BJ: So a large part of what we were/are thinking about is to do with ‘images’ of totality – that can indicate literal images, but it also has a broader meaning. Perhaps you could say something about that, and how the contributors addressed it?

MD: I think this was what I found most exciting about the contributions – the range of ways in which the authors dealt with and understood ‘images’ of totality. In the case of Judith Kaplan’s work, for example, sometimes this took the form of poetic images. Her article examines (in part) the work of a group of Russian historical linguistic scholars, who collaborated with Americans in the 1990s to attempt to uncover the deep pre-history of human language. One of the field’s founding fathers, V. M. Illich-Svitych, Kaplan tells us, pieced together a projected ‘Nostratic’ language, which, he claimed, gave birth to eight major world language groups. In the language he had devised, he composed poems. In one, he wrote,

Language is a ford through the river of Time, 

It leads us to the dwelling place of those gone ahead; 

But he does not arrive there

Who is afraid of deep water. 

I think this typifies the kind of visionary, sometimes even mystical perspective that, as the authors in this issue show, seem to emerge when people take the image of the total archive very seriously as a model for human knowledge. It seem to draw those who are involved into (and perhaps sometimes past) the limits of human subjectivity, and then to confront them, sometimes violently, with the political, moral, aesthetic and spiritual consequences. 

BJ: I love that this example is also about pragmatics. Kaplan explains how Illich-Svitych was trying to resolve quite a difficult technical issue in historical linguistics when he came up with this hypothesis about a single overarching language family. That seems to be a typical move – or one of two kinds of move: sometimes people start with a problem they want to solve and realise that they’ve come up with a procedure before coming up with a classification, at which point they end up with problems of scale, manageability, even moral issues to do with representation and ownership. This is striking in the case of Alan Lomax, as described by Whitney Laemmli. That’s also what I found with Mass-Observation. And it’s obviously a very contemporary concern in the age of social media, genetic data etc. The other direction is also interesting though: the ‘Casaubon method’, where you have a ‘key to all mythologies’ and collect or order everything within that system, or find a way to order everything in such a way that nothing can be added or taken away. Just thinking of Edward Casaubon from Middlemarch though, do you think there are important issues of gender and gendered knowledge in this collection?

MD: Something that comes through very strongly in a lot of the articles in this issue is the relationship between ambitious, utopian institution-building and patriarchal power. This is something that Jacques Derrida talks a lot about in his long essay, Archive Fever, which has a lot to say about how psychoanalysis – one of the 20th century’s defining knowledge projects – was very strongly structured by a Jewish patriarchal logic that valorises ritualised transmissions from father to son. Many of his conclusions there could, I think, be justly extended to cover the cases covered in this special issue. The dream of universal knowledge was often also a dream of extending the agency of individual men, institutions, nations, to encompass totalities which would then be pressed into their service, and a the same time used as a means of by which to draw in ever-greater quantities of data. Rebecca Lemov’s article, which describes the data-gathering practices of the American military in the South Pacific, is particularly good at showing how this masculinist, almost “conquestadorial” urge plays out in practice in the human sciences.

BJ: Another way to think about it – though maybe it raises more questions than it provides answers – is in terms of subjectivity: the archival subject, as (on the one hand) an organizer, possibly even a heroic or all-knowing organizer, then (on the other) an invisible labourer, cleaning up, sorting the data, enlisting subjects, becoming a subject (as in Mass-Observation), and finally (on the third hand?) the knowing subject – but I think this is where we kept hitting up against this idea of ‘pathology’ in totalizing projects. There is often ‘too much to know’, too much to organize, no place to start. I use the term ‘bathos’ to describe this for Mass-Observation but it’s definitely also present in Lemov’s piece in the figure of Tarev (a Micronesian person who displays behavior that baffles the measurement systems of the Americans sent to study him) and how he can’t quite find his place in the social data project run by Melford Spiro. The thing that links these is the critique of universality, which is there in our introduction and in some of the essays, but is probably best articulated in Cadence Kinsey’s piece on Camille Henrot and her work Grosse Fatigue.

MD: Maybe this brings us to an important point: there has been a lot of discussion recently, following electoral scandals in the US and in Britain, of the power of enormous data-gathering projects like those of Google and Facebook, of the political dangers of the dream of total knowledge. Shoshana Zuboff has written about this in a particularly provocative and urgent way in her recent book, Surveillance Capitalism. What do you think this special issue has to contribute to that debate? 

BJ: Probably the most obvious point is that the collection of huge amounts of data is also an issue of subjectivity, so that like it or not there is a fundamental connection between the self and its ‘data doubles’, and this isn’t something that can easily be ignored or avoided. Sometimes this is because there is a direct relationship between data and possibility, like in Daniel Wilson’s article about the kinds of information insurance companies offer and the attitude towards mortality that they engendered. In that case there’s a very clear connection between self-conception, financial possibility and particular ideologies of data. In other cases the connection is less clear cut but still decisive, and this seems to hinge on that idea of ‘totality’. One thing that Zuboff brings out really well I think is the way that Surveillance Capitalism is indiscriminate in a certain sense: these companies don’t really care exactly what kind of data they can accumulate. This gives a scary sense of randomness to the kind of (radically multiple) data doubles that we are all already accumulating. It’s also a kind of positivism in reverse: the data constitute the reality, but not because there is any kind of empiricist system, rather because there are massively accumulative technologies that just happen to latch on and then re-present different parts of the world.

MD: The way you put it just there suggests that maybe what the special issue adds to the debate is an important element of reflexivity. It’s not a new idea that those who are measured are changed by the process of measurement – it’s a point that Michel Foucault has made very thoroughly. Perhaps what the authors in this issue show is that there are some marked patterns in the way large-scale knowledge projects affect the human subject when those projects aim to include absolutely everything – an ambition which has never been so nearly reached as it has been by Google. 

BJ: Definitely. There are clearly issues of the limits of these projects, what they exclude, who gets left out and so on, that are common whenever the idea of totality is brought into play. But I also think the strength of the issue is in the historical specificity of the case studies. The point in each case (I take it) is that something as seemingly universal as universality has its own complex history. So there are useful points of continuity and also discontinuity – it has to be ‘both/and’ I think.

Matthew Drage is an artist, writer and postdoctoral researcher. He lately completed his PhD at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, and is now Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the History of Art, Science and Folk Practice, at the Warburg Institue, in the School of Advanced study, University of London. 

Boris Jardine is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow, supported by the Isaac Newton Trust, at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His project is titled, “The Lost Museums of Cambridge Science, 1865–1936.”