Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso Books. Chapter 2: Artificial Hells: The Historic Avant-garde
In the second chapter of the book, Bishop (2012) describes three historic avant-garde trends that were influential in the development of participatory arts: Italian Futurism (led by Filippo Marinetti), Russian Proletkult and mass spectacle, and Paris Dada (influenced by Andre Breton). These three movements encouraged “active spectatorship” in contrast to the conventional theater performance which was “derided” as one “producing passivity” (p. 44). Bishop describes these three movements as “models of participatory practice concerning three ideological positions (emergent Fascism in Italy, Bolshevism in Russia, and in France, a post-war rejection of national sentiment)” (p. 41).
Futurist activities were held on the street and included performances such as “gymnastics, slapsticks, singing, anatomical monstrosities, and so forth” (p. 45), which centered on the mostly negative interaction between performers and the public. As members of the audience and performers antagonized and attacked each other, these interactions were set to provoke conflict by evoking overwhelmingly negative emotions. The goal of Futurism was to capture the audience’s attention and redirect it toward destruction and violence which, as Bishop explains, aimed to “convert the widest possible range of Italians to a national, militaristic, techno-futuristic cause that aimed to motivate colonial expansion and rouse enthusiasm for war” (p. 47). Bishop emphasizes that “the participation” was understood by Marinetti as “total commitment to a cause;” such “abandonment” was accompanied by “regressive aspects too: a reduction to mob mentality, and abandonment of critical distance and reasoned logic” (p. 47).
Bishop’s analysis of Russian Proletkult and mass spectacle focuses on “ideological reprogramming” of the relationship between “works of art, artists, and audience” that “spanned art, theater, and music” in order to bring them in alignment with Bolshevik ideology. The goal of Proletkult, conceptualized by its “founding theorist” Aleksandr Bogdanov, was to “bring cultural production in line with collectivist ideas“ by abandoning bourgeois culture, and to revolutionize culture by bringing it in line with” collective ideas” by “merging” artists with workers and home with work and by “creating a revolutionary consciousness” (p. 50). The new art envisioned by Bogdanov was based on the “model of collective authorship” (p. 51); it was meant to be “useful and [to] effect concrete changes in society” (p. 52). The participatory role of “proletariat” was social/collective rather than individual.
Mass spectacles (described as “monumental outdoor spectacles”) were viewed as alternative to “professional theater and [as] an opportunity for culture to evolve from people themselves” (p. 58). Bishop explains the ideological difference between Prolekult’s theater and mass spectacle as follows. In Proletkult theater, the emphasis was on “participatory production:” a hierarchical model, in which state propaganda mobilized the public to form the “image of collectivity.” In mass spectacle, the emphasis was on “participatory presence:” a model in which the government supported “de-hierarchized creative process” (p. 61). Yet, critics of mass spectacle emphasized that its main goal was to “raise morale” and to distract the public from such social problems as poverty, labor camps and poor living conditions. The mass spectacle was described by critics as “a colossal waste of resources,” which rendered “the proletariat the subject of a representation that was crassly symbolic and superficial” (p. 61).
The Paris Dada movement organized performances that included mixed art forms, such as mixing music and poetry, which also used public spaces and involved interaction with the audience and, at times, techniques of “media provocation“ (p. 66). The group was conceived as “all-negating, anti-ideological, and anarchist” (p. 66). In contrast to Futurism, the goal of Dada events was to “evolve a desire rather than to scandalize” (p. 70) and to guide the viewer to “find a continuity between the work of art and their lives” (p. 71). Bishop explains that the movement created an opening “towards more refined and meaningful forms of participatory experiences,” by developing “more subtle areas of social investigation” (p. 71) (described as “quasi-anthropological investigations”) which required “appropriating a social form and subverting its conventional associations” (p. 72).
The main argument is that recovery, as drawn from Black Studies, should be foundational to black digital humanities. Recovery seeks “to restore the humanity of black people lost and stolen through systemic global racialization” (2). Through the application of restoration, the politics of recovery, data collection, and curation in digital humanities is critically reconsidered.
The main argument is that digital technology skills such as blogging, social media, mapping, Omeka, content management, and digital archiving are important skills to explore and apply the relationship between Digital Humanities and African American Studies.
The main argument draws on Bakhtin’s pulling forces, but also considers contributions from Jackson (1990), Zeitlyn (2012), Smith (2012), and Captlan (2010). From Jackson and Zeitlyn, the authors frames the relationship between researchers and fieldwork ass ambivalent and liminal (71). Yet, the researcher holds power through the agency throughout the research. Drawing on Smith, the authors points out that many ethnographers are hesitant to archive from a decolonial perspective that “the very act of collection is considered a potential violation and violence, one with a questionable legitimacy of appropriation, capture, extraction, and possession as well as a questionable authority to speak definitely about the objects captured (cf. Smith 2012)” (71). These frames lead the authors to frame in their own work “what type of archive was called for, who had interest and stakes in seeing it become a ‘thing’, and who had the energy and resources to create it” (72). They argue that engaging in an archive can address the issues raised and tap into the potentially transformative opportunities through ethnography and archives.
Vidali & Phillips (2020) argue that experimental ethnographic installations reveal the multidimensional nature of archives that include such contrasting functions and attributes as centralizing/organizing, dynamic/interactive, and accessible/engaging. The authors demonstrate how ethnographic installations are “permanently in process of creation and dispersal with agency and materiality that simultaneously pull toward a centralized coherence and a decentred diversity” (p. 67).
The authors propose that this multidimensional nature of archives is more complex than that assumed by the dualist opposition between organized collections and the “messy reality of collection, meaning, and rationality” (p. 68). Rather, Vidali & Philips (2020) emphasize that in archives there is “a multidimensional pull of various sources'' (p. 69). To explain this view, the authors use the concepts of centripetal force and centrifugal force as they were developed by the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bachtin. The authors use Bachtin’s view of the living language as an “oscillation” between the centripetal forces of “standardization and normativity,” on the one hand, and the centrifugal forces of “everyday realities of linguistic diversity” (p. 69), on the other. In the context of ethnographic installations (archives or archiving as conceptualized by the authors), the centripetal forces are those of “coherence and stability” and the centrifugal forces are those of “unpredictability and variation” (p. 69).
Additionally, the authors emphasize that archives can be seen as entities that contain “multiple agencies” and relationalities, such as the “nonhuman agency” of materials, or the agency of speakers captured in recordings, or “relationality of collectors and speakers” (p. 70).
As mentioned, the text discusses four areas to improve transparency and reanalysis. With data collection and recording, the authors encourage researchers to make use of a variety of technological tools such as audio or video recording. They suggest that these tools are used in daily life and that researchers should not take the tools used to collect or record data as a given. Instead, they should explain why such tools were used and others not given the contexts they are working in. They also suggest that making use of technology encourages more accurate data than recounting with paper and pen after the fact. Next, the authors point out that anonymization has become more difficult with the Internet and searching capabilities available to the public as well as other researchers. Rather than anonymization, the authors suggest disclosure to be a main practice because it is more honest with participants when soliciting participation and negotiating terms of consent. Data verification refers to checking discrepancies and suggest that researcher clarify their process of knowing in the study. Lastly, the authors suggest that rather than using sharing data as a norm that they should seriously consider giving more decision-making power to participants in the study over the data they contribute.
While outlining the goals and impacts that community archives organize around, the text argues crucial parts of community archives involve the personal dimensions that center the construction and purpose of developing a community archive, autonomy/independence, ownership, and sustainability. Personal dimensions refer to the diverse stakeholders involved in the curation and curation of a community archive. Autonomy, ownership, and sustainability refers to the desire for the archive to adapt to address new contexts and issues. However, the text highlights that community archives can often meet goals while obtaining public funding.
Referring archives as orphanages/hospices and performances, the main argument suggests that ethics codes of archives processes of consent and anonymization need to be reconsidered. The author highlights the role of archivists as mediators, operating liminal spaces (the archive) which gives way to the performance aspect and power of decisions made in the archival method. Recognizing this acknowledges that archival researchers need to pay attention to the weaknesses of standard anonymization, consent and access by mediating the issues that may arise. Promises made by anonymization are costly, all or nothing approaches hinder future research and limit the usefulness or matching the moral codes of the communities they are associated with. Since consent is difficult to obtain with the uncertainty of how archives might be used by others, the author points out the turn to participatory research which renegotiates the research process throughout the study. Lastly, the discussion on access covers issues on funding and ownership. Funding should hold researchers accountable to make all data collected publicly available, including field notes arguing that the destruction of data is an act of total ownership.
Zeitlin (2012) draws on historical and contemporary literature to describe different ways of understanding archives: their historical and contemporary roles in the society and their use in anthropological research.
In the beginning of this article, Zeitlin quotes works of Foucault who described “the archive” as “an expression of governmental control of its subjects” (p. 462) in which governments act as “gatekeepers” who select “which items are archived and which are condemned to oblivion” (p. 463). Thus, governments have the power to suppress and control voices of certain groups.
The author refers to other works by Foucault and works of Derrida to explain that the archive can also be used to “challenge the hegemony“ of governments and “to understand people from archives in ways never imagined or envisaged by those creating or maintaining the archives“ (p. 464). For example, scholars can “excavate” (p. 464) voices of silenced groups from an archive, through studying the positionality and biases of the archival materials, or by uncovering historical processes of record creation, thus “writing history (and ethnography) from below” (p. 465).
The author proceeds to discuss the role of archives as “liminal zones in rites of passage between memory and forgetting,” and as zones “where objects, files, and memories can be lost or retrieved” (p. 466). The work of Meehan (2009) cited in the paper conceptualizes archives as “evidence,” which is a “relation between record and event” (p. 466) that can be revealed through the interaction “among readers, documents, and archives” (p. 466).
The author also brings up two examples of the archive as “metaphorical overextension;” one is “archive as memory” and the other is “Internet as ... archive” (p. 467).
The metaphor of “archive as memory” refers to the role of archives as “repositories” of personal, collective, and historical memories (p. 467). The author brings up two works that argue that the metaphor of “memory” does not suit the concept of archive.
1) Steedman (2002) argues that archives are “human creations.” The process of active “discarding” of items (such as destruction of archives during the Second World War) is different from the process of “forgetting” (p. 468).
2) Rose (2009) argues that in our memories the past is not merely recorded but reconstructed: there will always be a difference between the first and second accounts of a memory. What is more, historical memories are reconstructed just as personal memories: different generations may “construct new narratives on the same bodies of evidence” (p. 468).
Regarding the use of the Internet as a metaphor for archive, Zeitlin points out that – while archivists “shape archives” and decide how they are cataloged – a large part of metadata in the web is “lost and [becomes] inaccessible” (p. 468).
Zeitlin also describes two models of archives. One model is ”orphanages or hospices.” In “orphanages,” caretakers manage documents with the hope of using them in the future (as the case is in film archives). And in “hospices,” one seek to ensure a “managed path to oblivion” (p. 469). The second model is that of “ performance records,” as in records of performance arts: scripts or musical scores. These records are different from performances themselves. The same can be applied to ethnographer materials and to field notes since such materials need to be interpreted and recreated.
In the second part of the paper, Zeitlin reviews several issues related to archiving in anthropological work.
The author describes three issues that concern “Ethical Codes.” First are problems of anonymization, such as the concern that anonymization of participants can prevent future development of research or conflict with “individual’s moral right to be recognized” (p.470). The second set of issues concern consent, such as the concern that materials can be used in the future for purposes other than participants had consented to. Third, there is the problem of researcher’s possession of data, including their control of access to data.
The author also brings up the issue of preservation of digital data. As technology evolves, some data can be “ trapped” in old technological devices.
Finally, Zeitlin discusses possibilities of the future of “radical archives” (p. 464), which is the technology that allows individually tailored archival data.
"How might the process of putting our outrage in order- collecting and order the culturl and intellectual products of resistance movements- remain deeply attached to the communities of practice from which they emerge as they migrate to established archives?" Eichorn 2013, 157
Eichorn grapples with the institutionalization of women's and queer people's archives from the second wave of the women's liberation movement. Eichorn acknowledges fears and critiques about the privatization of radical activism and poses the question: "what's at stake for knowledge production and activism when we foster these relationships?" (157)
Eichorn writes that in their experience, the archivists with which they have encountered are entrenched within the communities that they are archiving - involved in some sort of grassroots or community engagement. Eichorn seems to view this, as do some other texts about power and archivism, as central to liberation. Archives should not be made for the scholar alone, but should work in order to aid grassroots activism and social movements.