Archive That, Comrade!

Phil Cohen

Description

Archive That, Comrade! explores issues of archival theory and practice that arise for any project aspiring to provide an open-access platform for political dialogue and democratic debate. It is informed by the author’s experience of writing a memoir about his involvement in the London underground scene of the 1960s, the London street commune movement, and the occupation of 144 Piccadilly, an event that hit the world’s headlines for ten days in July 1969.

After a brief introduction that sets the contemporary scene of ‘archive fever,’ the book considers what the political legacy of 1960s counter culture reveals about the process of commemoration. The argument then opens out to discuss the notion of historical legacy and its role in the ‘dialectic of generations’. How far can the archive serve as a platform for dialogue and debate between different generations of activists in a culture that fetishises the evanescent present, practices a profound amnesia about its past, and forecloses the sociological imagination of an alternative future? The following section looks at the emergence of a complex apparatus of public fame and celebrity around the spectacle of dissidence and considers whether the Left has subverted or merely mirrored the dominant forms of reputation-making and public recognition. Can the Left establish its own autonomous model of commemoration?

The final section takes up the challenge of outlining a model for the democratic archive as a revisionary project, creating a resource for building collective capacity to sustain struggles of long duration. A postscript examines how archival strategies of the alt-right have intervened at this juncture to elaborate a politics of false memory.

Sujets

• Hippie

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629635316
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

In ancient Greek philosophy, kairos signifies the right time or the moment of transition. We believe that we live in such a transitional period. The most important task of social science in time of transformation is to transform itself into a force of liberation. Kairos, an editorial imprint of the Anthropology and Social Change department housed in the California Institute of Integral Studies, publishes groundbreaking works in critical social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, geography, theory of education, political ecology, political theory, and history.
Series editor: Andrej Gruba i
Kairos books:
Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society by Michael Albert
In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism: The San Francisco Lectures by John Holloway
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore
Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities by Alana Apfel
We Are the Crisis of Capital: A John Holloway Reader by John Holloway
Archive That, Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance by Phil Cohen
Beyond Crisis: After the Collapse of Institutional Hope in Greece, What? Edited by John Holloway, Katerina Nasioka and Panagiotis Doulos
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici
Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples by Erica Lagalisse
Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater

The Retort imprint publishes books and pamphlets in the spirit of resistance to capital and empire, emerging from the collaborative activity of the Retort group of antinomian writers, artists, and artisans.
Archive That, Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance
Phil Cohen
2018 PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-506-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964733
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
In memory of Ste, beloved adopted son whose untimely death created a void no archive can fill
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
Moot Points
Archive Fever: Coming in from the Cold?
Counter Culture: Then and Now
Ten Days That Shook My World: Remembering 144 Piccadilly between Spectacle and Trauma
In My End Is Others Beginning: Left Legacy Politics and the Dialectic of Generations
Winners and Losers
Let Us Now Praise Famous People: Paradigms of Remembrance and the Twin Cultures of Modernity
Fame Academies
On Memes and other Mnemonic Devices
Technologies of Immortality
Towards a Theory of Archival Genres
A Tale of Two Archives
Between Realpolitik and Dingpolitik : The Living Archive in a Post-information Age
The Adoptive Archive: A Thought Experiment
Left Field and the Quest for Uncommon Ground
Lest We Remember, Lest We Forget: On Iconoclasm and the Problematics of Silence
Archival In/Disciplines
Curating the Anarchive
Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future
The Arc of Memory
Postscript: The Politics of False Memory in the Age of Post-Truth
NOTES
FURTHER READING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
List of Illustrations
Dr John photograph
Don t Mourn, Organise
The Museum of Innocence
L Archiviste (Schuiten and Peeters)
Demonstration to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the facade of Oriel College, Oxford
The Black Cultural Archive
Infoshop 56a
Monument against Fascism, Hamburg
Goshka Macuga, Death of Marxism, Women of All Lands Unite , 2013
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Iain Boal for convening the original deposition event at the MayDay Rooms, for encouraging me to elaborate on those initial remarks, and for his many editorial comments. I would also like to thank Tim Clark for his detailed and perceptive comments on an early draft and for his very useful suggestions on how to improve it. Neither of the above should be held responsible for any of the views or arguments expressed here. Thanks also to all those friends and comrades who attended the MayDay Rooms event for their contributions to the discussion, which I have drawn on extensively in revising the text of the talk for publication. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves, the publisher of my memoir, Reading Room Only , for inviting me to talk at a conference of trade-union and community activists in Nottingham, which first prompted these deliberations. Finally I would like to thank Donald Nicholson-Smith for his encouragement, for his many useful editorial suggestions, and for helping see the project through to publication. As always, my partner Jean McNeil has provided much shrewd counsel and support, bringing a painter s eye to the detail of the argument; she also came to my rescue in helping source the references for the bibliography.
Phil Cohen, Wivenhoe and London, December 2017
Preface
Not so long ago I had the experience of mentoring a young German student who was intensely curious about British culture and society and what had shaped it in the second half of the twentieth century. He plied me with questions such as: What was it like before Mrs Thatcher? ; How does the situation of gay people today compare with what it was like in the 1960s? ; When did Damien Hirst first become famous? ; How did people in this country respond to the fall of the Berlin Wall? ; Have British people always not liked immigrants? I did not always find it easy to answer him without falling into what Marx called dumb generalities , but I did my best to point him in the direction of where the answers might be found. Quite often I ended up telling him stories about my own political involvements when I was his age, in the 1960s. After one such episode, he turned to me and said, Dude, you know, you re a real archivist! I did not know whether to be flattered or to read this as a wind-up cum put-down to the effect that my experience no longer had any relevance to the present and was simply of historical interest, but it became apparent that he meant it as a genuine compliment. After all, he came from a society which had tried to get a whole postwar generation to forget about its immediate past, and where opening up the archives revealed all kinds of previously hidden and painful facts.
It is, of course, very gratifying to be asked about one s past by someone much younger who is as interested in its political dimensions as its personal ones. Even the so-called selfie generation occasionally come out of their reverie, look about and fasten on some figure that can tell once-upon-a-lifetime stories about what the world was like before they were born. Still, I had never considered myself to be an archivist. I had a small collection of magazines, posters and other ephemera from the period (1965-78) when I was active in the London underground scene, but it never occurred to me that anyone would call it an archive or be interested in what it contained. But then, I reflected, nowadays everyone is an archivist of some sort. An archival reflex is programmed into every form of research and knowledge production, and through our digital devices we have an instant archiving system to hand. Moreover, in reaction to living in a throwaway society people collect all manner of things. There is no object too trivial or ephemeral to be invested with special meaning as a collectible worthy to be catalogued: beer mats, bottle tops, stickers. Scavenging for scraps of memory in the detritus of consumerism is the stuff many do-it-yourself archives are now made of.
So, as the reader will become all too aware, I am not a professional archivist or a trained historian. In fact I studied history in my first year at University, but even then the dim awareness that archival research was an essential rite of passage for the professional historian was enough to put me off. 1 I switched to anthropology, where fieldwork had the same ritual function but promised exciting present-tense encounters with real, living others rather than having to burrow like Hegel s old mole through mounds of dusty documents, attempting to resurrect the dead and throw up new insights into the darker, more hidden aspects of their worlds. Yet anthropology, as I was soon to discover, has its own archival anxieties bound up with its colonial past. 2 As an ethnographer I became interested in what people remember and forget, what they hold on to or jettison as they struggle to make sense of their lives unfolding in particular times and places, in other words in the whole process of do-it-yourself archiving. Most of my working life has been spent with communities experiencing extreme dislocation as the economic, social and cultural landscape shifts under their feet. In these circumstances, the archive as a metaphor or model of what can be said in the future about the present, when it will have become the past, takes on great salience, even and especially for those groups who have no direct access to the official apparatus of the public record but nevertheless find their existence overrepresented there, usually in the most reductive statistical terms.
When I was invited to contribute some material to an ar