Lawrence Liang, “The Dominant, The Residual, and the Emergent in Archival Imagination”, and Robert Rapoport, “The Contingent and the Predictive - A Response to Lawrence Liang”

In “The Dominant, The Residual, and the Emergent in Archival Imagination”, Liang begins by discussing contemporary archival impulses, where the rate of information growth exceeds categorization and order. His mention of the modern archive as a palimpsest of the dominant, residual, and emergent forms connects to our conversation in class about the blending and layering of historical moments and timelines. The digital archive, according to Liang, has reconstructed our perception of the archive to become a virtual place that allows for immediate data transfer and access. The idea of the active archive in a digital realm is a move away from the emphasis on the archive’s role as a preservation of records to its ability to disseminate information to a wider audience.

As an extension to our conversation last week about the value of an archive to national memory, Liang also discusses the value and residue of archival material. It raises the question of what materials in an archive are worth giving a space or exhibition to. Regarding images, he expresses that ordinary images gain value as information that is part of a database rather than by virtue of their own existence. Liang states, “…there can be no higher aspiration for archives than to facilitate meaning produced through the discarded.” In this way, archive material awaits activation. We create value and decipher meanings behind discarded images and found footage. Liang maintains that the archivist’s breath is a restorative process that gives life to “deserted” archive material. Here, dust and residue are central to the vision of the archive, and his idea of an active archive shifts the agency back to the archivist rather than the archive itself. However, he also argues that archives themselves are an active, creative force that generate new ways of thinking and challenge preexisting ideas. Additionally, they serve to engage our experience of ephemerality and time.

Liang states that the contingent is another way we should think about contemporary archives. Rapoport’s argument applies Liang’s discussion of contingency to examples of archival video. In contrast to Liang’s view of archival filmmaking playing off the contingent, Rapoport provides examples where contingency is dubious in our digital era, and states that the archive must reclaim contingency. Software has changed our relationship to contingency in the archive. Rapoport also extends Liang’s discussion of the archivist’s breath and parallels it to describing the archival impulse. Assigning value to the residual is described to be a compulsive and automatic process.