The Futurity of the Archive:
rmx & ctstrph
However, as Derrida writes, “ what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives” (18). As such when the nature of the archive shifts, disciplinary identity shifts with it.  Beyond monographs and blind-reviewed journal articles now lies everything from online syllabi and assignments to blog posts and instructional screencasts. These too are now archived by Google, YouTube, and so on. Perhaps this is catastrophic, but it is also deterritorialization, for good or bad, an exposure to heterogeneity, otherness and change.

When we think about databases as a technical foundation for establishing disciplinary chronology, both in terms of its past and its future (that is, how it wishes to present itself to the future), and also as articulating disciplinary identity and message to academia, education policymakers, and the larger public, these expansions, while in some respect reflective of a flourishing of intellectual activity also represent a potential catastrophe. Traditionally, a discipline’s identity lies with its journals, conference proceedings, and monographs: all carefully curated within largely inaccessible and inscrutable archives. 
Our desire to turn to the digital database as a technical means for preserving or producing disciplinary history and identity are troubled by three broad trends.


First, rhetoric and composition continues to diverge, widening the sites of scholarly inquiry and curriculum as the numbers of professional and technical writing programs and courses multiply and we see the continuing proliferation of digital communication. 


Second, building upon that digital communication, we are likely to see a growing range of media and venues for disciplinary work as well as a richer variety of applications and devices with which we will access that work in an expanding number of sites and purposes. 
Third, based on this richer, though perhaps more chaotic and uneven, production and access to work in our discipline, it is possible that a wider audience of users will make use of our work, beyond the thousands of rhet/comp scholars and grad students, maybe even beyond the tens of thousands of college composition instructors to a broader public of teachers, students, parents, and possibly even literary scholars.
Conventionally we think of the database archive as a mechanism for securing the past. At the same time, the database is inescapably a remix of the past, as the entries are clearly abstracted from their primary locations on printed pages or URLs. A quick comparison of the database entry for a journal article in JSTOR or on Comppile with the article itself demonstrates the obvious difference. Furthermore, in a user’s interaction with the database, entries are remixed and presented according to the logic of the database search. Again, this is easy to see in any search, which results in a list of articles that are likely from different journals and different times, which make no reference to one another in the articles themselves.
So while a database may secure the past, it does so through a iterative process of remixing, slicing the data in singular ways with each search. Indeed, one might argue that scholarship in its raw form is so heterogeneous that it is only through the homogenizing remix of the archive that disciplinary territory can be established. That is, while we may typically think of remix as a ragged juxtaposition of media, the seamless remixes we find in a database are probably more common in our discipline.
When one examines the construction of a database, it is clear that while its structure remixes the history and identity of its objects, it also is designed with thought to how the archive will be accessed in the future. If we think more capaciously about database technologies, we should be able to see them as technologies that seek to organize time and space: history, destiny, and territory. 
That is, information architecture seeks to anticipate how its users will desire to make use of the archive, while also providing cues that instruct users as to how the database has been designed. In this respect, one might say that databases are as much about the future as they are about the past. Database structures seek to anticipate the historiographic remixes of future searches. 
In this presentation, my own methodological predilection is to investigate the production of archives in terms of social assemblage theory, to examine how technology and other objects and institutions operate to secure disciplinary territories. At the same time, however, the expansion of disciplinary conversations and databases beyond traditional scholarly modes means a potential deterritorialization of our discourse as it moves beyond its traditional audiences and contexts.
1. Databases
2. Derrida Fever
In considering the technical and immediate disciplinary questions regarding archiving, it is worthwhile to pass through Derrida’s treatment of the question. In Archive Fever, Derrida asks what psychoanalysis would look like if Freud and his contemporaries “had had access to MCI or AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail”  (16). He then suggests 

the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case... No, the technical structure of the archiving  archive also determines the structure of the archivable content in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivation produces as much as it records the event. (Derrida 16-17).

So here we can see Derrida taking this matter further to suggest that the archive comes to determine the structure of the content itself, particularly as it relates to the future. I think it is particularly useful to think of this process in terms of remix. Derrida here opens the question of where the remixing begins, within the “content itself”? He notes that the archive “is entrusted to the outside, to an external substrate... But where does the outside commence? This question is the question of the archive” (8).
It is with this question of the outside, of exteriority, that we might turn productively toward social assemblage theory. Underlying social assemblage theory is a shift from mapping relations between interiorized organic totalities to mapping exteriorized parts characterized by both properties and capacities. Within the conception of relations of interiority one distinguishes between relations that define identity or totality and those that are extraneous to that definition. As such, for example, being part of a crowd at a stadium would be an extraneous relation that did not impinge on the organic totality of an individual within the crowd. Of course, such relations could shift and alter the individual, as in the case of “crowd mentality,” but even give this, the individual would still be an interiorized totality, separable from the crowd. As such, in this model, exposure to the outside always represents a potential threat to the interiorized totality of the organic whole. 
Conversely, when taking up relations of exteriority, DeLanda writes “the properties of the component parts can never explain the relations which constitute a whole” (DeLanda 11). Instead, the properties of the whole “are the result not of an aggregation of the components’ own properties but of the actual exercise of their capacities. These capacities do depend on a component’s properties but cannot be reduced to them since they involve reference to the properties of other interacting entities” (11). 

In this model, an individual cannot simply be defined by the properties of the parts that define him or her, as parts also are characterized by capacities that exist in a potential or virtual state and only arise through relations of exteriority. Individuals as subjects are not produced through the interiorized relations of the properties of the subject’s component parts; instead the subject only emerges through the exteriorized relations  (or assemblages) between parts that actualize particular capacities. In other words, rather than being threatened by exposure, subjectivity can only arise through exposure to the capacities actualized through relations of exteriority.
3. Relations of Exteriority
Manuel DeLanda maps the exteriorized relations of social assemblages along two axes. The first axes travels from materiality to expression. In thinking about assemblages of database interaction, one would have to include the components of the environment in which an individual was accessing the database, for example, an office, a desk, a chair, a laptop, etc. The databased itself has material components in the storage system where it can be found and material limitations to its access through encryption.  These components may also play an expressive role, and here I want to set aside for a moment the coded expressions of symbolic communication. Instead here DeLanda asks us to think of more affective expression, as in the duration of search processing, the visual display of results, and so on. Certainly there are coded elements to these that I will come to, but on this axes the point is to recognize that expressivity cannot be reduced to coded message.
The second axes shifts from territorialization to deterritorialization. Territorialization is the tendency of a space toward organization and increasing homogeneity. Deterritorialization then is a tendency to disrupt spatial boundaries or increase heterogeneity. DeLanda notes, “a good example [of deterritorialization] is communication technology, ranging from writing and a reliable postal service, to telegraphs, telephones and computers, all of which blur the spatial boundaries of social entities” (13).  Databases are an excellent example of a potentially deterritorializing communication technology as they explicitly remove data from the territories in which they are produced. However, as we often see, proprietary databases operate to reterritorialize data by limiting the ability of information to pass beyond spatial boundaries. 

Taking these two axes together, one might examine database assemblages where the materiality and expressivity of the components tend toward disciplinary territorialization as opposed to those that deterritorialize: all without actually considering the coded content of the database. One can only tell so much from an image, but even so, looking at these two images of JSTOR and Google, there are different expressions here and different forces of territorialization and deterritorialization. 
Of course one can only go so far without considering code. DeLanda address this concern through a third axis of the assemblage, “in which specialized expressive media intervene, processes which consolidate and rigidify the identity of the assemblage, or, on the contrary, allow the assemblage a certain latitude for more flexible operation” (see fig. 2) (19). The addition of the third axis allows for the investigation of linguistic expressions as secondary processes of territorialization, as codings, or alternatively as decodings intensifying deterritorialization.  
4. Assemblage Theory
Taking up DeLanda’s examples, one might hypothesize that social assemblages whose materiality and expression are largely mediated by communication networks might have a greater tendency toward deterritorialization and heterogeneity than those where such technologies do not play as integral a role. This is certainly clear in the contemporary classroom, where the students’ access to mobile networks deterritorializes the traditional academic territory. In scholarly terms, the traditional location of research (i.e. somewhere in the bowels of an academic library) increased the homogeneity of those with access. Even subscription-based, full-text databases serve this function. 

However, there are other, open access, database activities in our field that are more engaged with their deterritorializing potential. As one moves along the continuum of media networks from open access journals and blogs to videos uploaded to YouTube, the deterritorializing effects become more visible. This effect is, in part, the operation of communication networks as destabilizing traditional territorial boundaries but is also the result of potential decoding within the particular media communicated along the network. That is, in part, access to the activity of rhetoricians and compositionists (and I say “activity” because we aren’t sure if it is “scholarship”) causes disciplinary instability simply because the network technologies along which it travels brings the media into unexpected assemblages.  However, the content of these media (outside the territorializing domain of peer-review) is destabilizing as well. No wonder we tell students not to trust the Internet. Who knows what’s out there? Uncertainties not unlike those faced by early modern faculty looking at their university libraries: who knows what’s in there?
Who knows what assemblage, what archive, what discipline one is exposed to in such encounters?
5. Aeon and Chronos
Hang around on disciplinary listservs long enough and one will witness multiple reenactments of conversations about how we get universities and governments to pay attention to what we know.  Making our discipline more visible, searchable, and findable are all integral parts of such missions. I imagine these projects will be undertaken by us, or if not by us than for us by some other agency. As I might put it, territorialization happens, archivization happens, and through it disciplinary identity will be remixed, as it is always already remixed. And maybe our discipline will grow in cultural influence. I say be careful what you wish for. 

As the archiving archive of disciplinary identity, with its processes of coding and territorialization, seeks to make history by securing its future, we can add a temporal dimension to DeLanda’s assemblage: in one direction Chronos and the narratives of historical identity; in the other direction Aeon, 
Perhaps this is the narrative time that can be reconciled with the database. While archives reflect our desire for chronology, I would suggest that Aeon is the time of remix, the elusive and yet inescapable present moment in which social assemblages continually are composed.
Works Cited
DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum, 2006. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Masumi. Minneapolois: U of MN P, 1987. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print.

Images
Austria Freud Anniversary. Digital image. Web. 3 Mar. 2010. <http://greenlanternpress.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/freud.jpg, http://greenlanternpress.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/freud.jpg>. 
Gilles Deleuze. Digital image. Speculative Heresy. Web. 5 Mar. 2010. <http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/deleuze-and-speculative-realism/>. 
Jacques Derrida. Digital image. Logos, Est. 1995. Web. 2 Jan. 2008. <http://russellmcneil.blogspot.com/2007/08/jacques-derrida-1930-2004.html>. 
Jacques Derrida. Digital image. UCSB Dept of Religious Studies. Web. 3 Mar. 2010. <http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/projects/irreconcilabledifferences/Derrida_Bio.htm>. 
Litography_archive_of_the_Bayerisches_Vermessungsamt. Digital image. Wikipedia. Web. 3 Mar. 2010. <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Litography_archive_of_the_Bayerisches_Vermessungsamt.jpg>. 

Alex Reid, Phd.
Associate Professor, English
State Univ. of New York at Buffalo
areid@buffalo.edu