Abstract
This chapter analyses the sites of power implicit in archival ethics. Cubitt proposes that we are now in a position to regard technologies as the congealed form of primordial natural materials and processes, as well as human skills and knowledge. Archives are then technical-ancestral, and ecological, like any capitalist industry. They are also discursive domains, and therefore contested operations of power, a contest which includes not only social conflict but conflict with technologies—our ancestors—and the ecologies in which they subsist. Following Walter Benjamin’s redemptive theology, Cubitt argues that an archive cannot simply store the old. It must also address and redress the labour and materials, the land laid waste, energy expended, and the downtrodden whose sufferings paid for the materials it holds.
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Notes
- 1.
Jennifer Fay, ‘Buster Keaton’s Climate Change’.
- 2.
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound.
- 3.
Jussi Parikka, ‘Deep Times and Media Mines: A Descent into Ecological Materiality of Technology’.
- 4.
Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, ‘The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities’; Donald MacKenzie, Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed.
- 5.
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.
- 6.
Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development Report, 2020.
- 7.
Jacque Rancière, Hatred of Democracy; Chantal Mouffe, On the Political.
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Cubitt, S. (2021). Anthropocene Archival Ethics. In: Potts, J. (eds) Use and Reuse of the Digital Archive. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79523-8_8
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