A pretty great video about The Internet Archive is here. “Library of Alexandria 2.0 will exist for (hopefully) many more centuries than version 1.0 did.” And not only is The Internet Archive archiving the Internet, it’s trying to preserve real live books as well. “Burning books isn’t the problem; people get flooded–there’s so much information.” Hyperarchival realism, indeed.
Hyperarchival Realism
“Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive” in The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World
Michael J. Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor have edited a great collection of essays on nuclear criticism, The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World (this links to the publisher page). I have an essay in the collection, “Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive,” that any reader of this blog would probably find quite interesting. And of course there are a number of other interesting essays by accomplished scholars and nuclear critics. You can preview the table of contents, the preface, and the introduction here. And the book is now readily available for order from Amazon and of course other places. (Probably the quickest way to get it would be going directly to CSP’s site.)
I’ve included the Table of Contents below:
Introduction: The Silence of Fallout, Michael J. Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor
Chapter One: “What Works”: Instrumentalism, Ideology, and Nostalgia in a Post-Cold War Culture, Jeff Smith
Chapter Two: Specters of Totality: The Afterlife of the Nuclear Age, Aaron Rosenberg
Chapter Three: Queer Temporalities of the Nuclear Condition, Paul K. Saint-Amour
Chapter Four: Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive, Bradley J. Fest
Chapter Five: Cut to Black: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-September 11th America, Joseph Dewey
Chapter Six: The Pixilated Apocalypse: Video Games and Nuclear Fears, 1980-2012, William Knoblauch
Chapter Seven: Depictions of Destruction: Post-Cold War Literary Representations of Storytelling and Survival in the Nuclear Era, Julie Williams
Chapter Eight: Allegories of Hiroshima: Toward a Rhetoric of Nuclear Modernism, Mark Pedretti
Chapter Nine: War as Peace: Afterlives of Nuclear War in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Jessica Hurley
Chapter Ten: The Hunger Games: Darwinism and Nuclear Apocalypse Narrative in the Post-9/11 World, Patrick B. Sharp
Chapter Eleven: Legacy of Waste: Nuclear Culture After the Cold War, Daniel Cordle
Chapter Twelve: In a dark wud: Metaphors, Narratives, and Nuclear Weapons, John Canaday
Accumulating Ruin and a Pleasant Apocalypse
Adam Rothstein has a pretty interesting little essay for The State, titled “The Accumulation of Ruin-Space.” In it he asks,
But the question for these ruin-spaces is, how long will the[y] exist? We seem to have an attraction to ruins—we want them and seek them out, though never with the same functional desire with which we seek out current structures. What will we do in the future as these ruin-spaces pile up, unable to be destroyed because of their enforced temporality as preserved agedness? The earth is becoming a solid mass of scar tissue, as the tracks of human endeavor scour crosshatching into its surface.
Is the earth becoming a hyperarchive of ruins?
And also at The State, Asher Kohn writes about Central Asia as a post-apocalyptic space in “A Pleasant Post-Apocalypse.” He suggests that “[t]he history of Central Asia is in many ways a history of eschatologies; not a graveyard of empires but perhaps a graveyard of belief systems.” While “eschatological” might be a bit extreme to describe the history he traces, nonetheless, his description of the landscape of post-Soviet Russia bears considering:
It is truly very difficult to explain how Soviet geoforming was such a disaster. Whole seas were turned into steppe. Whole steppes were turned into blast zones. Whole blast zones were restructured to focus on an alien frontier. There is no real way to overestimate the effect this must have on the people who live in the region. Pastoralism is an artifact, not an economy. Islam was tortured by Soviet hubris. Language changes made it impossible for a grandson to communicate with his grandmother. And the land, the very essence of life itself, the only connection a person might have with the folkways of the parents, grandparents, and ancestors of their society, is turned to factory farms and dust and ash. In the 21st century, Central Asia is a post-apocalyptic world.
The article also has some wonderful pictures.
Dissertation Defended
On a bit of a personal note, yesterday I defended my dissertation, “The Apocalypse Archive: American Literature and the Nuclear Bomb.” As I move now toward turning it into a book, the first thing I’m gonna change will probably be the title. Onward toward more nuclear criticism and hyperarchival realism.
Assured Use of Space
My brother just alerted me to this relatively new and ongoing concern of the US Department of Defense: the assured use of space. He was also nice enough to point me toward an article that nicely lays out the global risks associated with space, “Mutually Assured Destruction: Space Weapons, Orbital Debris and the Deterrence Theory for Environmental Sustainability,” published in volume 37 of Air & Space Law. Among the article’s other concerns, Surya Gablin Gunasekara writes: “this article argues that the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction as applied to the space environment and the international space legal framework supply enough deterrence to prevent the widespread use of space weapons without the need for additional international agreements.” This adds a whole new wrinkle to my ongoing thinking about disaster, and further complicates notions of archival destruction because of how vital a role US communication satellites play in the global telecommunications infrastructure.
Digital Afterlives
Digital Public Library of America
In the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books Robert Darnton discusses the 18 April 2013 launch of the Digital Public Library of America. As Darnton describes the goals of this project, “The Digital Public Library of America [. . .] is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans–and eventually to everyone in the world–online and free of charge.” Wow, total access to the (hyper)archive for anyone. This is an amazing project.
Are You Freaking Kidding Me?
This is why this blog exists. None of any of this is a good thing. Actors in an apocalypse flick. Hyper. Archival.Realism.
Crisis . . .
Zack Beauchamp writes “Why You Should Be More Concerned About War With North Korea This Time,” at Think Progress.
CUNY is holding a symposium 8 April 2013 on a topic near-and-dear to my heart: how to think beyond / past / against the current ubiquitous discourse of crisis.
And some striking images of abandoned places.
Images from Fukushima and New Archival Impulses
As R. pointed me toward today, Google sent in its Street View cameras to Fukushima and captured some arresting images of deserted and uninhabitable space. David McNeil writes about this at The Independent.
And it is being reported that the FBI is seeking to expand its digital surveillance capability and the “CIA has agreed to a cloud computing contract with electronic commerce giant Amazon, worth up to $600 million over 10 years.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 