Analog Monsters in a Digital Age

Over the weekend, I finally finished Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke 2010). The book has had a significant impact on my thinking about time in an archaeological context and the potential for an archaeology that is contemporary offering new opportunities for an affective archaeology.

Oddly enough, her work also pushed me to think a bit more about the relationship between digital and analog practice which is a concern at the center of a paper that I gave at the EAAs and have been toiling to prepare for the European Journal of Archaeology. 

Freeman evokes the work of Mike Goode in her analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Freeman connects the character of Frankenstein’s monster to the differences between analog and affective and the digital and the cold. While this relies on a rather simple binary between the analog and the digital, the affective and the rational, and the fragmented and the smooth, Freeman’s analysis was thought provoking.

Here are my notes: 

Frankenstein’s monster as an analog creation where the constituent parts from which it was created remained visible the same way that the grooves on a record audibly and physically remind you of the end of one song and the beginning of the next or the pages in a book. The analog character of the monster as an assemblage is tied to its affective, emotional, passionate, and historical character and behavior. It’s useful to recognize the creature as an archaeological assemblage with pieces recycled from past individuals and brought together as a composite. The creature was seen as a failure by its creator, Victor Frankenstein, who aspired to a digital creature which although created by myriad small parts, effaces them with a seamless, “smoother” reality that is rational and ultimately devoid of the very passions that make us human.

Archaeologists, of course, continue to work in Victor Frankenstein’s tradition of modern practice which is  to create a smooth digital reality that caught in the tension between being indistinguishable from our experience of time and paradoxically, being inauthentic as a way of recording, understanding, and ultimately re-experiencing the past. In fact, we can argue, following Freeman, that modernity sought to create a past that eliminated the abrupt and affective character of its pastness produced through awkward and profoundly human juxtapositions present in its assemblage. In its place, we seek to create a smooth and seamlessness experience that either invoked the present or, at very least, a kind of utopian reality that they seek for the future. The assembly line is one approach to smoothing our disjointed encounter with the past, but as the assemblage of data that we produce from archaeological field work becomes more diverse, digital, and dynamic (in a post-industrial and post modern world) the pressure on modern ways of eliminating the jarring disjunctions and seams becomes more intense.

Logistics also offers a Taylorist model for integrating the fragmented world of the digital without returning to the affective and analogue experience of Frankenstein’s creation. The cost of this appeal to logistics, though, is a loss of the analogue texture and the striping of the the affective, emotional, bodily experience of archaeology that appears monstrous to the modern discipline.

Frankenstein’s monster offers another way to think about the same basic question that I’ve been obsessed with in recent years: can we become digital without striping away the analogue character of archaeology with its seams, noise, and textures that remind us of both the imperfect character of the past and the the present? Can an archaeology that embraces the transhuman cyborg remain liberated even as our approach to the past becomes increasingly mediated by digital tools that Ellul and Illich see as striving to repressing the reality of human experience and forcing us, as Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein himself realized, to kill the monster because we fail to recognize that the imperfections in the assemblage itself are not less perfect forms of reality, but the fabric of the real itself.

The goal of my EJA article, then, is not to militate against the digital, qua the digital, but to urge our discipline to reflect on the potential of the punk and the slow to create an assemblage that more represents the deeply sympathetic cyborg that was Frankenstein’s monster, than the seamless efficient work of the fragmented digital.