Arctic Archives: Ice, Memory and Entropy 9783839446560

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Susi K. Frank, Kjetil A. Jakobsen (eds.) Arctic Archives

Culture & Theory  | Volume 194

Susi K. Frank is Professor of East Slavic literatures and cultures at Humboldt University Berlin. Her research fields are geopoetology; literature/art and (visual) memory; literature and literary politics in (post-)imperial contexts (Russia and Soviet Union). Kjetil A. Jakobsen is Professor of history at Nord Universitet BodØ. From 2011 to 2014 he was Henrik Steffens professor at Humboldt University Berlin.

Susi K. Frank, Kjetil A. Jakobsen (eds.)

Arctic Archives Ice, Memory and Entropy

Gedruckt mit Unterstützung der Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: artic permafrost / pixabay.com Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4656-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4656-0 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839446560

Contents Acknowledgements | 7 Introduction: The Arctic as an Archive | 9

Susi K. Frank, Kjetil A. Jakobsen

What is a ›Natural Archive‹ ? On Similarities and Differences between Cultural and Natural Archives | 21

Georg Toepfer Archival Metahistory and Inhuman Memory | 37 Wolfgang Ernst The Melting Archive: The Arctic and the Archives’ Others | 49

Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski Landscapes as Archives of the Future? | 69 Peter Hemmersam, Janike K. Larsen Memory in the Anthropocene: Notes on Slow Archives and Melting Glaciers | 93

Sven Spieker

Performing Arctic Archives A Fragment of Future History. Gabriel Tarde’s Archival Utopia | 107

Kjetil A. Jakobsen The Absence of the Arctic. Photographic Archives of the Arctic | 131

Knut Ebeling, Harald Østgaard Lund

The Snowfield as an Archive of Soviet Underground Performance Art | 143

Sabine Hänsgen Excerpts from Anna Schwartz’s Archive | 153

Judit Hersko Gender in the Twentieth-Century Polar Archive | 177

Anka Ryall An Arctic Archive for the Anthropocene: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault | 197

Reinhard Hennig

Ice – Message(s) of a Memory Medium From Prague to Greenland: Ice Memories in Libuše Moníková’s Novel Treibeis (Drift Ice) | 221

Ulrike Vedder Myth of Preservation: Images of Ice, Snow and Glacier as Metaphors for Memory in Post-Holocaust Literature and Art (Sebald, Celan, Bałka) | 231

Asako Miyazaki Investigating the Labоratory of Popular Arctic Narrative in Russian Literature from the 1930s to the 1950s | 253

Elena Penskaya Archives of Knowledge and Endangered Objects in the Anthropocene: From Chernobyl to Polar Landscapes in the Work of Lina Selander and Amy Balkin | 269

Lisa E. Bloom Natural Archives as Counter Archives: Gulag Literature from Witness to Postmemory | 285

Susi K. Frank Contributors | 311

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our deep gratitude to Mandy Buschina, who assisted with relentless commitment, reliability and intelligence in organizing the conference, and to Natalia Grinina whose competent, prudent and circumspect support in the process of editing the volume proved to be absolutely invaluable. Our special thanks are due to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for financial support of the conference as well as of the publication of the volume.

Introduction: The Arctic as an Archive S USI K. F RANK & K JETIL A. J AKOBSEN

In 541 AD, the East Roman Emperor Justinian was at the height of power. In his capital Constantinople, he had built the Hagia Sofia, the church that was to remain the world's largest for a thousand years. Roman law was collected and codified, Roman customs and traditions restored. Almost all of Italy had been recaptured from the »barbarians« in victorious campaigns. The emperor was on the verge of reestablishing the Roman Empire in Western Europe. Then misfortune struck, as disastrous crop failures and plague weakened his state and army. Justinian was obliged to retreat to the eastern Mediterranean. In Western Europe, ancient civilization gradually disappeared, and history took a different path. A generation later, scarcely more than 5,000 people lived in Rome, amidst the mighty ruins of what had been a city of millions. According to geologists, surveys of the Greenland ice for the year 540 show a large increase in the sulfur content in the Earth's atmosphere, which is due to an enormous volcanic eruption, probably in the tropics. The result must have been temperature drops and crop failures of global proportions. Studies of the Arctic ice may help our understanding of European history. The polar regions are the knowledge archives of the planet, partly for climatic reasons, partly because human interventions have until recently had less impact than elsewhere.

I CE

AS A

M EMORY M EDIUM

Considered as a medium of remembrance, ice and permafrost in the Arctic differ from other natural archives in terms of which ages they conserve and in what form that happens. While stone receives only very old layers, ice and earth preserve younger layers giving information not only about geological, but also about historical facts. The storage medium ice allows an extremely precise dating and it

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preserves in a protective way. Where stone preserves only in petrified form and with the help of high pressure, earth and above all ice can preserve life almost in the form it had during its lifetime. Mammoths that turn up in the melting glaciers of Siberia are so well preserved that the meat may be edible. Among the three memory media stone, earth and ice, ice is the most vulnerable and unstable, because it depends on temperatures below zero degree Celsius. Consequently, climate change not only threatens our future, but in a sense also the past. The Ice Archive itself reveals a lot about the causes of climate change. Ice from 2011 contains 40% more CO2 than the one frozen in 1740, before the Industrial Revolution. Global warming will reduce the extent both of ice capping and permafrost. The natural archive that has evolved and remained untouched over millions of years, dissolves as it is released from the glaziers and the thawing Arctic tundra. Not only mammoth carcasses come to light, but also, notably, different types of traces of human history, which thus gain a new presence, before they decay and disappear. This applies to the mummies of leaders of early civilizations that appear in Siberia (such as the Altai princess), the remains of a large number of Arctic expeditions, and the seal and whaling industry in the Arctic, but also for various traces of the Soviet camp system, which the authorities would rather have blurred. In Eastern European literature, which deals with the traumas of Stalin's GULAG, the melting ice in Siberia is an issue. Varlam Šalamov, who with his Kolyma Tales has created one of the most important literary monuments of the GULAG, describes permafrost as an ally of the victims, a medium of remembrance that retains the traces of crimes that are barely narrative in their monstrosity. In post-Soviet times, Sergei Lebedev, but also the Czech writer Jáchym Topol approach the melting polar permafrost from a postmemory perspective. But, whereas in Lebedev’s novel Oblivion (2012) the icy GULAG-archive allows for ritually bemoaning those who had been waiting ›undead‹ in the intermediate-state of frozenness and thus doing justice to the dead, Topol envisions the GULAG ›archive‹ in an apocalyptic way: In his 2006 issue of The Trip to Bugulma, Topol asks what will happen when the ice melts and the mountains of corpses from the GULAG appear?

A T RAVELLING C ONCEPT »Archive« has become a prime example of what Mieke Bal calls a »traveling concept« in academia. It has moved from history and law to geology, paleontology, biology and information science. Scientists in many disciplines talk of natural

I NTRODUCTION

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archives and the law of many countries, including Germany, today includes provisions on natural archives, especially on soil and moors. The study of traveling concepts can open up an interdisciplinary dialogue, especially if these are linked to a common research object, as is the Arctic ice for many disciplines. By confronting common but perhaps differently used terms in an interdisciplinary dialogue, one recognizes theoretical premises that otherwise would have been difficult to see. The natural archive has been a concept for more than 200 years. According to the biologist and science historian Georg Toepfer, the first documented use is by the Comte de Buffon, who in 1778 made it the task of the natural scientists to excavate the »archives of the world«. In the decades around 1800, the archives of nature were already a frequently used linguistic image, as scientists discovered the geological measure of time and experimented with mental models to think of the relationship to a natural history that had almost instantaneously received a dimensionality beyond human capacity. Isaac Newton, who lived in the 17th century, believed the world to be 5,600 years old, citing biblical evidence. Already for Immanuel Kant 100 years later, the globe is several tens of millions of years old. As old as the concept of the natural archive is, it remains disputed due to its partly metaphorical character. Archive theorist Wolfgang Ernst warns against what he calls a metaphorical use of the concept of archives. Archives are not just any collection of memories of the past, they are intentional. The feudal lords carefully archived their »titres«, their legal claims on everything from kings to serfs. Modern archives are tied to legal or administrative processes. The archivist classifies, sorts and stores on the basis of certain principles and with intent. The core of the archive concept, as Ernst develops it, is the feedback mechanism between database and decision. Just as a computer always records what it does and stores, the operations in databases, which in turn form the basis for new operations, bureaucracy and courts file their decisions with the goal of being able to make new ones in the future. Natural archives are not archives in this sense, as they were not created intentionally and because there is no purposeful selection in nature. Nevertheless, natural archives are also selective; they preserve the traces of specific life forms and time periods and overlook others, all in a systematic way, which may often be reconstructed. The scientist is, in principle, in the same situation as the historian who comes into an archive and, by definition, wants to use it for something other than what it was created for. Both know that the past has been stored in a manner that is incomplete for their purpose, that the material has gaping gaps, and that they are facing systematic and often irredeemable loss.

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M ELTING A RCHIVES Especially as a result of Michel Foucault's writings, the archive has become a buzzword used for many types of memory and in a variety of scientific disciplines. Foucault simply replaced the term history with archives and archaeology. He did this to force a reflection on knowledge and power, breaking the habits of storytelling, pointing to the dumbness and distance of a past that exists only through its future-oriented use in the present. Not only research, but also contemporary art today revolves around the archival concept. Under the heading The Encyclopaedic Palace of the World, the Venice Biennale in 2013 illuminated how artists create alternative worlds by collecting, systematizing and archiving objects, images, artefacts and dreams. Ice is a medium of memory, but also a much used metaphor for the archive, in popular and artistic forms as well as in the scientific imagination. The Ice Age is a favorite theme of digital animation film. In his philosophical fable Fragment d'histoire future of 1896, the social philosopher Gabriel Tarde described how climate change transforms the world into a vast archive of frozen forms of life that in turn provide the blueprint for the technological mediation of a virtual world in an underground network society. 100 years later, the Wachowski siblings drew on Tarde’s vision for the storyline of their celebrated films about the digital Matrix. The digital technology that permeates the entire social life of today's society is constantly producing archives. Most of us walk around with a personal archive on the smart phone that contains more information than a royal library did at the time of the Sun King. Unlike analog media, digital communication always leaves traces that may be archived. Digitization makes the archive ubiquitous, while at the same time destabilizing it, setting it in motion. The Internet breaks the traditional understanding of the archive by replacing fixed memories with a culture of ceaseless circulation of data. Drawing on Zygmunt Baumann’s differentiation between »solid« and »liquid« modernity, it is striking how the empires of 19th-century ›solid‹ modernity consolidated their control over territories with the help of enormous archives. »Liquid« modernity causes the major crisis of today’s archive (Røssaak 2010: 16). Modernity threatens the archive’s solidity with liquidation, yet, as Spring and Schimanski point out in their contribution to this volume, the response to this threat is »the very modernity of archival techniques, paradoxically embedded in the liquidity of global (ex)change.« The internet archive is, as Wolfgang Ernst underlines, »anarchival«, so every effort to preserve the archive has to face up to the fact it is always in motion.

I NTRODUCTION

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Longing for immortalization of the present moment (and lovingly being aware of its vainness), romanticism in literature and art gave birth to a mythology of freezing and petrification. At least five writers of German romanticism – E.Th.A. Hofmann, A. v. Arnim, J.P. Hebel, F. Hebbel, F. Rückert – were inspired by an incident at the Swedish mines of Falun, where a man who was just about to marry, had been buried by a rock fall only to resurface as a completely preserved corpse some thirty years later. The experience of his bride, an old woman by now, inspired the romanticists’ concept of the uncanny. They made it a key narrative of romanticism and used it to explore the new conceptions of time that emerge in the context of what Friedrich Kittler has called the »Notation System (Aufschreibesystem) 1800« (Kittler 1985). Characteristic of »Notation System 1800« is a new near ubiquity of print culture and the emergence of more profound forms of state power, key words being mass education, prescription armies and nationalism. In the classic texts of German romanticism, Kittler unravels a meaning level exploring the paradoxes of memory and experience in a culture where time could for the first time be archived and stored systematically, but where this could still only be done very indirectly in the code of the alphabet. At the time of J.W. Goethe and Leopold Ranke all data flows had to »pass through the bottleneck of the signifier« (Kittler 1999: 4). 19th century historicism, with its framing of the past in the form of written narrative, that is as what we still call »history«, is a key script within Notation System 1800. (Jakobsen in Røssaak 2010: 131) So is the modern museum, which being a typically romantic invention, established new ways of keeping the past present and at the same time giving evidence to its irretrievable ›pastness‹. The monopoly of writing when it came to storing the past was broken in the 19th and 20th century with the invention of new storage media like photography, gramophone and film, and finally of the digital media, allowing for new types of archives and new ways of ordering and re-enacting the past, as well as other social orders. Archival regimes employing specific media techniques like the printed or handwritten word of »Notation system 1800« or the photography, typewrite, film and gramophone recording of what Kittler calls »Notation system 1900«, allow distinct social formations to emerge. That includes the »anarchival societies« (Jakobsen 2010) of our contemporary digital world.

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I CE

AND

E NTROPY

Interestingly enough, information science speaks the language of thermodynamics. The basic principles of information science were defined in 1948 by Claude Shannon in the article »A mathematical theory of communication«. Shannon modelled information & communication processing on the theory and mathematical patterns of thermodynamics. Entropy is a measure of the degree of order within a system. At minus 273 degrees Celsius zero entropy prevails. More entropy means less system and more movement. Ice is structured, water flows. In Shannon, entropy becomes a measure of the information content in a communication. Low entropy means that the variable is determined and therefore has a low information content. You know in advance, what will be said so the communication brings little new. Not only the terminology of information science, but also that of media practice often employ the language of temperature. Freeze and freeze-frame are key concepts concerning the way the visual media deal with time. Films and photographs »freeze« time and bring the people of the past to life for us. Furthermore, in the media archives worldwide, films and photographs are stored frozen to outlive time, the same applies to digital storage media. Robert Scott and his men died in the snow and ice of the Antarctic, but the films and photographs they had taken remained intact. Everyday language and some cultural theory associates life with movement, death with standstill and cold. A well-known work of film-theory, Laura Mulvey's Death 24 x a second: Stillness as a Moving Image, sets up an alleged dialectic between the »living image« and the frozen and thus »dead« still image, the »freeze« of which the film consists (Motion in analog film is an illusion caused by the eye being exposed to 24 still images per second). When the film image is frozen, this means, writes Mulvey, »a transition from the animate to the inanimate, from life to death.« (Mulvey 2006: 15) The metaphorics are striking, yet from the scientific perspective, this association of death and the freeze could be misleading. In her choice of metaphor, the well-known film researcher and feminist makes perhaps the same mistake that the father-in-law of one of the authors made when, a few years ago, he tried to terminate a wasp colony which had settled in on the roof of his Norwegian home. Tor, as his name is, took the wasp nest that he had sealed at night, when the wasps gather in it to rest, and put it in the freezer at minus twenty. The next day, he shook the seemingly lifeless wasps out of the nest into the toilet and drew the flush. After a few minutes, it began to hum in the bathroom... In theory – and occasionally in practice – it is possible to preserve life by freezing it. Strong heating, however, kills.

I NTRODUCTION

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To be or not to be, is that the prime question? Or should we rather discuss chaos, system and contingency? In the traditional sense, creating something would mean moving from non-being to being by setting things in motion. However, what if everything is already moving? What if the basic state of the universe is chaos? In that case, to give life would mean to establish system and structure. For much of the philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Sartre, death is non-being. It is nothingness; frozen and cold. According to the cybernetic perspective, however, death may be said to be hot, it is »too much« rather than »too little«. Death occurs when entropy becomes too high. The temperature rises and the organ systems dissolve into chaos. Therefore, to create life does not mean to set something in motion, but rather to freeze something in a pattern. Contrary to what everyday language might make one believe, the rising entropy of global warming will probably mean less rather than more life.

C ULTURE

OF THE

A NTHROPOCENE

In this volume, the memory medium of ice and the melting archives of the polar regions are examined from various angles. Preserved in the ice are traces of the geological and climatic history of the earth, as well as of the past, of life forms and history, including the history of modernity with its typical attitude towards nature as an object of conquest, of control and of transformation, expressively represented in the discourses of polar conquest and the imagery of the Arctic in Soviet modernity. Most of the papers began as contributions to a conference »Archives of the Arctic. Ice, Memory and Entropy« on the melting archives of the Arctic which was held in November 2013 at the Humboldt University of Berlin, organized by the two editors of this volume. The approach was cross-disciplinary, with geologists and computer scientists presenting alongside artists and literary scholars. Taking the concept of the anthropocene seriously, is to acknowledge that conventional distinctions between the arts and sciences no longer apply. The anthropocene is an epochal concept designating the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems. There is as of yet no agreement on the exact dating. Homo sapiens has made significant impact on ecosystems since the species started to spread across the globe. Thus, there is evidence that many species of larger animals (hominoids included) were exterminated, as the hunter communities of Homo sapiens expanded from the origin in Africa, reaching new continents, where animals were unused to the threat. However, since the twentieth

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century, with the taming of nuclear power, with genetic engineering and with anthropogenic climate change humans are changing the face of the Earth at a speed which is often referred to as »the great acceleration«. Culture is shaping nature, and the two cannot be separated in any convenient way; we need to understand the one in order to understand the other. The first part of this book is about clarifying the concept of the archive and tracing it as a travelling concept between disciplines. It has become customary in many disciplines to talk of natural archives. If so, in what sense? Are there archives in nature in the same way as there are legal or scientific archives? Several contributors in this book observe that the metaphor of the archive tends to be taken in too static a sense. Archives are not fixed, even if they aim to control and converse across time. Contemporary digital archives are liquid. As data, this new kind of archive tends to be online, is relational and also open to a wide range of manipulations. An archive is not given once and for all; it is intentional and needs to be maintained and used, even performed. The world is still a stage and the Anthropocene is an anthropo-scene. Contributions in the second part of the book each in their way examine how the Arctic archive is performed, by the natural scientists of the Global Seed Vault at Spitzbergen or the flourishing popular fiction inspired by Arctic archives, by Arctic explorers of both sexes or by avant-garde artists who by staging the metaphorical imagery of ice negotiate the notion of the archive as well as its agency. Finally, there is the thought provoking case of archival utopia, inside snow ball earth, as narrated by the great 19th century social theorist Gabriel Tarde in the allegorical novel Fragment of Future History. Contributions in the third part are about ice, as a metaphor for medium and time and as an actual medium of memory. Examples mostly from German postHolocaust and Russian post-Soviet literature demonstrate the significance and ubiquity of ice imagery when it comes to topics and states of politically problematic and traumatic memory. In highly complex tense negotiations of the Holocaust, memory on ice appears not only as a figure of preservation, but also for the isolation of memories from their previous constellation, keeping them from access and from being shared and worked through. It turns out that the imagery of Arctic ice not only gives way to reflections about ice as a memory medium, but also to reflections about natural archives as counter-archives and thus as a means to correct history that has been falsified by archives as instruments of political power.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Jakobsen, Kjetil (2010): »Anarchival Society«, in: Eivind Røssaak (ed.): The Archive in Motion. New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices, Oslo. pp. 127-154. Kittler, Friedrich A. (1985): Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, München. — (1999): Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], Stanford. Mulvey, Laura (2006): Death 24 x a second. Stillness and the Movie Image, London. Røssaak, Eivind (ed.) (2010): The Archive in Motion. New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices, Oslo. Shannon, Claude E. (1948): »A mathematical theory of communication«, in: The Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, pp. 379-656.

W HAT IS A ›N ATURAL A RCHIVE ‹?

On Similarities and Differences between Cultural and Natural Archives G EORG T OEPFER

In this article I shall give a short account of the history of the idea that there are archives in nature and I will address the question to which extent it may be appropriate to call natural deposits archives. Thus, it is the aim of the article to compare natural and cultural archives. I shall start by looking at the historical origins of the talk of archives in nature. This story leads back to the natural history of the late eighteenth century. I shall then turn to more recent accounts of natural archives, namely the archives of the soil; I shall focus on this natural archive because the soil is nowadays the most prominent archive in nature; and the soil is seen as an archive both for natural and cultural history: it harbors the remnants of past events in the history of nature and culture. In the third section I shall ask more explicitly what an archive of nature could be. I will then turn to the Arctic as a place of archives and finally summarize all this by describing the similarities and differences between cultural and natural archives.

»A RCHIVES OF N ATURE « N ATURAL H ISTORY

IN

E IGHTEENTH C ENTURY

Traditionally, the research field known as natural history had no temporal dimension. It simply comprised the descriptive knowledge of natural objects and the practices of collecting, observing and systematizing that produced this knowledge. Natural history was in its theoretical and practical goals descriptive and not explanatory.

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This understanding fundamentally changed in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The decisive steps were taken in the 1770s. One of the first to have a temporal understanding of natural history was Immanuel Kant in 1775. In his essay on the different races of man he wrote: We take the terms natural description and natural history typically as having the same meaning. But it is clear that the knowledge of natural things as they now are still leaves wanting the knowledge of what they earlier were, and what sequence of changes they underwent in order to come in each locality to their current condition. The history of nature, of which we presently have very little, would teach us about changes in the shape of the earth, and also the changes that the creatures of the earth (plants and animals) have undergone through natural migrations, and thereby about the degenerations (Abartungen) from the original form (Urbilde) of the stem genus (Stammgattung). (Kant 1905: 427-443, 434)1 It was actual natural genealogies what Kant had in mind here and which he wanted to replace the rather arbitrary system of logical classes (Schulsystem). For Kant, natural history, in the sense of studying long-term temporal successions of natural states, was the scientific method that would allow the advancement from mere opinion to actual insights. (Kant 1905: 443) In his Critique of Judgement of 1790 he associated this advancement with the establishment of a new speculative science of temporal natural history which he calls archaeology of nature. (Kant 1913: 165-485, 428)2 Its aim was, as Kant put it, to get an idea of the »former old state of the earth«. In his essay Kant referred to the Comte de Buffon as the one who gave the decisive inspirations to him. And indeed, three years after Kant, in 1778, Buffon also advanced a temporal understanding of natural history in the initial sentences of his Epochs of Nature: »As in civil history title deeds are consulted, coins are studied, and ancient inscriptions are deciphered in order to determine the epochs of human revolutions and to fix the date human events; so also in natural history it is necessary to excavate the world’s archives [les archives du monde], to extract ancient monuments from the earth’s entrails, to collect their remains, and to assemble in a body of evidence all the marks of physical changes that are able to take us back to the different ages of nature. This is the only way to fix some points in the immensity of space, and to place a certain number of milestones on the eternal road of time.« (De Buffon 1778: 1)3

1

Cited in Zammito 2012: 130-164, 144.

2

Cf. Fritscher 2001: 513-520.

3

Cited in Rudwick 2005: 230.

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As far as I could figure out this is the first application of the term archive to objects of nature, or more precisely to a collection of historical remains of earth history. Buffon’s comparison of civil and natural history refers to the level of methods, especially the techniques of accessing the past and the interpretation of its remnants. In both kinds of historiography it is necessary, according to Buffon, to screen, decipher and interpret the historical remains. For scientists being interested in natural history this means they have to excavate the world’s archives, to extract the ancient monuments and to assemble in a body of evidence the marks – or indexes, indices in French – of physical changes. By doing so they will be able to retrace the different ages of nature (les différens âges de la Nature). This passage comprises a whole bunch of new ideas. The most important innovation, which, as we saw, already was present in Kant three years earlier, was the radical temporalization of that part of science that was known since antiquity as natural history. With the introduction of the historical dimension natural history turned into an explanatory science. In Buffon’s writings this shift takes place with recourse to the established vocabulary of the historiography of human history. He speaks of buried monuments, historical remains that are to be deciphered, past ages – and most importantly for our context – the natural archives of the world. It is this transfer of terminology from the historiography of human history to that of the history of nature that allowed Buffon, in the first place, to represent his objects of research. At least in part Buffon could go back to an older tradition in which fossils were compared to buried medals or human monuments. (Fritscher 2009: 201-219) This comparison, fossils as »medals of creation« can already be found at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the posthumous works of the English natural philosopher and polymath Robert Hooke. (Hooke 1977: 52) The comparison was motivated by the pragmatic context in which these objects of nature and of culture appeared, namely excavations in the earth. The terminology established under the influence of systematic excavation projects in Pompeii and Herculaneum that started in the 1730s and brought to light the life of submerged former civilizations. In this context, fossils already were seen as testimonies of lost worlds. But, this conception was based on the simple biblical time scheme of an older antediluvian and a younger postdiluvian age. In contrast to this scheme, Buffon developed the idea of a history of nature differentiated in several epochs and ages. In this view, fossils could be analysed on the same methodological basis as archaeological monuments: as relicts offering insights into the temporal succession of lost worlds. The first one to explicitly use in this context the expression archives of nature seems to be the German botanist, naturalist and geographer Johann Gottlieb Georgi in his Observations on the Formation of Mountains and the Changes the

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Globe has Undergone, which apparently first appeared in 1780 in English as an appendix to the translation of the third volume of his treatise about the geography of Russia: »[…] the secondary and tertiary mountains of the empire […] compose the most ancient chronicle of the globe, the least liable to falsification; and, at the same time, their character is more legible than that of the primitive chains. They are the archives of Nature, antecedent to letters and the traditions of remotest ages, the investigation of which was reserved for our scrutinizing times.« (Georgi 1780: 299-371, 340-1)

At about the same time Georgi wrote this, the French naturalist Jean-Louis GiraudSoulavie formulated similar opinions in his Natural History of Southern France which appeared in 1781: » […] j’ai observé une superposition de granit sur du schiste micacé, qui donne un nouveau jour à l’Histoire chronologique comparée des granits & des schistes, & qui recule d’une époque l’Histoire ancienne du Globe terrestre. On sait que ces deux substances, les plus anciennes qu’on connaisse sur la superficie du Globe terrestre, avoient été confondues ensemble dans les archives de la Nature. (Giraud-Soulavie 1781: 156-7)

Here, Soulavie reports on the »superposition« of different sorts of stones in the »chronological history of the earth«, especially of granite and schist, the two types he thought to be the oldest on the surface of the earth, mixing with each other in the archives of nature. In an article that appeared two years later, Soulavie presses the metaphor even further and claims that because of the superposition of the stones one can even read in the archives of nature (lire dans les archives de la Nature). By doing so, it is possible, according to Soulavie, to give a chronological order (un ordre de chronologie) to the succeeding facts. (Giraud-Soulavie 1783: 289-294, 293)4 In the last decade of the eighteenth century this metaphor of reading in the archives of nature was taken up by several authors. According to these authors the archives of nature can be consulted (consulter les archives de la nature) in order to get something to know about the past history of the earth. These archives were supposed to be readable in the same way as historical documents are: »on peut lire

4

Cf. Rudwick 2005: 281.

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l’Histoire de la Mer, comme on lit celle de l’Homme dans les archives des Nations«. (De Luc 1798: 60)5 In this last decade of the eighteenth century the metaphor also appeared in other languages, for instance in German: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach wrote in 1790, petrifications were »the most infallible documents in nature’s archive« (die infallibelsten Urkunden im Archiv der Natur). (Blumenbach 1790: 1) Having established the historical perspective on nature as a succession of different ages, it was a small step to consider the archives of nature as the repository of its history. In nature’s archives you can find »what she herself has recorded of her history« (was sie von ihrer Geschichte selbst aufgezeichnet hat), as an anonymous German author has put it in 1799.6 So, with the end of the eighteenth century the term archive was well established in the study of earth history. During the nineteenth century the expression regularly occurs in the context of geological studies. The »archive of the earth« is seen as a place where »unquestioned proofs« (unbezweifelte Beweise) for the periods of earth history can be found (Ballenstedt 1822: 44-76, 51), such that the »archive of the earth« just has to be consulted to get information about the distribution of living beings in former times. (Hamel 1845: 49-78, 52) As it is well known, the concept of history and the methods of historiography changed to a considerable extent from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century: Material philosophy of history with its metaphysical construction of cultural history as standing in continuity with the history of nature was replaced by more formal approaches and methodological reflections emphasizing the role of studying the primary sources in the archives. This development might have changed the concept of the archive and its role in the context of natural sciences: Assuming a continuity of nature and history it might have been less controversial to consider natural deposits as archives. In the older conception, history of nature and man could be seen as one process directed towards one and the same end: the development of man. With breaking this continuity by the establishment of the »historical method« in cultural historiography in mid-nineteenth century it could have become more problematic to consider natural deposits as archives. But, as it seems, this development had not affected the use of the term »archive« in the natural sciences. Apparently, there was no discussion at all about the applicability of the term in the natural sciences at that time.

5

Cf. Rudwick: 2005: 327; 308.

6

»Sendschreiben an den Königl. Preuß Justizminister Maßow«, in: Die Geißel 3.3, pp. 227-320, 266.

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Instead of terminological differentiation in the course of differentiating methods of the humanities and natural sciences, it was, to the contrary, the widely used terminology of palaeontology which was borrowed from historiography that contributed to the rapid acceptance of the theory of evolution in the middle of the nineteenth century. But having adopted the terminology from historiography of human history palaeontology has also inherited the methodological principles and problems associated to it: The archives of the earth had to be deciphered and interpreted. Taking full account of this methodological parallel between the historiography of human and natural history, the biologist Theodor Boveri wrote in his treatise about The Organisms as Historical Beings from 1906 that historical natural science have still much to learn from the humanities. (Boveri 1906: 15) Natural science cannot write the history of nature without getting involved into hermeneutics. At the time Boveri wrote about the methods natural science had to learn from the humanities it was still an open question whether it is appropriate at all that natural science adopts the concept of history. The historian Johann Gustav Droysen, for instance, doubted in the 1880s that this is legitimate; according to him, »history« in its eminent sense is restricted to the human sphere. For »history« the war of words seems to be won by natural science: it is now very common to think of the history of non-human life or the history of earth or the cosmos. For »archive«, in contrast, things are not yet clear. Before entering this discussion with arguments I like to have a look at the field where it is now most accepted to think of archives in nature. This is the field of soil studies.

»A RCHIVES

OF THE

S OIL «

»Archive of the soil« became a fixed term in the last 20 years. This process started with debates about the protection of the soil as an important natural resource. One of the earliest documents to use the term was the conception of soil protection (Bodenschutzkonzeption) of the German federal government of 1985. In this conception several functions are attributed to the soil: as cultivable surface, as a place for buildings, a deposit of resources or waste, as groundwater reservoir, as recreation area, and finally as an »archive of natural and cultural history«.

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Since this year, 1985, the expression »archive of the soil« became gradually established in the context of discussions about soil functions.7 It even entered into the text of a federal law, the »law for the protection of the soil« from March 1998.8 However, in the 1990s there were some discussions about the legitimacy of the term. Michael Kloepfer, for example, in the first edition of his standard reference work about environmental law, which appeared in 1989, did not mention any function of the soil as an archive for natural or cultural documents. In a footnote he even called the function of the soil as a medium for historical documents as negligible from the point of view of environmental law. (Kloepfer 1989: 819) He did not give any explanation for this opinion. But one might suspect that the function of the soil as an archive appeared as negligible for Kloepfer because it only refers to the soil as a store of information and it does not refer to a function of the soil in ecological or economic terms: the archive of the soil is not a resource that has an ecological function or that can be economically exploited. But, as it seems, Kloepfer later had changed his mind on this matter because in the second edition of this book which appeared in 1998, in the same year as the federal law, he takes it for granted that the soil can function as an archive for natural and cultural history. In a list of the functions of the soil, Kloepfer gives in this second edition, it goes without saying that being an archive for natural and cultural documents is one among other functions of the soil. (Kloepfer 1998: 769) The driving force for the establishment of the expression »archive of the soil« seemed to be the German State Offices for Environmental Protection. In their presentations to the public the function of the soil as an archive plays an important role.9 (Bischoff 1994) In the last two decades these State Offices have produced several brochures concerning this topic.

7

Bundesministerium des Innern: Bodenschutzkonzeption der Bundesregierung, Drucksache 10/2977, Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, 10.3.1985, 5; von Mutius 1990: 477-496, 478; Reichmann 1992: 8-9, 8; Große-Brauckmann 1993: 47-52, 48.

8

»Gesetz zum Schutz des Bodens vom 17. März 1998«, in: Bundesgesetzblatt 1998, Nr. 16, 502-509, 503 (§2).

9

Landesumweltamt Brandenburg (ed.) (2005): Böden als Archive der Natur- und Kulturgeschichte. Ein Beitrag zur Darstellung der Archivfunktionen von Böden in Brandenburg, Potsdam; Landesanstalt für Umwelt, Messungen und Naturschutz BadenWürttemberg (ed.) (2008): Böden als Archive der Natur- und Kulturgeschichte, Karlsruhe.

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But, in what sense is the soil an archive? As the expression »Archive of Natural and Cultural History« indicates there are two senses to be distinguished. Angelika Book distinguished them already in 1986: »In two senses the soil has a function as a medium of historical documents. In the first place it is a source of information about important processes in the natural history of the formation of the soil. Secondly, it conserves objects made by humans in the past and, therefore, allows for important insights in cultural history.« (Book 1986: 11)

In this last sense, the soil is seen as an archive because it functions as a deposit for cultural monuments. In this sense, Walter Benjamin in 1932 considered the earth as medium in which the old cities were buried. (Benjamin 1991: 305-438, 400-1) This is the perspective of archaeology, or Bodendenkmalpflege in German, the care of field monuments. In another perspective, the soil is not just considered as a medium for documents of the past but as an archive in itself. This is the perspective of soil science, pedology or Bodenkunde. In this perspective the soil itself serves as a primary source for the historiography of the history of nature: for the reconstruction of geological processes, the history of the climate, the evolution of life on earth or the influence of human settlement. In this context soils have a historical documentary value (historischer Quellenwert). (Rösch 1998: 309-318; Hierold/ Bork 1998: 535-538) Aspects of this value are the stratigraphical position of the soil, its chemical composition, with e.g. phosphor as an indicator of human settlement, and biogenic residues as pollen, spore or fossils. Although all kinds of soils can function as archives for natural and cultural history, efforts are undertaken to mark certain soils as specific archive soils (Archivböden). (Bischof 1994: 8) In these soils stages of earth history or human influences are preserved in an exceptional way. Currently, several study groups are trying to formulate criteria for the distinction of archive soils. Main criteria are the rarity of the soil, its closeness to natural states, its importance for a certain region, its state of conservation, and its age.10 In this section I was focused on the development in Germany. In other countries the situation seems to be similar. The English expression »archive of the soil« appears at the end of the 1980s, it was used by study groups in the Netherlands,

10 Ad-hoc-Arbeitsgruppe Boden (2007): Methodenkatalog zur Bewertung natürlicher Bodenfunktionen, der Archivfunktion des Bodens […], Hannover; Bund/Länder-Arbeitsgemeinschaft Bodenschutz (LABO) (ed.) (2011): Archivböden. Empfehlungen zur Bewertung und zum Schutz von Böden mit besonderer Funktion als Archiv der Natur- und Kulturgeschichte, Aachen.

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urban archaeologists, investigating old cities in the Southern Netherlands. (Laleman 1989: 837; Hoefte 1990: 107-118, 107) Hence, as in the German context, in the beginning the soil was seen as an archive because of its function as storage for the residues of cultural monuments.

T HE A RCTIC A RCHIVE As far as I can see, it was only in the last years that the arctic has been considered as an archive for natural or cultural history. But, to be sure, it was clear since centuries that there are objects in the arctic ice that give insight into former periods of time and now extinct creatures. The best known example, of course, is the case of the mammoth. Descriptions of the skeleton of these animals found in the arctic ice can be found since the end of the seventeenth century. The first full description was given for a specimen found near the delta of the Lena River in 1799. The botanist Michael Friedrich Adams brought it to the Zoological Museum in Saint Petersburg, where the skeleton was mounted by Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius. But, nobody calls the arctic ice an archive because you can find now extinct mammals in it. An archive has to be a store of data, not of carcasses; it is not just a burial ground. What has been called an archive in recent years are lake sediments and ice cores which do provide data, proxy data, i.e. measurements of physical characteristics that are supposed to preserve past conditions, this means, data in need of interpretation. (Smol 2007: 17563-17564; Spielhagen 2012: 1055-1056) The proxy data of arctic sources provide high-resolution records of the climate in past times going back hundreds, thousands or, on the basis of rocks, even hundreds of millions of years. Especially revealing for many questions are ice-cores. The authors of a recent study about the winter surface air temperatures from Svalbard of the last 1,200 years claim: »Ice cores are among the best archives of past climatic and environmental changes«. (Divine 2012: 1-12, 1) So, the question is: What is a natural archive?

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W HAT

IS A

N ATURAL A RCHIVE ?

Some years ago, Wolfgang Ernst provided a kind of definition of a cultural archive for which a feedback-mechanism was central. The definition is this: »The archive is not the place of collective memories in a given society but rather the place of classifying, sorting (out) and storing data resulting from administrative acts, representing a kind of cybernetic feed-back option of data back to present procedures. Archived data are not meant for historical or cultural but for organizational memory (such as the state, business or media); real archives link authority to a data storage apparatus.« (Ernst 2005)

This seems to be a good definition for cultural archives. Its crucial element is the feedback loop between administrative acts and the stored data: authorities select data for storage and these data in turn influence future authorities. This means, there are intentional acts involved in the constitution and use of cultural archives. A certain type of natural archives also conforms to this pattern of cultural archives. These are the archives in museum collections. They also were built up by authorities and feedback on the stabilization of an administrated order, viz. the taxonomic order of natural things. This order was established in mid-eighteenth century natural history and stabilized in the context of the emerging museums of natural history. The archival function was at the heart of these new institutions which emerged in a counter-aesthetic movement by replacing the representative idea of the wonder cabinets by scientifically justified orders. (Spary 2003: 163180) Going into these archives it was possible to place specimens found in nature within the order of the »natural system«. And in turn, each new finding had potential influence on the architecture of the archival order. By their use, therefore, the museum collections functioning as archives played an authoritative role for any statement about the diversity and relationships between the objects existing in nature. This, of course, is not true of natural archives in the sense of natural deposits or traces of past conditions such as physical characteristics of ice-cores that are causally connected to past events or states in earth history. These deposits or traces were not created by intentional acts but, in the first place, just by natural laws and past events in the history of nature. And nature does not make use of these deposits and traces in authoritative acts whatsoever. To the extent that Wolfgang Ernst’s definition is taken to be authoritative, then, these structures are not archives in themselves. However, within a broader context of human detection and use, natural deposits and traces of past physical conditions can be seen as archives in Ernst’s sense

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as well. In their function as archives the natural deposits and traces are closely connected to human action in the two directions of their genesis and use. First, in their genesis nature’s archives are not just given but coproduced by humans: The relevant structures within nature’s archives such as ice-cores or rocks can be seen as causal outcomes or indices of past events or conditions only after extracting and processing the information by technical devices and interpreting it within the context of hypotheses and theories. And second, it is not nature itself, but only humans who make use of this information as indicators of past conditions and (hopefully) as background information for future action. Hence, in Ernst’s sense natural deposits and traces are established as archives not before their later use; nature has no archive by itself but only by humans using their objects as such. Natural archives come into existence by being extracted and processed from natural structures and by being used in an argument or the execution of administrative acts, for example in the political discourse about measurements to be taken against climate change. The authoritative acts in which natural archives are involved do not take place in nature alone but include human beings. On this basis, one encompassing explanation of »archive« could be: An archive is a place in which remnants of former structures or physical characteristics connected to past events or states are stored. The inclusion and exclusion (selection) of objects to the archive and the relationship between past and present states is governed by consistent laws that allow for conclusions about past events or states. In many cases, especially in natural archives, the information in the archived material is not just given but must be extracted and prepared by technological procedures (such as chemical analyses and calibration techniques). In these cases, the archive is not already present in nature but is coproduced by these technological procedures and the interpretation of the data. Moreover, it is essential to the functioning of remnants as archive that they can be (and actually are) used in arguments or acts that (potentially) feedback on the constitution of the archive.

This is just a minimal explanation of the term. It takes into account, first of all, that natural archives are not established by intentional acts alone and do not always feed-back on intentional, or more specifically, administrative acts. In their nonhuman component natural archives comprise material that was not intentionally produced with the historical record in view and the whole (unprocessed) archive itself is an unintentionally existing deposit. Hence, in the non-human component of natural archives there is a first order non-intentionality at the level of its objects and a second order non-intentionality at the level of the whole arrangement of the archive.

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This non-intentionality may have the advantage that natural archives are to a lesser degree than cultural archives subject to intentional alteration and falsification. The intentionality of the archive’s installation and its consequences seem to be the most important difference between natural and cultural archives.

S IMILARITIES AND D IFFERENCES AND N ATURAL A RCHIVES

BETWEEN

C ULTURAL

What is similar in natural and cultural archives is that there has to be a mechanism of conservation or at least lawful transformation that allows for the reconstruction of the past by using the items in the archive. In order to be conserved the material in archives must be isolated from disturbing external events. In the case of natural archives two effective means of conservation are high pressure and low temperature. The first is realized, for example, in stone sediments, the second in ice. Both mechanisms have the effect of transforming dynamic processes into static, or at least less dynamic, structures. This transformation is particularly articulated in the case of the conservation of living beings. In this case, the isolating mechanisms result in transforming the living system that was produced and maintained in a living state by metabolic processes into the pure structure of its morphology, e.g. its skeleton. In a similar way as human thinking and human interactions are preserved in cultural archives by static texts and other artifacts, living processes are preserved in natural archives as buried spatial configurations, as »fossils«. This transformation is also a representation: Past events are represented by conserved structures. To summarize all this, I like to stress five similarities between natural and cultural archives: The first is: Cultural and natural archives have consistent criteria of inclusion and exclusion of objects. In the case of cultural archives these criteria are intentionally chosen and may have to do with authoritative power; in the case of natural archives the criteria are given by natural laws, general laws of nature and specific laws having to do with the specificities of the place and medium of the archive’s location. The second similarity refers to the mechanism of conservation. It consists in both cases, cultural and natural, in arresting processes that would alter the material. One of the most effective means for this arresting is cold temperature. Low temperature for conservation purposes is used in cultural archives, e.g. in film archives or in tissue banks, and also, of course, in natural archives: It is first of all low temperature that makes the arctic such an effective location for the storage of

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physical and chemical characteristics correlated with states of the history of nature. I also already mentioned the third similarity: Both, cultural and natural archives represent past events not as events but as pure structures, relations or concentrations that resulted from past events. The fourth point refers to the fact that it is not only individual events that are represented in cultural and natural archives but, at least in many cases, regular patterns of past activities or different tokens of the same type. Natural archives normally preserve, e.g., many specimens of one biological species. And as the specimens are deposited in well documented temporal layers it is not only individuals that can be analyzed on the basis of natural archives, but regular patterns of past events. And, finally, both cultural and natural archives provide, in methodological terms, raw data and primary sources for the reconstruction of the past. Because of these similarities between cultural and natural archives, the material in the archives of nature can serve as evidence for past events in similar ways as documents in cultural archives do. In this respect, therefore, as registers of past history, cultural and natural archives are similar. When archives are defined on this basis, as registration devices of past events and states, then nature clearly has, to the extent that it has history, also archives. One may suspect, therefore, that by conquering the concept of history in the nineteenth century the natural sciences have also gained the related concept of archive. But in the same way as Droysen said that the natural sciences have not a concept of history in its eminent sense it seems to be true that they do not have the concept of archive in its eminent or, as Wolfgang Ernst has put it, in its proper sense. Archives of culture and of nature are supposed to be collections of conserved, static objects. But culture makes archives dynamic tools for specific concerns; they are integrated into procedures of administrative power, in their establishment and their use. This dynamization of the static cultural archives may be seen as a symbol for the uniqueness of human culture because humans are, as the Australian philosopher Kim Sterelny wrote in his recent (rather unphilosophical) book The Evolved Apprentice, »creatures of feedback« (Sterelny 2012: 75): their evolutionary success depended on several feedback mechanisms. Creating and using archives in the eminent sense of the word may be one of them.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to the comments made at the Conference especially those by Kjetil and Johan.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Ad-hoc-Arbeitsgruppe Boden (2007): Methodenkatalog zur Bewertung natürlicher Bodenfunktionen, der Archivfunktion des Bodens der Nutzungsfunktion »Rohstofflagerstätte« nach BBodSchG sowie der Empfindlichkeit des Bodens gegenüber Erosion und Verdichtung, Hannover. Anonymus (1799): »Sendschreiben an den Königl. Preuß Justizminister Maßow«, in: Die Geißel 3.3, pp. 227-320. Ballenstedt, Johann Georg Justus (1822): »Die Versteinerungen des Elm-Gebirges und die natürliche Geschichte des Elm-Waldes«, in: Archiv für die neuesten Entdeckungen aus der Urwelt 4, pp. 44-76. Benjamin, Walter (1991): »Denkbilder« [1932], in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV.1, Frankfurt a.M., pp. 305-438. Bischoff, Ralf (1994): Böden als Archive der Landschafts- und Kulturgeschichte in Hessen, Unveröffentlichter Abschlussbericht vom 15. Mai 1994 (with many thanks to the author for sending the report). Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich (1790): »Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte der Vorwelt«, in: Magazin für das Neueste aus der Physik und Naturgeschichte 6.4, pp. 1-17. Book, Angelika (1986): Bodenschutz durch räumliche Planung, Münster. Boveri, Theodor (1906): Die Organismen als historische Wesen, Würzburg. De Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte (1778): Les époques de la nature (= Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, Suppl. 5), Paris. Bund/Länder-Arbeitsgemeinschaft Bodenschutz (LABO) (ed.) (2011): Archivböden. Empfehlungen zur Bewertung und zum Schutz von Böden mit besonderer Funktion als Archiv der Natur- und Kulturgeschichte, Aachen. Bundesministerium des Innern (1985): Bodenschutzkonzeption der Bundesregierung, Drucksache 10/2977, Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, 10.3.1985. Divine, Dmitry et al. (ed.) (2012): »Thousand years of winter surface air temperature variations in Svalbard and northern Norway reconstructed from ice-core data«, in: Polar Research 30.7379, pp. 1-12. Ernst, Wolfgang (2005): »The archive as metaphor. From archival space to archival time«, first published in: Open 7, http://archivepublic.wordpress.com/texts/wolfgang-ernst/, accessed online May 2019. Fritscher, Bernhard (2001): »›Kritik der naturhistorischen Vernunft‹. Umrisse einer historischen Epistemologie der kantischen ›Archäologie der Natur‹«, in: Volker Gerhardt (et al.) (ed.): Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung, vol. 4, Berlin, pp. 513-520.

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— (2009): »›Archive der Erde‹. Zur Codierung von Erdgeschichte um 1800«, in: Knut Ebeling/Stephan Günzel (eds.): Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten, Berlin, pp. 201-219. Georgi, Johann Gottlieb (1780): »Observations on the Formation of Mountains and the Changes the Globe has Undergone«, in: Russia: or, a Compleat Historical Account of all the Nations which Compose that Empire, vol. 3, London, p. 299-371. »Gesetz zum Schutz des Bodens vom 17. März 1998«, in: Bundesgesetzblatt 1998, Nr. 16, 502-509, 503 (§2). Giraud-Soulavie, Jean-Louis (1781): Histoire naturelle de la France méridionale, Paris, pp. 156-7. — (1783): »Descriptions des couches superposés de laves du volcan de Boutaresse«, in: Observations sur la physique, l’histoire naturelle et les arts 22, pp. 289-294. Große-Brauckmann, Gisbert (1993): »Gedanken aus Naturschutzsicht über ein Bodenschutzgesetz; Erwartungen und Forderungen, auch hinsichtlich der Böden als Pflanzenstandort«, in: Ökologie-Forum in Hessen (ed.): Bodenschutzgesetz, Wiesbaden, pp. 47-52. Hamel, Joseph Christian (1845): »Ueber Dinornis und Didus, zwei ausgestorbene Vogelgattungen«, in: Bulletin de la Classe Physico-Mathématique de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg 4, pp. 49-78. Hierold, Wilfried/Bork, Hans-Rudolf (1998): »Schutz des Bodens als Archiv der Natur- und Kulturgeschichte«, in: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Bodenkundlichen Gesellschaft 88, pp. 535-538. Hoefte, Rosemarijn (1990): »Caribbean Studies 1989«, in: European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 49, pp. 107-118. Hooke, Robert (1977): The Posthumous Works [1705], London. Spary, Emma (2003): »Forging nature at the Republican Muséum«, in: Lorraine Daston and Gianna Pomata (eds.): The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe, Berlin, pp. 163-180. Kant, Immanuel (1905): »Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen« [1775], in: Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.): Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, Berlin, pp. 427-443. Kant, Immanuel (1913): »Kritik der Urtheilskraft« [1790/93], in: Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.): Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, Bd. V. Berlin, pp. 165-485. Kloepfer, Michael (21998): Umweltrecht, München.

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Laleman, M.C. (1989): »The state of urban archeology in the ›old‹ Southern Netherlands«, Notices of Periodical and Occasional Publications, Mainly of 1988, in: The English Historical Review 104, pp. 777-850, 837. Landesanstalt für Umwelt, Messungen und Naturschutz Baden-Württemberg (ed.) (2008): Böden als Archive der Natur- und Kulturgeschichte, Karlsruhe. Landesumweltamt Brandenburg (ed.) (2005): Böden als Archive der Natur- und Kulturgeschichte. Ein Beitrag zur Darstellung der Archivfunktionen von Böden in Brandenburg, Potsdam. De Luc, Jean-André (1798): Lettres sur l’histoire physique de la terre, Paris. Von Mutius, Albert (1990): »Gesetzliche Möglichkeiten des Bodenschutzes«, in: Hans-Peter Blume (ed.): Handbuch des Bodenschutzes, Landsberg/Lech, pp. 477-496. Reichmann, Helmut (1992): »Stand und Probleme der bodenkundlichen Landesaufnahme«, in: Ökologie-Forum in Hessen (ed.): Böden in Hessen, Wiesbaden, pp. 8-9. Roy, Porter (1977): The Making of Geology. Earth Science in Britain 1660-1815, Cambridge. Rudwick, Martin J.S. (2005): Bursting the Limits of Time. The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, Chicago. Rösch, Manfred (1998): »Naturhistorischer Quellenwert des Bodens«, in: Ingo Kowarik/Erika Schmidt/Birgitt Sigel (eds.): Naturschutz und Denkmalpflege – Wege zu einem Dialog im Garten, Zürich 1998, pp. 309-318. Smol, John P. (2007): »Marine sediments tell it like it was«, in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104/45, pp. 17563-17564. Spielhagen, Robert F. (2012): »Hotspots in the Arctic: Natural archives as an early warning system for global warming«, in: Geology 40, pp. 1055-1056. Sterelny, Kim (2012): The Evolved Apprentice. How Evolution Made Humans Unique, Cambridge, Mass. Zammito, John (2012): »Should Kant have abandoned the ›daring adventure of reason‹? – The interest of contemporary naturalism in the historicization of nature in Kant and Idealist Naturphilosophie«, in: International Yearbook of German Idealism 8, pp. 130-164.

Archival Metahistory and Inhuman Memory W OLFGANG E RNST

The following text investigates if the relation between terms like »Arctic memory« to the institutional archive and especially technological storage is more than just a metaphorical one. Within a society increasingly dominated by storage practices, cultural memory itself »cools« down. The very definition of »information« itself is closely linked to mathematics which has been developed in physical thermodynamics. Therefore, the current interest in the »Arctic discourse« turns out to be a symptom of current media culture itself.

»A RCHIVES « OF THE A RCTIC T HE M ETAPHORICAL R ISK

AND

There are geological times and climatic changes on the one side and cold technological storage on the other. Both temporalities have one common denominator: They challenge what is familiar in cultural knowledge as »historical time«. The attractive figurative surface of the conference topic Archives of the Arctic. Ice, Entropy and Memory immediately triggers academic, cultural and artistic imagination. But behind there lurks a challenge on the epistemic ground level: Is it possible to keep a reasonable balance between the discursive effects induced by the Arctic ice as metaphor for cold memory and a precise discussion of terms like archive, memory, (neg-)entropy and storage, or is it rather advisable to keep both ways of analysis strictly distinct? Ice is a frequently used metaphor for the archive indeed, both popular and artistic as well as in the scientific imagination. But in terms of archival science, there could be no natural archives since the criterium of purposeful selection is lacking.

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Geological and thermodynamic time dramatically differ from symbolically organized time which is, according to Gianbattista Vico's and Ernst Cassirer's definition, cultural time known as history. How to resist extending the term »archive« to all kinds of metaphorical denomination of memory forms? The archive is a symbolical, cultural, thus (in Vilém Flusser's terminology) a »negentropic« form of memory organization, different from physical »recording«. A tactical answer to the metaphorical challenge is to take the ancient Greek sense of metaphorein in its media-archaeological sense: long-time transmission by ice memory. The Arctic ice is literally »metaphorical« in that it carries frozen states into a different time. But different from cultural »tradition«, this transmission is non-intentional. A physical »memory« of energetic processes (»Materialgedächtnis«) is not an archive since it is not inscribed into and by the symbolical regime. The memory of the past, metaphorically »frozen« in archival records, traditionally used to be de-freezed by historians turning this cool classified memory into hot historical imagination expressed in historiographical stories.1 Today, the traditional extremes of long-time storage (or even memory for eternity) for which the Arctic ice serves as a metaphor on the one hand, and short-time hot memory (within the perceptual »window of presence« within the human brain and in computing CPUs) for which electricity serves as an index in McLuhan's media theory, merge into one: The economy of temporal (re-)call becomes timecritical itself. Streaming media and storage become increasingly intertwined. (Chun 2011a) Storage is just a slowed-down event – like the »freeze frame« in cinematography. (Diekmann/Gerling 2010; Hámos et al. 2010) Archival stillness and processual media time are interlaced. (Green/Lowry 2006)

1

See Marshall McLuhan's notorious distinction of »cold« media which demand active participation and interpolation by human senses as opposed to high-definition information which »heats« only one of the human senses.

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The climatic change as induced by the industrial warming of the earth, resulting in melting (ant)arctic ice, serves as a macro-physical analogy to the heating up of communication in Internet real-time, time-flow, water instead of ice, short-term intermediary memories instead of the eternal archive. Let us climb Alpine mountains in early springtime. While the sun already starts to warm the wanderer, snow and ice on the ground still resists. It takes until actual summer to see this finally melt away. Evidently ice is less a metaphor for eternal memory than for delay: rather an equivalent to the electric condenser than to the archive. The time-critical counterpart of the archival long-time preservation memory is condensed time in frozen ice indeed. With frozen water, instead of archival endurance, we confront what Wendy Chun in terms of dynamic computer memories calls »the enduring ephemeral«. (Chun 2011b) Delayed energy storage, in Norway, are artificial lakes on top of the mountains, with their water flow to be released in times of energy shortage; the the Dt itself is the symbolical notation (and shape) of an ice-berg. »Delay«, as well known from early computer »memories«, names the variable, scalable temporal interval replacing the ontological notions of emphatic eternal memory. (Sharpless 1948)

R OCKY F IELDS : O N »M ETAHISTORY « If the Arctic ice does not represent an archive in its proper sense, does it rather embody a kind of involuntary memory of »anonymous« history in terms of Siegfried Giedion? Let me here introduce the term metahistory as the supra-time-critical transcendence of historical, man-made time. My use of the term archival »metahistory« differs from Hayden White's notorious definition of Metahistory as the forms of rhetorical prefiguration in emplotments of past events which transform the tectonics of the archival storage into narrative. (White 1973) I rather use the term »metahistory« in the sense of the historian of economics Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld. In his lecture at the German Historians convention in Heidelberg 1903 on »The limits of history« (Die Grenzen der Geschichte) Gottl-Ottlilienfeld reserves the same term Metahistorie for temporalities in the natural sciences as opposed to »historical« time in the humanities (Gottl-Ottlilien-

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feld 1925: 420). 2 For illustration, Gottl-Ottlilienfeld describes geological formations in the Odenwald region of South-West Germany analogously to the Arctic formation. Two temporalities have been at work here, the macro-geological and the cultural-historical. While the geological formations dissolved into a field of dissipated rocks (the »Felsenmeer« close to the city of Reichenbach) and represent macro-temporal physical entropy (the tendency to equally distributed disorder), the remains of ancient Roman carvings out of these rocks are traces of history, of neg-entropic, informative (Flusser) energy invested against the physical evolution (»historical« time). To the present spectator, though, the macro-dimensional and the historical time dimension aesthetically merge into one, since in many cases it is undecidable whether marks on or in the rocks have been the result of physical decay or ancient Roman carvings. As opposed to bare material memory, how to decipher symbolically »encoded« past if the hermeneutical cue (»code«) is not known? Sometimes it is difficult to separate naturally distributed rocks from a ruined human setting. The cognitively learned macro-temporal dimension is affectively perceived as condensed time. Conventional philosophy of history differentiates between geological and historical time as epoché. In the case of the field of rocks which at the same time served as stone quarry both temporalities suddenly appear undistinguishable. Entropic time cannot be grasped by historical imagination and is only symbolically accessible through Ludwig Boltzmann's formula which is engraved on this tomb stone at the Vienna’s Südfriedhof. Such a reading of thermodynamic entropy explicitly »compares with C. E. Shannon's discussion of telecommunication which can be exemplified this way: information is being coded as a telegram which in transmission creates negentropy in the cable. When the electric pulses are received, information can be retrieved« (Brillouin 1951: 335).3 This equals the formula for emphatic cultural tradition indeed: alphabetically coded information is sent by the institutional archive to be decoded by historians and transformed into narrative (historiography).

2

I owe this reference to Ferdinand Fellmann.

3

I owe this reference to Matthias Wannhoff, Media Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin.

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(A NT -)A RCTIC D ATA C LOUDS Our publication focuses on the circumpolar area under an archivological perspective. Let us do so in terms of information theory. Any transformation of entropic states into information is negentropic. Roald Amundsen's cartographer during the first crossing of the Northwest-passage, Godfred Hansen, described the polar explorer's erected stone look-outs as »[...] his journey's traces against time's erosion, [...] when his name is gone as the melting snow« (Eglinger 2010: 8). Let us switch here from physical to informational negentropy. In its interactive virtual environment Dialogue with the Knowbotic South (1994)4 the media art collective Knowbotic Research (KR+cF) devised a knowledge space to represent what we geographically call the Antarctic, a model of a Computer Aided Antarctica based upon the available computer-processed information on current Antarctic research as it appears in public data networks. Apparently, the Antarctic as informational space actually happens outside the Antarctic, as artificial nature in data representations of measuring and sensoring instruments covering this area and producing, every second, a stream, a flood of data (like satellite vision or US NSA data surveillance within the PRISM program). These informations can be grasped and administrated only by artificial intelligence (learning algorithms, so-called »knowbots«) in computer networks. These agents create objects out of the flood of information.5 The data body of this Cyber-Antarctica as presented by Knowbotic Research is based on temperature data and Ozone values – scientific material which has lost any deep sense or semantic meaning, replacing the semiotic, cultural interpretation by the Wiener/Shannon definitions of information through communication channels. Data clouds here replace narrative – like Iannis Xenakis' stochastic musical compositions. When the physicist makes an observation, he hyper-ecologically transforms negative entropy into information which nature never produced beforehand. Let us think in terms of thermodynamics which is the only non-metaphorical language (and mathematical symbolism) to link »Arctic memory« with the archive and with storage media.

4

For a curated documentation see http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/werke/dialogue-withthe-knowbotic-south, accessed online May 2019; for a video documentation see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ3ZbD5uGkE, accessed online May 2019.

5

For a report on the digital installation of Dialogue with the Knowbotic South in Kunstraum Wien see Wesemann 1995.

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A RCHIVAL E MERGENCY AND THE C OLD A RCHAEOLOGICAL G AZE : Q UICK FREEZE In media archives film roles are frozen down in order to withstand time. The vocabulary of storage media is significantly dominated by the language of temperature indeed. In administrative and mass media terms, »quick freeze« – a term taken from preservation of nutrition (Schockfrosten) is a preservation order, an administrative Speicheranordnung to prevent the almost immediate erasure of telecommunication data in companies just in case there is need to de-freeze them for legal investigation – the suspended interval. Thus the icy freeze is not just about long-time memory but a time-critical short-time-memory technology as well. In the United States there is a huge image archive permanently located in the Iron Mountain, Pennsylvania. (Sejdel 2004) The Corbis Corporation there keeps the physical photographies and negatives of which it commercializes their digital distribution and rights. In the cold technical language memory is nothing but a metaphor for storage which is not about remembrance but simply a numerical function of logistical addresses. The archive is a mnemonic agency in a technological sense, while remembrance is a human (if not social) bias which drives record traces from beyond the archive. In technical terms, »cold storage« means signal or data storage (such as Flash Memory) at the lowest possible expense of electric energy.6 (Metz 2013) Mo i Rana is the cold location of the memory-technological branch of the National Library of Norway in the far North – embedded within a mountain, cold storage here serves for audiovisual media storage as opposed to the culturally »hot« spot of the printed books library in the center of Oslo. Practically speaking storing digital data carriers in ultra-low temperatures (be it a refrigerator or an iceberg) exponentially increases the probability for undamaged preservation; »Arctic« digital memory. But just like in the case of the Corbis image agency, which stores its photographic originals within a mine operated by the Iron Mountain/National Underground Storage Company, the resistance to climactic change, earthquakes and other physical or man-made accidents is paid for by naccessibility. Physical memory becomes literally remote. For research, the user is directed to the Corbis digital archive; instead of analogue photographies from the past, the researcher is presented with their information. »Analog is having a burial and digital is dancing

6

This information comes from Johannes Maibaum.

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on its grave.«7 And Arthur Kroker added: »Now, we are suddenly living in the culture of the retrieval of digitally archived images by remote control: images safely kept at a distance from human contact, uncontaminated by the passage of time. The image archive is reduced to the steady flicker of the cybernetic code« (ibid.) which is in fact no more iconic but a series of alphanumeric characters (as presented in the control room in the Wachowsky brothers’ movie The Matrix).

F ROZEN S OUND It is the technomathematical condition of our media culture which triggers our metaphorical interest immediately once the Arctic subject is named – »cold« in terms of hardware and of mathematics which requires a research method as anticipated by Friedrich Nietzsche's passion of distance (»Pathos der Distanz«).8 (Nietzsche 1886: 227) The »frozen« corresponds with the techno-mathematical approach such as the electronic synthesis of the human voice. Among others with parallel approaches, Boris Yankovsky in Moscow in the 1930s developed a method of computing the human voice which treats the sound matter in a fully formal approach: a combination of a mathematical model of the synthetic tone (»syntone«) and its implementation in a processing mechanism (Yankovsky's Vibroexponator). »To synthesize the human voice singing a vowel, one would need to choose several templates related to formants [...], to add extra templates as needed [...], to recalculate their sizes according to the desirable frequencies and intensities of formants, and then to mix them. The final waveform would sound like a ›frozen‹ vowel«, as described by Andrei Smirnov (Smirnov 2013: 215). »Frozen« – aha. But caution, soon we are trapped by the metaphorical risk again. The phonograph as media artefact not only carries cultural meanings like words and music but is at the same time an archive of cultural engineering by its very material fabrication – a kind of frozen media knowledge that – in a media archaeological sense – is waiting to be unfrozen, liquefied. Digital archaeology operates both below and beyond the sensual or even cognitive thresholds of sight and sound – a level that is not directly accessible to human senses because of its sheer electronic and calculating speed. Synesthetically, we might see a spectro-graphic image of a tiny section of previously recorded sound memory – a straight look into the real media archive. The microphysical

7

Commentary by Sarah Boxer in the New York Times, April 15, 2001.

8

As expressed in Friedrich Nietzsche (1886): Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Leipzig, §257.

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close reading of sound, where the materiality of the recording medium itself becomes poetical, dissolves any semantically meaningful archival unit into discrete blocks of micro-sound. Instead of applying musicological hermeneutics, the media archaeologist suppresses the passion to hallucinate »life« when he listens to recorded voices. »The idea of ›cool‹ and now ›frozen‹ actually becomes a figure for the way in which media as time machines ›package‹ sense data in order to endure time. It plays with the idea of the traditional task of heritage, storage, and preservation of freezing time and dynamics of life« (Parikka 2013: 12) in terms of technical media.

I CE -C OLD V IDEO M EMORY (N OMI ) Phonographically recorded signal memory defreezes once it is being re-played by an appropriate record player. One step further is the technological de-freezing of electromagnetic latency, that is audio and video recordings on magnetic tape. In Henry Purcell's opera King Arthur the de-freezing of the »Cold Genius« figures prominently with its repeated staccato outcry »Let me freeze again to death«. This drama has been re-enacted by the singer Klaus Nomi. While the melting of ice is part of physical entropy, the video recording of Nomi's performance shortly before his death caused by the AIDS virus is a suspense of decay as media archive, a technical negentropy as long as the tape can be actually re-played. According to Norbert Wiener, »the time in which we live has an obvious direction and cannot be reversed without the production of effects which are more than paradoxical« (Wiener 1948/50: 198) – like the video-recording of Nomi's Cold Song. Such a recording preserves an icy memory of the Nomi song. The staccato-like articulation »Let – me – freeze – again – to death« is the semantic message of the recording technology itself. The tentative de-freezing of Winter ice here takes place step-wise (frame by frame) like the stop-motion essence of chrono-photography and cinematography itself does to any recorded life movement. Nomi looks very much alive with his eye movements, but what we are looking at is an iceberg of electro-magnetic signals. The older the analog tape gets, the

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more it entropically dissolves into equally distributed dots on the video monitor. De-freezing death is still undead here.9 Recently, a Japanese artist extended the defreezing to the storage medium itself, by creating phonographic audio recordings not on vinyl, but on ice. The sound literally melts away, returning to its originary fugitive tempor(e)ality.

F REEZING S TREAMING M EDIA Digital media culture itself de-metaphorizes expressions like »cold memory«. The hotter data trading in the WWW and the »social web« takes place (Derrida's »archival fever« very literally, since all algorithmic data processing requires at least minimal moments of intermediary number storage) the more it needs technical cooling: An example is the economic transition of the North-Swedish town Lülleor from previous steel industry to Information Technology; the Facebook provider installs a server farm for cloud computing. Here, the shift of emphasis from materiality and energy to information is not only true in Norbert Wiener's sense, but economically as well. The data in Facebook are being »mirrored« two to three times, for security reasons (which is creating data redundancy). What is it that makes icy conditions attractive for the digital »ice« age? The energy and water supply for such a data center equals the previous industrial steel factories; on a global level, two percent of energy consumption is actually due to computing.

A RCTIC C ONDITIONS

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S IGNAL

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One basic argument of my article has been to demonstrate the closeness of the cold Arctic memory metaphor to non-metaphorical storage technologies, that it takes the language and knowledge of thermodynamics and its derivative information theory to analyse this alliance and that the media-archaeological gaze is the appropriate method to cope with that constellation. In terms of archives of the moving image, it takes hours to dehydrate stored film material. Here, the archive is not a metaphor for icy memory, but the Arctic becomes a denominator for cold media memory itself. In fact, freezing slows down entropic degradation. Information is not completely independent of temperature

9

For Nomi’s performance see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQrqgSK8-XU, accessed online May 2019.

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when it comes to digital storage; for the storage of 1 Bit a minimal energy is necessary. In a refrigerator at around 10 degree Celsius the data endurance of a typical flash memory (like a USB stick) is secure for thousands of years.10 Does the NSA, for example, thus demand artificial Arctic glaciers to secure their data avalanche created by spying programs like PRISM? But in millennia ahead, the heating of the refrigerator will have increased the earth's negentropy to a deathly degree – Maxwell's demon maximized to the »max« (cf. Brillouin 1951). But in millennia, no being will be able to decipher a frozen electrostatic storage unit as a symbolical bit. In order to teach the reading code to future non-humans, a media archaeologist will first have to be frozen into Arctic ice as well – maybe the author of this text.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Boxer, Sarah (2001): »A Century’s Photo History Destined for a Life in a Mine«, in: New York Times, 15.04.2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/15/us/acentury-s-photo-history-destined-for-life-in-a-mine.html, accessed online May 2019. Brillouin, Léon (1951): »Maxwell's Demon Cannot Operate. Information and Entropy«, in: Journal of Applied Physics 22.3, pp. 334-337. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2011a): Programmed Vision. Software and Memory, Cambridge, Mass. /London. — (2011b): »The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory«, in: Erkki Huhtamo/Jussi Parikka (eds.): Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications, Berkeley /Los Angeles/London, pp. 184-203. Diekmann, Stefanie/ Gerling, Winfried (2010): Freeze Frames. Zum Verhältnis von Fotografie und Film, Bielefeld. Eglinger, Hanna (2010): »›Traces Against Time's Erosion‹: The Polar Explorer between Documentation and Projection«, in: Anka Ryall/ Johan Schimanski/ Henning Howlid Wærp (eds.): Arctic Discourses, Newcastle upon Tyne, pp. 2-18. Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, Friedrich von (1925): Wirtschaft als Leben. Eine Sammlung erkenntniskritischer Arbeiten, Jena, pp. 337-379. Green, David/Lowry, Joanna (2006): Stillness and Time. Photography and the Moving Image, Manchester. Hámos, Gusztáv/Pratschke, Katja/Tode, Thomas (2010): Viva Fotofilm. bewegt/unbewegt, Marburg.

10 As optimistically articulated in: Chip no. 5 (2012), 128.

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Knowbotic Research (1994): »Dialogue with the Knowbotic South«, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/werke/dialogue-with-the-knowbotic-south/, curated documentation, accessed online May 2019; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ3ZbD5uGkE, video documentation, accessed online May 2019. McLuhan, Marshall (1964): Understanding Media, New York. Metz, Cade (2013): »Facebook Wants New Breed of Flash Memory for Storing Old Pics«, in: Wired, 17.06.2013, www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/facebook-cold-storage, accessed online May 2019. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1886): Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Leipzig. Nomi, Klaus (1982): Cold Song, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQrqgSK8XU, accessed online May 2019. Parikka, Jussi (2013): »Archival Media Theory. An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology«, in: Wolfgang Ernst: Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. by Jussi Parikka, Minneapolis/London, pp. 1-21. Sharpless, Kite T. (1948): »Mercury Delay Lines as a Memory Unit«, in: Proceedings of a Symposium on Large-Scale Calculating Machinery, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 103-109. Smirnov, Andrey (2013): Sound in Z. Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia, London. Wesemann, Arnd (1995): »Datenschwärme aus der Antarktis«, in: Frankfurter Rundschau 02.09.1995. White, Hayden (1973): Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe, Baltimore/London. Wiener, Norbert (1948/50): »Time, Communication, and the Nervous System«, in: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 50, pp. 197-219.

The Melting Archive: The Arctic and the Archives’ Others U LRIKE S PRING & J OHAN S CHIMANSKI

Illustration 1: Photograph by Arne Nævra, »Polar Meltdown«, used by permission.

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C ONSERVABLE

OR

N EGOTIABLE ?

An image of a polar bear standing on a pedestal of melting ice became famous when it was runner-up to the One Earth category of the Wilderness Photographer of the Year Awards in 2007. (Cf. Booth 2007) The often uncredited or miscredited image had been taken by the Norwegian nature photographer Arne Nævra; the message was conveyed in the photo’s title, »Polar Meltdown«. The photo has been used many times in the media and on the web, and has quickly come to stand for the dangers involved in climate change, using the threat to the environment of an Arctic animal as a metonym for a global crisis. The way in which it has been received draws moreover on a notion of modernity which sets nature as a victim up against technology as an enemy, (Beck 1991: 35-6) even if the Arctic has always had an integral role to play in modernity. (Thisted 2017: 335; Hulan 2018: 84) Arctic nature is considered as world heritage which has to be protected, while technology acts as potential destroyer of that heritage. The Arctic thus functions as a repository of the past that at the same time is a guarantee of the future. It is in other words an archive. It relates to modernity with an ambivalence also found in more familiar, human-made archives, consisting of diverse records which narrate and document different memories from the past. The Arctic is in this discourse mainly reduced to a Northern region characterized by its fragile nature and global symbolic value, while other realities such as living in the Arctic are neglected. (for the various forms of the North see Jørgensen 2013: 272, 277-78) It raises questions of conserving the past as heritage on the one hand, and on the other hand questions of treating heritage as an economic negotiable, a resource or investment to be traded publicly. This plays upon the 19th-century image of the North as the perfect playground for industrialization and exploitation of resources on one hand and of huge areas of untouched and pristine nature on the other. (Jørgensen 2013: 275) We might even say that the Arctic must on the one hand be safeguarded and historicized and on the other publicly used and negotiated. Similarly, the modern archivist preserves the past with the aim of making it useful for present and future society. As Jacques Derrida points out, the etymology of the word »archive« relates both to origins in the past and to power in the present or future (think of words like »archaeology« and »hierarchy«), or as he puts it, »the commencement and the commandment«. (Derrida 1995: 9) While modernity (in all its various forms) feeds on such temporal ambivalences where both the Arctic and archives are concerned, does it always do so in the same way in today’s digitalized economy as it did say in the first heydays of liberal capitalism in the 1800s? In answering this question we will be examining the archaeology of modernity and the archive.

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Today, while a polar bear on the melting ice may be seen as object to be conserved, Nævra’s photo quickly became rather an object to be exchanged, a negotiable, if not economically, at least symbolically. Paradoxically, it is easily accessible on the internet, but the eroding nature of the internet, its failure as an archive in the traditional definition as stable and consistent, means that even tracing the photo’s provenance as a public image is difficult. The photo gained renewed prominence when it was distributed by the World Wildlife Fund in the run-up to the Rio Earth Summit in June 2012. It was chosen among photos on the World Wildlife Fund’s social media site Earth Book »http://www.earthbook2012.org« – a kind of environmental Facebook, since then taken offline – where it had been placed by the otherwise anonymous Carla Lombardo Ehrlich. Ehrlich is often credited by others with having taken the photograph. She wrote in her original, no longer extant posting from May, 25th 2012: »I believe that I do not have to say why I chose this photo...a picture is worth a thousand words. This beautiful creature has no where to go, and unfortunately, no longer on this earth that so many humans take advantage of. [sic] We have to wake up and start doing our part to save our precious earth and the precious wildlife that share [sic] it with us.«

One of the forces at work in the use of this image is an appeal to a discourse of conservation, of conserving the Arctic environment and the animals which live there because they are part of a global heritage that is crucial for our future survival. Whatever the physics of ocean ice are in reality, the image conveys a precariousness: the bear perched on the floating pedestal of ice becomes a metaphor for what is known as the ecological balance, which through human influence on the environment may suddenly become an imbalance. Research on focus groups about the effectiveness of climate change icons has shown that many identify emotionally with polar bears because they represent the fragility and purity of their environments (O’Neill/Hulme 2009: 407). The photo echoes our mental images of sculptures in white marble seen in museums, of figures monumentalized by being placed on pedestals; but this pedestal is melting, being eroded by the fluidity of sea water. While sculptures in museums traditionally give an impression of life through depicting figures with their weight more on one leg than the other, with the pedestal creating a firm, balanced grounding, the bear in »Polar Meltdown« exaggerates and parodies that kind of contrapposto in its awkward balancing act. To conserve the Arctic is to treat it as a museum or an archive, both as a repository of a past state and a storage of memory and information; but the Arctic archive is a fragile one. In many ways, not only public and activist culture, but also Arctic science treats the Arctic as an archive which has to be preserved and restored. Layers of

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ice in glacial ice-caps are archives from which we may reconstruct the history of climatic change through the centuries, polar bears function as living archives of their genetic code, and the ways of life of indigenous populations in the circumpolar regions function as archives of historical experience and cultural heritage. The image of ice layers in an ice core is particularly apt, functioning with a discursive resonance: the freezing of information, preservation through cold. (Frank 2017: 19) The Greenland ice cap has been revealed as being a repository of documentation of climate change. Also, while the Arctic itself may be a living archive, it is clear that Arctic science is engaged in a very modern practice of transferring this information into human-made archives – such as when the ice core is preserved for later research, in institutions such as the National Ice Core Laboratory in Lakewood, Colorado.1 In the potent image of the ›archive of the ice‹ the difference between the natural and the human becomes a difference, we would claim, of techniques. Both nature and humans create archives, but they use different means to do so. The main point we want to make here is however that through the discourse to which Nævra’s photo belongs, the conservationary aspect of the archive, with its focus on preservation and restoration, comes to stand for a form of resistance to a particularly fluid form of modernity. By juxtaposing conservation (the stable, the ›solid‹, the Arctic as it has been) with a threatening movement and mobility (the melting ice, the changing climate), the photograph reflects a discourse of domination which Zygmunt Bauman saw as part of his concept of »liquid modernity«: the shift from a power play between who is »bigger« and »smaller« to one between who is »quicker« and »slower«, with the quicker being able to decide the speed of change. (Bauman 2000: 188) The polar bear is seemingly helpless fastened to a shrinking ice-float like a shipwrecked sailor, slowly sinking, and prompting associations with what it means to be powerless in today’s fast and mobile society. The underlying message of the image is that it is the new forces of modernity – not being limited by territory or territorial attachment – which determine the fate of the polar bear and on greater scale of the Arctic, and eventually the world. The photograph may even function as a form of identification for those who feel powerless and rootless; by decrying today’s instability, it attempts to reinstall solids, to literally provide the polar bear (and the onlookers) with solid ice under their feet. In other words, the photograph articulates a desire to re-establish the security

1

The National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF) – formerly the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL), »About NSF-ICF«, https://icecores.org/about, accessed online May 2019.

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of the archive: layers of ice, providing stability, along with reliable knowledge about the past and present and hence prediction about the future. However, and here we arrive at the second force at play in our archival paradox, in addition to the appeal to preservation. The content of the image is also predicated on its use, its public dissemination and performance, i.e. its status as a fluid negotiable. For the environmental activists and sensationalist journalists who have put the image into circulation, it is an investment, which can only function to the extent that it joins a global marketplace of ideas. Both the document before turning into an archival record and the photograph at the point of being taken are contingent products which acquire relevance and meaning by being inserted into specific structures and narratives, made by the archivist through selection and ordering or the user through interpretation. It is the logic of these structures and narratives which underlies their power as storages of human or environmental memory.2 The power of this photograph is precisely that it has a pedagogic message – less polar ice means more problems for polar bears – a story which has identifiable protagonists, and which is particularly striking and memorable. As one of the judges of the original Wilderness Photographer of the Year competition, fellow nature photographer Klaus Nigge, stated: »This image is not about composition or magical light […]. It is the simplicity of the message: the last polar bear on the last piece of ice in a time of global warming.«3 The photo has value because it takes an environmental crisis and transforms it into an economic negotiable, a spectacle which the public can buy into, and which is circulated on a global scale. It is symptomatic of the present age: as a digital image on the web it is deterritorialized with theoretically everyone having access to it, as an image featuring the specific environment of the Arctic it is reterritorialized. The long history of the polar bears as an attractive object for commodification is a recurrent theme in Michael Engelhard’s Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon. (Engelhard 2016) With modernity, the polar bear increasingly became a part of mass culture and media spectacle, with the image of the polar bear, rather than the bears or their pelts themselves, being reproduced and circulated widely. From the 1980s onwards the polar bear has functioned as a symbol of climate

2

For the ambivalent relation between contingency and (historical) narrative see Ernst 2013: 141-42.

3

Booth, Robert (2007): »Dazzling, dramatic wildlife images show magic of nature«, in: The Guardian 25.10.2007, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/oct/25/wildlife, accessed online May 2019.

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change and environmental degradation, though sometimes the images drown out the actual environmental message or the real world of polar bears. (Engelhard 2016: 14-15, 24, 211-12) Images of polar bears, especially when they are shown against a snowy or icy background and their fur is shown as white (and not yellow or grey), denote the purity of the Arctic wilderness, (Hansson 2010: 15; Engelhard 2016: 209-10) to be protected against human incursion. They, along with other icons of Arctic change and narratives of the ›disappearing‹ Arctic, can contribute to the construction of the Arctic as a homogeneous and ›empty‹ space, and thus to the erasure of an indigenous presence that threatens to disturb dominant environmental discourses. (Bravo 2009; Bjørst 2014; Herrmann 2015: 303; Körber et al. 2017: 17; Stuhl 2017) Indeed, also human communities in the Arctic are threatened by solidity of the ground beneath their feet becoming liquid, as the permafrost melts. (Hulan 2018: 75) Each iconic image of a polar bear tends to essentialize polar bears and the Arctic, standing for all polar bears and the whole Arctic. (Bjørst 2014: 133). They are often invested with melancholy and nostalgia. (Herrmann 2015: 297; Hulme 2010: 42; Körber et al. 2017: 15) In one sense then, the image denotes conservation, but at the same time the form connotes that which threatens to destruct the Arctic, the economic negotiability on which globalization is founded. The multiplied versions of the image on the web and in other media help locating its graphic content in public memory, making it part of human heritage. It is however the very proliferation of the image which inserts it into various narratives and makes it tradable. Here one of the paradoxes of modernity, of its contradictory and context-dependent features, becomes apparent. The constant negotiation between Bauman’s »solid« and the »liquid« modernities continually shapes global and local discourses, and this dynamics moreover corresponds to the traditional notion of the archive as stable and unmoving versus the contemporary idea of it being in motion. (Røssaak 2010: 12) The narrative the photograph is inserted into, refers to a stable notion of the Arctic as archive, aiming at preservation, while it at the same time reveals the constantly changing character of this archive by its material being disseminated via the internet, making it potentially accessible to everyone.

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Here we want to examine this underlying tension for its implications where Arctic archives are concerned. The concept of ›modernity‹ is important to our argument. ›Modernity‹ is of course a highly ideologically charged and complex concept featuring many different spatial and temporal forms; it has become common to apply

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it in the plural ›modernities‹, rather than in the singular. (Venn/Featherstone 2006) Subsequently, we will be making an archaeological foray into the origins of one specific discourse of Arctic modernity going back into the historical archives in 1874, and also developing on tensions around the concept of the archive. First however we would like to discuss further the terms introduced in the image of the polar bear on a pedestal. The way in which the image has been used suggests that it is only by entering into the marketplace that an environmentalist discourse is made possible: only by being commodified can the image gain impact. The message of the image is however that there is a place which should not be sold: the Arctic should not be made into a commodity. The Arctic becomes a place which symbolically stands for a resistance to commodification. Until recently, it seemed as if the environmentalist discourse was winning the argument, and that precisely by appealing to the global impact of climate change. If the polar ice is not conserved, the whole world may suffer severe consequences. However, with mounting empirical evidence of the melting of the polar ice, it appears that the global marketplace has seen an opportunity to capitalize on polar melt. The logic seems to be that perhaps we must accept the arguments about climate change, but in the moment that we accept them, we can forget about them again, because of the new opportunities presented by ice-free waterways in the summer months. Maybe this is not such a paradox as it may seem – if we follow our argument that the Arctic functions as archive of natural and human heritage – considering that the two guiding principles of the archive are remembering and forgetting. (Derrida 1995) If we continue with this analogy, then it is the users of the archive who decide which records to use, and which ones to discard; which ones should be defined as heritage to activate and trade in the present and which ones as heritage turning into history. This sense of opportunity in the melting polar ice is based on a perception that it makes the Arctic into a place of economic negotiables. The Arctic is now tradable, because open waterways make new trade routes possible and increase potential access to the so-called ›riches‹ or ›bonanza‹ of oil and gas resources in the Arctic (Stuhl 2017: 22).4 Hundreds of glossy scenarios are produced with maps of lines and blobs in the Arctic, conferences with titles such as »Arctic Frontiers«5 are arranged, mixing policy and science, and governments have been quick to invest in e.g. Northern Area Strategies (we refer here to the Nordområdestrategi of

4

Since this article was first given as a lecture, oil prices have sunk, making the value of continued resource exploration in the Arctic less secure.

5

arcticfrontiers.com, accessed online May 2019.

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the Norwegian government6). Climate change has made the Arctic more accessible to cruise tourism, an industry, as René Hulan states, which »exemplifies ›globalization‹, its liquidity and consequences« (Hulan 2018: 34). In these discourses, the sense of climate crisis gives way to the idea that with the melting or liquidization of the ice, one might also liquidize one’s previously frozen assets, make good out of the crisis. This kind of economic thinking constitutes one central form of modernity, related to Bauman’s »liquid modernity« (Bauman 2000). As the Arctic ice melts, it becomes a symbol of liquidity on other planes. The anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen talks of an »overheating« of the world, borrowing a term from economic theory or engineering and using it in many different contexts. (Eriksen 2009) This overheating is a product of the perceived heightened speed and mobility of the world, that overcoming of space which is so often presented as a central form of modernity, and indeed of globalization. Heightened kinetic activity is the definition of heat, so it seems logical that the melting of the ice, caused by heat, should be accompanied by movement, mobility and access. In the concept of »liquid modernity«, the process goes even further: power now means to be elsewhere. As Bauman observes, the long drive to move faster through space has arrived at its limit because of the instantaneity of the digital media (Bauman 2000: 10) and »power has become truly exterritorial« (Bauman 2000: 11) in today’s global economy. However, while the present global commodification of the Arctic seems to symbolize this ultimate form of power, it is clear that resource extraction and Arctic transport is still dependent on forms of access and mobility through physical space, and thus on the physical liquidity of an icefree Arctic ocean. In the economy, ›liquidization‹ is associated with a negative situation, a crisis, but the economy also is kept alive through the ›liquidity‹ of assets. Oil and gas are both liquid resources, gas in our context having to be made into liquid in order to transport it from Arctic installations. Economic interests can invest in environmental icons, including polar bears, in order to ›whitewash‹ their ecological footprints in the Arctic (Engelhard 2017: 212; Bloom 2017: 192-93). Ironically, to return to Nævra’s photo, the One Earth Award that year was sponsored by Shell, (Booth 2007) a central actor in resource extraction in the Arctic.

6

Utenriksdepartementet, »Regjeringens nordområdestrategi«, Regjeringen.no, https://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dokumenter/regjeringensnordomradestrategi/id448697/, accessed online May 2019.

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T HE O RIGINS OF L IQUID M ODERNITY I N A RCTIC D ISCOURSE Having examined some of the underpinnings of a very contemporary discourse of the Arctic, we now want to make an archaeological foray into the past in order to develop on the tensions involved in these figures of the melting Arctic and of liquid modernity. While in 1874 the ›Arctic is melting‹ topos had yet to be established, there existed a conflict between two related topoi, those of the ›frozen‹ and ›open Arctic sea‹, which in turn connoted ›uselessness‹ and ›usefulness‹, (Spring/Schimanski 2015) or resistance and negotiability. Moreover, categories of solidity and liquidity as activated in modernity theory suggest that oppositions such as that between resistance and negotiability were integral parts of modernization processes. Again, polar bears took on a central role in the Arctic discourses of the 1870s (Schimanski/Spring 2010: 32-35), and we will suggest connections between economic and medial modernity in line with those we have outlined in the case of the public reception of Nævra’s photograph today. To do this, we will be going into the archive – the historical archive – and more precisely to events originating in the 19th-century metropolis of Vienna, namely the financial ›panic of 1873‹ (in German known as the Gründerkrach) and the return of the Austro-Hungarian polar expedition in 1874, after two years in the Arctic. The expedition was welcomed with huge celebrations in Vienna after having discovered Franz Joseph Land in 1873. In the Central European context of the 1870s, both the stock exchange crash of 1873 and the Austro-Hungarian polar expedition were seen as connected to modernity. The stock exchange crash was a product of an overheated economy, the entrepreneurial heyday known in German as the Gründerzeit. The transformation of the neoabsolutist Habsburg monarchy into the semblance of a modern state was accompanied by a liberalization of financial controls and the creation of high-risk economic instruments. (Eigner 2014: 84) The bourgeoisie attempted to gain hegemony through an ideology of political, economic, technological and social liberalism which it also identified with science, progress, the future and modernity. In 1873, this position was consolidated by the arranging of the World Exhibition in Vienna, in which the mercantile, industrial and technological advances of the time were presented in a globalized space. The promise of this era was however also threatened by the Vienna stock exchange crash in the May of 1873, which quickly spread to other stock exchanges throughout the world and signalled the beginning of a years-long global financial crisis and period of stagnation.

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The return of the polar expedition the next year provided a way of negotiating the obvious tensions in the liberal model.7 Typical features associated with modernity such as progress and material advancement had been corrupted by the liquid values represented by the stock market. Tellingly, caricatures depicting the consequences of the stock exchange crash featured liquid imagery, with people drowning in water or in a quicksand-like substance.8 After the crash, the expedition and the scientific ideals it represented provided a way of returning to a more idealistic and stable version of modernity. The spectacular celebrations of the expedition may be interpreted in the context of efforts, typical for modernity, to transform liquids into solids again and to provide stability and predictability. The insecurity which the banking crisis revealed in the liberal economy caused also a crisis in the idea of progress, the response being that the idea of progress had to regain shape, had to be recast on a secure basis and background. Baumann makes a distinction between the liquid modernity of today and a previous ›heavy‹ modernity where the conquest and possession of territory was the ultimate aim. (Bauman 2000: 113-14) We would rather speak of a dynamic relationship between liquid and solid aspects of late 19th-century modernity. The discovery of new lands in the Arctic, while not giving rise to any concrete territorial claims, gave symbolic solidity to Austria’s post-1873 liquid state. In the 1870s, the effort to regain solidity in a world defined by progress was far more marked than it is in today’s liquid modernity. If the utilitarian aspect of economy had shown itself to be more fragile than previously thought, then another aspect had to replace it: the economics of heroism, of idealism. The expedition members fulfilled these expectations to a great extent. While the Viennese elite could not invest money in idealism, they could invest symbolic capital in pride in the nation and in the aspiration to transform Austria-Hungary into a competitive modern state. Journalists and speech-makers were quick to affirm that the expedition brought no economic benefits with it. Indeed, its rejection of the open polar sea theory – i.e. a liquid core inside the frozen Arctic ocean, which would have made the Arctic more shippable – contributed to an ongoing sidelining of earlier holy grails of polar exploration in the material realm. In previous periods, Arctic exploration had been driven by a search for riches in the form of natural resources and sea pas-

7

Schimanski/Spring 2015: 94, 103, 172-74, 348-50, 542-43, 546-47; and (although he does not focus on the term liberalism) Walsh 2015: 150-58.

8

»Baron Wodianer« (1873a), in: Die Bombe 18.05.1873, p. 131; »Baron Wodianer« (1873b), in: Der Floh 24.05.1873, p. 1.

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sages. The Austro-Hungarian expedition was typical of the new, uneasy partnership of science and ›firsts‹ in polar exploration – increasingly, Arctic travel was becoming a competition of reaching somewhere first, of laying claim (even though only symbolically) to still ›empty‹ space. However, while the expedition was thus not directly connected to the economy in any substantial way, the crash did have important impact on the discursive response to the return of the expedition. The return was not only figured as good news in the midst of bad, but also the rhetoric became infused by various fluid puns and sliding signifiers which connected Arctic and economic worlds. Such references were particularly frequent in the satirical material and in the so-called Feuilletons or commentary columns of the daily newspapers, textual spaces in which a stylistic and intellectual journalistic competence could be used to comment and reflect ironically on the events of the day. Our example here is taken from a slightly obscure source, a Viennese newspaper titled the Constitutionelle Volks-Zeitung, edited by A. Vorbringer. This minor newspaper had all the accoutrements of a daily newspaper, but only appeared at highly irregular intervals, indicating an insecure economy and perhaps a very small staff. Such publications must be seen in the context of economic overheating, which was accompanied by the founding and financing of a very large number of new newspapers in this period, but also in a liberalization of censorship and stamp tax laws and practices. Many of these titles were also to disappear quickly, especially after the stock exchange crash of 1873. The unsigned feuilleton in the Constitutionelle Volks-Zeitung on October 1, 1874, under a week after the return of the explorers to Vienna, unfolds an extended metaphor of Arctic exploration and economic speculation. It begins with a long and vague reflection on walking on ice, in German, »auf’s Eis gehen«,9 or as is often said in English, ›walking on thin ice‹. The ice, which in other contexts may be read as standing for solidity, is here read as implying risk, fragility, and the danger of sinking in icy water. This image of walking on ice is then made concrete. As the polar explorers are introduced, the text gives its readers a new image, that of ice making a crashing noise, as it did on the expedition, outside their ship the Tegetthoff. In German, of course, one can experience the Krach noise of the ice, but also a stock exchange crash, such as that which happened in the stock exchange in Vienna, is a Krach. »Our polar explorers have experienced more Krachs than our stockbrokers [Börsianer], – almost all of whom abandoned their ›Tegetthoff‹ on the Schottenring [site of the Vienna stock exchange] last year, through one Krach only, and have been blown to the winds. –

9

»Feuilleton« (1874), in: Constitutionelle Volks-Zeitung 01.10.1874, pp. 1-2, here 1.

60 | U LRIKE S PRING & J OHAN S CHIMANSKI Yes, the Krach on Cape Schottenring has revealed, how many have been walking on ice, – and how few have successfully saved themselves – since some of them must have saved themselves – but where are they? – or, in which furs do they hide?«10

In the newspaper, the explorers are contrasted to the stockbrokers and speculators, the explorers having endured more than just one Krach. The text however opens for the possibility that not all of the speculators have gone under, and that some of them, like the explorers, have successfully survived and gone to ground. Some of them are perhaps hidden in furs – not the furs of the polar explorers or of polar bears, but the furs or Pelz of rich bankers, or of those who pretend to be something other than what they are (as in the metaphor of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, in German a ›Wolf in Schafspelz‹). The text continues by invoking the celebrations on the explorers’ return as a hunt for spectacle: »I thus find the neverending celebrations [of the explorers] and the neverending hither and dither wholly understandable – and also the hunt for the Arctic explorers. – Because they are now hunted, as they themselves will not deny. – The whole world wants to see them, – the whole world needs money; – […].«11

Here fame and spectacle are figured as money, as economic value, and the value of the explorers for the Viennese public is that they return, or give a return on investment, in contrast to the speculators who have ruined many of their livelihoods. The anonymous feuilletonist then goes on to use similar arguments and Arctic rhetoric with respect to alcoholism in Vienna, but afterwards returns to the field of economics:

10 »Unsere Nordpolfahrer haben mehr Krache erlebt, als unsere Börsianer, – die schon durch einen Einzigen fast ingesammt im verflossenen Jahre ihren ›Tegetthof‹ [sic] am Schottenring verließen, und nach allen Windrichtungen verschlagen wurden. – Ja der Krach am Cap Schottenring hat bewiesen, wie Viele auf das Eis gegangen, – und wie Wenige sich glücklich gerettet, – denn gerettet müssen sich doch welche haben, – aber wo sind sie? – oder in welchen Pelzen stecken sie?« (»Feuilleton« 1874: 1) 11 »Ich finde es daher vollkommen begreiflich den endlosen Jubel und das endlose Hinüber und Herüber – und die Jagd nach den Nordpolfahrern. – Denn das auf Sie [sic] nun Jagd gemacht wird, werden sie selbst nicht läugnen. – Alle Welt will sie sehen, – alle Welt braucht Geld; – […].« (»Feuilleton« 1874: 1)

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»Indeed, the Arctic explorers have done a great service to humanity. They have through their criss-crossing voyages, through their endurance, proven that one may even turn back successfully from where one thinks oneself stuck and one dares not hope for a way out. – They had nothing more than ice and snow, bears and seals.«12

The explorers are however, the text continues to argue, not just a symbol of the possibility of return from ill fortune. The text continues by referring to those who profit from bad fortune, using the common stock exchange metaphor of a ‘bear’, the speculator who invests in falling shares. In the famous modern sculpture in front of the Frankfurt Stock exchange, the bear shows pessimism and the bull shows optimism, though some believe the terms stem from a different image, of the bear falling downwards onto its prey in contrast to the bull who thrusts its horns upwards, which would underline the image of the bearish investor profiting from a failing economy. During a downturn, some traders will sell shares they have not yet bought, in the belief that the shares will fall and can then be bought cheaply, so-called short-selling, a practice historically associated with the market in bear skins. The feuilletonist writes: »– Why yes, the bears were their good fortune. – Oh! a good bear is capable of creating both good and bad; as long as one knows how to benefit from bears. – Our joint-stock companies of the entrepreneurial [Gründungs-] and World Exhibition year of 1873 had also partly shown us adorable, plum bears, – however, these bears did not bring fortune to the shareholders who had walked on ice, hunting the bears, – and there is the old, yet ever-new saying, […] ›Nothing good comes of bears, – except paws and liver; – And among the shareholders benefits go – only to the [dividend] giver.‹«13

12 »Jawohl, die Nordpolfahrer haben sich um die Menschheit ein großes Verdienst erworben. Sie haben durch ihre Kreuz- und Querfahrten, durch ihre Ausdauer bewiesen, daß man selbst von da aus noch, wo man festzusitzen vermeint, und keinen Ausweg mehr zu hoffen wagt, dennoch glücklich umkehren kann. – Sie hatten nichts mehr als Eis und Schnee, Bären und Seehunde.« (»Feuilleton« 1874: 2) 13 »– Ja doch die Bären waren ihr Glück. – O! ein guter Bär vermag viel Heil und Unheil anzurichten; je nachdem man aus den Bären Nutzen zu ziehen versteht. – Unsere Actien-Gesellschaften im Gründungs- und Weltausstellungsjahre 1873, hatten auch theilweise allerliebste, feiste Bären uns gezeigt, – jedoch diese Bären waren für die auf’s Eis gegangenen und auf selbe Jagd machenden Actionäre nicht zum Glücke, – und es ist ein altes Sprichwort, doch bleibt es ewig neu, [...] ›Vom Bären ist nichts gut, – als Tatzen und Leber; – Und Nutzen hatten von dern Actionären – nur die Geber.« (»Feuilleton« 1874: 2) Rhyme in translation as in original.

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Short-selling, which can produce bubbles, is associated with and sometimes identified with stock exchange crashes. So, while bears helped the explorers survive in the Arctic in 1872-1874 by providing a source of food, they did not help the short-sold shareholders in 1873. The message here compares and contrasts polar explorers with shareholders; the allegorical message however goes both ways. On the one hand, shareholders must learn endurance from the explorers; on the other, exploration is seen as a form of investment. The contrast privileges the Arctic over the market as a sign of modernity, for the explorers are associated with ideal values of endurance, learning, and service to humanity (and the nation). The explorers represent a ›good‹, solid form of modernity. As in the case of the contemporary image of the polar bear on a pedestal of ice, we would however like to interrogate the material performativity of the text – its medium of dissemination – and specifically its style. Typically for the Feuilleton genre, it makes surprising leaps of reasoning from one theme to another, from polar explorers to stock exchange traders to the Viennese public to alcoholics to bears etc. The style mimics the »hither and dither« with which the text characterises the public’s hunt for the polar explorers,14 and the »criss-crossing« movement with which it characterises the voyage of the explorers themselves.15 In this text, the feuilletonistic ›back and forth‹ is marked in an unusually explicit way by the many incomplete sentences and the dashes separating them. The text appears as being made up of small fragments; the solidity of normal prose has melted into a meandering flow of loose thoughts and phrases. The message of the text is that explorers’ endurance, their ›good‹, solid modernity, must be contrasted to the volatility of the marketplace. The simple contrast between marketplace liquidity and solid heroism is however undercut by the style of the text. As in the case of Nævra’s image of the polar bear, the idealist message of the text contradicts the way in which it is presented, in this case by the liquidity of its prose, giving value – semantic value – at every sudden turn of events.

14 »Hinüber und Herüber«.(»Feuilleton« 1874: 1) 15 »Kreuz- und Querfahrten«.(»Feuilleton« 1874: 2)

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The feuilleton from the Constitutionelle Volks-Zeitung is obscure, while the photograph of the polar bear on the pedestal has been circulated widely. However, the feuilleton, in its content and style, does represent radical versions of a discursive tension between ›good‹ and ›bad‹ forms of modernity at a time of crisis. Marx and Engels attempted to capture this tension in their image of the lack of substance in 19th-century modernity, translated into English: »All that is solid melts into air«.16 The situation in 1874 bears certain similarities to the modern day conjunction of rhetorics of economic and ecological crises; indeed, in a striking parallel, the appeal to the Arctic can also be seen today as way out of a financial crash. As AnnSofie Nielsen Gremaud argues, »[t]he Arctic has affectively become a space for the articulation of crisis management in the political rhetoric of the Icelandic Government (2013–) and in the rhetoric of former President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson (1996–2016)«. (Gremaud 2017: 197) Our argument is that the terms of this tension point forward to the present-day tension between conservation and liquidity symbolized by our very contemporary image of the polar bear on the pedestal. In both cases, salvation and return to solidity is paradoxically predicated on the fluid circulation of pathos through a media spectacle. However, while the Feuilleton is certainly about salvation from one form of modernity through another – saving oneself from the economic crisis and the stock exchange bears by investing in the ideals of polar heroism and scientific idealism – it lacks the implications of preserving and conserving an archive, which underlie our contemporary discourse of environmental crisis. To understand this often underplayed element in the rhetoric of climate change, it is however important to emphasize that the archive is not simply an instrument of preserving the past in frozen form, but also, both philosophically and in institutional terms, an instrument to be accessed and used actively in forming the future. The tension between different forms of modernity – parallel with modernity’s increasing reflexivity, as Ulrich Beck would have it, though he limits this aspect to late modernity (Beck 1986) – is made extra clear in the Arctic, as both a modern utopian playground and a place of resistance to modernization. In a post-Westphalian world system, the Arctic is until today one of the very few regions which to a large extent has been a terra nullius. Although this position as a political void has

16 »Manifesto of the Communist Party«, Marx and Engels Internet Archive, Transl. by Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, accessed online May 2019.

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been constantly challenged and reaffirmed throughout the last centuries, it has opened up for a variety of narratives and re-tellings as to how to record the past, the present and the future of the Far North. (Shadian 2013) If the archive, and the Arctic archive, is a place of conservation, it is a very modern place of conservation. It is certainly threatened by processes of modernity, much as archives have been threatened by the technologies of war and other structural damage – we think of institutional archives destroyed through the heat of explosions, or, as happened in Cologne in 2009 when the Historical Archives of the City of Cologne collapsed due to the building of a railway tunnel underneath it. Symbolically, modern mobility destroyed parts of history; images of the collapsed archive in Cologne remind one also of those of calving glaciers, like the bear on the ice pedestal a contemporary symbol of global change. The archive has not however only been a symbol of resistance to modernity, which has often seen memory as »something that restrains freedom of action in the present«; (Frank 2017: 21) it is clear from the many postcolonial studies inspired by Michel Foucault and others that the archive is one of the main instruments of modernity. (e. g. Stoler 2009) The empires of 19th-century »solid« modernity consolidated their control over territories with the help of enormous archives. Importantly, the structure of the archive as it developed during the 19th century paradoxically also replicates something of the interchangeable liquidity of the stock exchange. The archives’ series, indexes, archival descriptions and hierarchies of shelves, boxes and folders are attempts to create solidity in a modern form of repository which otherwise exhibits aspects of the liquid anomie (Bauman 2000: 21) of modern individuals or of money in the market. This problematic has become doubly urgent in a period of digitization of archives, as archives are transformed from the solidity of paper to the informational flow of bits and bytes. (Røssaak 2010; Grau ed. 2017) The Cologne example shows the contradictions of modernity to the full. The narrative of destruction through one form of modernity, the railway, was given a happy ending, as some of the lost documents could be reconstructed through another form of modernity, digital photography.17 Through the image of the archive as a technical apparatus – emphasized by Derrida in his essay Archive Fever (Derrida 1995: 15-17) – it becomes clear that conservation is partly dependent on modern technology. In addition, the Cologne narrative signals that the archive is dependent on access, on always being ready for new users, as being built for the present and for the future.

17 »Große Ehre für schnelle Helfer: Das digitale Historische Archiv Köln für den Grimme Online Award nominiert«, Universität Bonn, http://www3.uni-bonn.de/ Pressemitteilungen/135-2009, accessed online May 2019.

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Some of this shifting temporality of modernity is also present in the image of the polar bear on the ice pedestal and in the feuilleton from 1874. The performative force of the message in both examples is that we must conserve solidity, but this message is undercut by their mode of dissemination. Moreover, as we have shown, the Arctic discourses of the 1870s carry within them an archaeological record which connects them to present-day contradictions in Arctic modernity. Presumably, according to Beck’s model of late modernity as a »risk society«, (Beck 1986) explorers and stockbrokers would be categorized as typical of an earlier form of modernity, and as representing Bauman’s »solid« rather than »liquid« modernity. Our example from 1874 shows however that in their confrontation with the Arctic, explorers and stockbrokers must reflect upon established models of solid modernity. The ›uselessness‹ of the Arctic as perceived by Central Europeans in the 1870s encourages an ambivalence between investment in solidity and more reflexive investments. The environmentalists have invested in the photo of the bear on the pedestal of ice like a stock exchange ›bear‹ investing in a falling share. The award judge, quoted earlier, talked of the »the last polar bear on the last piece of ice«: a rhetorical figure appealing to a sense of futurity – we say rhetorical, as the bear in the photo is certainly not the last polar bear, even though there may soon be a last polar bear. The implication is that the Arctic archive, as both a natural archive and cultural heritage, must be preserved for the future. However, at the same time, the photograph itself is distributed in a globalized flow of information according to the technological logic of human-made archives. This is, as Røssaak points out, the major crisis of today’s archive: the effort to arrest the archive’s motion, to preserve it, yet having to accept that it is more on the move than it ever had been before. (Røssaak 2010: 16) In conclusion: Modernity is the ambivalent other of the archive, while the archive is one of the sources of modernity’s reflexivity. Modernity threatens the archive’s solidity with liquidation, yet the response to this threat is the very modernity of archival techniques, paradoxically embedded in the liquidity of global (ex)change.18

18 This article is based on research within the Arctic Modernities project, part-financed by the Research Council of Norway (project number 226030) as part of their POLARPROG research programme.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY »Baron Wodianer« (1873a), in: Die Bombe 18.05.1873, p. 131, http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=bom&datum=18730518&seite=1&zoom=33, accessed online May 2019. »Baron Wodianer« (1873b), in: Der Floh 24.05.1873, p. 1, http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=flo&datum=18730524&seite=1&zoom=33, accessed online May 2019. »Feuilleton« (1874), in: Constitutionelle Volks-Zeitung 01.10.1874, pp. 1-2. »Große Ehre für schnelle Helfer: Das digitale Historische Archiv Köln für den Grimme Online Award nominiert« (2009), Universität Bonn, http://www3.uni-bonn.de/Pressemitteilungen/135-2009, accessed online May 2019. Utenriksdepartementet, »Regjeringens nordområdestrategi«, Regjeringen.no, https://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dokumenter/regjeringens-nordomradestrategi/id448697/, accessed online May 2019. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000): Liquid Modernity, Cambridge. Beck, Ulrich (1986): Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, Frankfurt am Main. Beck, Ulrich (1991): »Von der Vergänglichkeit der Industriegesellschaft«, in: Ulrich Beck (ed.): Politik in der Risikogesellschaft. Essays und Analysen. Mit Beiträgen von Oscar Lafontaine, Joschka Fischer, Erhard Eppler u.a., Frankfurt am Main. Bjørst, Lill Rastad (2014): »Arktis som budbringer: Isbjørne og mennesker i den internationale klimadebatt«, in: Mikkel Sørensen/ Mikkel Fugl Eskjær (eds.): Klima og mennesker. Humanistiske perspektiver på klimaforandringer, København, pp. 125-44. Bloom, Lisa E (2018): »Invisible Landscapes: Extreme Oil and the Arctic in Experimental Film and Activist Art Practices«, in: Anna Westerståhl Stenport/ Scott MacKenzie/ Lill-Ann Körber (eds.): Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene, London, pp. 183-95. Booth, Robert (2007): »Dazzling, dramatic wildlife images show magic of nature«, in: The Guardian 25.10.2007, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/oct/25/wildlife, accessed online May 2019. Bravo, Michael (2009): »Voices from the Sea Ice: The Reception of Climate Impact Narratives«, in: Journal of Historical Geography 35.2, pp. 256-78.

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Derrida, Jacques (1995): »Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression«, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in: Diacritics 25.2, pp. 9-63. Eigner, Peter (2014): »Boom und Krach: Österreichs wirtschaftliche Entwicklung um 1873«, in: Wolfgang Kos/ Ralph Gleis (eds.): Experiment Metropole: 1873: Wien und die Weltausstellung, Wien, pp. 84-93. Engelhard, Michael (2017): Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon, Seattle. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland (2009): »Living in an Overheated World: Otherness as a Universal Condition«, in: Vytis Čiubrinskas (ed.): Identity: Discourses and Politics of Otherness, Institute of Baltic Sea Region History and Archaeology, Klaipėda, pp. 9-24. Ernst, Wolfgang (2013): »From Media History to Zeitkritik«, in: Theory, Culture & Society 30.6, pp. 132-46. Grau, Oliver/ Coones, Wendy/ Rühse, Viola (eds.) (2017): Museum and Archive on the Move: Changing Cultural Institutions in the Digital Era, Berlin/ Boston. Gremaud, Ann-Sofie Nielsen (2017): »Icelandic Futures: Arctic Dreams and Geogrpahies of Crisis«, in: Anna Westerståhl Stenport/ Scott MacKenzie/ LillAnn Körber (eds.): Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene, London, pp. 197-213. Frank, Susi K. (2017): »Ice as a Literary Motif in Soviet Arctic Modernity«, in: Heidi Hansson/ Anka Ryall (eds.): Arctic Modernities: The Environmental, the Exotic and the Everyday, Newcastle, pp. 16-38. Hansson, Heidi (2010): »Isbjörn i snöstorm: Bilder av regionen Norr« in: Heidi Hansson/ Maria Lindgren Leavenworth/ Lennart Pettersson (eds.): Regionernas bilder: Estetiska uttryck från och om periferin, Umeå, 2010, pp. 15-28. Herrmann, Victoria (2015): »The Cold War of Global Warming: Recycled Visual Narratives from the Top of the World«, in: Polar Geography 38.4, pp. 289-305. Hulan, Renée (2018): Climate Change and Writing the Canadian Arctic, Basingstoke. Hulme, Mike (2010): »Four Meanings of Climate Change«, in: Skrimshire, Stefan (ed.): Future Ethics: Climate Change and the Apocalyptic Imagination, London, pp. 37-56. Jørgensen, Finn-Arne (2013): »The Networked North: Thinking about the Past, Present, and Future of Environmental Histories in the North«, in: Dolly Jørgensen/ Sverker Sörlin (eds.): Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, Vancouver, pp. 268-79. Körber, Lill-Ann/ MacKenzie, Scott/ Westerståhl Stenport, Anna (2017): »Introduction: Arctic Modernities, Environmental Politics, and the Era of the

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Anthropocene«, in: Anna Westerståhl Stenport et al. (eds.): Arctic Environmental Modernities, London, pp. 1-20. Marx, Karl/ Engels, Frederick: »Manifesto of the Communist Party«, in: Marx and Engels Internet Archive, Transl. by Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, acessed online May 2019. O’Neill, Saffron J./ Hulme, Mike (2009): »An Iconic Approach for Representing Climate Change«, in: Global Environmental Change 19.4, pp. 402-10. Røssaak, Eivind (2010), »The Archive in Motion: An Introduction«, in: Eivind Røssaak (ed.): The Archive in Motion: New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices, Oslo, pp. 11-26. Schimanski, Johan/ Spring, Ulrike (2010): »A Black Rectangle Labelled ›Polar Night‹: Imagining the Arctic after the Austro-Hungarian Expedition of 18721874«, in: Anka Ryall/ Johan Schimanski/ Henning Howlid Wærp (eds.): Arctic Discourses, Newcastle, pp. 19-42. Schimanski, Johan/ Spring, Ulrike (2015): Passagiere des Eises: Polarhelden und arktische Diskurse 1874, Wien. Shadian, Jessica M. (2013): »The Arctic Gaze: Redefining the Boundaries of the Nordic Region«, in: Sverker Sörlin (ed.): Science, Geopolitics and Culture in the Polar Region, Farnham, pp. 259-89. Spring, Ulrike/ Schimanski, Johan (2015): »The Useless Arctic: Exploiting Nature in the Arctic in the 1870s«, in: Nordlit 35, pp. 3-27. Stoler, Ann Laura (2009): Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton. The National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF) (n.d.): »About NSF-ICF«, https://icecores.org/about, accessed online May 2019. Thisted, Kirsten (2017): »›A place in the sun‹: Historical Perspectives on the Debate on Development and Modernity in Greenland«. in: Heidi Hansson/ Anka Ryall (eds.): Arctic Modernities: The Environmental, the Exotic and the Everyday, Newcastle, pp. 312-44. Venn, Couze/ Featherstone, Mike (2006): »Modernity«, in: Theory, Culture & Society 23.2-3, pp. 457-65. Walsh, Stephen A. (2015): »On Slippery Ice: Discovery, Imperium, and the Austro-Hungarian North Polar Expedition (1872-4)«, in: Martin Thomas (ed.): Expedition Into Empire: Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World, New York, pp. 148-70.

Landscapes as Archives of the Future? J ANIKE K . L ARSEN & P ETER H EMMERSAM

The interdisciplinary Future North1 project experimentally investigates the territories and landscapes of the High North or Subarctic regions of Northern Europe. It studies the relationship between people and their environments and attempts to map the ›future‹ landscapes that are developed through both social and individual agency. The project is founded in a conception of landscape as a shared material human experience, one that supplements the traditional conception of landscape as primarily an aesthetic category. It looks at landscape as both a result of political, cultural and social development – but it also explores landscape as an agency in the production of these. The aim of the project is to raise awareness and knowledge of new landscape typologies, to include the everyday in the category of landscape, and explore tools to articulate and narrate future thinking with and from within the landscape. Two basic archive functions are evoked here: first the systematic documentation of exploration represented by the research travel, and secondly the reading of the landscape as if it was an archive – in ways that enable new narratives about the past and present condition to emerge, thus reconditioning a contemporary space of future thinking.

1

www.futurenorth.no, accessed online May 2019.

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The Kola Superdeep Borehole commenced in 1970 with the specific aim of drilling as close to the Earth’s mantel as possible and to investigate the geologic resources at specific depths. The project was part of a Soviet national endeavor, counting 12 boreholes throughout the Soviet Union. In 1989 the drill had to be stopped at 12.262 meters due to the danger of melting of the drill bit. On the way down it had penetrated a good portion of the lithosphere, and had extracted samples estimated to be 2.5 billion years old. We visited the Kola Superdeep Borehole near Zapolyarnyj, not far from the Norwegian border in 2012. We followed the potholed track zigzagging between the nickel-mining tailings, and we found that the steel and concrete structures that made up the research facility had been halfway demolished and reconfigured. It now represented itself as an assembly of components, partially ordered and sorted by type by what appeared to be three independent ›entrepeneurs‹ working on the site: steel, copper, bore samples, Erlenmeyer flasks. At the same time, some parts of the research location seemed to be left in the condition it was in when activities ceased, leaving labs with equipment that in a ›frozen‹ or museum-like, archival way seemed to have recorded the marks and traces of human activities in the Tundra landscape. Thus, the location may be regarded as an entropic museum, as far as the original building, while decaying and slowly being reordered according to its basic materiality, still exhibits the remnants of scientific endeavors. Furthermore, we find it to be an archive of the subliminal desires on the Soviet state, of the efforts to transcend the spheres of human habitat – to space, and under ground. Seen as an archive, it is a paradoxical space – as all archiving is anti-entropic by nature. Archives seek order through classification and sorting, predictability, and not the least preservation of data (Ernst 2004). In addition – and perhaps most obviously – the bore samples extracted at the facility trace and ›archive‹ the chronology of the formation of the Earth’s crust over millennia as a layering of eruptive and sedimentary matter. This site represents an assembly of archival forces that we find are in operation throughout the Kola Peninsula. This chapter then asks several questions: What is a landscape archive? What methods might be developed to read landscapes as archives? Are there useful and productive linkages between the reading of landscape archives and the tools that we already possess in our work on landscape and in architecture and urbanism? To address these questions, the chapter gives an account of a travel to the high northwest of Russia in 2013, and accounts for our attempt as a multidisciplinary research team to explore modes of journeying and collaborative landscape reading – mapping natural, transformed and built-up landscapes while moving through them. The specific trip presented here (one of several to the region) was delimited

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by time and money; we spent 7 days on the road on the Kola Peninsula, and slept in 4 different cities. Our trip is thus not one of immersion, but one that hinges on brief, intense meetings with people, cities and territories. The perspective of the outsider is maintained, and even nurtured. We want to investigate how we perceive of things for the first time. This includes studying how perception of material landscapes is mediated through existing knowledge, disciplinary perspectives and preconceived notions of landscape, originating elsewhere. We are not the first to document and present experimental landscape research including traveling and exploration. Our work draws on and coincides with certain art and architectural practices based on traveling, mapping and landscape documentation. Some of these are media practices such as the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)1 where Matthew Coolidge and others document large-scale landscapes through photography. Another is Smudge Studio2, consisting of Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, who undertakes travels and landscape documentation as their primary activity. Scientists and specialists have represented the North and specifically the Arctic through travel, expeditions and documentation for more than five centuries. A recent version of this tradition, in which our travels undoubtedly belong, involves interdisciplinary teams and is characterized by a deliberate intention to read, analyze and learn from the landscapes of the North – be they cities, territories or tracts of land. This involves teasing out the social agency and the humanistic, interpretive dimensions of objects and materials that traditionally belong to the natural sciences – in our case: the social implications of the presence of minerals on the Kola Peninsula. In our travels, we are very much aware of the ›danger‹ of reproduction that Jilly Traganou points out: »Traveling … not only produces new ideas that were not previously thought or explored but also often reproduces preconfigured ones« (2009: 25). What we ›see‹ may rely more on concepts imbedded in us as observers, rather than on the material qualities of the experience. In fact, she argues, travelling functions as a »framework of representation« that is condition by and related to »major epistemological and geopolitical transformations that shape geographical desires and imagination« (Traganou 2004: 3 cited in Traganou 2009: 25). Well aware of the pitfalls of reproduction, we try to exploit the tendency to always compare something new with what we already know, and we find that certain approaches to mapping landscapes that highlights this double character of travel observations can be cultivated.

1

http://clui.org/, accessed online May 2019.

2

http://smudgestudio.org/, accessed online May 2019.

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O BSERVING

THE

›N EW ‹

Architectural traditions of traveling and mapping provide us with clues to the way these activities construct knowledge of the landscape. On the opening page of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s seminal book, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), we find the 18th century »Nolli Plan« of Rome. The point they made was that visiting the car based Las Vegas totally devoid of traditional architectural qualities, was as instructive to the contemporary architect planning and designing today’s cities, as a visit to the eternal city was to the young educated mind of the 18th and 19th century. The ambition of the book was to reveal the actual architecture of modernization, by venturing outside the traditional haunts of urban and architectural designers, into an urban environment entirely dependent on cars and air-conditioning. Taking the organic nature of Roman urban fabric as a cue, it reverses the logic of architectural production and the abandonment of normative theories in favor of a process in which »the built evidence of the existing city, which had come into existence almost ›unconsciously‹, was to be furnished with a theory after the fact« (Stierli 2013: 318). Venturi and Scott Brown’s work illustrates and inspired a tradition of performing urban research as a kind of architectural production (Hayden 2004: Sieverts 2005), and of architects traveling »temporarily to various types of otherness« (Traganou 2009: 22), most explicitly illustrated by Rem Koolhaas’ investigations of alternate states of modernization in non-US/European contexts (e.g. Chung et al. 2001; Koolhaas 2000) with the aim of uncovering – in a raw form – the structuring forces of globalization as the predominant driver of change – with the purpose of affecting future change. Specifically, the tool applied in Learning from Las Vegas was the journey format. While traveling, the research team attempted »to maintain an aura of objectivity and a tone of scholarly dispassion« (Vinegar and Golec 2009), attaining to scientific credibility (Latour 1987) by enforcing strict, unbiased and repeatable protocol to the fieldwork they undertook. Inspired by the photographic works of Ed Ruscha, the team adopted a ›dead-pan‹ documentary style that mimics classic scientific documentation in which bias or judgment is withheld. In Martino Stierli’s opinion this attempt at neutral observation may be linked to the »radical, skeptical epoché« of Husserl’s phenomenology (Husserl 1960; Stierli 2013). Husserl’s epoché involves a bracketing of the phenomena looked upon; through a ›phenomenological reduction‹ a phenomenon is delimited from its surrounding context to serve as an object to the intentional gaze. However, as Rem Kolhaas (2000) stresses, what we are ›learning from‹ are situations, lands, cities where the structuring force of globalization as the predominant driver of change

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may be identified. They are complex situations of forces and drivers – not easily ›reduced‹ to a pure object. On the Kola Peninsula we are indeed looking at situations depending on global states of capitalism, and specifically the price of ore on the world market. And we are indeed trying to isolate physical traces of those forces that work upon the region. The astonishment involved in epoché may thus be interesting in an initial phase of exploration, a phase that seeks to meet a city, or a tract of land, objectively. While looking at the Kola landscape we find that we surrender to the trajectory of material (mineral) agency found in Kola. Hence we enter a situation where we are guided by what we are looking at – a situation that deprives us of a presumed phenomenological mastery of the situation. In our work and through our travels we are slowly build an archive of Arctic and Subarctic landscape situations that are charged in one way or another, and that bear witness to the powers at play in different regions. Our archive is however not necessarily displayed and browsable – an inherent characteristic of the archives such as that of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Their website 3 features the Land use Database, The American Land Museum, as well as the Morgan Cowles Archives drawing from over 100,000 images of thousands of places taken since the inception of the organization in 1994. Inherent to our study of the North is documentation by photography. Rather than establishing a publicly accessible archive, we have used these as tools for critically considering our own approach to landscapes – to investigate what kind of gaze we operate by, and how it may be changed. In addition, the photographic practice of the project has proven critical in identifying and discussing the archival nature of cities and landscapes, both by isolating structuring elements in the landscape and by bringing both the typical as well as the extraordinary landscape features to the front.

W HAT

DID WE SEE AND HOW DID WE SEE IT ?

We have travelled to Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula in Northwest Russia several times. In September 2013 we travelled the peninsula for a week. To get to Kola we took the two-hour domestic flight from Oslo to Kirkenes right on the Russian border. The group from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design included a media scholar, two architects/urbanists, as well as a literary scholar and landscape theorist.

3

www.clui.org.

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After meeting up at the Barents Institute4 with our fellow researcher, a social scientist, we were picked up in Kirkenes by a minibus and Russian driver called Alexandr, who would travel with us for the next week. Traveling to the Kola Peninsula involved identifying and refining the way the travel works as a structuring devise for observation, but also conceptualization of landscapes. The methodological tools that emerge include everyday activities: walking, pausing, talking and driving, but also social media tools – and all of these, involve ways of seeing and communicating observations. Our itinerary though 6 Kola cities provided us with diversifies opportunities to try out different methods of working. Initially we explored the potential of our minibus as a workspace. Travelling Northern landscapes always involves a lot of driving. But cars and buses have turned out to be poor places for the kind of discussions and exchanges you can have while walking. What we have learned, however, is that reading out loud while travelling – about the landscape travelled through – is a productive use of journey time. Cars and buses also perform as ambulating viewing platforms. Veritable landscape machines, they allow always-new views to continually develop. They delimit our access to the landscape, but are still our main means of ingress and representative of how we see. They do however require a second element: the pause; we stop and step out to photograph. After crossing the Russian border – which is always a nervous moment – we travelled straight to the town of Zapoljarnyj where we spent the first night at Hotel Pechenga at the central square. That night we walked the city, discussing what we saw and to what degree it represented a planned Soviet city. We marveled at the elaborate art decorating public buildings of the town, and sought out the edge of town where the surrounding landscape and the overwhelming industrial transformation of the landscape could be observed. Since out first walk as a group, walking cities and landscapes with a multidisciplinary team has become a central approach to reading landscapes. We have no planned entry to the cities. We observe them from scratch. We observe phenomena that can be described from one or several of the expert perspectives that we bring along. We encounter people that tell us stories about themselves and the places we see. We all take countless photos, often very similar ones.

4

One team member is associated with the Barents Institute, a subsidiary of UiT – The Arctic University of Norway.

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From Zapoljarnyj we backtracked to Nikel, a town that has become almost mythical in the Norwegian environmental consciousness due to its heavy emissions of Sulphuric Acid. Situated very close to the Norwegians border, it features bleak architecture, monumental forbidding industrial structures and a barren surrounding landscape in which vegetation has been killed off. We wandered the town eager to find information that could support our impression of the place. Because our appointment with a city official had been cancelled, we sought other sources of information, but the museum was closed on a Monday; helpful librarians at the town library could provide only two books containing historical information and photographs. This somewhat failed visit demonstrates that as academics we are not satisfied with what we see – part of scientific observation involves trying to make sense of a place – to search for the reasons and stories behind the appearance.

Illustration 1. Nikel’

We then left for Murmansk – the largest city of the circumpolar North, a city that to most people is immediately associated with coldness and remoteness, dominated by grim industry. To us, however, it has somehow become the White City of the North. Sharply delimited from its surrounding landscape, the mass of concrete abruptly stops short in nature, rendering the city a landscape feature. In Murmansk, we further explored the walk as tool. The walk as urban practice is a well-established in urban studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) theories of practice which included the bodily disposition of the habitus, and Michel de Certeau who uses the act of walking through the city as an example of the reappropriation of space through everyday practice (1984). (See also Walter Benjamin 1991,

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Ingold and Vergunst 2008) The flâneur is a reoccurring concept in literature and art practices. Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche are but a few famous walkers. Guy Debord uncovered an alternative Paris in his derives (1958), Robert Smithson interpreted the suburban landscape of Passaic, New Jersey (1967), and Rebecca Solnit has explored the dynamics of the reflexive flâneur (2001), as have Francesco Careri in Walkscapes (2001). Most of these however, were solitary explorers – connecting the city to inner landscapes. We are a walking, talking group of observers, intent at sharing impression, there and then. In Murmansk, we applied the walk, cultivated on this trip both as transect (akin to the development studies rapid assessment tool (World Bank 2007)) and as a ramble, as a methodological device – call it ramble, linger and gaze, as do Katja Grillner, whose work by this title explores narrative dialogue in the landscape garden (2000). During our two days of walking the city, we further employed elements from different forms of architectural ›mapping‹ techniques as a way of discovering and documenting both the city and our impression of it.

Illustration 2. The tracsect starts and stops at the city’s landscapes edges

The first day we simply drew a line on the map, which we then followed, photographing, sketching and discussing what we encountered on this almost day-long walk down the steepest residential hill in Murmansk. Again we sought out the edge of the city and moved towards the center while observing the distribution of

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ground and space. Being our very first systematic approach to reading the Murmansk landscape, we embarked on this walk with what we might call »the lure of the familiar« at the back of our heads, a fact we all became aware of during our walk. We had planned the walk within an urbanistic frame. The line ran from the edge of the city, at the back of a building we had identified the year before, to the harbor where the ice-breaker-now-museum, The Lenin, is moored. Along this transect we tried to capture modulations of frontal and lateral views – not so much for the view, but to trace the level of attention the different landscape types required (the closeness of ground in the lateral, transport to view in the frontal ones).

Illustration 3. The start of the walk on the city’s edge in the Pervomaisky district

It was during this walk that we realized that our preconfigured notions of landscape were informing our ways of looking to an almost absurd degree, and that we tended to describe them by referencing landscapes we are already familiar with. We noticed the semblances to places we already knew, such as the urbanized Mediterranean foothill landscapes of Naples or Marseilles.

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Illustration 4. View at the port of Murmansk

Walking meandering streets, paths cutting between them, and long stairway systems, we recalled the Potemkin stairs in Odessa, but also the more homely path system at Fløien in Bergen, Norway. We discussed the layout of this hill, how it allowed views to develop as we descended it. The lateral and frontal views poured in as we descended the stairs, a space completely informed by the panoramic it seemed. We had to ask ourselves to what degree it was planned like this? We soon learned, from a passing former sailor and construction worker, that this section of town was built over only 4 years in the 1980s. Back then, these hills were considered countryside. There seems however to have been agreement that some of the nature be preserved. Hence, the green slopes between the terraces (separated by slopes too steep for heavy construction equipment), covered by shrubby birch and different weeds. We discussed the layering of the views – how they included residential areas,

Illustration 5. View at the terraces in Pervomaisky district

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commercial district, iron ore loading areas, and the nature beyond it. However, we soon realized how focused we were on sightlines and the meandering system of paths stairs and road. To us, the landscape unfolded as a picturesque landscape, referencing those planned mid-eighteenth century English parks where the views were so carefully planned. Gordon Cullen’s serial vision also came to mind, inspired by studies of experiences of movement through Italian hill-towns (1961). Arriving at the industrial harbor, our conversation was no longer about the layered views, but about crushed and processed rock and other materials of different grain. We crossed a pathway running above long ore trains on different tracks. Watching these we did not even think about the fact that we were standing on a viewing platform of sorts – the footbridge leading over the tracks – we were concerned about the sudden presence of minerals from across the expanses of Kola, testimony to the mining activities in more remote parts of the peninsula. We knew of course that they were being reloaded here, but were not prepared for such a splendid variation of differently textured minerals on the move. The following day we met up with a group of young people, associates of Natalia Kolesnik, the dynamic vice director of an incubator for cultural entrepreneurs called Mister Pink. We talked to the group about their hopes and expectations for the future of Murmansk, and walked with them through the ›rough‹ Northern district of the city, where they pointed out businesses and entrepreneurs, as well as points of particular interest for them: a flower garden untypical of a city where private care of urban space are still rare, childhood places such as the local school and candy store, and what was dilapidated presumably a former Sami urban village, now occupied by people in line for new and modern apartments. The walk ended at a creek that reeked of sewer and chemicals – a poignant reminder of the fact that cities, as well as industry, is a significant source of pollution in Kola.

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Illustration 6. Printscreen from the app YOUrban

This walk unfolded as one of the first testing grounds for our new iPhone app for collaborative and interactive urban mapping – MAPPA – developed in a different research project on urban media and the city, called YOUrban5, and useful for our ambulatory event. Our assumption is that this kind of digitally mediated cultural mapping, which relates to creative and experimental readings of urban landscapes, but also emphasizes the »objects« and contents of mapping as culturally co-constructed and integral to actual mapping performance in the field (see Hemmersam et al. 2014, Morrison et al. 2012). The social aspect of the app implies a degree of collective authoring taking place, enabling not only reading but also collaboratively writing the city, »reformulating what already exists« (Corner 1999: 214) as a fundamental precondition for future thinking. It relates to emerging forms of mapping covering the interaction of human and non-human actors (Latour 2005, Yaneva 2012), and as a social mapping tool it emphasizes space as »a social product – one less designed and constructed than enacted or performed through specific behaviors and practices« (Shepard 2011: 22). Rather than exposing particular ›expert‹ views on the urban landscape, in our use of MAPPA we have learned that it creates combined and shared narratives, that emerge through the conversation between the mappers’ expert perspectives

5

www.yourban.no, accessed online May 2019.

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that occurs when traversing the urban landscape, but also in the social nature of the app which allows mappers to add to, change and delete entries – to create transversal themes and connections by using hashtags, but also to add links to external webpages and other digital resources. Importantly, the app streams geolocated Instagram posts to the live map during mapping sessions, linking to a ›virtual‹ landscape space of brief moments, the interior of buildings and glimpses of the dreams, aspirations and playfulness of segments of the community. This provides a third level of landscape reading beyond the immediate sensorial registration and the remapped preconfigured notions and conceptions brought along by the mappers. Employing non-digital terms, one could say that MAPPA serves as both a looking device and an archive. In fact, it proves an efficient corrector to the camera, by enabling selective landscape documentation focused on the conjoined competences of the researchers but also the local informants involved. This selection and digital recording of spatially located observations is an archive function of the app, and enables a reading of the city as an archive. The writing, but also the reading of the archive can take place on site, but also elsewhere and at other times – adding to the trans-local nature of urban landscape space.6 Leaving Murmansk, we travelled to the interior of the peninsula. We visited the extraordinary Subarctic Botanical Garden of Kirovsk, located in the spectacular Khibiny Mountains that are literally being ripped apart by mineral extraction. This garden does not just display indigenous flora, but is in fact an experimental archive of plants from all over the world that have been collected by scientists since 1932 and introduced to the Khibiny climate. The seeds of those that survive are stored and archived in on-site pavilions, and later introduced in other places in the region.

6

MAPPA was available on the Apple app store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mappacollaborative-tool-for/id578620293.

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Illustration 7. Seed storage pavilion. Subarctic botanical garden of Kirovsk

To the south, the garden hugs Lake Bolshoy Vudyavr, allowing visitors a splendid view of the geological archive of the ›25 Km‹ mining town (located 25 km from Apatity). Shockingly however, the large-scale mining of Apatite, which is integral to the production of fertilizers and other products, interrupts the otherwise pastoral idyll by its display of torn mountainsides.

Illustration 8. View at the Khibiny Mountains

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Here, we found ourselves in the middle of two extraordinary situations, an earthy archive of rare and robust plants and their seeds on one side, and on the other, a devouring mining practice. At 25 km the mountain itself is the ore and the miners have developed a method for bringing it down, bit by bit. We were looking at a paradoxical juxtaposition of storage and exploitation, also producing a picturesque image, distorted to the degree of escaping its picturesque framing.

Illustration 9. View from the botanical garden

The concept of the picturesque was developed to mediate between then Kantian notions of the beautiful and the sublime, explicitly trying to escape the speculative element of the sublime. Theorists such as Uvedale Price (1810) and William Gilpin (1804) praised the picturesque for its ability to offer variation while still providing near pastoral scenery with a certain arrangement of views – often composed of foreground, middle ground and background landscape arrangements. The blend of industry and park so explicit in this scene certainly offers variation so extreme that it may contribute to reintroduce sublime elements in the landscape situation. Not only is wilderness introduced, but it is also a wilderness demolished. This is not an uncommon outcome of Soviet economic planning, which saw little or no value in the uninhabited landscape, but rather regarded the presence of minerals in the ground as an opportunity to build ideal worker’s cities, a vision that the botanical garden also fits into, as its raison d’etre was the identification of plants that would enable, thrive in, and beautify, such northern towns. (Bruno 2011)

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Illustration 10. Lake-side park in Monchegorsk. Unknown concrete structures

The theme of the industrial picturesque found outside Kirovsk re-emerged later on in our trip in Monchegorsk. Its main features (beyond the diabolically looking industrial plant outside the residential district) are the monumental central boulevard and the picturesque lake-side park, a remnant of the original tundra vegetation symbolically left standing inside the city in order to emphasize the way industrial cities were seen to be in harmony with, and to be enhancements of, nature in Soviet urban planning ideology (Bruno 2011). Strewn among the sometimes scruffy trees in the park we found reminiscences of concrete structures that we cannot tell the origin of, and the iron railing framing the now empty site of the merry-go-round, residues of what in a proper French or English picturesque park would be called follies.7

7

Follies are architectural features that serve to visually suggest different types of activities or allude to exotic and remote places (in time and space).

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Illustration 11. View from the balustrade towards Olenegorsk (Photo: Andrew Morrison, used by permission)

The central axis of the park ends on the shore, in a terraced stair framed by a crumbling white balustrade, reminiscent of the sometimes ruinous remains of classical architecture that would symbolize classical virtues in the picturesque park. Here we find a paradoxical view to a mountain of tailings in the distance, mining residues, in the neighboring town of Olenegorsk. Where the classic picturesque park would offer views of pastoral fields and beautiful horizons, this one offers a view to landscape destruction.8 The urban axis of the main boulevard of the city similarly ends in the exceedingly large nickel and copper production plant that leaves the city and its surroundings one of the most polluted in Russia. By its two

8

The French painter Claude Lorraine was a favorite of the British nobility of the mid18th century, and the English landscape parks were often designed to allow for views that resembled his particular type of pastoral painting –. These were framed by trees, they had an obvious point from where to look, often a plateau, and the paintings were organized with a foreground, often with a proscenium, a plateau from where to look, surrounded by trees, a middle ground – a human landscape with freshwater and pastures and a background of receding hills – often associated with infinity, or as for the Hudson School of Painting, the frontier.

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Illustration 12. Park in Zapolyarnyj

axis the city displays its paradoxical manifestation as extended through a horizontal and a vertical desire – the desire for and dependency on the prehistorically formed layers of minerals, and the desire for grand human manifestations.

T ERRITORIAL L OGICS What did our preliminary methods teach us about seeing during this trip: How are our specific ways of viewing and perceiving of our environment acting out as we travel? Traveling Kola we begin to see like professionals: we selectively observe land use, urban plans and park areas, as well as the visual indicators of living conditions. Entering the cities, we are struck by the amount of greenery that seems to penetrate the city limits and spread along its streets. We realize that these are planted: Every street is lined with trees, and each city has parks carefully laid out with defined areas for vegetation. The vegetation is climate specific, and is carefully tended to. We have conversations about the strategic and cultural presence of industry, dwellings, memorials, the cemeteries and problem of life expectancy in the region. We notice that we see almost no physical traces of the pre-Russian indigenous inhabitation that once inhabited the large Kola Peninsula. One of the first things that strike us as we start our journey is what would strike any traveler in these landscapes: the burnt and damaged ground around Nikel, Zapoljarny and Monchegorsk. This damaged landscape is the effect of the nickel

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and copper ore processing. We are also struck by the first views of the cities themselves, of Nikel and Murmansk as they lie, monochrome and contained, in the landscape. They appear to be defined objects on the one hand, but exactly this object-ness is what makes them also look like landscape features at a distance. The cities appear white, and sharply defined against the surrounding nature performing as landscape features – much the same way as do the open quarries and tailing mountains.

Illustration 13. Tailings

These are all observations. They are our first encounters with a city fabric and landscape composition that is fairly new to us. But how methodologically did we meet these environments given our specific preconditions for viewing and reflecting? It is surprising for us to realize how easily we employ a generic aesthetic and a culturally reproduced set of references in our first reading of landscapes. One example of how our seeing is prefigured is fellow researcher Andrew Morrison’s many associations to Southern Africa during this trip. It started at the fields in Zapadnaya Litsa where the Russian red army defeated the Germans in 1944 and where the field’s expanse and situated-ness among the mountains had a configuration not unlike his childhood Zimbabwe. This is significant: how we seem to always refer to something we already know, and are familiar with. The lay of the land seems to not be specific to the regional location but to preconceived ideas of what is a landscape. Although it does in fact appear that The Kola and Zimbabwe are two of the very few places on earth where the ancient continent of Pangea is still exposed, and that the two regions holds the same range of minerals.

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This may be an important and useful insight: in our reading, what we saw seemed often to refer to something else, in a relational network of references. What we see is all the time just another configuration of landscape, city, nature. By making explicit what preconfigured notions echoed with observations and by being ›reductive‹, we are able to move beyond our preconceptions of the region, mythological references, and expectations to how Kola Peninsula might look. In an attempt to synthesize on a more abstract level, the landscapes of Kola seems to emerge to us as ancient geological formations, overlaid with visually thick layers representing the Soviet era from 1916 to 1991: railroads, roads, mines, tailings, factories, power lines, housing blocks. The most significant layers in the landscape are those representing political events: The urbanization spurred on by the building of the railroad in 1916 as part of the armed conflict of the revolution, as well as the traces left by Second World War. This layer is less physical, but leaves a significant reading in the form of memorials, monuments, memories and stories. This event also connects the landscapes of Kola with conflict and strategic war effort: Nickel was a strategic war supply over which the horrific three-year battle of Litsa Valley was fought. This strategic perspective on the Peninsula was continued in the pose-war period, which saw further militarization and large-scale urbanization and mineral extraction as a result of the drive for industrial independence of Soviet socioeconomic planning. The layered interpretation of the landscape supplements a reading of the peninsula’s landscapes as paradoxically manifesting and intersecting cuts of horizontal and vertical desires. On the one hand there is the desire for and dependency on the prehistorically formed layers of minerals, while on the other hand there is a desire for grand human scale plans of urban environments. We ask ourselves if the different ways of applying lines – to walk lines, to observe the line of the horizon, to add a more abstract structure of lines and cuts (vertical and horizontal) as well as layers – do in fact prove useful in a reading of the particular configuration of mineralogy and urbanism that makes out the Kola Peninsula. They are ways of reading cities and territories, and not least of reading them together, as different configurations, in the same material field, that allows for different interpretations of material and cultural agency and of thinking about possibilities for the future. Sightlines become, in the end, substituted by a more abstract set of lines, informed by our movement through and observations in the landscape. Maybe one could say that we are trying to look with the landscape, as Tim Ingold would describe it, not at it (Ingold 2013). Moreover, the systems of layers and cuts, and the territorial logic involved in creating these, leads us to acknowledge that what we are in fact observing is a

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›thing‹, in Latour’s sense of the term (2004). The Kola Peninsula is a networked and cut layer of visible effects of what is fundamentally a limited numbers of industrial initiatives and methods. One such ›thing‹ is made up of Norilsk Nikel’s mining operations, the urban development that it demanded starting in the 1930s, the pollution from these, and hence their social, environmental and health effects. This thing is also a product of geology, a field belonging to the natural sciences. Ours then, is an attempt to approach geology from the point of view of the urbanist, the media scholar, the literary scholar, the social science etc.

M OVING M ETHODS

FOR THE

F UTURE

Illustration 14. Exhibit at the Geological Mueum of the Kola Science Centre, Apatity

Touring the Kola Peninsula we observed few above-ground materials that dated back longer than to the 1930s. Beyond that, in addition to water and vegetation, we observed only prehistoric material; rock, soil and open quarries. We know that the minerals were ground forming for 8 of the 9 cities on the Kola Peninsula. These cities were built and still subsist due to the desire to exploit the minerals in the areas. The Kola Peninsula harbors 25 % of all known mineral types on earth, which amounts to over a 1000. This means that a relatively small area forms a melting pot of meshed minerals composites. Explorations on the peninsula has revealed deposits of gold, platinum and silver to mention but a few, and these will probably be exploited as soon as there is new infrastructure in place. 9 Trying to project our

9

As of today there is only one main infrastructural system on the Kola, the main road running from Murmansk and south – in the same direction as the St. Petersburg railway.

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imagination into their futures, we find that there is no escape from such dominant structuring of their logics. The Kola Peninsula supports us with an array of archives: the natural archive of geology, the garden as a both of collection of plants and seed and of skewed views, the ground and air as archive of anthropogenic pollution, the built environment as archive of war history and political ambitions. An initial response to these various archives is to build our own archive of photos and first-impression texts: During our trip to Russia we had (almost) daily sessions where we would discuss impressions and write up posts for our project blog. 10 Sometimes these blog-posts directly reflect conversations between the team members during the day. They are written collaboratively and attempt to create links between observations and key questions and theoretical issues that the research project will address. In addition to this record of observations, MAPPA constructs an archive of observational transects from several other locations in the Arctic. The material allows us to compare urban landscapes across the Arctic region by comparing the way in which both similar and very different assemblies of local and external forces working upon the landscapes. Both MAPPA and the Future North blog are based on readings of multiple ›landscape archives‹, building on social, geographical, political and built landscape knowledge and relations. They slowly build an archive of landscape interpretations. Where archiving is anti-entropic by nature, present day Kola is entropic by nature and culture. We have observed dilapidating wooden structures slowly sinking into the ground, dust from unmanaged tailing ponds blowing over the landscape, and the obsolete Kola Superdeep Borehole where an entire scientific drilling operation with labs is left to decay and be pillaged. Yet we insist on regarding the region as an archive – both of mineral deposit, of certain mining practices, of soviet city planning, and not the least of paradoxical landscape configurations. We try to read landscape as a set of indexes, not in relation to an underlying meaning – but as a figural play that displays that there is no underlying meaning, or essence, of landscape. On the Kola, landscape is displayed as a relative system construed not only by the individual, but also by a set of forces and desires adhering to forces outside of the landscape. We read it by applying interdisciplinary measures, leaving the geology as an agent in a system of significance. Has Kola then become a text rather than an archive?

10 www.futurenorth.no, accessed online May 2019.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, Walther (2001): Arcades project. New York. Bruno, Andy R. (2011): Making nature modern: Economic transformation and the environment in the Soviet north, PhD thesis, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977): Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge. Careri, Francesco (2001): Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (Land & Scape), Barcelona. Chung, Chuihia J./Inaba, Jeffrey/Koolhaas, Rem (et al.) (2001): Great Leap Forward, Harvard Design School, Project on the city, Köln. Cullen, Gordon (1961): Townscape, New York. Corner, James (1999): The agency of mapping: speculation, critique and invention, in: Dennis Cosgrove (Ed.): Mappings. London, pp. 213-252. Debord, Guy (1958): »Théorie de la derive«, in: Internationale Situationniste 2, pp.19-23. De Certeau, Michel (1984): The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley. Ernst, Wolfgang (2004): »The Archive as Metaphor: From archival space to archival time«, in: Open 7, pp. 27-32, http://www.skor.nl/_files/Files/OPEN!%20Key%20Texts_Ernst.pdf, accessed online May 2019. Gilpin, William (1804): Observations, on the Coasts of Hampshire, Sussex, and Kent, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty made in the summer of the year 1774, London. Grillner, Katja (2000): Ramble, Linger and Gaze: Dialogues from the landscape garden, PhD thesis, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Hayden, Dolores (2004): A Field Guide to Sprawl, New York. Hemmersam, Peter/Aspen, Jonny (et al.) (2014): »Exploring locative media for cultural mapping«, in: Adriana de Souza e Silva/Mimi Sheller (eds): Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces, London, pp. 167-187. Husserl, Edmund (1960): Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology [1950], Translated by Dorion Cairns, The Hague. Koolhaas, Rem (2000): »Harvard project on the city, ›Lagos‹«, in: Rem Koolhaas/Stefano Boeri/Sanford Kwinter (et al.) (eds): Mutations. Barcelona, pp. 652-719. Ingold, Tim/ Vergunst, Jo Lee (eds.) (2013): Ways of walking: Ethnography and practice on foot, Farnham.

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Ingold, Tim (2013): Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, London. Latour, Bruno (1987): Science in action, Cambridge, Mass. — (2004): »Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern«, in: Critical Inquiry 30, pp. 225-248. — (2005): Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford. Morrison, Andrew/Aspen, Jonny/Hemmersam, Peter (et al.) (2012): »Designing Experimental Urban Mapping with Locative Social Media«, in: Praima Israsena/ Juthamas Tangsantikul (et al.) (eds.): Design Research Society 2012, Conference proceedings, vol. 3, Bangkok, pp. 1291-1304. Price, Uvedale (1810): Essays on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful: And, On the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, London. Shepard, Mark (2011): Sentient City, Cambridge. Sieverts, Thomas (2005): Zwischenstadt - inzwischen Stadt?: Entdecken, Begreifen, Verändern, Wuppertal. Smithson, Robert (1967): »A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey«, in: Artforum 6.4, December 1967, reprinted in Nancy Holt (ed.) (1979): The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York. Rebecca Solnit (2001) Wanderlust: A history of walking, London/New York. Stierli, Martino (2013): Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film, Los Angeles. Traganou, Jilly (2009): Travel, Space, Architecture, Farnham. — (2004): »Η ιδεολογική επιστράτευση του τοπίου: Προοπτικές ανάγνωσης του ›ελληνικού τοπίου‹ και παραλληλισµοί µε την περίπτωση της Ιαπωνίας (The Ideological Function of the Landscape: Readings of the Greek Landscape and Parallels with the Case of Japan), in Skopelos Nissides (ed.): Ωραίο, Φριχτό και Απέριττο τοπίο: Αναγνώσεις και Προοπτικές του Ελληνικού τοπίου (Beautiful, Awful and Unpretentious Landscape: Readings and Prospects of the Greek Landscape), Athens, pp. 95-107. Venturi, Robert/Denise Scott Brown/ Izenour Steven (1972): Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge. Vinegar, Aron/Michael J. Golec (2009): Relearning from Las Vegas, Minneapolis. World Bank (2007): Tool Name: Transect Walk, http://www.pdfshares.net/download/3PSU/tool-name-transect-walk-world-bank.pdf, accessed online May 2019. Yaneva, Albena (2012): Mapping Controversies in Architecture, Farnham.

Memory in the Anthropocene: Notes on Slow Archives and Melting Glaciers S VEN S PIEKER In his popular documentary entitled Chasing Ice (2012) National Geographic reporter James Balog uses twenty five digital time-lapse cameras to produce an image archive of the melting glaciers of Iceland, Greenland and Alaska. By making this material accessible via the Internet to a worldwide audience, Balog wants to convince everyone of the existence of climate change and of its consequences. As the film’s trailer states: »Traveling with a team of young adventurers across the brutal Arctic, Balog risks his career and his well-being in pursuit of the biggest story facing humanity. As the debate polarizes America, and the intensity of natural disasters ramps up globally, Chasing Ice depicts a heroic photojournalist on a mission to deliver fragile hope to our carbon-powered planet.«1

However, while superficially speaking, Chasing Ice functions like any other ecologically oriented documentary – telling the story of an adventurer and photo collector who is driven by the need to inform the world of an impending disaster – in other respects, Balog’s documentary is not a very typical film about climate change. Although it begins with a series of apocalyptic scenarios of the consequences of global warming, these are not included, as might be expected, as a wake-up-call or as a means to rally politicians to the cause. On the contrary, the film’s gloomy initial sequences are designed to prove that the scientific, rational debates that have fueled discussions of climate change in the past serve no discernible purpose anymore. Disavowing all such explanations of global warming,

1

Chasing Ice (2012), description to the movie trailer, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIdkgZVGhWc, accessed online May 2019.

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Balog’s strategy is to produce visual evidence based solely on the affect of the images he captures, and on an understanding of archives not as technological armatures for the storage of data but as natural environments. *** For some time now, we have experienced an unprecedented inflation of the term »archive« in art and elsewhere. To the chagrin of some, this inflation seems to rob both the archive itself and the activities associated with it of any specificity. Indeed, the ever-intensifying use, distribution, and acceleration of images and innovative practices for their organization (such as databases) seem to condemn traditional archives to obsolescence. At the same time, interfaces inspired by »the archive« can nowadays be found everywhere, whether we save an image to Flickr or iPhoto, download a YouTube video, or visit a chat room in a social network – more often than not, we find ourselves in a space more or less clearly identified as an archive. Beyond this, globally operating (and continuously expanding) collections of Big Data such as Google Street View rob the archive of any remaining specificity. As our buying habits are as much subject to immediate recording as our movements in public space we realize that the archive surrounds us. Of course, one might object that these practices, no matter how widespread they may be, have very little in common with archives in the sense in which traditional archivistics defines them. While such objections are no doubt justified, it may be futile to insist on a single model and definition of archivization, especially with a view to contemporary art practice where a whole range of often divergent or even irreconcilable definitions of the archive are in circulation. And, perhaps, artists are onto something here in the sense that it would appear that the archive has always, to a degree, resisted definition. In a small book inspired by Freud's concept of the psychic apparatus, Jacques Derrida once suggested that the archive may never be completely identical with itself because there is no archive that does not already carry the seeds of its own destruction within itself: »Right on what permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than what exposes to destruction, in truth what menaces with destruction introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument [...]. The archive always works, and a priori, against itself.« (Derrida 1995: 14) However, and leaving aside the implications of Derrida’s statement for psychoanalysis specifically, if it is the case that archives are never simply identical with themselves or with the memories they store, then we may also see in this apparent deficiency an opportunity. For indeed, given today’s near limitless production and mining of Big Data – what I call the archive as environment – it appears necessary to develop a politics

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of the archive that does not equate the latter exclusively with the storage of the past, or indeed with storage at all, but that aligns it with a practice that occurs in the present.2 As Oliver Lerone Schultz writes: »If ›the Archive‹ is equated with the container-like and mechanistic realities of a dying media environment, then one must protest against it. If, as now appears to be the case, »the Archive« becomes an integral part of new forms of domination within the control society, then it needs to be carefully examined by all those who engage with it…« (Schultz 2013)

Schultz' reminder coincides with the critique of the archive advanced by scientists from different disciplines who increasingly throw doubt on any attempt to explain memory and remembering with reference to the archive understood as a container for the storage of past events. For instance, in an essay tellingly titled »After the Archive« the psychologist Jens Brockmeier writes that »today, the idea of memory's very existence is seriously called into question, and so is the view, traditionally associated with the archive, of remembering as a more or less unitary individual capacity.« (Brockmeier 2010: 8) Brockmeier's criticism is directed at those who think of memory as a kind of black box, and of remembering as the transfer of what is stored in that box from (invisible) latency into (visible) reality. Against such ideas, Brockmeier and others favor an understanding of memory that views it not as a storage site for the immaterial past but rather as a performative, materially conditioned activity grounded in, and operating from, the present: »It seems, however, that the view of memory as storage or archive is about to be dismantled in several other areas of memory studies, albeit to different degrees and reflected in distinct ways. At the same time, new perspectives take form that reach beyond the archive idea of memory and offer more open, fleeting, and culturally embedded visions of what people do when they are remembering and forgetting. A main feature of these visions is that they transcend the isolated human brain as the single site of these activities, localizing them instead within a broader framework of social and cultural practices and artifacts, which are themselves subject to historical change.«3

An important role in the current critique of the archive is played by the idea that all remembering is conditioned by the media technologies that control its activities, especially the computer. (Spieker 2016) José Dijck views the computer as a polymorphic »digital memory machine« whose ability to link texts, images, film and audio-visual material has significantly changed the way we exercise memory. 2

The critique of the archive begins with the historical avant-garde. See Spieker 2008.

3

Ibid.

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Dijck understands computers not primarily as mnemonic storage sites but as a means to produce memories by connecting and networking already stored images and texts. In his reasoning, the past is not passively waiting for its recall in the manner of a black box; rather, it is recall that produces memories, in the first place. (Dijk 2007: 16)4 This conclusion can be extended to art production, as well. As Kenneth Goldsmith notes in his book Uncreative Writing (2011), »given the almost incalculable number of texts the problem is not how to write more such texts. Instead, we must learn how to navigate the incalculable number of texts that already exist?« (Goldsmith 2011) Seen in this light, writing or art production is a form of archival navigation. Without specifically dealing with the implications of his ideas for a new theory of the archive, the curator Nicholas Bourriaud has described this situation in the field of art as »post production«, a term by which he means a form of post-autonomous art that places the creation of connections between already existing forms above the creation of new such ones. (Bourriaud 2002) The efforts by Goldsmith, Bourriaud, and others to view the archive not as a passive storage site but as site of production have been referred variously as »living archive«, »archive in motion«, »critical archive«, or as »performing archive.« (Spieker/Danbolt 2014) In all these cases, the goal is to neutralize to the extent possible the archive’s presumption of historical objectivity and the neo-liberal dream of archives as universally transparent storehouses of knowledge. Much like Constructivist film and the anti-archival gestures of the Dadaists in the early 20th century criticized the archive of the 19th century, so now various practices in the field of contemporary art and digital media seek to resist the dream of a neo-liberal universal archive with the ambition to classify and store everything from the human brain to the solar system. What Tara McPherson has called »post-archive«5 refers to the real power structures that collect, store, and use information and to efforts to deploy such data flows experimentally and/or subversively. One could describe these practices as an attempt to slow down the flow of digitized information and to develop alternative methods for its handling.6 In the realm of art production, efforts to think the slowing down of information

4

Cf. Dijck 2004. Other researchers, such as Diane Taylor, call the internet »anti-archive.« Cf. Taylor 2010.

5

Cf. McPherson 2015: 486. I prefer the term »slow archive« as a way of avoiding the idea of the archive’s history as a form of teleology.

6

Such methods may well include the traditional (paper) archive: As Wolfgang Ernst has pointed out, traditional archives nowadays serve as reminders of an alternative, slower, and more deliberate approach to data management. See Ernst 2005.

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include what Hito Steyerl has called »poor images« (= an archive of images whose resolution weakens more and more through their permanent circulation in data space) (Steyerl 2009) or what Dragan Espenschied terms »digital obscurity« (2014): »[…] digital obscurity offers the experience of encountering something that has gone unseen or unnoticed by others. It is a rare, intimate and personal moment in a media world that is geared toward high visibility and high-speed circulation. Discovering a website where the traffic counter shows a single-digit number is so attractive because the counter proves that you, the viewer, are part of a small and select group to have experienced a particular digital artifact or practice.«

Other examples include Serbian artist Kristina Benjocki who reworks excerpts from local history books into woven carpets. In this way she not only appropriates archival information, by transforming it through manual labor, she also re-materializes Yugoslav history. In this process, Benjocki's main focus is not on the story told by the history textbooks she uses but on the physical structure of the pages on which that story is printed, including the traces left by previous readers. Benjock’si interest in history as a material process places the emphasis on what is non-recoverable, on the margins, and on what cannot be so readily fed into the never-ending flow of information. For her 2006 project A Room of One's Own / A Thousand Libraries Swedish artist Kassia Dahlberg borrowed all available copies of Virginia Woolf's essay »A Room of One's Own« from Swedish libraries and then transferred all the underlined passages and marginal notes from these copies into an edition of the essay that she, Dahlberg, published herself. In all the cited cases, the storage of traces that characterizes the archive is focused on what is peripheral and marginal, on what either cannot be valorized or what escapes valorization altogether. The slow archive may be thought of less as a technical infrastructure for the storage of the past than as a kind of environment. By this I mean to say that whereas conventionally we imagine the archive as a box or a container with discrete boundaries, and whereas in this reading any interpretation of archival space depends on the opposition between the archive’s inside and its outside (memory as a black box), nowadays it may be more accurate to think of archives as a space that surrounds us rather than as an autonomous interiority. In the digital age, archivization, it seems, is more and more a byproduct of biological life itself. The implications of this founding are profound: if we no longer think of archives as parts of an administrative (mechanical) machinery, the door is wide open to the possibility of the archive as part of nature. Here it would no longer be accurate to describe the archive as an instrument of memory, if by that we mean a mechanical

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function, a »mnemonic force« that relegates what is past to a confined space categorically separated spatially and semantically from the present. It would mean furthermore to think the archive as a dynamic form of production where any rigorous separation of the past from the present, hence from life itself, is difficult to achieve. Of course, archives and biological life are commonly portrayed as opposites because we tend to conceive the archive as a Kulturtechnik, and hence in opposition to nature. From the point of view of the Anthropocene, however, such an opposition seems increasingly doubtful. As a geological epoch, the Anthropocene implies that the changes wrought by human beings in the natural environment in the wake of industrial and technological development – climate change, for one thing – are no longer external to that environment, but have become part of it. This, however, means that we cannot study the history of the earth without taking these man-made phenomena into consideration as they have become part of the ecosystems we inhabit. In that sense we must also reckon with the possibility of »natural archives« whose mode of operation suspends the inside/outside opposition on which interpretations of the archive have typically depended, and which function like a (natural) environment rather than discrete mechanisms. To be sure, in a broad metaphorical sense the idea of a »natural archive« is nothing very revolutionary. Everyone is familiar with the rings formed each year by trees in the forest, or with the way in which geological formations can be understood as living records of their development over thousands of years. Other examples where it may seem as if nature preserves records of itself find expression in popular metaphors such as »cloud computing«, a manner of speaking that assumes that a global network of servers accompanies us like clouds in the sky. Clouds are by definition scattered, and they appear anywhere in the world. As an archive metaphor, clouds presume that in the digital age, memory, rather than being a technical function, has become part of the natural environment that surrounds us like an atmosphere. Similar metaphors such as »data mining« disrupt the boundary between technology and nature even more forcibly: it is as if (digital) data had become a part of the geological formation of the earth. However, while in a very broad sense it may make sense to call such phenomena »archives«, in a more specific sense, it may not. Returning to the documentary Chasing Ice, I would like to suggest that in the age of the Anthropocene, the idea of a »natural archive« only makes sense if we accept that the idea of nature has itself undergone drastic changes. In the film, director James Balog does not want to be seen as a scientist; instead he presents himself as an amateur who is convinced that the ice, and not just our scientific discourse about it, provides the key

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to understanding »the story« of the melting glaciers: »The story is in the ice, somehow.«7 (TC 00:03:59-00:04.03) This phrase needs to be understood literally: by producing and distributing images of the glaciers, Balog forces the »story« out of the ice. Consequently, the term »story« should not here be understood as a reference to a textual narrative but to the data sets emitted by the glaciers that Balog translates into images. In Chasing Ice the icebergs do not function as signifiers of the threatened purity of the Arctic but rather as instances of the never resting global circulation of images and information. As such they are part of a network of which Balog’s cameras are another. Indeed, in a sense, the animated images of floating icebergs in Chasing Ice are metaphors for globalization itself, suggesting that climate change is a threat less to »nature« than to the complex system of globalized information flows. In Balog’s documentary, the question is therefore less what the secret of the icebergs may be, what may be hidden in them (these are the classic questions of the archive) or what kind of narrative might be most adequate to the idea of climate change – but rather which images can best tell the ice’s own story: »If I do not have pictures, I do not have anything.« (TC 00:32:01-00:32:04) Not coincidentally, Balog makes no effort to conceal the startlingly artificial character of his images or sequences by making them look more »real«. The reason for this is that the parameters of realism itself have changed. Under the conditions of total immersion created by the Anthropocene – and contrary to realism, which generally demands a strict separation between inside and outside –, the Arctic is here shown as an atmosphere that is itself part of a larger (media) environment whose visualization is the point to the film. If the title of Balog’s film hints at a »chase« then the animal involved, given the size of icebergs, can only be dinosaurs. However, while icebergs in Chasing Ice are associated with the man-made epoch of the Anthropocene, dinosaurs manifestly belong to an earlier age in which nature confronted the human being like an absolute outside. Nevertheless, there are many parallels between icebergs and

7

The phrase »The story is in the ice« is a reminiscence of another film in which icebergs play a role, Hans Frank’s SOS Eisberg (1943), starring Leni Riefenstahl in one of the lead roles. The film involves a scientist who travels to Greenland with four other researchers in order to find the missing arctic explorer Karl Lorenz. On top of a glacier they find, enclosed by ice, the diary of one of the participants in Lorenz’ expedition, which allows the rescuers to reconstruct the catastrophe and find the missing explorer. The film confirms the paradigm of the text-based archive as containing a secret that is waiting to be deciphered.

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dinosaurs: for one thing, dinosaurs, like icebergs, are (were) threatened by extinction, and in both cases the weather had a decisive role to play. While the dinosaurs disappeared because the temperatures dropped, icebergs are melting because it is getting warmer. Of course, the idea of »chasing dinosaurs« is itself part of a now defunct archaeological model whereby the hunt for dinosaurs illustrates the belief that we are separated from the past by an insurmountable epistemological gap that the collection of its traces in museums must help bridge. A powerful illustration of this can be found in Steven Spielberg’s classic movie Jurassic Park (1993) where a team of scientists visits a theme park on an island near Costa Rica at the invitation of its director. The park is full of dinosaurs that have been cloned with the help of mosquito DNA that was found in pieces of amber. Despite efforts to prevent them from procreating, a defect in their reconstructed DNA sequence allowed the dinosaurs to procreate and kill a park employee. Jurassic Park shares the postmodern obsession with text and representation, although it places that obsession in a new, bio-political context. Located between biology and politics, bio-politics is defined by its concern with the administration of life and populations, and in this sense we might say that Spielberg’s dinosaur sanctuary functions like a test case of bio-political life management. That said, it quickly becomes clear that the park’s isolation on the island – a vital precondition for the success of its bio-political experiment involving the cloning of exclusively female dinosaurs – is nothing but an illusion: in Spielberg’s film, the fantasy that the manipulation of dinosaur DNA for profit can proceed in isolation soon meets with the reality that capital wants to expand (beyond the boundaries of the theme park): the error in the dinosaurs’ newly implanted DNA, which allows them to procreate, functions like a defect in the DNA of the capitalist system itself, and Jurassic Park as its symptom.8 In all these respects, Chasing Ice presents itself less as the opposite of Jurassic Park than as the continuation of its underlying logic. In Spielberg’s film, the boundaries that separate the park from is outside (the vulnerable electric fences), while certainly fragile, are still in place as he encourages us to look for the hidden defect in capitalism’s DNA, of which the greedy intentions of the system’s worst manipulators (Dodgson) are a symptom. Meanwhile in Balog’s documentary, no such hope is held out, and the search for a »smoking gun« (the error in capitalism’s DNA) is abandoned from the start. In Chasing Ice the melting of the glaciers is

8

This is the meaning of the subplot involving Dennis Nedry, the park’s lead computer programmer. Nedry, is bribed by a man who works for the corporate rival of the company that runs the Jurassic theme park to steal fertilized dinosaur embryos.

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not understood as the equivalent of a hidden defect in bio-political representation but rather as something that is endemic to an environment where such defects – which in Jurassic Park are nostalgically attributed to the ethical choices and intentions of individuals – have long since become systemic. Balog consequently presents the shrinking of icebergs not so much as a »natural« phenomenon whose causes he investigates – the director is manifestly not interested in researching the global corporate interests that either cause climate change, or that prevent the problem from being addressed – but rather as a decrease in imaging power. For him, the problem is not so much that the icebergs are becoming physically »smaller« (in absolute terms) but that they are losing their power to affect us; they are becoming »poor images« in Steyerl’s terms. Indeed, it seems as if one of the decisive differences between the treatment of dinosaurs in Spielberg’s film and the portrayal of icebergs in Balog’s documentary is that whereas the former threaten the system because of their absolute size, in Chasing Ice, the disaster of melting icebergs is seen much more as a problem of scale i.e., as a problem embedded in the system as a whole. Scale, as we know, describes the ability of a system to function adequately even as it becomes larger or smaller. If, for example, in a photo application we resize an image, then we expect that all of its parts retain their function in relation to the whole, even if the image is now larger or smaller overall. The problem of the melting icebergs as it is portrayed in Chasing Ice therefore is not that their becoming smaller is the equivalent of a bad ethical choice or a greedy form of capitalism that threaten an otherwise perfectly functional sanctuary from without (Jurassic Park), but rather that it upsets the balance inside a capitalist system whose legitimacy is no longer subject to being questioned. This is also why Balog’s documentary relies not on the power of arguments but purely on the power of (enhanced) images: Chasing Ice is not the kind of documentary where a stringent narrative would help establish credible relations between causes and their effects. Again, Balog’s film is less about icebergs per se than about the waning of their affective charge and about the director’s quest for its restoral. This, in turn, means that in Chasing Ice the archive shifts from being a storehouse of historical traces, for which 19th-century historicism serves as a model, to being the place where we lay politics to rest.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Bourriaud, Nikolas (2002): Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York. Brockmeier, Jens (2010): »After the Archive: Remapping Memory«, in: Culture Psychology 16.1, pp. 5-35, http://cap.sagepub.com/content/16/1/5, accessed online May 2019. Derrida, Jacques (1995), »Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression«, in: Diacritics 2, pp. 9-63. Dijck, José Van (2007): Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford. — (2004): »Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory as Object of Cultural Analysis«, in: Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 2, pp. 261-177. Ernst, Wolfgang (2005): »Art of the Archive«, in: Helen Adkins (ed.): KÜNSTLER.ARCHIV / ARTIST.ARCHIVE (with C. Boltanski, J. Gerz, I., & E. Kabakov et al.), book 1/9 for the Exhibition ARTIST.ARCHIVE, 19.06.-28.08.2005 -, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Cologne 2005, pp. 93138. Espenschied, Dragan (2014.): »Acknowledgement, Circulation, Obscurity, System Ambience«, Rhizome.org, 24.06.2014, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/jun/24/emulating-bomb-iraq-arcangel/, accessed online May 2019. Goldsmith, Kenneth (2011): Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, New York. McPherson, Tara (2015): »Post-Archive, The Humanities, the Archive and the Database«, in: Patrik Svensson / David Theo Goldberg (ed.): Between humanities and the digital, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 483-502. Schultz, Oliver Lerone (2013), »›Don’t Forget the Archive!‹ – Collecting NonArchives For the Post-Media Condition«, concept note for the Post-Media Lab in Lüneburg, Germany, 25.-27.05.2013, http://www.lerone.net/?p=406&language=de, accessed online May 2019. Spieker, Sven (2016): »Manifesto for a Slow Archive«, in: ARTMargins 3.3, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/128-articles/772-manifesto-for-aslow-archive, accessed online May 2019. — (2008): The Big Archive, Cambridge, MA. Spieker, Sven /Danbolt, Mathias (2014) (eds.): Roundtable on the Critical Archive, in: ARTMargins 3.3, pp. 3-20, https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00091, accessed online May 2019.

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Steyerl, Hito (2009): »In Defense of the Poor Image«, in: e-flux Journal 10 (November), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/, accessed online May 2019. Taylor, Diane (2010): »SAVE AS... Memory and the Archive in the Age of Digital Technologies«, a video recording of the talk at the UC Berkeley, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGurF1Rfj0U, accessed online May 2019.

F ILMS Chasing Ice (2012) (US, R: James Balog) Jurassic Park (1993) (US, R: Steven Spielberg) SOS Eisberg (1943) (GER/US, R: Hans Frank)

P ERFORMING A RCTIC A RCHIVES

A Fragment of Future History Gabriel Tarde’s Archival Utopia K JETIL A. J AKOBSEN

Despite the resurgent interest in Gabriel Tarde’s vitalist philosophy of difference, since its enthusiastic rediscovery and celebration in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Eric Alliez, Maurizio Lazzarato, Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour, there has so far been little scholarly interest in his elegant philosophical fable Fragments d’histoire future. The book was written in the 1880’s and appeared in English in 1905, the year after Gabriel Tarde’s death. H.G.Wells chose the title Underground Man and wrote an influential introduction accommodating Tarde into Wells’ own rather conventional technocratic cosmopolitanism and into the nascent genre of science fiction. In the following I will refer to the work simply with a direct translation of the original title, as Fragment of Future History, hereafter FFH.1 FFH tells how a globalized civilization of the future is destroyed by climate change disaster. Nature survives only in archival form, in books, photographs, sound recordings and film as mankind founds a new underground archival society. Having left the face of the earth. Mankind lives only with second order nature;

1

A new English language edition appeared in 2004 »updated by Liam Gillick« with Maurizio Lazzarato writing the introduction. This edition is of little scholarly value, since it is an »updating« not just of Cloudesley Brereton’s 1905 translation, but also of Tarde’s text. Gillick and Lazzaretto kept Wells’ title, with its confusing allusion to Dostoevsky, adding in parenthesis Fragments of future histories, a very liberal, pluralized translation of the French title. In the following, citations draw on the 1905 English translation, but I have modernised the language slightly, while checking against Tarde’s French. Page numbers refer to the French edition of 1904, reprinted in 1980.

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with plants, animals, oceans, planets and stars as they appear in archival media and, notably, in scientific discourse. Underground man has enjoyed a bit of a career as science fiction and in popular culture, with most readers being utterly unaware that the fable was written by one of the greatest social theorists of the nineteenth century. A recent example of this type of influence is the successful Science Fiction film trilogy The Matrix from the 1990’s, by the Wachinskys, which was inspired by Tarde’s intriguing 19th century fable about a future underground network society beyond nature, surrounded by ice and based entirely on archival simulacra. Reading Tarde simply as a science fiction author, speculating on what the future may bring, is clearly a misreading of the author’s intentions. So what does Fragments of future history mean? What is Tarde seeking to demonstrate in this novel? In literary studies such questions would normally be highly problematic from the methodological point of view. When reading a work of art, we are usually not interested in deciphering its meaning, but rather in pointing out how it produces a multiplicity of possible meanings. Asking for the meaning of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Franz Kafka’s Process would seem naïve. The Fragments of future history is, however, a different kind of text. It is a pedagogical fable written by a philosopher in order to bring out key points in his ontology and his theory of society. The novel was originally published in the Revue internationale de sociologie in 1896, refers to itself as an experiment in sociology, and it is full of references to the social science debates of the day. The fable therefore calls for a reading which deciphers its meanings in the light of Tarde’s doctrine and the intellectual context of his time. In his introduction to the »updated« 2004 edition Mauricio Lazzaroto relates the text to the problems of globalization and the threat of ecological disaster: »Tarde urges us to reflection in order to avoid the damage caused by both globalization and the ›Catastrophe‹.« (Lazzaroto in Tarde 2004: 9) Tarde’s metaphors are certainly relevant to these issues, and yet Lazzatoto’s reading is anachronistic. It was certainly not Tarde’s intention to warn about ecological disaster, even though the metaphors he uses in his novel are interesting in light of later debates and developments. So what were Tarde’s intentions? To find that out I will opt for the methodology of Cambridge style intellectual history, as it has notably been clarified by Quinten Skinner (Skinner 2002). Understanding the intentions of an author does not imply going into the head of some other and possibly long dead human being. In order to grasp intentions one simply considers the author as someone who is doing things with words in a context. Thus intellectual historians of the Cambridge

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school typically treat canonical texts in the history of political theory as interventions in on-going political debates. Focus is on what individual writers may be said to have been doing in what they wrote. The general question which this chapter seeks to answer is »What did Gabriel Tarde do when he did the FFH?« To answer it one must clarify what the late 19th century debates in social theory were that Tarde’s text relates to, and how he positioned himself in relation to them. One notably needs to understand the Tardian social doctrine and theory of time and memory that the novel brings to life. Finally, there is the question of how the novel relates to the literary genre to which it refers – that of utopian literature.

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Gabriel Tarde (or Gabriel de Tarde, he also used the traditional noble form) grew up and lived much of his life in the town of Sarlat in the Dordogne, an area known for its peculiar geology and its wonderful grottos, many of whom contain rich traces of prehistoric life. The Tardes were nobles and jurists and had been a leading family in the area for many centuries. Late in life, Gabriel’s widowed father took for his second wife a young Parisian woman, who is said to have been intellectually brilliant. Gabriel was their only child. In his youth, Gabriel suffered periodically from an eye disease, which left him near blinded and tormented by headaches for weeks. The disease, which receded as he came of age, disrupted his scholarly trajectory somewhat, but not his intellectual development. The adolescent profited from periods of convalescence to read profoundly, and, when unable to read, his mother would read philosophy out aloud for him in the dark and engage in discussion. A lawyer and judge by profession, Tarde was in 1894 appointed head of the Statistical Bureau at the French ministry of Justice, in which he obtained facts, figures and documents of great value for his work in social studies. As a criminologist Tarde argued that crime had social and psychological reasons, vigorously opposing the biologist approach of Cesare Lambroso and his school. His bestknown works of sociology were »The Laws of Imitation« (1890) and the »Social Logic« (1895). Tarde argued that social phenomena start with inventions by individuals or small groups of people living in environments that favour innovation, and that they spread through processes of imitation, opposition and – when innovations cross each other – adaption. In his lifetime, Gabriel Tarde was an extraordinarily successful individual. Had he lived among the Vikings a thousand years earlier, he would have been called a hamingjuma!r, a man of happiness; someone who succeeds in all walks

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of life. His intellectual versatility was extraordinary. Well versed in mathematics and statistics, Tarde was a master of the French language, capable of exposing his doctrines with great eloquence and notably with wit and humour in any genre from treatise and essay to poetry and novel. Gabriel led a model family life with his wife and his children and made strong, warm and lasting friendships wherever he went. At the time of his death, Tarde held the chair of contemporary philosophy at the Collège de France and enjoyed European fame as a criminologist. His reputation as a sociologist overshadowed that of his younger and already famous rival Emile Durkheim, with whom he had long been engaged in debate. Posterity was not kind on Gabriel Tarde, however. As a professor at the Collège de France he enjoyed a free and prominent role as a public intellectual, perfectly fitting his eloquent and generous personality. Unlike his great rival at the Sorbonne, Tarde, however, did not have doctoral students and did not found a school. Durkheim outlived him, and his vigorous school saw to it that soon Tarde was remembered in France chiefly as the defeated opponent of Durkheim. Retrospectively, one understands why Tarde’s oeuvre seemed less relevant in the first half of the twentieth century. Tarde did not really address the great issues of class, inequality and alienation, and his belle époque aestheticism seemed out of step in the harsh social climate of the early twentieth century. Equally importantly, he failed to demarcate sociology as a discipline and join the general movement toward specialization in the academy. Where Durkheim followed Comte in seeking to explain the social by the social, Tarde focused on what we would today call microsociology or socio-psychology. His writings were actually not really programmatic at all, they were the product of one immensely learned individual. In addition, there was something with Tarde’s style of argument, which seemed alien in an academic world that was being specialized and professionalized. He tended to universalize rather than delimit his argument. In his most interesting work, Monadology and Sociology, the author typically spends much of the text showing the relevance of his sociological argument to physics, chemistry and biology! What was not perceived at the time, perhaps because his prose is so pleasant, was the fact that Tarde was indeed a highly systematic thinker. The systematics of Tarde were located on a philosophical level, in the ground-breaking differential ontology which he put to work in all domains that he studied, and which enabled him to argue systematically, and with interesting implications, outside of his chosen field of study. Inspired by higher mathematics and by pre-Socratic philosophy, Tarde developed the idea that »Diversity and not unity is at the heart of all things« (Tarde 2015: 53). In Monadology and sociology, Tarde’s most adventurous philosophical work, he argued that identity is only a special limit case of difference.

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Nothing is identical even to itself, if nothing else so because of the factor of time. Reality is always on the move. A never equals A, it equals A + X. Tarde was very impressed by Hegel, and he followed the German thinker in rephrasing the grand issues of Western philosophy in temporal terms. He was impressed also by Hegel’s insight that ideas and societies develop through opposition and confrontation, and developed his own version of it. Tarde, however, is strictly speaking not a dialectical thinker. Dialectics from Plato to Hegel describes a movement from detail, through opposition and fragment to the totality, which contains everything within itself while being more than the sum of it all. Tarde assumes, on the contrary that the smallest unit, which he, following Leibniz, calls the monad is the richest, and most complex. In the mathematical terms, that Tarde also liked to employ, one would say that the finite integers the infinite. The whole is less complex than the parts. As seen from the standpoint of Tardian sociology, society is not the sum of all, but rather an abstraction, some relatively simple laws and procedures that control and limit the extreme complexity of non-social humanity. His entire social theory is based on the ontological argument that difference, not wholeness, constitutes the richness of existence: »To exist is to differ; difference is truly in a certain sense the substantial side of things, that which is both most unique to each of them and most common to all. We have to start from this point and must not allow ourselves to explain it; it is that to which everything comes back, including identity, (which others falsely take as their starting point). Because identity is only a minimum and, therefore only a species – an infinitely rare species - of difference, as rest is but a special case of movement, and the circle a singular variety of the ellipse. To start from some primordial identity is to suppose at the origin, either a prodigiously improbable singularity, an impossible coincidence of multiple beings, both distinct and yet alike, or the inexplicable mystery of a single being that is simple and yet later divides itself for reasons unknown.« (Tarde 2015: 50)

»Identity« is the minimum form of difference, where only time distinguishes two events. This touches on the classical issue of nominalism and realism, that is on the ontological status of universal. Tarde found that this debate, which occupied the European mind for centuries, could be rephrased as that of repetition and variation (Tarde 1903: 7). When particulars repeat with that minimum of difference that we call »identity«, we have »universals«. With Tarde these are not sophisms. When this ontology of difference, accidence and contingency was put to work in sociology, it became possible to ask very pertinently, what it meant to innovate, to imitate, to copy and to disseminate. Invention is never pure, Tarde argued, it always involves an element of repetition.

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The inventor mirrors and is mirrored. Invention makes itself felt in society through a process of imitation, which is never one on one. Copies differ somewhat and serve as originals for the next copy. Inventions abound, social studies should therefore focus on the processes of dissemination. Why is it that some social innovations are adapted others not? As pointed out by Jean Milet in his important treatise Gabriel Tarde et la philosophie de l’Histoire, Tarde developed the ontology or « metaphysics » which underlies his œuvre, from the start of his career. Basic ideas are presented already in the little treatise La Différence universelle, written in 1870. The mature formulation is found in Monadology and sociology (1893). Tarde’s ontology of difference was overlooked in his lifetime and was soon forgotten. It was not really considered philosophy at all until almost a century later when Gilles Deleuze referred repeatedly to Tarde in Repetition and difference, his seminal 1968 doctoral treatise.

S TORYLINE The novel is narrated by a fictional historian of the distant future, thus the title Fragment of future history. The first part describes the rise of a one world state in the twenty-first and twenty-second century. Following the twentieth century, which Tarde prophetically describes as an age of global industrial warfare between nation states and empires, cosmopolitanism slowly, but surely wins through. What seems like a utopia of natural reason is realized in the form of a one language and one state cosmopolitan order for mankind. The great powers unite in a world confederation, with its capital first in Constantinople, then in Babylon. With technology and science perfected, illness, poverty and the need to labor, is overcome. Electricity is drawn from waterfalls, the winds and tides. Machinery driven by this enormous energy freely furnished by nature renders superfluous every kind of domestic servant and the greater number of artisans. Poverty becomes a memory of the past due to technical progress, Even ugliness is with time overcome as mild eugenic incitements are introduced to allow for the gradual perfection of the human race. Ancient Greek is adapted as the universal language of humankind. What is described in the first half of Tarde’s novel is the type of utopia we know from John Lennon’s popanthem »Imagine«: There are no countries Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too

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All the people Living life in peace.

It must be said that this utopia is not entirely happy. The problem of power is never really resolved. A world state entails enormous concentration of power. Who is to dispose of that power? Who is to rule the world state? Various models of government as well as the architectural styles that go with them are tried out, none solve the problem in a definite manner. Still there is mostly peace, which is a great improvement on Tarde’s own time and especially on the brutal twentieth century. Now however, Tarde’s novel breaks sharply with genre expectations. In this relative utopia, disaster strikes: »On several occasions already the sun had given evident signs of weakness. From year to year, its spots increased in size and number, and its heat sensibly diminished. People were lost in conjecture. Was its fuel running out?« (27) So called »alarmists« now warned against the possibility that the sun might die, but the public concerned itself little about the matter, as they generally do when change is gradual and not sudden. However, the winter of 2489 was so disastrous, it was actually necessary to take the threatening predictions of the alarmists seriously. The return of the spring was anxiously awaited: »The spring returned at last, and the starry monarch reappeared, but its golden crown was gone, and it was itself close to unrecognizable. The sun was entirely red.« (29) In the years that follow the sun and all nature with it, is seen to pass from red to orange to yellow, from yellow to green, and from green to indigo and pale blue. At the same time disaster succeeds disaster. »The entire population of Norway, Northern Russia, and Siberia perished, frozen to death in a single night; the temperate zone was decimated, and what was left of its inhabitants fled before the enormous drifts of snow and ice, and emigrated by hundreds of millions towards the tropics, crowding into the panting trains, several of which, overtaken by tornadoes of snow, disappeared for ever.« (30)

The sun falters year-by-year, causing temperatures on earth to decline. Glaciers expand and oceans freeze until the earth becomes a gigantic snowball. In Babylon, the global capital, a group led by Miltiades and Lydia embark on a project of survival by going underground. There they build a new civilization, drawing on heat and energy from the earth. The ice, with its deep frozen world also provides food as well as water. Unlike Noah in his Ark, they do not bring animals and plants with them; that would be impracticable underground. Instead,

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they establish a gigantic library »enriched with cinematographic albums«, containing all the principal works of mankind and natured: »We shall set up a vast museum composed of single specimens of all the schools, of all the styles of the masters in architecture, sculpture, painting, and even music. These are our real treasures, our real seed for future harvests, our gods for whom we will do battle till our last breath.« (55)

The group takes with them all that can be saved of the libraries and museums of the world capital, all the books and the museum, collections and archives and go underground where they go on to build a new civilisation. Thus the last survivors of humankind pack together the quintessence of the ancient grand libraries and museums of Europe that had already been brought together at Babylon. The cream of all former museums, of all previous exhibitions of industry and art – manuscripts, books, bronzes, and pictures – is saved. Underground men are thrown back upon themselves in a world where nature can only be archived and simulated in various media. There are no plants, animals, no scenery, no sky, no sun or rain, no seasons, no night and no day. Climate change has transformed the earth into an immense archive of deep frozen life forms that in turn provides blueprints for a new virtual world of technological mediations. In this non-spatial world of simulations, humans carve out a future, living in their underground ateliers within an intentional second order cultural archive, drawing on a non-intentional first order natural archive; the ice-clad earth. Surprisingly life in the underground caves turns out to be an improvement on the global state which went before. Unlike in the former world state above ground the social order is decentered, there are no territories to control. Political utopia gives way to aesthetic utopia.

W HAT D OES

IT

M EAN ?

The Fragment of Future History is at first sight not a challenging text, written as it is in a clear and highly entertaining style. Tarde was an excellent writer, even though he tended to lose his thread somewhat in longer texts, under the impact of fresh ideas. The FFH, however, is a compact and well-composed work of fiction. Indeed, one reason Tarde fell into oblivion, may be that he seemed too eloquent to be taken seriously as a social scientist. The profoundness and originality of his thought seems to have been underestimated precisely due to his ability to present

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it brilliantly in any literary or scientific genre, from advanced calculus and sociometrics to essay, novel and poem. If we take a step back from the charm of Tarde’s style, the text becomes mysterious. Why is the global utopia described in the first half of the book not entirely happy? And what about the seemingly nightmarish underground life? What is Tarde trying to show by setting his utopia in the underground, seat of the death world for antiquity and of hell for Christianity? What is he doing in relation to the genre of utopia and to the social sciences of his day? The genre of utopia was invented by renaissance humanists, notably Thomas More, Tomaso Campanella and Francis Bacon, in a historical context that could be called the first wave of globalization. The new genre offered philosophical reflections on the many travel descriptions that astonish Europe in this time. Mores's Utopia from 1516, which gave the genre its name, is located in the Caribbean and the fictional narrator is Raphael Hythloday is said to have accompanied Amerigo Vespucci on his journey to the new world. The discovery of America, a whole new continent with peoples, plants and animals of which no mention is made in the learned authorities of the ancient world, put the authority of established European learning under pressure, especially as Gutenberg’s printing press was making new and often conflicting texts available to the public, while early capitalism was challenging the social structure. Faced with these challenges to their schooling and learning, the humanists of Europe turned to the imaginative political writings of Plato, and found the model for a new genre of philosophical fiction in his Republic (Politeia). Plato’s key images in that dialogue are the cave, the light and the sun. The imagery of the »light of dialectical reason«, moving from the depth of the cave towards the sun of the supreme idea, is continued in much utopian literature. Thus, in Tomaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (Cività del sole) the architecture of the ideal state mirrors that of the solar system. The city is organized in seven spheres that circle the temple of the sun, from which the high priest whose name or title is Sun, rules the state. FFH is in many ways a pendant to the City of Sun, there are striking similarities between the two authors. For both Tarde and Campanella the social bond is aesthetic and erotic in nature. But the methods, the way to knowledge and wisdom is the exact opposite in the two utopias. Method comes from µ6D(&(7 – meaning way or path in ancient Greek. In Campanella, as in Plato and later in Hegel, the way of reason moves from the detail to the totality, which is the richest and fullest unit; the sun in the imagery of Platonism. Tarde very conscientiously deconstructs and reverses this imagery. In Tarde reason is on the move, not upwards towards the totality of reason – the sun – but downwards towards the smallest and richest unit: The monad. Tarde’s »reductionism« is very paradoxical since

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it entails moving downwards from the relative simplicity of the macrolevel to the rich complexity of the monad.

Z ARATHUSTRA

IN

R EVERSE

Tarde’s novel describes a descent from sunlight to the depth of cave, where the movement downwards seems to be accompanied by a corresponding rise in consciousness and social perfection. The further mankind descends from the sun and down into the caves, the higher the levels of intelligence and reason achieved. The structure is the exact opposite of that of Plato’s Republic and of the standard imagery of Utopian literature. Towards the end of the book the reader encounters a wonderful parody of a philosopher of history in the Hegelian or Comtian tradition, called »the greatest intellect of his time«: »According to this profound thinker the social development of humanity, which started on the surface of the earth and is continuing today beneath its crust, close to the surface, is destined in proportion to the growing solar and planetary cooling, to pursue its course from strata to strata down to the very centre of the earth, while the population forcibly contracts and civilisation on the contrary expands at each new descent.« (124)

The narrator praises the Dante-like precision with which this great theorist characterises the social type peculiar to each of these humanities, immured within its own circle, growing ever nobler and richer, happier and better balanced. The grand narrative reaches its climax in the hilarious description of »the last man«, who seems to be an impossible synthesis of Nietzsches »Übermensch« and his »last man«: »One should read the portrait that he has drawn with a bold brush of the last man, sole survivor and heir of a hundred successive civilisations, left to himself yet self-sufficient in the midst of his immense stores of science and art. He is happy as a god because he knows everything and rules over everything, because he has just discovered the true answer of the Great Enigma, yet dying because he cannot survive humanity. By means of an explosive substance of extraordinary potency he blows up the globe with himself in order to sow the immensity of space with the last remnants of mankind.« (125)

Friedrich Nietzsche was the summit of European intellectual fashion in 1890’s, thanks notably to the positivist interpretation of Georg Brandes. Tarde and Nietzsche were contemporaries, with Nietzsche being born in 1844, a year after Tarde,

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but dying ahead of him in year 1900. Tarde’s radical critique of Western metaphysics is closely related to that of Nietzsche. The key difference between them is one of language. For all his stark critique of Plato and Western metaphysics, Nietzsche, like Hegel remained intensely loyal to the metaphors of Platonism. Nietzsche’s hero is the »Übermensch«, his Zarathustra is ever striving upwards, to the mountaintop and into the sun. If we followed the dialectical logic of Hegel and Nietzsche (which is precisely what Tarde does not do), then the Tardian hero, would be the »Untermensch« striving ever downwards. The structure of FFH corresponds to Tarde’s recommended methodology for social studies. While future (and past) social scientists have gone towards the sun, seeking ever higher levels of abstraction; Tarde argues the virtue of looking down, to be narrow and »myopic«: »[My conception], in brief, is almost the reverse of that of Mr Durkheim […], instead of explaining the small by the large, the detail by the big, I explain the overall similarities by the accumulation of elementary actions, the large by the small, the big by the detail« (Tarde 1893: 63, quoted from Latour 2002). Social scientists always make the same mistake, that of »going upward until you embrace vast landscapes panoramically [assuming] that the principal source of any social co-ordination resides in very general facts out of which it falls by degree until it reaches the particulars«. (Tarde 1893: 114, quoted from Latour 2002). Where Durkheim looked for social structure, Tarde’s preferred level of analysis corresponds to what one might today call microsociology or social psychology; studies that delve into the complexity of the local. Researchers in the social and cultural sciences move upward, when they should be looking downwards, at ever finer details. The way followed by mankind in FFH is that which Tarde recommends social science should follow. Where in Dante’s Divine Comedy the cosmos becomes an allegory of the spiritual search of the poet, it becomes in FFH an allegory of the way of sociology.

T RAVELLING

IN

G EOLOGICAL T IME

More, Campanella and Bacon travelled in space, to new unknown islands in the Americas. The age of discovery, from Columbus to Copernicus had expanded space enormously. Isaac Newton discovered the laws that enabled this enlarged space to be systematized, but he knew little of time. The world of Isaac Newton was 5600 years old and had undergone no major changes since creation. If the renaissance discovered space, it was the long nineteenth century, that is roughly the period time from Kant and Hegel to Bergson and Freud, that discovered time;

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historical, evolutionary as well as geological time. Late eighteenth century thinkers and scientists like Immanuel Kant and Pierre Laplace argued that the earth and the universe was tens of millions of years old. At the same time, historians and philosophers of history developed the notions of irreversible change and progress. The past became a distant and hidden land, to be explored by historical research. Starting with Mercier’s L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais, published in 1771, political utopians travelled through time, into the future. They did so using historical time frames, describing new modes of government, educational institutions or means of production. Alternatively, they employed evolutionary time frames wherein human biological material is improved and perfected. The prestigious literary genre of utopia was gradually transformed into the more popular one of science fiction. FFH is a rare example of travel also in geological time. With the discovery of geological time, notably the ice ages, and the fashion for thermodynamics, the fear of climate change became widespread in the late nineteenth century. The philosopher and sociologist Tarde skillfully exploits these fears to construct an intriguing tale, which also functions as a parable of his radical ontology and social doctrine. The first half of the novel is very much in line with the utopian tradition as it stood in the late nineteenth century. At the time, utopias tended to be global in scope, examples being H.G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia and Kang Youwei’s Da Tong shu (A book of great unity). The commercial and technological unification of mankind and the globe had become an inevitable concern in reflections on the future. H.G. Wells noted in A Modern Utopia, that the development both of peaceand wartime technology favours the breaking down of borders, and that therefore »No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern Utopia« (chapter one § 3). A state powerful enough to keep isolated under modern conditions would be powerful enough to rule the world or at least exercise global influence. A modernday utopia must therefore be a world state, he wrote. In FFH the choice of Greek as universal language is highly anachronistic and it is best read as a (ironical?) comment on the genre itself. Greek is the language of Thomas More’s Utopia and will be the language of the global utopia. Why is it that this global utopia is not entirely happy? The answer may again be sought in Tarde’s ontology, which has political implications. Classic utopias are planned societies, symmetrical cities ruled from a center. Tarde’s »utopia« consists of underground networks; there is no defined center. The most creative cluster will by consent be named capital, but the title seems largely honorific. Tarde is critical of macrosociology and its possible implications in centralized social planning and architecture. For similar philosophical reasons his utopian experiment is very different from the »final solutions« of totalitarian thought. In his

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underground world, there is no sun king, no organizational center and no fixed plan. Even though apocalypse strikes mid-way in the novel, there is no uniquely defined teleology in the text. There is no end of history vision as there is no essence of man to realize, no unequivocal natural reason to lay open and put into practice. Thus, utopia becomes a never ending story, forever »a fragment of future history«.

A N E XPERIMENT

IN

S OCIOLOGY

The narrator introduces his description of underground life by naming underground society »an extended sociological experiment«, consisting in the purification of society as a result of the complete elimination of living nature, whether animal or vegetable, man only excepted. »The problem, in a way, was to learn, what would social man become if committed to his own keeping, yet left to himself – furnished with all the intellectual acquisitions accumulated through a remote past by human geniuses, but deprived of the assistance of all other living beings, nay, even of those beings half endowed with life, that we call rivers and seas and stars. Humans were thrown back on the conquered, yet passive forces of chemical, inorganic and lifeless Nature, that are too deeply separated from them to exercise on them any action from the social point of view.« (74-75)

Here the novel effectively presents itself as a literary experiment aiming to see »the real social bond appear in all its vigour and purity« (74). We learn what humanity would do when restricted to itself alone and obliged to extract from its own resources all its pleasures, all its occupations, all its creative inspirations. Cut off from every influence of nature, except human nature itself, the social milieu would for the first time be able to reveal and display its true virtues. The experiment addresses the debates on the nature of society and the social bond that were pursued by Tarde and other leading social researchers at the time. Yet, the fact that Tarde, of all people, wrote a novel describing the purification of the social by the abolishment of non-human nature is something that comes as a surprise. It was Durkheim, against Tarde, who argued the autonomy of the social. According to the younger theorist, social facts should be explained by social facts. Tarde, on the contrary was a monist who argued for the ontological continuity of society and nature. He took care to define and distinguish society, biology and physical nature. What distinguishes them is the media in which they organize. The

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medium of imitation plays a role in societies analogous to that of heredity in organic life and vibration among inorganic bodies (Tarde 1903: 12). The FFH is an investigation into the nature of the social bond. Surprisingly, however, Tarde claims that the social bond in society and the social bond in nature is basically the same. Durkheim famously claimed that the social scientist »should treat social facts as a thing«. Tarde, notes Latour 2002, claims on the contrary, that »all things are society«, and that any phenomenon is a social fact. In FFH, the narrator describes the society/nature dualism as something that has long since been overcome by scientists: »Our chemists, inspired perhaps by love and better instructed in the nature of affinities, force their way into the inner life of the molecules and reveal to us their desires, their ideas, and under a fallacious air of conformity, their individual physiognomy. While they thus construct for us the psychology of the atom, our psychologists explain to us the atomic theory of self, I was going to say the sociology of self. They enable us to perceive, even in its most minute detail, the most admirable of all societies, this hierarchy of consciousness, this feudal system of vassal souls, of which our personality is the summit. We are indebted to them both for priceless benefits. Thanks to the former we are no longer alone in a frozen world. We are conscious that these rocks are alive and animated, we are conscious that these hard metals which protect and warm us are likewise a prolific brotherhood.« (119-120)

What does Tarde mean when he argues that there is a neglected social dimension to nature? Inspired by Leibniz’ theory of the monads Tarde understood the »social« as the capacity to organize. Atoms and molecules are, he wrote »distant micro citizens«, (Tarde 1893a: 41), due to their capacity to organize. Having conceptualized the differences, Tarde always stresses the similarities of the social, biological and non-organic, and how the three levels intermingle. Tarde and Durkheim agree in dismissing the argument made by Herbert Spencer, fashionable at the time, that society be understood as an »organism« in terms of models from the natural sciences, but they do so for opposite reasons. Durkheim dismissed the »reductionism« implied in employing biological models in sociology. Tarde does so while stressing the sociability of nature. Natural phenomena are already »social«, he claims. Spencer thus grossly underestimates the complexity of »organisms« and of the molecules and atoms that make them up. Human societies are simple compared to what Tarde calls the societies of organisms, rocks, molecules or atoms. With his usual wit, he compares the biggest human society of his time, China, with other objects of science, concluding that a society made up of only 300 million elements (China’s population at the time) is extremely small. »An organism that would contain such a limited number of basic

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anatomic components would be inevitably located in the lowest degrees of vegetality and animality« (Tarde 1999:64, quoted from Latour 2002) Furthermore, the structures of societies and cultures are also relatively simple, claims Tarde. Unlike with rocks or plants, aggregation from the atomic to the macroscopic level poses no major challenge. Nothing in social studies parallels the problems one is faced with when seeking to move between nuclear physics and chemistry or organic chemistry and biology. Make sure there is no misunderstanding; Tarde’s point is not to reduce society to nature or macro to micro, but to bracket out these unproductive and misleading distinctions to allow more productive distinctions to be made.

T HE S ELFISH M ONAD Monadology and sociology is a paradoxical title. Tarde describes how his monadology differs from that of Leibniz: »[Leibniz] had to imagine a pre-established harmony, just as complement to their errant and blinds atoms, the materialists must invoke universal laws or the unique formula that encapsulates all of these laws, like some mystical commandment that all beings obey and that emanates from none of them – some ineffable and unintelligible verb which, without having ever been spoken by anyone, can nevertheless be heeded everywhere and always.« (Tarde 2015: 42)

The problem is to understand why and how monadic agents organize and meet in relative order. Leibniz »solved« this problem by assuming pre-established divine harmony. To Tarde, who is strictly secular, that is not an option. He offers instead a radical critique of both materialism and idealism. His monism disclaims the key distinction shared by both ontologies between the actions of the agent and the laws that act on those agents. Thus for materialists all that exists is matter. Yet matter is not blind. They tend to assume that matter is organized by laws that ensure, for example, that the various components of the atom or molecule relate in a manner which is predictable, at least statistically. Bruno Latour summarizes Tarde’s position: »To speak of laws of nature that would preside over the activity of blind atoms, is even more spiritualist than to endow those atoms with some will and purposes, since it implies that those laws are ›listening to‹ and ›obey to‹ some voice which has never been ›uttered by any one‹. Materialists believe in ›mystical commandment‹ because their epistemology divorces

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Tarde proposes an alternative to the misleading metaphor of »agent« and »structure«. It is to see the monad as itself a carrier of organizing laws. Society is not superior to the monads, it is »only a simpler, more standardised, version of one of the monad’s goals which has succeeded in making part of its view shared by the others.« (Latour 2002: 7). In Leibniz, God establishes a pre-existent harmony between the monads, Tarde’s monism is, on the contrary Darwinian. The Tardian monad is reminiscent of later Darwinian models like the Dawkinian selfish gene or Susan Blackmore’s memes in that every monad is in competition for influence (Dawkin 1976; Blackmore 1999). Every monad is more and other than the society it participates in, at the same time as they compete to impose their social innovations and influence the reduced reality of the totality. In order to understand society as a whole, one should focus on hegemonic monads, that is on whatever aspects of their ontological richness, which an individual or small group of individuals are able to abstract out and impose on the totality. Building a whole social theory around the concept of imitation may seem strange. As Bruno Latour convincingly points out (Latour in Candea 2015: 190), Tarde does this for deep laying reasons of method. The focus on imitation allows the Tardian to avoid the misleading distinction between structure and agency and between subject and object. The very concept of imitation challenges the subjectobject distinction, and replaces it with an epidemics of ideas. In imitation the subject-object distinction is reversed and deconstructed, since it is the passive part, he or she who is being imitated who is the »subject«, while the active imitator is the »object«. Tarde does not come across as a systematic researcher, yet his methodological observations are often penetrating, as when he – a century before Michel Foucault – notes that the distinction between subject and object is »a dangerous speculative trap«, and that social science should instead trace »processes of subjectification and objectification« (Tarde 1999: 225, quoted in Candea 2015: 16). In a Tardian perspective, the social order is always fragile and temporary. It consists of dynamic networks of creativity, imitation and adoption. Small creative units invent a social form that is imitated and copied until we have vast social unities like the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church or the United States of America. An empire is only the simplified, routinized, repetitive element of one of the monads, who has managed to make his or her local culture into a general idiom. Tarde’s monadism limits his utopianism. As Alain Touraine has pointed out, the utopia in most versions of utopia, is the social realm itself. From Plato’s republic

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via More and Campanella to H.G.Wells, utopia is a place where all is social, and where even the most intimate aspects of human existence must be examined under the light of reason and stand the test of social utility (Touraine 2000). Thus the returning scandal of sexuality in utopia, which even the good Churchman Thomas More made into a public affair. Tarde however, has a clear concept of the »nonsociological ground of sociology« (Toews in Candea 2015 129-139). Besides the habitual, norm regulated social sides of human existence there are also »those relating to the more uncouth aspect of the universe, which art delights continually to seize and reproduce, and which satisfy (as it would seem) an eternal craving for diversity, picturesqueness, and disorder.« (Tarde 1974; 212, quoted by Tows in Candea 2015: 130) Science studies »the regular succession of repetitions, struggles, and harmonies in the universe – in other words, the regular side«. The danger for social science lies in the fact that there is a natural and almost inevitable alliance between science and the social dimension of man when it comes to focusing on the »dogmatic slumber« of regularity (Tarde 1903: 82), forgetting the non-social ground of the social. In the underground society of FFH sexuality is regulated so as to serve social purposes of population control and public health. Only people who display creative talent are allowed to procreate, mirroring Tarde’s dictum that genius is the ability to progenate. Nonetheless, the narrator makes clear that there is a high cost to this defiance of the unsociable forces in man. Miltiades and Lydia themselves died fighting for the cause of free love, and there is the all too frequently used institution of double suicide, by which unhappy lovers get hoisted by a lift to the gaping mouth of an extinct volcano and reach the outer air which in a moment freezes them to death. Society is not the sum of individuals, but a part, an aspect of human life, always provisional and under transformation. Since man is an unsociable as much as a social animal, there is always a price to pay when society expands its field of action, even for the best of reasons. On the other hand there is, as Latour points out, a political upside to Tarde’s differential ontology: »You can enrol some sides of the monads, but you can never dominate them. Revolt, resistance, break down, conspiracy, alternative is everywhere.« (Latour 2002) A striking fact about FFH is that there is hardly any mention of education in the text. Paideia, the training of children to serve the common good is constitutive of the genre from the twin foundational texts, Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia. In Tarde’s underground world there is no commonwealth and no public good. There is, however, a civilizational process going on by which the monads engaging in art and love sometimes fall into rhythm.

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T HE S OCIAL B OND In each monad there is a will to impose its organizing principles on the world. Biological agents spread their genes, social agents their innovations, non-organic agents vibrate. They are also drawn to each other, in a way which carries a family resemblance both to Newton’s law of attraction and to Nietzsche’s drive to power. As with Nietzsche the drive is social; it is a drive to have and be had. The verb to have is essential in Tarde’s philosophy. He advices that one thinks in terms of properties and relations, not things and substances: »All of philosophy so far has been founded on the verb To Be, whose definition seemed to be the philosopher’s stone that need to be discovered. We can affirm that, if it had been founded on the verb To Have, many sterile debates, many mental standstills would have been avoided. From this principle ›I am‹, it is impossible to deduce, with all the subtlety in the world, any existence other than my own; hence the negation of exterior reality. But if you postulate: ›I have‹ as the basic fact, the had and the haver (l’eu et l’ayant) are given at the same time as inseparable.« (Tarde 2015: 57)

Modern Western philosophy is a kind of grammatical mistake, claims Tarde. Philosophers like Descartes or Kant ask questions in terms of the verb to be. What is a human being and what is »the thing itself«? We would say that they are asking for essences. The Cartesian cogito and the Kantian thing in itself are both logical mistakes. Since, as Tarde has shown, there are no identities in the world, only differences, it is not meaningful to ask what I am or what the thing itself is. Reality is relational, thus the most meaningful questions are have-questions. Tarde accuses the philosophers of hypocrisy, in asking what humans are instead of what they want – their avidity, possession or properties. Given the relative egoism of the monad; what is the social bond? In the FFH the narrator agrees with Tarde’s rival Emile Durkheim in dismissing the idea prominent among economists that the social bond is utility. »Certain sophists, who were called economists, and who were to our sociologists of today what the alchemists formerly were to the chemists or the astrologers to the astronomers, had given credit, it is true, to this error – that society essentially consists in an exchange of services. From this point of view, which, moreover, is quite out of date, the social bond could never be closer than that between the ass and the ass driver, the ox and the drover, the sheep and the shepherd.« (78)

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Pure mutual interest does not make a society. However, Tarde also dismissed Durkheim’s transformation of the mutual utility idea into the hypothesis that the «division de travail», that is the functional differentiation of society will create »organic solidarity« as people come to understand their mutual interdependency. Tarde’s reasoning, as demonstrated in the FFH, is that the breaking down of tasks into specializations will not make society more complex and differentiated. Instead, it may lead to the taking over of human tasks by machines, enabling humans to concentrate on more general and creative tasks. Social differentiation is relatively simple in Tarde’s underground utopia; the »cities« of the world are creative clusters, specializing in various forms of art and craft, and whichever is most creative is »the capital«. The social bond is expression and imitation. Humans have the instinct to ape each other and the will to express themselves through innovation and art. In FFH the narrator sums this up as follows: »Society, we now know, consists in the exchange of reflections. Mutually to ape one another, and by dint of accumulated apings diversely combined to create an originality is the important thing. Reciprocal service is only an accessory.« (78)

Humans do not gather together in cities because they are mutually useful, but because they need each other. They need to see and be seen and to have and be had. This exchange of reflections offers the possibility for the civilizational process which is described in the thought experiment of the FFH. Reality is relational, taking the form of property, greed and violence under some social conditions, but also and under other circumstances of the aesthetic life where monads have and are had, expressing themselves mutually in art and love. Tarde was inspired by the romantic or neohumanist idea, developed by J.G. Herder and continued for example in Hegel, that humans are expressive at heart and that you alienate them if you deny expression. Unlike the romantics, however, Tarde sees art as primarily a social relation. Where the aesthetic is often as in Kant’s concepts of the beautiful and the sublime understood as a relation of the human spirit to nature, in FFH, there is no nature, the erotics of the human body excepted. When travelling by electric wagon between towns and cities one sees not mountains and forests, lakes and sunsets, but frescoes, statues and mosaics. The underground world is »an infinite cathedral«, a velvet underground. Art and love secure the needed level of social cohesion. Social control is exercised not by punishment, but by the threat of exclusion from the play of reflections and by the reward of loving and being loved, and by seeing and creating works of art.

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A RCHIVAL S OCIETY

AND THE

O NTOLOGY

OF

D IFFERENCE

The narrative structure of science fiction novels tends to be awkward. Whether in fiction or academic history, narrators address present and future readers. The science fiction narrator is alone in addressing people who died many centuries ago. FFH has many examples of the strange structure where the not yet born narrator A explains the long ago dead reader about the nature of a future society. Thus when describing the artworks that adorn the connections travelled by electric wagon the narrator makes comparisons with the Pitti Palace, the Uffizi at Florence, and pillared hall of Karnak in order to give »our ancestors a faint idea of what we see«. In FFH, this awkwardness invites reflection on the fictional nature of narrative history. Tarde pokes fun at the tendency to retrospective illusions that turn theologians into sociologists and vice versa. As a matter of fact, the problem of human life and what to do with it is open; it does not allow a definite answer, given the fact that »difference is the alpha omega of the universe« (Tarde 2015: 50). Generations, societies and individuals pose it in ever new forms, supplying new answers to new questions, and there can and should be no linear history. As for the laws of society that do indeed play themselves out in history, sociologists like Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim misrepresent the nature of functional differentiation, claims Tarde. Durkheim assumes that the first human societies are small and simple and that they gain in complexity with differentiation. According to Tarde, however, history and evolution are not on the move towards ever-greater complexity, but towards simplification. Monadology plays itself out also in time. Primitive societies he claims are infinitely varied and highly complex. »The movement of history« is towards homogenization and simplification, as when the grammar and phonetics of languages simplify and the number of languages decreases. In the FFH dynamics tend towards a relatively homogenous global civilization. Increasing functional differentiation does not entail more social complexity, it simply means that tasks are simplified so that machines may take them over, leaving humans with more time to engage in human relations. The main reason we believe that the present is more complex than the past is that the past is gone, most of it without leaving a trace. Tarde’s underground men not only live without nature, they live also with a very thin relationship to history. They have no physical traces of the past; there

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are only the archives. Tarde’s ontology with its emphasis on accidence, contingency; does not allow for grand history.2 He does, however, believe in history as a scientific history, drawing on archival studies, the laws of social science, and on statistics and probability. The underground men entertain a non-linear connectedness between past, future and present mediated through a wide range of archival media; writing and print, photography, film and sound recording. A Heideggerian would describe their relationship as superficial and inauthentic. Tarde seems to think it both sufficient and essential. The latter is demonstrated negatively in the novel when the humans with archives meet those without archives: »[…] a bold sapper by dint of forcing his way through the flanks of the earth beyond the ordinary galleries suddenly penetrated into a strange open space buzzing with human voices and swarming with human faces. But what squeaky voices! What sallow complexions! What an impossible language with no connection with our Greek! It was, without doubt, a veritable underground America, quite as vast and still more curious. It was the work of a little tribe of burrowing Chinese who had had, one imagines, the same idea as our Miltiades. Much more practical than he, they had hastily crawled underground without encumbering themselves with museums and libraries, and there they had multiplied enormously. Instead of confining themselves as we to turning to account the deposits of animal carcasses, they had shamelessly given themselves up to ancestral cannibalism. They were thus enabled, seeing the thousands of millions of Chinese destroyed and buried beneath the snow, to give full vent to their prolific instincts.« (109)

Without memory supports, that is without culture, caught, in the prison of the present, the practical minded Chinese lose their humanity: »In what promiscuity, in what a slough of greed, falsehood and robbery were these unfortunates living! The words of our language refuse to depict their filth and coarseness.« (110)

2

In what remains the most important monography on Tarde, Jean Milet (1970) argues differently, interpreting Tarde in light of the Hegelianism which was fashionable in postwar France. In his final chapter Milet actually takes the FFH to be Tarde’s evolutionary scheme, »his philosophy of history«. In this reading, Tarde becomes a most inconsistent thinker; what to do with all the passages in which he warns against historical determinism and stresses the role of contingency in social developments? Notably, Milet ignores the fact that the narrator in FFH makes clear that the condition in which underground men live at the time of his writing is not the final word of history, and that humankind may well one day go back to the surface, should climate conditions change.

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From Tardian ontology (A equals A plus X) it follows that nothing can be preserved, no copy is perfect, every repetition is different. This is perhaps precisely why Underground civilization is a happy one. Working in the archives and from the documents, underground men are inventing and reinventing themselves, documenting themselves in the process. In this world without nature, without animals, germs, plants, no sky, oceans or landscapes, poetry as well as the natural sciences blossom. From the ontology of difference, it follows that there is life in the archives! The irony in Tarde’s text is that, in the underground world natural science is making progress even though there is little nature left to be researched. The description of vigorous scientific debates between astronomers who have never seen the sky, and botanists who have never held a plant in hand, is funny and yet the narrator here brings out a serious point in Tarde’s understanding of science. Science documents itself in order to enable repetition. Its transparency and traceability is close to perfect. Since documentation is at heart of science, it can survive even the death of nature. The empiricist understanding of science as observation of the fact of nature is simplistic and does not get to the heart of things. This is clearly brought out in FFH when underground men meet the descendants of a colony of Chinese who have done like Miltiades and his group and escaped disaster by going underground. The Chinese, in their practical way, did, however, do so without bringing the archives and cultural monuments with them, and so their culture has entered a process of degradation and primitivization. Efforts at educating them prove futile, especially since they believe in the superiority of their empiricist understanding of knowledge. »These degraded beings had lost all recollection of the Middle Empire and even of the surface of the earth. They heartily laughed when some of our savants sent on a mission to them spoke to them of the firmament, the sun, the moon and the stars.... They listened, however, to the end of these accounts, then in an ironical tone they asked our envoys: ›Have you seen all that?‹ And the latter unfortunately could not reply to the question, since no one among us has seen the sky.« (110)

In a trivial way, the empiricists are right in their perception of knowledge, and yet that perception does not produce knowledge that is both verifiable and transmissible. Thus for all their practicality, they live degraded existences. The key message in Tarde’s Fragment of Future History, which deserves careful consideration, is the following: In order to create a rational society it is more important to archive the past than to plan the future. Planning the future is hard, often impossible and sometimes counterproductive. One must trust the ingenuity

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of creative networks or else risk slavery and stagnation. Archiving the past, on the other hand, is both feasible and necessary. In Tarde’s fable, the unhappy descendants of the Chinese provide the instructive counterexample. China was a civilization, but a practical and empirical one, and when disaster struck and the Chinese, like other humans, were obliged to seek refuge underground, they forgot to bring their books, archives and works of art. Following Francis Bacon, Tarde understands science as the human activity that documents itself. What Miltiades and Lydia invent is therefore not only an aesthetic utopia, but also a scientific society, a society which lives off documents and documentation.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Blackmore, Susan (1999): The Meme Machine, Oxford. Candea, Matei (ed.) (2015): The Social After Tarde, London. Dawkin, Richard (1976): The Selfish Gene, Oxford. Djellal, Faridah/ Gallouj, Faïz (2014): »The laws of imitation and invention: Gabriel Tarde and the evolutionary economics of innovation«, in: Revue Economique 68.4, pp. 643-671. Jakobsen, Kjetil A. (2010): »Observing the stars. Love in the age of systems«, in: MedieKultur 49, pp. 26-40. Latour, Bruno (2002), »Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social«, in: Patrick Joyce (ed.): The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, London. Milet, Jean (1970): Gabriel Tarde et la philosophie de l’histoire, Paris. Skinner, Quentin (2002). Visions of Politics Volume 1: Regarding Method. Cambridge. Tarde, Gabriel D. (1893): La logique sociale, Paris. — (1903): The Laws of Imitation, New York. — (1904): Fragment d’histoire future, Paris. — (1974). Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. Perspectives in Social Inquiry series. New York. — (1980): Fragment d'histoire future [1904], Genève (Facsimile reproduction of the 1904 edition by Slatkine of Lyon). — (1999): L’Opposition universelle; essai d’une théorie des contraires. Le PlessisRobinson, Paris. — (2004): Underground. Fragments of Future Histories [1896], Brussels.

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— (2015): »Monadology and Sociology«, in: Matei Candea (ed.): Gabriel Tarde. Two Essays, pp. 31-65. Touraine, Alain (2000): »La société comme utopie«, in: Lyman Tower Sargent/ Roland Schaer (eds.): Utopie: La quête de la société idéale en Occident. Paris, pp. 28-38.

The Absence of the Arctic Photographic Archives of the Arctic K NUT E BELING & H ARALD ØSTGAARD L UND

A IRSHIPS

OVER THE

A RCTIC

On 11th of May 1926, the Norwegian airship Norge had left Kings Bay at Svalbard in an Italian dirigible paid by Mussolini housing the famous Amundsen-NobileEllsworth Transpolar Flight. Their mission was to find, or at least to fly over the North Pole and take home some photographs of the North Pole that none of the earlier Amundsen expeditions had managed to bring back home yet. But the photographic aim of this expedition only made evident the difficulty of visual evidence from the arctic region. The first of these problems had nothing to do at all with the visual representation of the poles but more so with the geographic impossibility to locate the exact poles at all: There isn’t, there wasn’t any such thing as the pole. Where was the pole? Which pole were they talking about? Immediately when one starts to talk about the difficulty of locating the poles, there arises the complication of defining poles – that can be defined as geographic, cartographic or magnetic. This was a somewhat strange situation: There was an ongoing fascination or hysteria about ›the poles‹ – of which nobody knew where they were, nor how to locate them. Looking at this complication within the history of the visual or photographic archives of the poles, one understands that this history of visual evidence is preceded by an entire scientific history of geographical discourse of locating the poles. The question of visual archives of the arctic responds to a scientific discourse – that only needed to be proved. So one is facing the aporia that speaking of the poles assumes that something was there, which actually wasn’t. But the scientific discourse around the difficulty of locating the poles also fought with real problems

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– for example, the phenomenon of geographic poles which were slightly ›wandering‹. The exact points on the surface of Earth, where the Earth's axis of rotation intersects the Earth's surface (the definition of geographic poles) is not stable. The Earth is not so perfectly round as the model, the globe, and Earth’s rotation is also affected by movements at its inside as well as other heavenly bodies. Consequently the geographic poles are slightly ›wandering‹ relative to the surface. Since it appears to be only a matter of meters little attention is usually given to the practical difference between geographic and cartographic poles. Hundred years ago this was not obvious. As a caricature in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten shows, it was an unanswered question exactly where the flag should be planted.1 During 19th century it was known that the geographic poles could be moving, but not how much (Lund/Berg 2011: 256-260). In addition there is no land in the area of the geographic North Pole, only floating ice – and ice is per definition that what withdraws itself from fixation through its permanent change. So the explorers knew even if they posted flags at the poles, they would float away long before anyone would happen to come by. For these reasons, there was no time for systematic and daylong observations that had been done at the South Pole, neither miles of encircling. The situation was much more problematic and complex: The cartographic poles were the only ones that could be found in the arctic – they were the only ones that could be ›constructed‹ by matching the artificial scientific cartographic system to the earth: Finding the poles meant constructing them. It was as if these explorer’s said: There isn’t a pole? Then we have to construct it! So it’s a relatively artificial or contingent situation – an archival situation. In another case of another expedition, one can make the case more concrete: On the occasion of the also famous South Pole Fram-expedition of 1911, Amundsen and his men knew very well that they were not able to locate the exact South Pole. So they decided that their camp at the spot where they planted their first flag should be encircled with a radius of twelve and a half miles: »The encircling was accomplished in this way: Three men went out in three different directions, two at right angles to the course we had been steering, and one in the continuation of that course.« (Amundsen 1912, 2: 125-126) Each man planted additional flags at the end of his ski-track. Without any of the heavy compasses or other means of navigation except for the sun and watches, they depended on the ski-tracks to find their way back to the camp. Luckily wind and snowstorm did not erase them too soon. After that they moved further in a direction they thought could be south, to a second spot they called »Polheim«, and repeated the same procedure in a slightly smaller scale.

1

Aftenposten, 24.03.1912, in: Lund/Berg 2011: 260.

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What Amundsen and his men did in December 1911, was to represent the cartographic South Pole on Earth’s surface: With their skis, sledges, flags and tent they drew a terrain from the map. Then they drew a map of their drawing in the snow, with straight thin pencil lines representing the nearly straight tracks of the skis and sledges. As a matter of fact, there was nothing represented in their consequential Chart of the Immediate Surroundings of the South Pole that was not brought there by the explorers themselves. The polar heroes fixed the points of the cartographic coordinate system upon Earth itself at the approximate location of the slightly varying and invisible geographic poles. This obviously was more a matter of staging than discovery. As much as with sledges and ships the stage of the polar heroes was built with new illustration and printing techniques.

T HE R EPRESENTATION

OF THE

A RCTIC

The topic of illustrations and printing techniques of the visual archives from the arctic changes the focus from the question of the location of the poles to the question of their representation: One always has to keep in mind that these two levels should be separated. The difficulty of the visual fixation of the poles in the earth is another problem than the visual documentation of these fixations. Indeed, the visual problem of documentation of the poles alone was quite drastic or even exasperating: Because even if there was a pole, there was nothing to see or photograph or represent out there! What was visible in the arctic were endless surfaces of snow and ice in constant transition and always the same – places of forever changing patterns that could not be easily represented in photographs. Besides that, nor earth rotation or magnetism was for a camera to record. Consequently, visibility had to be produced, constructed or even staged. This meant two things: First, one had to create a visibility out there in the ice, one had to create something to see there in the first place – one had to create something dramatic, one had to dramatize the scene. In other words: One had to play theatre – which was what they obviously did: On many photographs, one sees them busy in posing and creating something to see. In these pictures, one is not dealing with the problem of locating or representing poles – but with representing humans in that extreme situation. To sum it up, one can get the impression that the harder the situation of visualization gets, the more likely one will end up with stereotypes and clichés (in both the original senses of the words as means of printing reproduction, and the more recent as simplified worn out repetitions of forms). Secondly, the explorers had to mark the Earth – obviously with items like flags. This is why we see flags all the time: All this flag business doesn’t come from the

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fact that there was something to see, but from the opposite fact that there was nothing to see – besides the flags you put there yourself. So the job of representing the arctic truly was a highly contingent situation. In many photographs, we see people that were busy in marking the earth all the time. They were marking the unmarkable, representing the irrepresentable. And they were doing this, because there seemed to be an enormous difference in the perception of marked or unmarked earth. This difference appears also in their representations: The National Library of Norway owns several gelatin silver prints from what has to be the same take from above the Polar Sea – both with and without flags. In some of the prints, there are no signs or traces of flags at all.2 Hence flags must have been drawn or pasted into the picture which has then been photographed again and again, until finally appearing convincingly enough as a photograph of a pole. Under a printed version without flags the text says: »MYSTERYSILENCE-DESOLATION«.3 At the next plate in the same book the text under the other photograph from the same take, but with flags, states proudly: »THE NORTH POLE! MAY 12, 1926«.4 Therefore one can say there was a certain postproduction involved in the production of a witness of the poles. But not only photographs were rephotographed to introduce something into the picture which wasn’t there before; the actual situation had gotten rephotographed as well. There is also the famous story of Amundsen’s 1911 race for the South Pole, when the Norwegian and the English expedition competed in who would get there first. As is well known, the Amundsen expedition did. At the camp they called »Polheim« Amundsen left a little spare tent, and just before they left, one of his men, Olav Bjaaland, took a photograph of his four companions in front of it. One month later the competing British Scott expedition arrived – and rephotographed Amundsen’s triumph in the shape of a triangular tent. As the legend goes, the tent also served as a mailbox for Amundsen, for he left two letters there: one for the rivaling expedition of Scott, telling them to forward another letter to the Norwegian king. But Scott couldn’t do Amundsen this favour, because he himself and his expedition died on their return from the South Pole. But beside his dead body was found later the letter to the king as well as two rolls of exposed film (Lund/Berg 2011: 282-284). More than a year later, a photograph of four Eng-

2

Beside the flags the different versions also vary in other details and framing, but since the photographs were taken from the constantly moving dirigible, the identical pattern of ice reveal that they have to stem from the same take (Lund/Berg 2011: 288-293).

3

Kershner 1929: plate no. 17.

4

Kershner 1929: plate no. 18.

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lishmen around the Norwegian tent with a straight Norwegian flag on a long bamboo pole arrived at the Norwegian court together with the missing letter. Already then, media had, just as Amundsen had expected, a longer durability and range than human beings. In theoretical terms, this anecdote is still dealing with the relation of location and documentation: One might think that location and documentation of the poles would belong to different ontological levels; one would expect that fixations of the poles in the earth are something different than the documentation of these fixations: First comes the scientific and geographic problem of locating the poles, afterwards their visual representation, forming an archive that relies on the preceding scientific discourse. But the visual evidence of this archive tells another story: It tells us that the representation of the poles can replace their location and that representation can substitute reality. Thus in the case of these visual archives, the ontological order reality-representation is reversed by visual media. Hence the ontological order is likewise reversed: Even if one might think that location and representation should come together because one cannot represent poles if one hasn’t located them at first, this is exactly what happened: They were represented before they had been located; and more so, they were represented because they hadn’t been found. In the absence of an exact location of the pole, it was represented anyway – and this representation served accordingly as evidence of the location of the pole. From this moment on, the represented arctic existed foremost in its visual representation, in its archive, rendered visible by techniques and discourse – and it is yet very hard to say if there was anything precedent to representation which in this case acts like a translation without original: What one is dealing with in the case of the visual archive of the arctic are only translations and constructions – but no ›reality‹, at least no evidence of it.

T HE V ISUALIZATION

OF THE

A RCTIC

Consequently, although the question of representation of the arctic begins with the absence of the poles; the absence of the arctic is likewise a highly visual problem. This is why one has to discuss the conditions of visibility of the poles and their visualization – which have, in the history of representation, been pictured in many ways: as seas with monsters, as lost paradises, as volcanic mountains or as endless holes – and as the bull’s eye, the place where all the meridians meet. Discussing the visualization of the arctic, one also has to mention the famous picture already cited of the Norwegian tent with a proud Norwegian flag arriving at the king’s court – one also has to discuss symbol politics and the symbolic capital involved

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in the so called »Race for the Pole« around 1900. It is obvious that this legendary race had not only to do with survey and discovery, but with competition and control with symbols. There was a tremendous symbolic capital involved in this expedition that needed the flags to function. Actually, the pole was totally useless »except as a symbol« (Potter 2007: 38); plus the flags were useless if the public couldn’t see them, if they weren’t represented. Therefore, the symbolic capital needed a medium to represent the flags and thus witness the presence of men at invisible poles – and everybody knows what this witnessing medium was: photography. It was photography that served as visual currency of this symbolic capital. Photographs from the poles were as valuable as the expedition itself, maybe they were its secret goal. Hence the problem of absence of the poles and the simultaneous rise of photography gave birth to a phenomenon that can be named the photographic north pole – a pole that only and at first exists in its photographic representation. The search for the poles did not only overlap with photographing them; as photographs were the only witnesses of ›having been there‹, the photographic witnesses became as important as the location of the poles themselves. One realizes how the two distinct ontological levels of reality and its documentation or representation intertwine as well; the search for ›original‹ vintage prints parallels somehow the search for the poles. Accordingly, there are many stories of a race not only for the poles but also for their prints and vintage prints and how they were missing and who had them. »[A]nd all these thin glass plates to be handled and treasured as though they were more precious than diamonds – as they certainly were.« (Cato 1955: 86) Another evidence for the importance of the photographic search for witnesses of the exploration of the arctic is the fact that Amundsen’s preparations for his expedition to the North Pole in 1909 were accompanied by Norway’s leading photographer Anders Beer Wilse and the pioneering polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who were engaged in providing and adjusting photographic equipment.

F OUR M EN

AND A

T ENT

AT THE

S OUTH P OLE

As important as the visual documentation of the arctic and its archive is the question of their publication. According to Foucault, this evidence only enters the realm of knowledge once it gets stated, declared and witnessed – once it is in the realm of the énoncés. Yet it is easy to understand even without any theoretical or ›archival‹ framework that the conditions of the visibility of the arctic lie not only in the arctic itself, in its geographic, carthographic or scientific situation – but also in its publications, which undoubtedly produce a certain visibility. Not until the

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arctic appears and gets published in concrete, and often very popular media (such as newspapers or even stamps), it transforms into what Foucault calls knowledge – for the production of scientific knowledge begins not with evidence which speaks for itself, but with the medial or institutional procedures that are acted out upon them – with what is done to them, for example in publications. The reason for this is the idea that what we receive and perceive from the arctic is not its direct evidence nor its visual documentation but published documentation: processed photographs and mediated pictures. Discussing processed photographs and mediated pictures in the case of the arctic, one eventually has to bring up the previously discussed case of the »Four Men and a Tent« – which is by far the most important picture and cliché of the exploration of the poles that travelled around the world in different variations. It is this enigmatic picture that became an icon of the Norwegian polar heroes – an image that didn’t only symbolize the race to the poles but that had won the simultaneous race for pictures. Also in the case of this icon we are surprisingly dealing with a reproduction without original. No negative or vintage print exists except for a little yellowed badly fixed un-retouched silver-gelatin developed-paper-print that is to be found in a private album labeled Tasmanian views at the National Library of Australia. This only known vintage print showing »Four Men and the Tent« has survived here not despite but exactly because of its lack of significance in its context (Lund 2010: 167-78; Lund/Berg 2011: 278-281). This popular iconography translates into different types of representation and media, it travels through popular media and popular culture. There is an entire archive of this single photography, varying only a little bit, almost unnoticeable, in all photographic media of the time – a fact that somehow reveals the medial trade secret of these photographs that wouldn’t be thinkable without or outside of the archive. One might think of this analogue photograph that it is always the same basic photograph that travels around the world – and true, it is always the same iconography, but not at all the same picture. It travels through different media: from photographic variations of this photography to details of that photography and from various printing procedures or operations of that picture to various retouches of it, from its sketches or drawings to their book reproductions, from paintings or aquarels of it to book representations of the photographs and finally from book covers even to stamps with a mysterious fifth man together with the original »Four Men and the Tent«. Facing the icon of the »Four Men and the Tent«, one faces the entire gallery of popular analogue reproduction techniques of the beginning of the 20 th century – techniques which use this iconography, because it fits so well. The popular ico-

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nography of »Four Men with a Tent« translates into different types of representations and popular media. This is also apparent in a reproduction which really is a reproduction of a reproduction of a reproduction: A drawing or etching of a public viewing of a diapositive of the photograph of the »Four Men and the Tent« – and of course its newspaper reproduction with the picture within the picture that also shows the inevitable icon. And this picture never stays the same: Even though the iconography of »Four Men and a Tent« seems quite robust on its travel through media, even if it appears to remain the same – the picture never does. Every reproduction, every retouch, every screening added something or took something away from it. The work of the archive is far from being passive or neutral. Within the archive of this single photograph, one can distinguish between medial and iconographic factors: In the case of the »Four Men with a Tent«, one is not dealing with an iconography like in the history of art, in which one icon means something specific which is translated from one painting into another. In the case of the arctic archive, we’re not dealing with translations but with transpositions: with copies and blueprints without original – with reproduction techniques. Looking at them, one obviously observes that the polar exploration became extremely popular during the 19th century through a wide range of visual media from paintings, engravings and panoramas to photographs, lantern slides and illustrated press. And in time the phrase ›from sketch made on the spot‹ came to be replaced by ›after photograph‹ for printed pictures. In other words: The history of arctic expeditions intersects with the media history of printing and photography. The intense period of races for the poles from the late 1880s to the 1920s coincided with worldwide breakthroughs for new means of production and distribution of photography. For example, Kodak provided light and easy equipment with their roll-film cameras, halftone prints became increasingly integrated with text in books, magazines, papers and posters. Hence one can state that the fame of »The Four Men« was not due to any structures in the snow or to the photographic surface. What worked for this icon was mainly the state of the reproduction techniques of the time – the possibility of the visual integration of the picture with text, maps and other kinds of graphics that had just been invented. Thus the success of the »Four Men« was an effect of the archive (or the graphic designer’s studio): It was an archival success, a triumph of the archive over reality. The visible activity of graphic design here raises another theoretical question: Where does the fixation of the pole happen? Does it lie in marking the earth, in photographing it or in the publication of these photographs, in postproducing them, in putting them together with text and scientific discourse, making a story out of

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them? Where begins for these pictures Foucault’s énoncé? When do the poles become visual knowledge? When do pictures enter the world of knowledge? When the pole is marked, when it is photographed or when these photographies are postproduced and become published and enter the realm of scientific knowledge? In the visual archive of the arctic exists another sequence of photographs that shows most directly their belated and archival nature – the fact that photographs less document or represent a reality that is staged with their help. At 7th of March 1909, as a part of Amundsen’s preparations for his expedition to the North Pole, Norway’s leading photographer Anders Beer Wilse made a much used series of photographs of Amundsen in his polar outfit at the ice of the Oslo fjord outside his home at Svartskog. Originally, this sequence was meant to illustrate the explorer in the arctic. But when the same expedition later was redirected to the South Pole, because the Americans in the meantime had claimed their attainment of the North Pole, Wilse’s photographs from Svartskog ended up illustrating – Amundsen in the Antarctic! This anecdote illustrates quite well that the polar heroes were as concerned with staging as with discovery; and as much as with sledges and ships the stage of the polar heroes was built with new illustration and printing techniques. They tell the story of reproduction without original: Rephotography together with reproductions of the same few photographs confirmed and fixated the South Pole as an image beside the picture of the map. The image of the North Pole never came to be fixated or confirmed the same way. In the fleeting ice of the arctic there was no possibility of rephotographing anything.

T HE A RCTIC

AND THE

A RCHIVE

In the end, one could relate the visual archive of the arctic to theoretical conceptions of the archive. If one reads the visual archive of the arctic with theoretical conceptions of the archive like Foucault’s, there are several shifts to observe: First, a shift from representations to codings and secondly from the challenge of the document to the monument – to take up two key concepts of the Archeology of Knowledge. The research on the visual archive of the arctic is not only one of a photo historian, but also one of an archivist in the Foucauldian sense of the notion: This is not only because the researcher works in an archive or because he or she established an archive – but much more because of the working and research method implied by this archive: This archive does not only represent the visual history of the polar heroes – it shows how their image came about. One can track

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back the official pictures and icons of the polar heroes to their making, their ›making of‹; one can go back to the historical publications and wonder, which pictures were used in which publication for what purpose. This archive doesn’t represent the images of the polar heroes as plain facts, representing and witnessing that they were there; but it shows, again, how this impression came about, how it was artificially made and constructed. It doesn’t strictly follow the rhetorics of these pictures, but reverses their direction; it goes into their semantics and takes it apart to deconstruct it. In one word, this archive allows research in the very texture of these representations, »in the texture of the document itself«, to use Foucault’s distinction between document and monument: It allows to view the photographic »document« as »monument«. Talking about Foucault, one can precise one question already asked: Where does this non-representational archive begin? When does its visual material become or enter visual knowledge? With the scientific discourse on the arctic or with its visualization in publications? When it is photographed or when these photographies become published and enter the realm of science? One can say, expanding Foucault’s theory of knowledge to visual knowledge, that the production of visual knowledge begins not only with evidence which speaks for itself, but with every procedure that is done to it, with every operation that is done to these pictures. It is every little swirl, the smallest turbulence, that creates a new picture – that creates visual knowledge, for example that of publications. For what we perceive in them are not the poles as such but mediated pictures, representations, visual turbulences. One could easily state, as one conclusion of this research, that the polar heroes have not only been in the arctic, they have also been in the archive, meaning: Even being in the arctic, they were very concerned with the visual reproduction not only of what they had seen in the past but also of what the public would see of it in the future: Even if they were ›there‹ in the past, their state of mind was framed by the contemporary media that allowed them to convert their authentic experiences into future symbolic capital – into distributable pictures that would be sent around the world much faster than they could travel. Having been in the archive instead of in the arctic attributes the archive a new position: The visual archive of the arctic can thus be characterized as an ›active‹ instead of a ›passive‹ archive – as an archive which is not the passive receiver or recipient of a material unaltered by it, but an archive as active agent in forming and coding of what it contains. In this archive things don’t stay as they were but are ever altered and ever-changing as much as the ice they don’t manage to capture. This conception of an ›active‹ archive of the arctic is actually quite problematic confronted with a visual material whose value lies obviously in the contrary:

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in its value as passive witness, in a direct, authentic representation of the outer world. This is, at least in their rhetorics, the case of the polar photographs which witnessed the presence of men at north or south poles. But do these photographs eventually lose their weight as witness in the archive? Does the archive destroy their quality as witnesses? Is the archive the place of truth that takes away the false mask of authenticity that the pictures of the polar heroes always wear? On the one hand, a photographic North Pole is a phenomenon of postproduction. But not only; on the other hand, even if flags do not appear in photographs before they were retouched and reproduced, they still picture a Pole – namely the photographic North Pole as it is fixated in photogravure, halftone and gelatin silver prints, which cannot totally get deconstructed. This is also why the lines between photographic, mechanical and manual reproduction are not always clear, and why published photographs may, and in certain cases should, be considered both as reproductions and originals at the same time. This two-sidedness of the arctic archive – to be simultaneously authentic and medially reproduced, to be always already medially mediated and real at the same time – that contains traces of reality foreshadows our digital contemporary witness problematic.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Amundsen, Roald (1912): The South Pole: An account of the Norwegian Antarctic expedition in the »Fram« 1910-1912, London. Amundsen, Roald/ Ellsworth, Lincoln (1926): The first flight across the Polar Sea, London. Cato, Jack (1955): The story of the camera in Australia, Melbourne. Kershner, Howard Eldred (1929): Air pioneering in the Arctic: the two polar flights of Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth, New York. Lund, Harald Østgaard (2010): »The South Pole Photograph«, in: Roald Amundsen’s Sydpolekspedisjon 1910-1912 [booklet accompanying DVD], Oslo, pp. 167-78. Lund, Harald Østgaard /Berg, Siv Frøydis (2011): Norske polarheltbilder 18881928, Oslo. Potter, Russell A. (2007): Arctic spectacles: the frozen North in visual culture, 1818-1875, Seattle.

The Snowfield as an Archive of Soviet Underground Performance Art S ABINE H ÄNSGEN

In the 1970s, performances played a decisive part in the development of an alternative sphere of communication in Russian-Soviet culture. Performances became important meeting places for an underground art scene that realized its activities outside the practices of state culture – access to which was regulated by strict censorship – primarily in the countryside around Moscow, in studios and private apartments. Here, forms of artistic self-organisation developed parallel to the initiatives of samizdat, the movement of »self-publishing« in the fields of literature, philosophy and science. Within this group culture, performances stimulated exchange between those who were active in various media – between artists, musicians, writers, theorists and critics. However, it was not simply a matter of intensifying social contact; rather, the communication processes within the scene were turned into an aesthetic event. Before the backdrop of the city of Moscow, in the theatrical atmosphere of an existence shaped by ideology and ritual – if you think of the numerous parades, celebrations and mass spectacles – one’s own artistic existence itself became the object of staging, and in particular performances represented an occasion for the art scene to stage itself. Critical investigation of these ritualised forms of communication in Soviet ideological culture is already indicated as a programme in the name of the performance group »Collective Actions« (»Kollektivnye deistviia«) that came into being in 1976; the group was founded by Nikita Alekseev, Georgi Kizevalter, Andrei

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Monastyrskii and Nikolai Panitkov, although other members joined later, including Elena Elagina, Igor’ Makarevich and Sergei Romashko.1 There was also a permanent circle of participants. Many well-known Moscow artists and writers took part in the actions: Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Dmitrii Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Vladimir Sorokin, members of other groups (»Inspection Medhermeneutics«, for example), Vadim Zakharov or Yuri Albert). All of the artists involved in the organization of an action appeared as the authors of the project; as a rule, the initiator of the idea’s realization signed first, and the others were then named according to their degree of participation. The borders between authors, participants, and spectators were fluid. The aim was not to create any kind of art objects; instead, it was a matter of staging an action that developed on the border between art and life. Andrei Monastyrskii, the main theorist of the group, characterized the principle of the Collective Actions in the following way: »The only positive definition would be a dynamic definition: the event’s action emerges through the joint effort of authors and spectators, aiming for a shift in the subject of perception from the demonstration zone (›art‹) through the border area (›strip‹) of the indistinguishable – into the zone of scattered everyday perception (›life‹).« (Monastyrskii 1989: 140)

»Trips out of Town« was the connecting theme of these actions – trips made by a group of participants, who were generally invited to the event by the organizers in advance, which led to a certain expectation on the side of the invited. As a rule, the group headed into the countryside around Moscow – usually to a wide, empty field, that is, away from the sphere of the metropolis, saturated with symbols and texts, into an unmarked, ›empty‹, natural space. Often a field of untouched snow was the stage for minimalist actions. The first performances, fundamental to the group’s aesthetics, were extremely reduced in plot development. For the action Appearance, which took place on March 13, 1976, the spectators were invited to a field. After five minutes, two of

1

The first five documentary volumes of the Collective Actions Group, which appeared in samizdat, were republished in the volume Kollektivnye deistviia: Poezdki za gorod (Collective Actions: Trips out of Town), Moscow, 1998. English translations from the documentation of the group`s early period were published in the edition: Collective Actions (2012): Audience Recollections from the First Five Years, 1976-1981, trans. and ed. by Yelena Kalinsky, Soberscove Press, Chicago. Further documentation of the performances of the Collective Actions Group can be found on the website: http://conceptualism.letov.ru/KD-ACTIONS.htm, accessed online Maz 2019.

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the action’s organizers appeared from the forest on the opposite side of the field. Crossing the field, they approached the spectators and handed out documents evidencing their participation in the action. For the second action Lieblich on April 2, 1976, a ringing electric bell was buried in a field of snow before the spectators’ arrival; it continued to ring even after the spectators had left the field. The minimalism of these actions – that aestheticize simple physical activities (walking, standing, watching, listening) as well as elementary patterns of perception and abstract categories (presence/absence, appearing/disappearing, sound/silence, rhythmical sequence, interval, pause) – developed an ironic effect in contrast to the splendor and power rhetoric of the official political rituals realized in the symbolically charged architectural sphere of the metropolis. The physical effort of travelling to and from the actions by suburban railway, bus, and often a walk on foot – which could take several hours or a whole day – was disproportionate to the minimalism of what was happening on the field. A key concept within the group’s aesthetic theory is »empty action«. The introduction of minimal elements of action aims at the extension of the process of expectation that in the course of the performance is emptied of any concrete contents. With several tricks and manoeuvers – i.e. the »distraction of the gaze« or the »expectation without fulfillment« – in the empty action any assumed objectives and contents are nullified.2 In contrast to long-distance Arctic expeditions in Soviet history – differing from the heroic narratives of conquering nature and from the ideals of progress and modernization in the project of building communism – in these trips to the periphery of Moscow the white snowfield becomes in a specific experimental setting a demonstration zone creating new perspectives of contemplation and reflection for the participants. The vast expanses of white are here at the same time manifestations of snow and snowscapes and of abstract, metaphysical spaces. Unlike the eternally frozen ground of the permafrost, the snowfield is a temporal feature of the landscape – it exists only in wintertime and when the temperature rises, the ground that was covered by snow is revealed again. Beyond the organizers’ plans and intentions, weather conditions unfold their own dynamics and crucially influence the course of an action and the perception of the participants. By walking through the snow, the participants perceive the situation bodily. The attitude, associated with the process of walking is that of perceptiveness, responsiveness to the created situation.

2

A discussion of »empty action« in the context of the aesthetics of contemplation cf. Boris Groys 2011: 7.

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Thus a dynamic interaction with the natural environment develops, leading to an exchange relationship between cultural gestures and nature. 3

Collective Actions, »Appearance«, 1976

Walking across a snowfield is a recurrent pattern in the performances of »Collective Actions«: it can be regarded as a physical process, but on the other hand the footsteps leave traces in the snow, which produce a kind of inscription. This is especially demonstrated in the performance Looking at a Waterfall from February 12, 1981. The invited participants gathered at the edge of a snowfield. For the next several minutes Nikolai Panitkov was running around on the field in different directions, stopping and falling from time to time. Finally, he stood still in the middle of the field with his cap in his hands. Meanwhile the viewers were given copies of a picture by a 15th century Chinese artist Fen Xi Looking at a waterfall, and it became apparent that Panitkov’s footprints on the snow reproduced the picture’s drawing. In a recollection of the performance Ten appearances (February 8, 1981) Ilya Kabakov very intensely describes the physical process of walking through the snow: »We found ourselves on that same field where I had been several times before. Leaving the road behind, we were immediately plunged into deep snow and had to walk in step. This physical hardship of stepping with legs not very fit for the task and without the help of skis into deep holes, into these tunnels cut deep into the snow, immediately focused the mind on this heaviness and hardship.« (Kabakov 2012: 63)

3

Regarding this relationship cf. the contributions in Kastner 2012.

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Collective Actions, »Looking at a waterfall«, 1981

The goal in the aesthetics of »Collective Actions« was not to accomplish a heroic deed, but rather to attain a contemplative state of mind by fulfilling little tasks (as for instance walking, reeling a thread etc.). »Trips out of town« are a kind of experiment that enables one's own self-observation in the state of expecting an event: »Still, slowly but surely, anticipating when this sinking through the snow would finally end, I neared the forest. I repeat that because of this physical hardship, there were no other feelings or impressions.« (Kabakov 2012: 65) The assignment for the participants in Ten appearances was to walk away from a board in the center of the snowfield, unwinding each a white thread from bobbins that were affixed to this board. Reaching the end of the thread, they received – attached to it – a piece of paper with a factographic text (the name of the organizers, time, date and place of the action).

Collective Actions, »Ten Appearances«, 1981

Astonishingly, despite of all disillusionment brought about by »empty action«, in the end stands a joyful feeling of delight. As Ilya Kabakov points out, he perceived the experiment as a pleasant and cheerful play:

148 | S ABINE H ÄNSGEN »In other words, it was as though we had been released, directed somehow, our journey preprogrammed by those who had conceived all this. They had conceived ahead of time how I would feel after all these trials and perturbations: a kind of pleasant and cheerful, terribly harmless, playful and, I would even say, tender and touching kind of game or a toy that not only brought no harm, no mockery, but instead brought nothing but delight.« (Kabakov 2012: 68-69)

The white snowfield also refers to the Suprematist tradition in Russian art. Malevich used this term to characterize a space beyond the visible world, beyond the objective, beyond the bounds of nature. For him the Suprematist white (for instance in his composition White on White, 1918) was a space of pure feeling, of contemplation transcending the visual phenomena of the objective world. In the »Collective Actions« the Suprematist white, however, is returned into nature, it is a field in the outskirts of Moscow, where the white is materialized as snow. Besides the Suprematist tradition, which inspired as well a series of white paintings by Ilya Kabakov, for the group »Collective Actions« Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, in particular his term »Lichtung« (clearing) and the Buddhist »shunyata«, a positively interpreted concept of »emptiness«, are of great importance. With its aesthetics of emptiness, the group relates itself to Zen-Buddhism, which John Cage had already introduced into the context of contemporary art. The ultimate aim for Zen-Buddhists is to achieve a state of consciousness beyond language. Paradoxical enigma, so-called koans, serve to liberate oneself from the concepts of language using the medium of language. The performances by the »Collective Actions« group, however, are not a naive, neo-Rousseauian escape from culture: they are not limited to the direct perception of a situation, but due to their enigmatic character they stimulate a multitude of interpretations. The visible phenomena are always related to an invisible dimension of meaning as well, whereby the performative gesture in the situation more closely corresponds to a new impulse in an endlessly interpretative spiral in which situation and documentation enhance each other again and again. Textual paradigms (instructions, rule, structures of the plan) are translated into real actions, the documentation of which once again creates spaces of texts and terminology (abstract categories) becoming the motivation for new actions. The interpretative discourse initiated by the performances of »Collective Actions« – which seeks to overcome the text and yet is thrown back, again and again, upon the text – belongs to a diversely motivated tradition of »negative« semiotics.

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In a later stage of development, the group began to compile documentary volumes about its actions, in which a range of materials (descriptive texts, narratives by the participants, theoretical comments, discussions, photographs, drawings, diagrams complemented by video and audio recordings) form a descriptive-narrative-interpretative artwork of documentation.4 Performance art, which is determined by transience, uniqueness, and a shared presence with the audience, has always faced the task of reflecting on its own documentability within the artistic process. In Moscow Conceptualism, however, the documentation of ephemeral events took on a very special meaning. Not only did it reflect, as in the case of Western performance art, the problematic nature of passing on traditions of actions, happenings, and performances; self-documentation was moreover a strategic means of compensating for having been excluded from the general public and the mass media within Soviet society. By incorporating documentation into the aestheticizing process, the group »Collective Actions« also took up a basic issue of international conceptualism: the relation between the work of art and its commentary. The abstract, linguistic-philosophical direction of American Concept Art – for example in Joseph Kosuth’s »Art after Philosophy« – experienced a literary concretisation in the context of the Soviet alternative culture of the 1970s, which led to the narrative development of different stories and a multiplication of the commenting voices. However, the many accompanying texts to the performances of »Collective Actions« are not – as in the case of Ilya Kabakov – stylised as the statements and opinions of imagined spectators, usually ordinary people; these commentaries come from real people who participated in the actions and, on the level of documentation, become figures of the discourse. The documentation volumes of »Collective Actions« group which have appeared since the 1980s in only a few typewritten, illustrated copies in samizdat – outside the official Soviet publication channels and monopolised print media –, also inspired the creation of the Moscow Archive of New Art (Russ.: Moskovskii Archiv Novogo Iskusstva; abbr. MANI), an artists’ archive for conceptual art in Russia. In this archive, artists themselves collected the art that was excluded by the state policy of remembrance, thus making it available to future generations.

4

For further elaboration on principles of documentation cf. my online publication: Hänsgen 2007.

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Programmatic in this context is a later series of performances by »Collective Actions« from the 2000s, during which documentation materials of the group were given to the earth, buried in the ground to hibernate in the snowfield.

Collective Actions, »Wintering in the Ground at Heidegger’s Clearing«, 2013

In the performance Wintering in the Ground at Heidegger’s Clearing on August 8, 2013 memory cards with video recordings by group members and by viewers were put into little metal jewel-boxes in the shape of white bears – poetic objects referring to the Artic region. These jewel-box bears were placed into plastic containers (one inside the next) along with silica gel and rice absorbent and buried for the winter in »Heidegger’s Clearing« (next to Kievogorskii Field, the main place of action),. According to the action`s plan, the jewel-boxes with the memory cards were dug up the following year. The aim of this action was to find out in a test whether the video files would be preserved on the memory cards in working order after their wintering in the ground. After the memory cards turned out to be functional, in the next action of this series a long-time experiment was started – with reference to Soviet times called The Underground Five-Year-Plan. Exactly the same way and in the same hole, once again a jewel box in the shape of a white bear was buried. This time it contained a comprehensive archive of the group »Collective Actions«, copied on a memory card and on a flash drive from Sergei Letov's website » http://conceptualism.letov.ru«: 14456 files, several videos of actions that had taken place in various years on the Kievogorskii Field, including the 1985 action Russian World, pdf files of the books of German Titov's Library of Moscow Conceptualism and other materials.

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Collective Actions, »Underground Five-Year-Plan«, 2014

In the temporal dimension of this action the process of archiving is realized as metaphor of hibernating. The large white snowfields, the space where in Soviet times performances by the »Collective Actions« group took place, are condensed in tiny figures of white bears. Through the shrinking of space, the time-line is activated as an »Underground Five-Year-Plan«. It is an open prospect, and during the action the fate of the buried archive remains unclear. Will the objects be found? Will the archive be preserved taking into account the agency of nature: temperature, humidity, creatures in the earth? Will the materials be decipherable, will they be readable? How will they be received, by what readers and viewers, and in what contexts? What effect will they have? Will they perhaps even inspire new actions?

B IBLIOGRAPHY Collective Actions (2012): Audience Recollections from the First Five Years, 1976-1981, trans. and ed. by Yelena Kalinsky, Soberscove Press, Chicago. — (n.d.): The Descriptions, Photo, Video and Audio of all the actions, http://conceptualism.letov.ru/KD-ACTIONS.htm, accessed online May 2019. Groys, Boris (2011): Art Clearings, in: Boris Groys (ed.): Empty Zones: Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions, London, pp. 6-9. Hänsgen, Sabine (2007): Collective Actions: Event and Documentation in the Aesthetics of Moscow Conceptualism, http://conceptualism.letov.ru/Haensgen-Collective-Actions-Event-and-Documentation-Aesthetics-Moscow-Conceptualism.htm, accessed online May 2019.

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Kabakov, Ilya (2012): »Ten Appearances, February 8, 1981«, in: Collective Actions: Audience Recollections from the First Five Years, 1976-1981, Transl. and ed. by Yelena Kalinsky, Chicago, pp. 63-69. Kastner, Jeffrey (ed.) (2012): Nature. Documents of Contemporary Art, Cambridge/London. Kollektivnye deistviia (1998): Poezdki za gorod (Collective Actions: Trips out of Town), Moscow. Monastyrskii, Andrei (1989): »Kollektivnye Deistviia«, in: Flash Art – Russian Edition 1, pp. 140-141.

Excerpts from Anna Schwartz’s Archive J UDIT H ERSKO

This paper presents annotated excerpts from the collection of Anna Schwartz hitherto unavailable to the public. While the family donated the papers of this remarkable, but unknown explorer shortly after her death in 2009 it is only recently that interest in her work has prompted the cataloguing of the materials. Strangely Anna Schwartz’s emergence from obscurity is not due to the fact that she was the first woman to make it onto a US Antarctic expedition before the 1960s when she participated in Admiral Byrd’s third Antarctic expedition in 1939. Instead it is her obsession with two pelagic snails, the sea angel (Clione limacina) and the sea butterfly (Limacina helicina) that has made her into an emblem of the Anthropocene. Thecosome pteropods such as the Limacina helicina function as canaries in the coalmine when it comes to ocean acidification, one of the most insidious aspects of anthropogenic climate change. As we learn from Schwartz’s biography her intimate relationship with these tiny creatures was in contrast to the heroic notions of exploration of her day, while ironically her focus on the minute and invisible layers of the landscape has proven more relevant to current research in Polar science: » […] (pelagic mollusks) can play a key role in the food web of various marine ecosystems. They are a food source for zooplankton or higher predators such as fishes, whales and birds that is particularly important in high latitude areas. Since they harbor a highly soluble aragonitic shell, they could be very sensitive to ocean acidification driven by the increase of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. « (Comeau et. al. 2010)

Readers will find that we have chosen to reproduce the archival guides and excerpts directly, without much commentary, in order to provide a direct glimpse into the rich diversity of the Anna Schwartz collection.

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C OLLECTION O VERVIEW T ITLE : Guide to the Papers of Anna Schwartz, 1938 – 2009 C OLLECTION D ATES : 1938 – 2009 S IZE OF C OLLECTION : 18 boxes and 5 crates A BSTRACT : Anna Schwartz (1920-2009), explorer, photographer and artist. Papers consist of correspondence, journals, source material, maps, photographs, printed matter and objects.

I NTRODUCTION

TO THE

C OLLECTION

The papers of Anna Schwartz contain correspondence, journals, newspaper clippings, diaries, source material, published and unpublished manuscripts, interviews and reports, maps, photographs, printed matter and objects relating to her professional life as an explorer, photographer and artist. Additionally, other materials related to Schwartz’s life and work are also included, for example documentation of her daughter’s accomplishments where it pertains to Schwartz’s interests and career as well as items surrounding the Austro-Hungarian Arctic expedition of 1872.

B IOGRAPHY & H ISTORY Anna Schwartz was born on August 20, 1920, in Budapest, Hungary. At age twelve she received a box camera and embarked on her life-long career as a photographer. Her first photograph was published in a newspaper and by age fifteen she had developed her obsession with phenomena of light, shadow and transparency. Schwartz was a bright student and attended high school but at age sixteen she was expelled because of daydreaming rather than paying attention. She became an apprentice to a successful woman photographer, Klára Langer and continued to hone her craft. Schwartz was also an avid naturalist and a great admirer of scientific explorers, including the German-born Maria Sibylla Merian who was the first person to observe and document the metamorphosis of butterflies. Anna Schwartz had grown up with tales about her grand uncle Gyula Kepes who was the doctor onboard the Admiral Tegetthoff, the ill-fated ship of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition (1872-74). His achievements are legendary, as despite the most adverse conditions and misfortunes all crew members survived

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(with the exception of the machinist who died of tuberculosis). Unlike most expeditions of this era the Austro Hungarian North Pole expedition did not primarily serve a nationalistic or colonial purpose but strove to discover the northeast-passage and collect scientific data. Schwartz studied the accounts of the two expedition commanders in great depth with special attention to their observations of the flora and fauna of the Arctic region. Unfortunately, the excellent collection of specimens gathered by her grand uncle Kepes was left behind when the crew decided to abandon the Tegetthoff. It was one of Schwartz’s naturalist friends, a student of oceanography in London, who told her about another voyage that was organized for purely scientific reasons during the same era. Funded by the British Royal Society the HMS Challenger sailed almost 69,000 miles between December 1872 and May 1876 with the purpose of examining the deep-sea floor and answering comprehensive questions about the ocean environment. Based on her friend’s account Schwartz determined that she had to see the Challenger manuscripts first hand because these reports contained the scientific detail of ocean flora and fauna that was lost to her uncle’s expedition. She traveled to London in 1937 and spent several months in the company of young people she had been introduced to by her friend. This circle included a young woman who introduced Schwartz to the tradition of album making that thrived in nineteenth century England and she realized that women of the Victorian era had effectively invented the photo-collage later adopted by avantgarde artists. This experience had a profound effect on the later development of Schwartz’s artistic career. It was in London while studying the pages of the Challenger report that Anna Schwartz first came across the sea angel (Clione limacina) and the sea butterfly (Limacina helicina). The symbiosis and transparency of these organisms as well as their abundance at the poles ignited her curiosity. The quest to find and photograph these pelagic snails in their natural habitat defined the next phase of her career. In the late 1930s Schwartz’s distant cousin Evelyn Schwartz, who was born and raised in New York, had a burgeoning relationship with Vilhjálmur Stefansson, the famous and controversial polar explorer. At this time (1937-39) Stefansson was the president of the Explorers Club and Schwartz hoped that he could be of assistance with her project. In 1938, Anna Schwartz crossed the ocean to visit Evelyn and to meet Stefansson. With their help she got to know the right people and was eventually able to join Admiral Byrd’s third Antarctic expedition. She had to disguise herself as a man and hence her participation proved to be unsustainable. On March 20, 1940 Anna Schwartz returned with the first ship that set sail to the US from Antarctica. During her short stay she attempted to capture

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images of the planktonic snails but despite the fact that in 1934 Frits Zernike invented the phase-contrast microscope that allowed for the study of colorless and transparent biological materials she was not able to capture them on film as such equipment was not yet available in Antarctica. Instead she took to making ›invisible‹ embroideries and drawings. Inspired by the crates, assorted objects, and detritus scattered in the Terra Nova hut she later branched out to create »invisible« objects that are part of the archives today. Nevertheless, Anna Schwartz’s attempt to study the sea angel and the sea butterfly in their natural habitat at the poles was pioneering. Her intimate relationship with these tiny creatures was in contrast to the heroic notions of exploration of her day, while ironically her focus on the minute and invisible layers of the landscape has proven more relevant to current research in polar science. These planktonic snails function as canaries in the coalmine when it comes to ocean acidification, the chemical changes that result from the absorption of carbon dioxide emissions by the oceans, one of the most insidious aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Even the shells of live planktonic snails dissolve under circumstances predicted for the near future. These effects are occurring much more rapidly than previously expected, especially in the cold waters of high latitudes such as the Polar oceans. The Limacina helicina exists at both poles and it uses aragonite to form shells as opposed to calcite, which makes it more vulnerable to these developments. It comprises 50% of the zooplankton at the poles and thus plays an important role in the marine food web as a major dietary component for predators such as large zooplankton, herring, salmon, whales and birds. Shelled pteropods such as the Limacina helicina also play a geochemical role in the oceans, as they contribute to the export of calcium carbonate and can represent a major component of the carbon transport to the deep ocean. After she made it back to the US from Antarctica Anna Schwartz returned to Hungary out of concern for her family despite the protestations of Evelyn and Stef. When the war ended she enrolled in Viktor Gertler’s film school that began operations in 1945 on top of the rubble in Budapest. She received a scholarship and became the first woman trained as a cinematographer in Hungary. She went on to create many award winning short films on a variety of topics including a piece on the fjords of Norway and a portrait of the Hungarian born Op artist Victor Vasarely. Many of Schwartz’s films addressed the interests of children. Her 1965 short about orphanages called attention to the plight of children caught in a bureaucratic system with no concern for their emotional welfare while other pioneering pieces during the 1960s created in cooperation with child psychologists called attention to child abuse and neglect. In 1970 Schwartz immigrated to Sweden with her husband and one daughter. Her other daughter settled in Germany. In Sweden

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Schwartz resumed her career in still photography, also revisiting her interests in art, nature and collage. During this period she was able to once again engage with her passion for pelagic snails and polar science as well as translate and annotate her diaries and papers. She died of pancreatic cancer on April 12, 2009.

E XCERPTS

FROM THE ARCHIVES

S ERIES 1, E ARLY Y EARS AND E DUCATION , 1920 – 1938

Box 3: Photographs 1923-1938

Illustration 1: Anna Schwartz 1923

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Illustration 2: Anna Schwartz, first

Illustration 3: Anna Schwartz 1932

published Photograph ca. 1934

Illustration 4: Anna Schwartz 1935

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Illustration 5: Anna Schwartz, early work, apprenticeship years 1936-38 (studio Klára Langer)

S ERIES 2, P APERS RELATED TO THE A USTRO H UNGARIAN N ORTH P OLE E XPEDITION AND S CHWARTZ ’ S GRAND UNCLE D R . G YULA K EPES Box 3: item 8 Anna Schwartz, notes for an unfinished book about Dr. Gyula Kepes, the doctor onboard the Austro Hungarian North Pole expedition, 1938 (translated from the Hungarian with additional comments by Anna Schwartz, 1983): 1: Background Seventeen years ago, in 1921, Norwegian sailors found a note off the coast of Cape Fligely on Rudolf Island at the northernmost point of Franz Josef Land. It said: Some members of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition have here reached their highest point in 82.5 N.L., after a march of seventeen days from the ship, lying inclosed in ice in 79 51’ N. L. They observed open water of no great extent along the coast, bordered by ice, reaching in a north and north-westerly direction to masses of land, whose mean distance from this highest point might be from sixty to seventy miles, but whose connection it was impossible to determine. After their return to the ship, it is the intention of the whole

160 | J UDIT H ERSKO crew to leave this land and return home. The hopeless condition of the ship and the numerous cases of sickness constrain them to this step. Cape Fligely, April 12th, 1874. (Signed)

ANTONIO ZANINOVICH, Seaman EDWARD OREL, Midshipman JULIUS PAYER, Commander. (Payer 1876, 2: 166)

The Norwegian sailors sent the note to Vienna and so it came to pass that the Austro Hungarian North Pole expedition that had been such a sensation in 1874 was once again in the news. Word reached my family in Budapest and my aunt Ida grew obsessed with uncovering the family connections. My grand uncle Dr. Gyula Kepes, who served as the physician of the expedition, was still alive and we visited him occasionally before he passed away in 1924. I have no memory of these meetings as I was too young but I grew up with endless stories about this handsome bon vivant who defying all expectations ended up an exceptional physician, explorer, scientist and national hero. While the Austro Hungarian North Pole expedition got a second wind from the note discovered by the Norwegians grand uncle Kepes has been all but forgotten. I am collecting these notes to write a book about him and revive his memory. Early history: Gyula Kepes was born in Vári on December 7, 1847. He began his studies in Ungvár as well as Budapest and eventually transferred to medical school in Vienna. In his early days abroad he was better known in ballrooms and concert halls than in academic circles. In a portrait of him published on October 11, 1874 in Vasárnapi Ujság the writer states that young people in those early student days called Kepes a »nice fellow« while the stricter old generation said »this one will not amount to much either« (»Gyula Kepes« 1874: 641) The family lore has preserved his playful good humor as well. Supposedly cousins and siblings looked to him as a confidante, especially when it came to heartbreak or other matters that required a good listener and consolation. (I need to get more detailed information – have to make sure to seek out aunt Ida and older relatives who are still alive). While neither family nor acquaintances had high expectations of uncle Kepes (because of his lighthearted ways) he proved them wrong by finishing his exams with the highest honors. He became a very serious student and was promoted to medical doctor at age twenty-three in 1870 with flying colors without giving up his in-

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volvement in social life (for example he was first an active then an attending member of the Hungarian club in Vienna). He was well liked by peers and mentors alike. When plans for the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition were finalized, in January 1872, Dr. Kepes was one of twenty-three applicants for the physician position (he was one of five Hungarians). He had the enthusiastic support of two doctors he worked with at the time, Dr. Drasche and the famous surgeon Dr. Weinlechner. Despite these excellent recommendations his chances were doubtful as people with very powerful connections vied for the position. It was at this point that uncle Kepes decided to send a cable to Trieste where Julius Payer, one of the commanders of the impending expedition, was staying. Kepes knew Payer from the 1860s, his early days in Vienna, when they spent many a merry night together in the entertainment halls. Payer immediately sent a cable back to tell Kepes that both he and Karl Weyprecht, the other expedition commander, support him. Payer even travelled to Vienna to secure Kepes’ appointment, as he was very keen on getting »a qualified doctor who was also a pleasant companion« (»Gyula Kepes« 1874: 642). However, even after he was named doctor for the expedition the maligning did not cease and many forces tried to overturn this decision. The pressure was strong and Payer mentioned it to uncle Kepes who at one point decided to step down to make sure the commanders could replace him with someone who had their confidence. Payer hurried to correct this misunderstanding and assured Kepes that he and Weyprecht are not listening to detractors and are determined to take him on the expedition. Two of the powerful sponsors, Count Wilczek and Count Zichy also gave him their full support. Hence ,as it often happens in life, it appears that uncle Kepes’ personality and friendships had a greater role in securing his position on the expedition than his professional credentials (which by the way were also excellent). The Expedition: Dr. Kepes’ first task was to help select the crew for the expedition that consisted of twenty-four men total (including himself and the commanders) mostly under the age of thirty. He had to assess the applicants’ health as well as strength and capacity for privation, including hauling heavy cargo, enduring starvation, extreme weather and more. He had to do this without the aid of modern medicine, as there were no x-ray machines or other such equipment, which is probably how Otto Krisch slipped through with his tuberculosis. In addition, Dr. Kepes was not only in charge of selecting the appropriate kind and amount of medication but he also had to plan the diet for the journey. He made some excellent decisions that included items that protect against scurvy such as sauerkraut and lemon juice. At

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this time there was no awareness of vitamins and his idea to extract the juice from lemons (this cut down on weight and allowed them to bring more) was groundbreaking. When the expedition stopped in Tromsø he picked up additional nutritious berries special to Scandinavia. People credit him with the fact that despite the many misfortunes of the two-year expedition only one crew member lost his life, the engineer Otto Krisch, who died of tuberculosis, which he probably contracted before the trip. This is how Julius Payer expressed his admiration: »To the watchful skill of Dr. Kepes we owed it, that the health and constitution of the members of the expedition suffered so little from all their hardships and privations.« (Payer 1876, 1: vi) It appears that Gyula Kepes’ sunny disposition was as important to the survival of crewmembers as his medical abilities. He as well as the two commanders went out of their way to find ways to console and entertain the often despairing and ailing crew. They set up a school where they taught reading and writing to the many illiterate crewmembers, they organized entertainments and parties, they dispensed alcohol (mixed with lemon juice) and presided over religious meetings. Uncle Kepes who had been the confidante in his own family continued this tradition and patiently listened to and consoled others throughout the two years. This psychiatric triage was also ahead of its time (Sigmund Freud was sixteen years old in 1872). The trials and tribulations of the expedition have been well described by many, most prominently by Payer himself in his account of the journey. I will need to make some decisions about what to include in this category. Some options are: 1. The most famous accomplishment of the expedition was the discovery of a group of islands that they spotted on August 30, 1873 as they drifted north of Novaya Zemlya frozen into ice. As soon as they could traverse the terrain Julius von Payer led exploratory forays onto this land that has come to be known as Franz Josef Land. These were extremely painful excursions. Payer, who was fueled by ambition and could get away from the backbreaking labor of pulling sleds when he wanted to, drove the crew to the limits of endurance. In one incident a sled, dogs and crew tumbled into a crevasse, their fall fortuitously stopped by the sled that got wedged into the sides. Payer cut himself loose and ran for miles to get help from crew members left behind at a previous stop. They got back in the nick of time to save crew and dogs from freezing and even the sled was almost fully functional when retrieved. Instead of turning back Payer insisted on moving north with the aim of passing beyond latitude 82°. His march to what the crew feared might be the North Pole, was only cut short by the land itself. They reached the northernmost point of Franz Josef Land on Rudolf Island (today we know this is

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the northernmost point of Europe, Eurasia, Afro-Eurasia and Russia) and there they left a record of the visit in a crack of a rock. 2. Retreat: in early 1874 the commanders decided that the crew will not survive another winter on ice, hence they made plans to abandon the stranded ship and walk towards the Siberian coast. There are some aspects of the preparations as described by Payer that fascinate me. For example »…In the quarters of the crew, sewing went on without intermission, and piles of thread disappeared under their fingers, to appear again in the strangest patterns worked on the old garments.« (Payer 1876, 2: 212) Or »Lieutenant Weyprecht deposited our meteorological and magnetical readings, the log-books and the ship’s papers, in a chest lined with tin, and soldered it down…« (Payer 1876, 2: 211): »Now too we had to part with our Zoological, Botanical, and Geological collections, the result of so much labour; the ample collection of instruments, the books which had helped us over many a weary hour, and the sixty-seven bear-skins which we had so carefully prepared – all these had to be abandoned. The photographs of friends and acquaintances we hung on the rocky walls ashore preferring to leave them there rather than in the ship, which must some time or other be driven ashore and go to pieces.« (Payer 1876, 2: 219)

Science: It is the scientific quest that most excites me about the Austro Hungarian North Pole expedition. Its funders and commanders were primarily focused on science and after returning from the ice Lieutenant Weyprecht dedicated the remainder of his short life to advocating for purely scientific exploration at the poles. At a meeting of the German scientific and medical association in Gratz, (later summarized in an article that appeared in Nature, October 11, 1875), he maintained, »that the Polar regions offer, in certain important respects, greater advantages than any other part of the globe for the observation of natural phenomena such as Magnetism, the Aurora, Meteorology, Geology, Zoology, and Botany.« He deplored, that while »large sums have been spent and much hardship endured for geographical knowledge, strictly scientific observations have been regarded as holding a secondary place.« (»Lieut. Weyprecht« 1875: 539): »While we think the curiosity of a healthy kind which seeks to know the configuration of the entire surface of our globe, we are sure every man of science will admit the value of Lieut. Weyprecth’s propositions. There has, without doubt, been hitherto too much weight attached to merely reaching a high latitude, and too little provision made for strictly scientific observation. Lieut. Weyprecht’s suggestions deserve the serious consideration of all

164 | J UDIT H ERSKO civilized countries; were they adopted as a ground for action, a new era, in polar exploration would be begun, and results of far higher value than any hitherto obtained might with certainty be expected.« (»Lieut. Weyprecht« 1875: 539)

Karl Weyprecht’s commitment to scientific rigor did not recognize any obstacles and won the admiration of both Payer and Kepes. Weyprecht began meteorological observations when the Tegetthoff left Tromsø on July 14, 1872 and continued them until the day they abandoned the boat on May 20, 1874. For example, as printed in the Scientific American and in Nature: »Lieutenant Weyprecht of the Austrian Polar expedition made the remarkable discovery that the ice never drifted straight in the direction of the wind, but that it always deviated to the right, when looking from the center of the compass; with N.E. wind it drifts due W. instead of S.W.; with S.W. wind it drifts due E. instead of N.E.; in the same manner it drifts to the north with S.E. wind, and to the south with N. W. wind. There was no exception to this rule, which cannot be explained by currents nor by the-influence of the coasts, as with these causes there would be opposite results with opposite winds.« (»Relations between Magnetism and the Aurora« 1875: 262 ; »Scientific Report […]« 1875: 397)

During the last two months of the expedition Dr. Kepes also helped collect meteorological data. Measurements were taken fourteen times a day, every two hours plus 9 am and 3 pm every day. Some of these observations were focused on understanding the behavior and forms of ice. In one experiment they observed the changes in ice cubes that were open to the air and ones that were submerged in water. Payer describes how in March 1873 a »cube of ice freely suspended lost 1/1000 of it weight from evaporation daily while the ice cube submerged to a depth of ten feet from February 19 to March 5 showed an increase of its mass amounting to ¾ of an inch round its surface.« (Payer 1876, 1: 153) Most importantly my granduncle Kepes was in charge of collecting samples of the flora and fauna of the region, which he accomplished with the help of Weyprecht who during the weeks of the summer let down a net almost daily and dragged it for some hours. Payer sketched the samples that were thus collected in case the originals were lost and it is a good thing he did so as Dr. Kepes’ collection had to be abandoned when the crew left the Tegetthoff. All that made it back to Vienna were written observations and Payer’s sketches that were within the tin boxes that had been soldered shut before the launch of the return journey: »The magnetical and meteorological observations, so carefully taken and tabulated by Weyprecht, Brosch, and Orel, together with the sketches of the Fauna of the Frozen Ocean,

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drawn by myself from the collection of Dr. Kepes, were presented to the Imperial Academy of Sciences at Vienna, and will in due time be published under the auspices of that august body.« (Payer 1876, 1: vii)

Flora and Fauna of the Arctic: I can only imagine what came up in the net as it was dragged on a daily basis during the weeks of the summer. Payer himself only alludes to a few species in his book and is most excited about one: »The drag-net often brought up Actiniae, Briareum grandiflorum (Sars) and June 2, 1873, from the depth of 110 fathoms, a specimen of the extremely rare Umbellula described by Mytius and Ellis, 1753. Since that date this animal had been lost sight of, until it was found again by the Swedes-Gladans expedition 1871 – in Baffin’s Bay, and by the Challenger, 1873 between Portugal and Madeira and between Prince Edward’s Island and Kerguelen’s Land. It may be assumed that our Umbellula is identical with the form first described, 1758, by Linnaeus as Isis encrinus. I regret to say that this, the most interesting of all the objects we had collected, was left behind in the Tegetthoff. The sketch of it made from life will facilitate a comparison with the forms known in the other regions and variously named.« (Payer 1876, 2: 94! 95)

It was in this reference by Payer that I first came across the journey of the Challenger but I did not pay much attention to it until my friend Otto invited me to London in 1937 to view the Challenger Reports.

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S ERIES 2, P APERS RELATED TO THE A USTRO H UNGARIAN N ORTH P OLE E XPEDITION AND S CHWARTZ ’ S GRAND UNCLE D R . G YULA K EPES Box 4: Newspaper clippings etc.

Illustration 6: Clipping from Le Monde, the command-

Illustration 7: Clipping from Le

ers of the Austrian North Pole Expedition and Dr.

Monde, map of the location of the

Kepes

Tegetthoff

Illustration 8: Vasárnapi Ujság, XXI year, 41-st issue, Budapest, October 11, 1874

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S ERIES 3, P APERS RELATED TO THE A NTARCTIC E XPEDITION 1938-1940 Selections from Box 8: Diary entries, New York 1938-1939 (original diary entries translated to English with additional comments by Anna Schwartz, 1984-2002) December 28, 1938 I had a long conversation with Evelyn today about her intellectual awakening over the past decade. Poor Evelyn lost her parents so early and had to grow up on her own in the company of her sisters. She was only 13 when her father dropped dead from heart attack and left them penniless with a catatonic mother. It is remarkable how well she has fended for herself and how she has developed so many abilities. She studied art and has talents in both visual and performing arts. Given the lack of parental figures maybe it is not so strange that she has accumulated mentors. This has led to several »relationships« with older men. She was only seventeen when she hooked up with Bucky (Buckminster Fuller) who was twice her age and impressed her with his brilliant visionary ideas and disappointed her terribly in the end (making her promise that she will never ever start anything with a married man). Precisely for this reason she has refused the advances of Christopher Morley, an author who has been courting her for the past year or so. I have seen how crazy he is about her as he visits frequently at Gotham Book Mart where she works. Since I arrived just before Christmas I have seen him come by multiple times. He is actually Bucky’s friend and sometimes they come together to take Evelyn out for lunch (which infuriates her employer Frances Steloff). I guess Evelyn has forgiven Bucky enough that they can be friends again. – She is also spending much time with another older (much older) man, the famous and controversial polar explorer Vilhjálmur Stefansson whom she calls Stef. He is the reason I came to visit. He is currently the president of the explorer’s club and knows everyone there is to know in polar exploration circles. I am so hopeful he will be able to help me with connections. Evelyn is not entirely conscious about this yet but I see definite attraction between them (despite the huge age gap) and he has never been married so that is definitely a plus in his favor. He has recently arranged an exciting opportunity for Evelyn to use her artistic skills to help build the dioramas for the Icelandic pavilion at the upcoming New York World Fair opening in April this coming year.

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May 9, 1939 Yesterday I had an opportunity to ask Stef about his adventures in the Arctic. Since I have much time on my hand I have read several of his books (Evelyn has received signed copies from him but she has not read any of them yet). I am not so fond of his impersonal semi-scientific style but I did not tell him that. I am fascinated by the fact that he has lived with the Inuit fully immersed in their lifestyle and I asked him to tell me more. He spoke a lot about their eating habits and the necessity to eat meat and animal fat to survive under the harsh conditions. He has extensive theories about food so I ended up telling him about granduncle Kepes and how his selection of food items (including mixing lemon juice with alcohol) helped save the lives of the crew on the Austro Hungarian North Pole expedition. I asked Stef about Herschel Island, where he first heard about the Copper Inuit, who later became the focus of his quest. I was particularly interested in some of the people he knew there. I have done some research and know that this island grew to be the whaling center of the Western Arctic between 1894 and 1905. The first foreigners arrived there in search of Bowhead whales in 1889. Whale oil was a prized commodity but more than anything the boom in the whaling industry at that particular moment was driven by the fashion of women’s corsets that for structural support required baleen, a keratinous substance that hangs down from the upper jaws of baleen whales and functions as the filter for their food intake. I found it ironic that the constrictive fashion of Victorian women was the driving force behind the whale trade on Herschel Island while the lifestyle on the island itself was anything but restrained according to most accounts. Foreigners tended to arrive without women and lived a wild life. They hired Inuit »seamstresses« who performed more than one role in their lives. Some of these men did settle in the Arctic with their Inuit families as for example the Norwegian Storker Storkerson who participated in three of Stef’s expeditions. Evelyn had shown me a group photograph with Storkerson in the center and several Inuit women with children who did not look native (series 7, box 13, item 4). I was especially interested in the woman and child on the left side of the image. I knew from Evelyn that in 1908 Stefansson hired a »seamstress« Pannigabluk and that there were rumors that she was the alleged mother of his son Alex, a blue-eyed Inuk. Evelyn has been unable to pry anything out of him regarding his personal life in the Arctic and I am not sure why I thought I would be more successful. I was not. Instead I got a long lecture on the friendly Arctic and how any of us could live there just like the natives (which was not new to me having read his books). In 1921 he had handpicked and sent a team of three Americans and a Canadian to create a permanent settlement on Wrangel Island in order to prove his theory and claim the land for

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Canada. They hired an Inupiat woman, Ada Blackjack, as their cook and seamstress and she became the sole survivor of the expedition. While Stef did not emphasize the general failure of this disastrous experiment he touted Ada’s ability to develop trapping and hunting skills to survive as an example of the friendly Arctic. I have to say that he has not convinced me yet. September 20, 1939 I can barely contain my excitement. Since my arrival in New York we have spent many nights at Romany Marie’s Restaurant with Evelyn and Stef. Before I talk about what happened today I should say a few words about Romany Marie’s. It is the most extraordinary place – or rather an ordinary diner that hosts extraordinary people. Evelyn started going there when she was still in high school (she can’t remember how it happened but she thinks that a schoolmate brought her there). Romany Marie is of Romanian Gipsy descent, a very colorful character, who enjoys the company of artists, intellectuals and bohemians. Sometimes she feeds them for free (I believe she did that for Bucky at one time). This is where Evelyn met Bucky as well as Stef. In fact Stef organizes his explorer club meetings here, which brings me to my current excitement. Three weeks ago at a dinner party loosely associated with the Explorer’s club at Romany Marie’s I met a woman by the name of Ruth Hampton who is one of the people representing the Department of the Interior on the Executive Committee of the United States Antarctic Service designated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (She was last in the news around the events following the disappearance of Amelia Earhart just two summers ago). I told her about my interest in the Clione limacina and the Limacina helicina and my desire to go in search of them to the Poles and we had a perfectly pleasant conversation but that was the extent of it. However, today she contacted Evelyn through Stef and asked her if I can type. Her department is in charge of hiring a few volunteers for the US Antarctic Service Expedition led by Admiral Byrd and they had a man lined up, a photographer and a decent typist but he has fallen ill and departure for the expedition is fast approaching. Ruth Hampton had remembered that I am a photographer and now they are in a pinch for someone to record scientific data in images and words. This is my chance but there are a couple of obstacles I have to overcome. For one no women are allowed on these expeditions and two, I am entirely unable to type. Evelyn can’t help as her training is in the arts and typing is not among her skills.

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S ERIES 7, A NNA S CHWARTZ P HOTOGRAPHY AND A RT 1938 – 2009 Box: 13 Collages

Illustration 9: Anna Schwartz, Collage »Self-Portrait as Explorer«, 1938

Illustration 10: Anna Schwartz, Collage »With Scott at the Pole«, 1938

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Illustration 11: Anna Schwartz, Collage »Pannigabluk and Alex on a corset of baleen«, 1939

Illustration 12: Canadian Arctic Expedition (unnumbered) Storkerson in center with »Jack« Hadley on his left and crew of »Polar Bear and Eskimo seamstresses. The section on the left was used for the collage

Notes to »Pannigabluk and Alex on a corset of baleen«, 1939, Anna Schwartz 2002: When I made this collage superimposing Pannigabluk and Alex onto a corset made of baleen in 1939 I did not know much about their actual relationship to Stef. It was only much later that researchers would find records indicating that the wife

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and son of Stefansson, Pannigabluk and Alex, were baptized on Herschel Island in 1915 (Pálsson 2001: 14-15). Nor did I know that Stefansson lived with Pannigabluk off and on for nine years and with Alex for eight, that Pannigabluk was not just the source of much of the information in Stefansson’s studies but that she conducted many of the interviews and collected much of the material described in his work. She saved his life and nursed him back to health on several occasions and she did most of the physical labor including building their house and hunting while he sat and wrote in the field. Nor could I know at that time that Pannigabluk raised Alex alone and never lived with a man again after Stefansson left in 1918, or that Stefansson who at the age of 62 had remained a staunch bachelor would only marry Evelyn in 1941, a year after Pannigabluk’s death.

S ERIES 9, S CIENTIFIC C OLLECTIONS , I MAGES 1938 – 2009

AND

N OTEBOOKS

Box 15: Limacina helicina

Illustration 13: Illustration of Pteropods

Illustration 14: Limacina helicina, © Russ

from the Challenger Report, © Dr. David C.

Hopcroft, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Bossard, 19thcenturyscience.org

Used by permission

Used by permission

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OF

Illustration 15: ›Invisible‹ objects by Anna Schwartz »Evelyn Puppeteering« and detail »Kathleen Scott«

B IBLIOGRAPHY »Kepes Gyula« (1874), in: Vasárnapi Ujság, XXI évfolyam, 41-ik szám, pp. 641642, http://epa.oszk.hu/00000/00030/01075/pdf/01075.pdf, accessed online May 2019. »Lieut. Weyprecht On Arctic Exploration« (1875, October 21), in: Nature 12.312, p. 539, https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v12/n312/index.html, accessed online May 2019. »Relations between Magnetism and the Aurora« (1875, April 24), in: Scientific American 32.17, p. 262, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=h9m&AN=61952351&site=ehost-live&ppid=divp8, accessed online May 2019.

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»Scientific Report of The Austro-Hungarian North Polar Expedition of 1872-74« (1875, March 18), in: Nature 11.281, pp. 396-398, https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v11/n281/index.html, accessed online May 2019. Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) (2013): Executive Summary of the 2013 Arctic Ocean Acidification Assessment (AOA), Oslo. Bloom, Lisa (1993): Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London. Comeau, S/ Gorsky, G/Jeffree (et al.) (2009): »Impact of ocean acidification on a key Arctic pelagic mollusk (Limacina helicina)«, in: Biogeosciences 6, pp. 1877-1882, www.biogeosciences.net/6/1877/2009/, accessed online May 2019. — (2010): »Response of the Arctic Pteropod Limacina helicina to Projected Future Environmental Conditions«, in: PLoS ONE 5.6, e11362. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011362, accessed online May 2019. Hersko, Judit (2012): »Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer«, in: Andrea Polli/Jane Marsching (ed.): Far Fields: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles, Bristol/Chicago, pp. 61-75. — (2011), »Anna’s Cabinet of Curiosities«, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Online exhibition http://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.101501477 69611253.346156.20 9156896252, accessed online May 2019. — (2010): ›Translating‹ and ›Retranslating‹ Data: Tracing the Steps in Projects that Address Climate Change and Antarctic Science, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/40z2b75n, accessed online May 2019. Penny, Simon (ed.) (2009): After Media, Embodiment and Context: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, University of California. Hunt B, Strugnell J, Bednarsek N, Linse K, Nelson RJ, et al. (2010): Poles Apart: The »Bipolar« Pteropod Species Limacina helicina Is Genetically Distinct Between the Arctic and Antarctic Ocenas. PLoS ONE 5(3): e9835. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009835, accessed online May 2019. Niven, Jennifer (2003): Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic, New York. Orr, James C./Victoria J. Fabry (et al.) (2005): Anthropogenic Ocean Acidification over the Twenty-first Century and its Impact on Calcifying Organisms, in: Nature 437, pp. 681-86. Pálsson, Gísli (ed.) (2001): Writing on Ice: The Ethnographic Notebooks of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Hanover/London.

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— (2003): Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, New Hampshire. Payer, Julius (1876): New Lands Within The Arctic Circle: Narrative of the Discoveries of the Austrian Ship »Tegetthoff« in the Years 1872-1874, vols. 1-2, London. — (1874): »Austro Hungarian Polar Expedition«, in: The Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 19.1, pp. 17-37. Ransmayr, Christoph (1984): The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, New York. Riebesell, U./Gattuso, J.-P./Thingstad, T. F. (et al.) (2013): »Arctic ocean acidification: pelagic ecosystem and biogeochemical responses during a mesocosm study«, in: Biogeosciences 10, pp. 5619-5626, www.biogeosciences.net/10/ 5619/2013/, accessed online May 2019. Siegel, Elizabeth (2009): Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, The Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, New Haven/London. Stefansson Nef, Evelyn (2002): Finding My Way: The Autobiography of an Optimist, Washington, D.

Gender in the Twentieth-Century Polar Archive A NKA R YALL

The library at the Norwegian Polar Institute contains a small archive of miscellaneous information concerning people connected to its work in the polar regions in one way or another. Designated »Biographies«, the archive dates from the early days of state-supported polar research around 1920 and was kept, at least sporadically, until the mid-1990s, when the Polar Institute was relocated from Oslo to Tromsø. Since then, though new materials have occasionally been deposited and a few names have been added, the archive has not been actively updated. Hence, it is to all intents and purposes a closed archive that covers over 70 years of collecting, mainly of newspaper clippings, but also of some personal items like letters, postcards and testimonials. The materials are kept in two copious filing cabinets with drawers full of large yellow envelopes labelled with names from A to Å, 1325 in total, that are stored in two copious filing cabinets. Only 30 names, about 2.3 per cent, are female. Statistically this is probably an accurate reflection of the overwhelmingly masculine – not to say masculinist – world of twentiethcentury Norwegian polar research, politics and resource exploitation. Indeed, a mere name count confirms Lisbeth Lewander’s claim that in polar affairs in general women are distinguished by »their absence and their scarcity« (Lewander 2008: 208). At least since the late nineteenth century, when men like Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen gained international prominence as polar explorers, the Arctic has been a crucial feature of the Norwegian nation-building project. As the biography archive indicates, this project has involved the construction of a national identity largely based on the actions of men in a space itself defined, as Sherrill Grace puts it, by »extremity and masculine adventure« (Grace 2001: 145). Hence, the great gender imbalance of the archive reflects the discrepancy between what Renate Lachmann has called »institutionalised memory« and the excluded

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history that preserves »unofficial memory« (Lachmann 1993: xxv). My concern here is with the representatives of this almost excluded history. Who are the few women in the archive? How exactly did they contribute – acknowledged or not – to Norwegian polar affairs? Most importantly, to what extent does the information about them illuminate the gendered practices and assumptions of polar history? In what follows I attempt to answer these questions via a reflection on my readings in and around the biography archive over a period of many months.1 I was initially prompted by curiosity about the 30 women, most of whom were unfamiliar to me, and started out with very little knowledge – not only of women’s participation in Norwegian polar affairs, but also of institutionalized Norwegian polar research in general. It quickly became obvious that I would have little chance of understanding the former without a grasp of the latter. But the relationship is paradoxical because women play practically no part in the official version of the history of the Norwegian Polar Institute and its predecessors (Barr 2003; Drivenes 2004). By resurrecting the women in the archive, few as they are, I hoped in some respects at least to be able to amend this lack. Throughout, I have shared what historian Penny Russell has called »the experience of being in the archives« and there »enter[ing] fleetingly into relationships of affect and empathy« with the women whose lives were documented (qtd. in Dever et al. 2009: 21). Even when combined with information found in other sources, however, I found the archived materials frustratingly scrappy and inadequate. All in all, they give a sense of the peripheral or auxiliary position of women in relation to the central concerns of the institution, as well as of their minimal access to polar activities and the various mechanisms of exclusion that kept them on the outside or in the fringes. In light of male-dominated polar history, this is neither shocking nor surprising; in Carolyn Steedman’s words, it simply shows how »power has operated« (Steedman 2001: 68). Neither is it surprising that the women involved rarely seem to have questioned official priorities. Yet the development of institutionalized polar research in Norway begins to look quite different when viewed from their perspective.

1

Thanks to Ann Kristin Balto and Ivar Stokkeland at the Norwegian Polar Institute for knowledgeable assistance, inspiring conversations and many helpful suggestions.

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Not surprisingly, the content of the biography archive reflects the Polar Institute’s emphasis on the Norwegian »polar provinces« (Berg 2013: 155), that is, the Svalbard archipelago, Jan Mayen and other islands in the Polar Sea – an area of national (and nationalist) interest that originally also included Northeast Greenland and Franz Josef Land – together with Antarctica. Historically, the archive originated in the period during which Norwegian polar activities began to become less associated with the accomplishments of individual heroic explorers than with more mundane institutionally organised and government-sponsored efforts in which politics and research was closely connected to commercial exploitation of resources. This institutionalisation was largely due to the efforts of one particular individual, the geologist and polar bureaucrat Adolf Hoel (1879-1964), who in his memoirs refers to the transformation of extensive polar research, associated with men like Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, to modern polar research of a more intensive character, which he defines as detailed scientific studies of particular areas (Hoel 1977: 14). The latter evolved gradually, passing through three historical phases: the first, from 1909, annual Norwegian State-Supported Svalbard Expeditions; the second, between 1928 and 1948, the Norwegian Svalbard and Arctic Ocean Survey (Norges Svalbard- og Ishavsundersøkelser, hereafter abbreviated NSIU); the third, from 1948, the Norwegian Polar Institute. NSIU was established as a direct result of the Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920, which gave Norway sovereignty over Svalbard five years later, and for Hoel both research activities and exploitation of natural resources in the far north were inextricably linked to a national and expansionist agenda of political control over polar territories (Drivenes 1994). As the historian Einar-Arne Drivenes succinctly phrases"it, »the goal was a greater Norway« (Drivenes 2013: 316). In 1929, Hoel was instrumental in the establishment of Arctic Commercial Enterprise (Arktisk næringsdrift), a company run in tandem with NSIU (Fure 1996: 126). Its purpose was to safeguard Norwegian interests in the polar regions, specifically Northeast Greenland, through the support of such traditional activities as hunting and foxtrapping. Two years later, Hoel was centrally involved in nationalist efforts to annex an area of Northeast Greenland that was named »Eirik Raude’s Land« after the first Norse coloniser of Greenland for Norway. Although the claim was rejected by the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Hague in 1933, Norwegians overwinterings continued and continued to be sustained by annual NSIU relief expeditions (Barr 2003: 151-9; Skarstein 2006). Thus, Northeast Greenland

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became the outer reach of what the journalist and author Nils Johan Rud called Norway’s »drifting borders« towards the north and west.2 As part of his nationalist and expansionist agenda, Hoel likewise vocally opposed the Soviets’ use of the sector principle to claim Franz Josef Land in 1926, particularly when they went on to ban hunters and trappers from other countries. According to Susan Barr’s history of the Norwegian Polar Institute, »It was not in Hoel’s character to sit and watch while yet another large part of what many considered to be Norway’s backyard was appropriated by others« (Barr 2003: 167). This combined emphasis on commercial, political and natural-science activities – all dominated by men – that continued into the post-war period, has clearly been a decisive factor in the selection of what to preserve in the biography archive. Hence, what Ann Laura Stoler calls »the politics of storage« may to a great extent explain the lack of materials related to women (Stoler 2002: 93). The practice of collecting material in the biography archive seems to have been most active during the two first phases, which more or less coincide with reign of Hoel, who was actively involved from the early years of State-Supported Svalbard Expeditions and their director from 1919, and who headed NSIU until he had to resign after the Second World War because he had collaborated with the Germans during their occupation of Norway. Hoel clearly wanted to keep abreast of all aspects of Norwegian polar territories, including the fluctuating climate, wildlife and resource situation in the High Arctic. In addition to NSIU and other unaffiliated researchers, his informants comprised overwintering trappers who were paid to write and submit journals of daily observations. Likewise, from its establishment in 1928, NSIU subscribed to retriever services that sent newspaper clippings about current polar issues. Most of them are currently stored in a large attic archive at the Polar Institute, many bundled together by date (month and year) and various topics such as mining, research or fisheries. It seems likely that Hoel at an early stage felt the need to separate clippings and information about people from materials dealing primarily with matters of general or political interest. Hence the biography archive in many ways functions as a subsidiary of the main archive. However, random checks indicate that there is no clear distinction between the two

2

Rud participated as a journalist on the 1939 NSIU relief expedition to Northeast Greenland and wrote about first it in a series of short syndicated newspaper articles composed en route, then in a travelogue serialised in the popular magazine Arbeidermagasinet for alle the following autumn and, two years later, in a novel which is a thinly fictionalised version of the events on board the expedition ship Polarbjørn. In all formats the term »drivende grenser« (»drifting borders«) occurs, and Rud also used it as the title of his novel.

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archives, and in both there are considerably fewer clippings from the early 1980s onward. About that time, probably due to the personal interest of Susan Barr, who was employed at the Polar Institute from 1982 until 1998, first as information officer and then as historian, there are some signs that materials in the biography archive were sometimes selected with a better gender balance in mind. The amount of materials stored in the envelopes in the biography archive varies considerably. In some there is only one small item, others are stuffed full to bursting with papers, and a few famous names dominate. Under A, for example, 17 thick envelopes with the typewritten name »Amundsen, Roald« in the upper left corner fill almost a third of a drawer, while another block consists of five envelopes labelled »Andrée, Salomon August« with subcategories mostly related to the Norwegian discovery of the remains of the Swede’s abortive 1897 balloon expedition to the North Pole on the remote Kvitøya (White Island) in 1930. There are more materials relating to Amundsen than to anyone else in the archive. By comparison, information about the other famous Norwegian polar explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, fills eight envelopes. The reason seems to be twofold. First, Amundsen was a much more controversial figure; second, he had some of his most notable successes, such as a transpolar flight in 1926, after the archive was established but long after Nansen’s career as polar explorer was over. Moreover, the archive contains a mass of clippings, telegrams and other correspondence concerning the unsuccessful effort to locate Amundsen’s seaplane when it was lost in the Barents Sea in 1928 during his efforts to rescue the Italian explorer Umberto Nobile whose airship had crashed on the ice. The only woman represented by more than one envelope is the glaciologist and explorer Monica Kristensen (b. 1950), and the majority of the clippings in her four envelopes concern her third and unsuccessful Antarctic expedition in 1993-94, which ended when one of its members died after falling into a crevasse. As in the case of Amundsen and Andrée, spectacular successes and failures produced newspaper copy for the archive. However, most of the lives memorialised in the archive are less well known and unconnected to scandal or sensational journalism. The bulk of the envelopes contain information about ordinary people, mainly Norwegians, who were engaged in Arctic fisheries, whaling, trapping, mining or trade, and who contributed to the work of NSIU or the Polar Institute in various capacities or were known to its employees. A random but representative example under A is a slim envelope labelled »Albrigsten, Anton«. In it there is a single item, a clipping from a local newspaper marking his 70th birthday on 24 October 1940 and noting that as a young man Albrigtsen had been a fisher and trapper in the Arctic Ocean and on Svalbard. Albrigsten was clearly peripheral to NSIU activities, but information about NSIU and Polar Institute employees, office personnel as well as scientists,

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is also stored in the archive. Hence there are materials relating to both Hoel himself (11 envelopes) and his successors as directors of the Polar Institute. When assessing the overall content of the biography archive, I have found Aleida Assmann’s distinction between canon and archive very useful. Assmann notes that while the canon represents »actively circulated memory that keeps the past present«, the archive is »the paradigmatic institution of passive cultural memory« and »situated halfway between the canon and forgetting« (Assmann 2008: 98, 102). Whatever has become incorporated into the canon is rigorously selected on the basis of culturally ascribed value. Most importantly, »it outlives the generations who have to encounter and reinterpret it anew according to their time« (Assmann 2008: 100). The archive, in Assmann’s words, is »the storehouse for cultural relicts« (Assmann 2008: 99). She argues that such materials have been »de-contextualised« from the frames that previously authorised them, but that the archive makes them available for new contexts and interpretations. As mentioned, the biography archive contains materials related to individuals clearly belonging to national and polar canons, Amundsen and Andrée among them. But most of what is stored there, such as the clipping honouring Anton Albrigsten, can be classified as cultural relicts, preserved, as Assmann puts it, »in the intermediate state of ›no longer‹ and ›not yet‹, deprived of their old existence and waiting for a new one« (Assmann 2008: 103). In fact, it is not immediately obvious why the notice about Albrigtsen was preserved apart from the assumption made above that the Polar Institute archivists deposited materials relating to people known to them. Like most of the information in the biography archive it is de-contextualised. It may, however, be reframed and actualised within a new context, and the history and optics of gender is one such context.

I NVISIBLE W IVES The history of gender as manifested in the biography archive is clearly, as I have already noted, a question of various kinds of access to polar activities. The small number of envelopes labelled with women’s names is probably an accurate indication of their minimal access. In itself, however, the statistical imbalance between men and women tells only a small part of the story. We have to ask what roles women played and on what terms they participated. In the history of polar exploration, the most famous women are explorers’ wives, usually viewed as loyal facilitators of their husbands’ exploits or promoters of their reputations, spectators rather than actors (Spufford 1996: 147). Lady Jane Franklin is, of course, the prime example. However, only a single envelope in the biography archive carries the

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name of an explorer’s wife. In it there is one item, a newspaper report from 1996 of a lecture given in Oslo by Louisa Young about the relationship between Fridtjof Nansen and her grandmother, Kathleen Scott, the widow of the British explorer Robert Scott. It was archived by head of polar history and documentation at the Polar Institute, Susan Barr, who (as her initials show) has taken the trouble to correct some misinformation in the report. Although the clipping may have been filed because of the information about Nansen, Kathleen Scott’s name on the envelope is evidence of Barr’s interest in documenting women. In general, however, wives are invisible in the archive, if only because they have usually been subsumed under their husbands’ names. One of these wives is the Austrian artist Christiane Ritter. I first became aware of the biography archive as a result of my interest in her beautifully illustrated Eine Frau erlebt die Polarnacht (A Woman in the Polar Night) (1938), a modern classic of Arctic literature, and her case may be used to exemplify the criteria probably used for preserving materials. The only information about her in the archive is a review of the Swedish translation of her book, written in 1940 by the then NSIU secretary John Giæver and published in the leading Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.3 However, the envelope containing the cutting carries the name of her husband, Hermann Ritter. This may be explained by the fact that Hermann, a naturalist and former naval officer turned trapper, was well known to NSIU researchers in Svalbard, where he spent several winters in the 1930s, and where his wife joined him for one season (1934-35). Yet there is no biographical information about Hermann in the envelope, only a brief handwritten note from his brother providing information about his full name. In fact, that note and the article about Christiane’s book are the only materials that have been filed about them, and when curiosity led me to begin trying to chart the knowledge about women’s polar activities collected in the archive, I found the contents of other envelopes equally scanty, selective and seemingly fortuitous. If Aleida Assmann is correct in her assertion that an archive is a kind of random accumulation (Ansammlung) rather than targeted collection (Sammlung), the biography archive is a case in point (Assmann 2009: 173). Almost without exception, precise biographical facts must be sought elsewhere, and often the reason for someone’s inclusion became clear to me only through quite extensive detective work (this could probably be said of the men in the archive as well).

3

Thanks to polar historian Harald Dag Jølle, who introduced me to the biography archive in connection with a talk I gave about Ritter’s book at the Polar Institute on 3 October 2013.

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It was by going through the archive, opening one envelope after the other to check its contents, that I realised – as the case of Christiane Ritter suggested – that the percentage of women in it is slightly higher than the number of envelopes carrying female names indicates, because clippings with information about married women have often been filed under their husbands’ names. In addition to Ritter, one notable example is Liv Balstad, wife of Håkon Balstad, the first post-war Norwegian sysselmann (governor) in Svalbard. In 1955 she published a well-received, popular and still very readable account of her experiences there, Nord for det øde hav. Like Ritter’s book it was translated into several languages, and in 1958 an abbreviated English version was published under the title North of the Desolate Sea. Although at least half the many clippings in the envelope labelled »Balstad, Håkon« concern this book and its author, she was clearly viewed by the archivist(s) as an appendage to him. In very different ways Ritter and Balstad use their memoirs to appropriate the polar region for women, but their perspectives on Svalbard and the High Arctic as a place where even women (and, in Balstad’s case, children) can thrive and feel themselves at home may have had little resonance with the political, economic and scientific priorities of NSIU and the Polar Institute. Or did it simply seem »natural«, at least in the early years of the archive, to file materials about married women under the husbands’ names? In fact, both Ritter and Balstad bring what might be called a housewife’s perspective to bear on the High Arctic. Detailing the many challenges of housekeeping in a primitive trappers’ hut at Gråhuken (Grey Hook) on the northern coast of Svalbard, Ritter’s narrative transforms quotidian domestic management into a form of heroic femininity. As the governor’s wife in Longyearbyen, during the early period of reconstruction after German bombardments in 1943 had left only a few buildings intact, Balstad lambasts the Norwegian government for its neglect of Svalbard in the post-war period, but she too places coping with everyday problems of housekeeping at the centre of her narrative. For both the struggle for survival is connected less to external dangers than to limited access to fresh food and necessary vitamins, as well as to a lack of basic cooking equipment. Both, likewise, use the housewife’s losing battle with antiquated and dilapidated cooking stoves as the subject of comedy. In Ritter’s narrative the stove, their only source of heat and hot food, is described as »a catastrophe […] fractured down the middle, so that the four legs stand all askew […] smothered in a deep layer of salt and rust« (Ritter 2010: 33), which when it finally lights fills the whole hut with smoke and soot. One of the many sketches in Eine Frau erlebt die Polarnacht captures the comic futility of her attempt at maintaining the domestic standard of a respectable bourgeois housewife in a trappers’ hut in the Arctic wilderness. Balstad ech-

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oes this experience in a lively description of the stove in the temporary accommodation in which she and her husband had to make do before the new governor’s residence was built. It is personified as an angry monster that eventually explodes, making her feel as if she has relived »the demise of Pompeii and Herculaneum« (Balstad 1955: 72). The memoirs of Balstad and Ritter provide feminised versions of life in the High Arctic. Men, too, dwell on domestic issues in their memoirs of hunting, trapping, exploration and coping with extreme natural conditions. But these two female authors have clearly made homemaking a deliberate choice of perspective, in which the Arctic world often shrinks to an interior of a house or hut, or at most to the near environment. Two watercolours in Ritter’s book illustrate this. In one she depicts herself fetching water in a nearby spring during the polar night as a small dark figure dwarfed by the surrounding mountains. The other shows her alone inside the one-room hut, where the cold is so intense that the potatoes have frozen: »They are covered with layers of ice and shine like Christmas tree decorations« (Ritter 2010: 101). Over the bunks are fox skins hung from the ceiling to dry. In contrast to the other scene, the perspective and the close-up of her dark looming body seen from behind here underscores the claustrophobic smallness of the hut. Both illustrations, however, may be seen as expressions of what Sidone Smith has called the feminine logic of »sessility«, while Hermann, the widely roaming male trapper in Christiane’s narrative, represents »the masculine logic of mobility« (Smith 2001: X). Even Christiane’s movements outside the hut do not take her far afield and are clearly connected to her role as a housewife. Yet when representations of housekeeping are transposed to the Arctic, and the Arctic wilderness is textually and/or visually incorporated into an »everyday« associated with femininity, the conventional polarisation between (masculine) heroic action and (feminine) domestic activity is undermined.

A UXILIARIES As may have been apparent from my first examples (Amundsen, Andrée and Albrigtsen), I worked my way through the archive systematically from A to W (the last envelope with a female name being that of the trapper Wanny Woldstad), and almost from the start I encountered mysteries. That interviews with the trapper Gudrun Andersen, who spent several winters with her husband in both Svalbard and Northeast Greenland during the 1940s and early 1950s, had been deposited was easy to understand. But I had to look beyond the archive to find out why there was an envelope with two newspaper articles summing up the life and career of a

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journalist, writer and feminist named Ella Anker (1870-1958). The clue, it turned out, was the word »Grønlandssaken« (the Greenland controversy) listed among her many activist causes – and underlined in blue pencil by the retriever service – in one of cuttings. In fact, she was a close associate of Hoel’s, who in a pamphlet titled »The Right of Norway to Eirik Raude’s Land« (1931) agitated fiercely for the right of Norwegians to colonise Northeast Greenland, a right she claimed that the treacherous Danes had unlawfully deprived them of in the Kiel Treaty of 1814. Like Balstad, she participated in Norwegian polar affairs by using her pen in order to influence public opinion, in the process inserting herself into history. Because Anker was a well-known writer, a Google search was enough to provide clues to her auxiliary role in polar politics. Other names were considerably more puzzling, and it took me a long time to understand why there is an envelope in the archive labelled »Bakkevig, Victoria Eleanore« and containing only two items, a notice of her death at Ullevål Hospital in Oslo on 9 July 1947 and a small leaflet containing the four hymns sung at her funeral five days later. Indeed, after some futile searches and enquiries, I had given up identifying her when in another envelope I found similar items, but this time with some additional materials that identified the dead woman, Kristine Marie »Kinn« Glückstad (1873-1940), as an office assistant at NSIU. It then occurred to me that perhaps Bakkevig too had been an employee, and in the Regional State Archives in Tromsø, which contains the Polar Institute’s office files, I found a V. Bakkevig listed as »cleaning woman« on the NSIU payroll. The payroll also shows that she worked at NSIU for ten years until the month she died. In fact, Bakkevig she was caretaker and messenger as well as cleaner, and had a small two-room flat at the NSIU premises in the old University Astronomical Observatory in the centre of Oslo. In the winter one of her responsibilities was also to clear snow from around the building (Barr 2003: 180, 460).4 As she is not listed in the Oslo address book on any previous location in the city, she had obviously moved there from somewhere else in Norway. The most dramatic experience of her tenancy must have been the explosion of a German ammunition ship in the nearby Oslo harbour on Sunday 19 December 1943, which caused severe damage to the house. According to the damage report, the blast and falling debris »resulted in roof leakage, almost all the ceilings having to be repaired, almost all the window panes broken, doors and window frames splintered, wallpaper and

4

Barr’s history of the Polar Institute and its predecessors does not identify Bakkevig as the cleaner, and although it contains the names of many of the female office staff in the text itself, none is included in the index. The explanation is probably that they are peripheral to her analysis of Norwegian polar politics.

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walls damaged by splinters«, as well as »a chaos of dust and mess« that took several months to clear up (Barr 2003: 204). If Bakkevig was at home, the explosion must itself have been a harrowing experience, and as NSIU cleaner, she was doubtless responsible for much of the dusting, scrubbing and tidying of the offices that took place afterwards. With a permanent staff of between 11 and 13 (Barr 2003: 180, 211), NSUI was a very small institution. I imagine that when Bakkevig died all her colleagues (perhaps with the exception of the polar researchers away on fieldwork) attended the funeral, that they afterwards did not know what to do with the leaflet of hymns with »Miss Victoria Bakkevig« on the cover and therefore deposited it in an envelope together with the death notice. Since they all knew her, they probably thought it unnecessary to identify her further. According to the death notice she was someone’s »beloved sister, sister-in-law and aunt«, and in her job as cleaning woman, caretaker, snow-clearer and messenger for NSIU she in her own way contributed to the twentieth-century development of Norwegian polar politics and research, even if she certainly never set foot on any polar territory. Like the female subaltern whose suicide is deconstructed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she »cannot be heard or read« but has left a few traces behind that may be mediated and interpreted by later generations (Spivak 1988: 308). Thinking of her I am irresistibly reminded of Virginia Woolf’s overlong endnote in her 1933 fictional biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel Flush, about »the inscrutable, the all-but-silent, the all-but-invisible servant maids of history« (Woolf 2009: 113). Victoria Bakkevig was one of these servant maids, and in its oblique way the archive pays homage to her, however without acknowledging her actual role, which must have seemed insignificant. On the NSIU payroll at the Regional State Archive I also found the names of eight other women about whom materials are stored in the biography archive. In fact, the majority of the women filed under their own names in the archive during the NSIU years (about half of the total) were office employees, all, with the exception of Bakkevig, secretaries, accountants or office assistants. Some of them must have been well educated because they enabled Hoel and the other researchers maintain an extensive international correspondence. One example is the previously mentioned office assistant, Kinn Glückstad. According to a curriculum vitae stored in the archive, she had worked for four years in Germany and studied in both England and France. Yet they were all in auxiliary positions, and they must also have functioned as archivists, filing the clippings received from retriever services and selecting what else to archive on the basis of instructions provided by Hoel. As the payroll shows, NSIU was strictly gender divided: all the men participated in its political, developmental and scientific activities, all the women were

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office personnel. The former are listed on the payroll with professional titles, the women as Miss or Mrs, and, needless to say, the men were better paid than the women. The archive contains materials about only one female employee during the NSIU years not attached to the Oslo office. Identified on the envelope as »Laura Borgen hotelkeeper«, she was hired by Hoel in 1936 to run a summer hotel in NyÅlesund at 78° 55’ N on the west coast of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago. Hoel, who spent his later years writing a history of Svalbard, describes her qualifications as well as her efforts at securing financing and transforming an abandoned mining settlement into a hotel and bar (Hoel 1966-67, 1: 95-98). He does not mention that Borgen (1879-1961) was also his sister-inlaw (Barr 2014: 102). The biography archive includes even less information. Apart from a note about photos that have been removed to more secure storage, like all the photos in the archive, the only item in her envelope is a completed membership form for the Norwegian Polar Club providing her date of birth, occupation and number of seasons in the High Arctic. But perhaps the Polar Club membership represents enough of an epitaph. It is as the successful first and only keeper of the so-called North Pole Hotel, where she spent four seasons until the outbreak of war put an end to the venture, that she deserves to be remembered.5 Borgen, like Bakkevig, was probably so familiar to the NSIU staff that she did not need to be further identified. Even after the change of name in 1948, the Polar Institute employees seem to have continued to view themselves as members of a family, and perhaps, like most conventional families, they were most comfortable with women in feminine supporting roles. In this respect the envelope of the wellknown palaeontologist, Natascha Heintz (b. 1960) is representative. While she was employed at the Polar Institute in 1960-66, her role was administrative. The envelope with her name identifies her as clerical officer »married to the geologist Thor Siggerud«, a long-time employee of the Polar Institute, but anyone opening it in the hope of finding biographical data about her is bound to be disappointed. It contains only one item, a thank-you note for »the lovely flowers« sent to her on the occasion of the birth of her son in 1962. Meaningless when uncontextualised, the note indicates that the biography archive also had the function as a depository of personal detritus with little or no information value. In one respect Heintz is typical. Throughout the twentieth century, all the polar researchers attached to the Polar Institute and its predecessor – with the single exception of a female topographer who worked there for eight years – were men

5

A new attempt at running a hotel in Ny-Ålesund in the mid 1960s did not succeed (Barr 2014: 113).

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(Barr 2003: 533). As a result of the relocation to Tromsø in 1998, however, that statistic seems to have changed almost overnight. Because most of the employees refused to move from Oslo, the Polar Institute had to renew its staff and entered a period of international recruitment of young researchers, many of whom were women, and at present the gender balance is quite different from what it was during the period covered by the archive.

P IONEERS The few female polar explorers and scientists about whom there is information in the biography archive have one thing in common: they were not employed at NSIU or the Polar Institute. From the botanist Hanna Resvoll-Dieset (later Resvoll-Holmsen) (1873-1943), the first woman scientist to do fieldwork in Svalbard in 1907 and 1908, to Monica Kristensen, who led Arctic and Antarctic expeditions in the 1980s and 1990s, they all had financing from other sources. ResvollDieset, who is the token woman in histories of NSIU (e.g. Drivenes 2004: 181), first went to Svalbard as member of an expedition organised by Prince Albert I of Monaco. The following summer her expenses were partly covered by the newspaper Aftenposten, which paid her for a series of travel letters (Fuglei and Goldman 2006: 6; Berntsen 2006: 46). Kristensen was dependent on funding from British research institutions as well as private sponsors. The most famous of these unaffiliated polar explorers was the American Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1972). Regularly referred to as »millionairess« and »polar lady« in the archived cuttings, she used an inherited family fortune to outfit the seven Arctic expeditions that she led between 1926 and 1938. She started out as a big-game trophy hunter before turning her attention to photography and science, surveying and mapping the coast of Northeast Greenland via photogrammetry. Materials in the archive, such as the manuscript of Hoel’s review of her book The Fjord Region of East Greenland (1935), published in a Norwegian geographical journal, show that she was highly respected by the NSIU scientists (Hoel 1935). However, the cuttings in both the biography archive and a separate envelope (mistakenly filed?) in the Polar Institute’s main cutting archive are mainly evidence of her celebrity status in Norway after she in 1928 placed her ship and crew at the disposal of the search for Roald Amundsen’s missing seaplane. Brief visits by her to Norwegian cities before or after her Greenland expeditions were obviously enough to cause headlines. The lack of women in Norwegian polar science is thrown into relief by a small newspaper clipping dated 15 October 1932 and stored in an envelope labelled

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»Demme, Mrs Russian polar researcher«. Below the photo of an androgynouslooking young woman wearing a heavy sweater, a skirt and a woollen helmet out of which hangs a long braid, the brief notice opens with the information that the Norwegian language has acquired a new word, »polarforskerinne«, the suffix »inne« feminising the occupation of »polarforsker« (polar researcher). The reason for the neologism is that »the lady« in the picture, who has overwintered as a scientist for two years on Franz Josef Land (in the cutting the place name is underlined in blue) and is due to spend her third winter there as leader of a meteorological station, cannot correctly be called »vitenskapsmann« (the masculine-gendered Norwegian word for scientist). The text then reminds readers that Mrs Demme’s stay will coincide with the first overwintering by a Norwegian woman on Svalbard as a hunter and trapper. Although this emphasis on the gendering of traditional male occupations may be read positively (or negatively) as the proclamation of a new era in polar history, what is most striking is the treatment of Mrs Demme as an anomaly, someone for whom there is no designation because a scientist is per definition male. There is no information about Demme herself. Even her full name and dates, Nina Petrovna Demme (1902-77), must be sought elsewhere, but she is mentioned under the heading »Women Explorers« in William James Mills’ encyclopedia of polar history (Mills 2003: 717). While evidently celebrated in contemporary Soviet media as a pioneering female polar researcher, her name has ended up in the NSIU archive simply because of her connection to the contested archipelago of Franz Josef Land. The archive reflects the prominence during the 1990s of both Monica Kristensen and Liv Arnesen (b. 1953), the latter known as the first woman who successfully completed a solo skiing expedition to the South Pole in 1994. The materials in their envelopes indicate the extent to which women polar explorers – some sixty years after Demme – were still considered anomalies. Arnesen’s envelope, which identifies her as »skier«, is full of clippings celebrating the pioneering South Pole expedition, among them two admiring profiles that both focus on gender, one by highlighting her function as an exemplary role model for other women, the other expressing surprise at Arnesen’s femininity. »But what kind of person is this then?« asks the journalist rhetorically. »A super-masculine woman like a bulldozer, with the bulging muscles of a weightlifter? Absolutely not. And that’s the point – you don’t need either to be or look like a man to take a beating. If anyone has proven that, it’s Liv« (Menne 1995). Clearly intent on showing herself as men’s equal and invading what she in the archived newspaper cuttings calls »the boys’ turf«, Arnesen openly challenged male polar hegemony. At the same time, she modestly downplays her own achievement, both in the interviews in the archive and in her book about the South

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Pole venture, where she refers to herself as »an extreme tourist« only in it for pleasure (Arnesen 1995: 80). In contrast to Arnesen, the more ambitious Monica Kristensen became a controversial figure. After her first Antarctic expedition in 1986-87, as many clippings in the archive show, she was regularly lauded as »the undefeated ice queen«. However, when she financed her next expedition by contracting to search for the tent Roald Amundsen had left at the South Pole in 1910 so that it could be displayed in Lillehammer during the 1994 Winter Olympics, it was characterised by many as a publicity stunt, and one of her most vocal critics was the then director of the Polar Institute, Olav Orheim. Clippings of comments about the search for the tent, usually negative and often combined with opinions about Kristensen’s looks and personal qualities, make up much of the contents in her four envelopes. The coverage seems to have amounted to an avalanche that culminated, as mentioned, when one of her companions died after falling into a crevasse. After that, the attacks on her grew more acrimonious, although she still had her defenders, some among them arguing that she was a victim of blatant sexism. Her main offence in the eyes of several commentators was her implicit wish to be associated with Amundsen. How dare she, as a woman, even dream of comparing herself to a national polar hero, in many cases seem to have been the message. The unnamed Norwegian woman referred to in the cutting about Demme was probably Wanny Woldstad (1895-1959), the first and best known of the other group of female pioneers in the archive, the trappers and trappers’ wives or companions who wintered in Svalbard and Northeast Greenland during the 1930s and late 1940s. While most of the items in Woldstad’s envelope are newspaper cuttings from the 1930s, including a Danish article from 1934 titled »Mrs Polar Bear Hunter«, she made her name twenty years later with a memoir of her five winters as a trapper in Svalbard (Woldstad 1956). In the title of the book she distances herself from other women overwinterers, who if not housekeepers were considerably less involved in trapping than their male companions (Rossnes 1993: 19), by using the masculine-gendered Norwegian word for trapper, »fangstmann«, about herself (Karlsen 2014: 5-6). (The feminine-gendered »fangstkvinne« would have been a more obvious choice.) The biography archive contains materials about several women trappers in addition to Woldstad, three under their own names (Gudrun Andersen, Berntine Johansen and Petra Winther), the rest (Sally Kræmer, Anna Oxaas and Helfrid Nøjs) under their better-known husbands’ names. The materials about these women consist primarily of interviews and articles that give a sense of the extent to which they – like the female polar explorers – were perceived as women »straddl[ing] the edge of normalcy«, to cite Stuart Henry’s definition of social deviancy (Henry 2009: 2). Like Liv Arnesen half a century later, they are

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portrayed as women whose femininity has remained intact in spite of highly unconventional lives. The survival of normative femininity in the Arctic is the theme of one of the more amusing of the cuttings dealing with women trappers. This is an article from a December 1939 issue of a Norwegian women’s magazine, in which the journalist interviews the 28 year-old Petra Winther and her husband Levin, an experienced trapper hired by Arctic Commercial Enterprise, on their voyage to Northeast Greenland that summer on board the NSIU expedition vessel the Polarbjørn. They were just married (»How romantic! On a honeymoon to Greenland!« exclaims the journalist) and had planned to spend one winter as trappers in »Hoelsbu«, a hut built in 1930, at the height of the Greenland controversy, and named after the NSIU leader. Instead war broke out, and they stayed on for three years until evacuated by the Americans (Mikkelsen 2008: 134-5). For the journalist, Petra’s wish to be a trapper is clearly simultaneously a violation and an affirmation of gender norms. Though her chosen occupation is so unusual as to be suspect, it can be understood in terms of a natural desire to accompany her husband wherever he wants to go. Besides, as he opines, »a woman is a woman even in Northeast Greenland«, a view that is confirmed when the Winthers are forced to transfer to a small boat because the ice prevents their ship from landing, and the last thing she is heard saying is »Oh, Levin, won't we have room for my sewing machine?« (Røer 1939: 41). A young geology student, Brit Hofseth (1917-41), was also on the ship, on her way to do independent fieldwork on Clavering Island, and if she had not died less than two years later on another field trip to Northern Norway, she might have become the first woman to breach the compact male dominance in Norwegian polar research (Ryall 2015). In addition to some photos (removed for safe keeping) showing an alluring young woman on what was clearly the adventure of a lifetime, her envelope in the archive contains four items. One is a death notice, and two are long obituaries describing Hofseth as an exceptional young woman, not only academically brilliant but also a delightful person beloved by friends and colleagues alike. The fourth item in Hofseth’s envelope, deposited seventy years later, is a newspaper clipping about an exhibition occasioned by the bicentenary of the founding of the University of Oslo in 2011 and celebrating pioneering women in the natural sciences. Hofseth was among the pioneers chosen, and the report is illustrated with one of the photos taken on the expedition to Northeast Greenland in 1939. It shows her in the pose of a liberated woman in trousers, with that other emblem of modern femininity, a cigarette, between her fingers. The text informs readers that she had declared that she studied geology more out of »fear of the

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kitchen than love of science«. It also states – tantalisingly – that »she became a femme fatale in natural-science circles, igniting the passions of almost all the men on an expedition on the polar vessel Vesterveg« (»Reale damer« 2011). This is fiction passed off as facts. The ship Vesterveg only exists in the pages of Nils Johan Rud’s novel Drivende grenser (Drifting Borders) (1941), which was based on his experiences as a journalist on the Polarbjørn expedition. It is a character in that novel, the botanist and man-eater Norunn, who claims that she has chosen natural science as an escape from a more conventional feminine life, while Hofseth herself according to the obituaries was hard-working, ambitious and driven by a passionate love of geology. Using references to Rud’s fictional Norunn, for whom science is a mere pretext, as biographical information about Hofseth, the report undermines her professionalism and suggests the extent to which masculinist attitudes about women in polar science still persist.

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To sum up very briefly, the biography archive at the Norwegian Polar Institute shows that modern institutionalisation had little effect on the marginalised status of women in polar affairs. Discursively, clichés of femininity – ranging from wifely virtues to insinuations of inappropriately seductive behaviour – serve to keep women in the margin even when they begin to participate actively in resource exploitation or science. Those very few women who did break the mould were individual entrepreneurs, adventurers and writers. In the cuttings, and therefore in the archive as a whole, they are treated as tokens and censured or eulogised as such. But, as Carolyn Steedman puts it, »the archive is also a place of dreams« (Steedman 2001: 69). My dream is that another perspective might be possible, even that the incorporation into Norwegian polar history of women like Victoria Bakkevig, Liv Balstad, Louise Boyd, Brit Hofseth, Wanny Woldstad and the others I have mentioned, may one day change institutionalised memory. As Aleida Assmann has argued, archived materials are in an intermediate state, »deprived of their old existence and waiting for a new one« (Assmann 2008: 103). I have tried to suggest how such a new existence might be possible, and I believe that in a different history of twentieth-century polar affairs, less interested in politics, resource exploitation and heroic actions, more in culture, representation, images and perceptions, the narratives of these previously excluded women and their activities could easily be moved closer to the centre of the stage. That, in turn, would also encourage a gendering of both men’s polar activities and polar history as a whole.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Anker, Ella (1931): The Right of Norway to Eirik Raude’s land, Oslo. Arnesen, Liv (1995): Snille piker går ikke til Sydpolen, Oslo. Assmann, Aleida (2008): »Canon and Archive«, in: Astrid Erll/ Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin, pp. 97-107. — (2009): »Archive im Wandel der Mediengeschichte«, in: K. Ebeling/ S. Günzel (ed.): Archivologie: Theorien des Archivs in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten, Berlin, pp. 165-75. Balstad, Liv (1955): Nord for det øde hav, Bergen. Barr, Susan (2003): Norway – A Consistent Polar Nation? Analysis of an Image Seen through the History of the Norwegian Polar Institute, Oslo. — (2014): »Hotellet i Ny-Ålesund 1936-39«, in: Polarboken 2013-2014, Oslo, pp. 102-14. Berg, Roald (2013): »From ›Spitsbergen‹ to ›Svalbard‹: Norwegianization in Norway and the ›Norwegian Sea‹, 1820-1925«, in: Acta Borealia 30.2, pp 154-73. Berntsen, Bredo (2006): En grønnstrømpe og hennes samtid. Hanna ResvollHolmsen: botaniker, svalbardforsker, fjellelsker, fotograf og naturvernpioner, Steinkjer. Dever, Maryanne/ Newman, Sally/ Vickery, Ann (2009): The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers, Canberra. Drivenes, Einar-Arne (1994): »Adolf Hoel Polar Ideologue and Imperialist of the Polar Sea«, in: Acta Borealia 11.1, pp. 63-72. — (2004): »Ishavsimperialisme«, in: Einar-Arne Drivenes/ Harald Dag Jølle (eds.): Norsk polarhistorie 2: Vitenskapene, Oslo, pp. 175-256. — (2013): »Science and Politics: Some Aspects of Norwegian Polar Research in the Twentieth Century«, in: Polar Record 49.3, pp. 316-19. Fuglei, Eva/Helle V. Goldman (2006): »Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen: A Pioneer in Svalbard«, in: Polar Research 25.1, pp. 1-13. Fure, O.-B. (1996): Mellomkrigstid 1920-1940, Oslo. Giæver, John (1940): »En kvinne i polarnatten. Fra praktvilla i Karlsbad til fangsthytten på Gråhuken«, in: Aftenposten 16.05.1940. Grace, Sherrill E. (2001): Canada and the Idea of North, Montreal. Henry, Stuart (2009): Social Deviancy, Cambridge. Hoel, Adolf (1935): »Louise A. Boyd: The Fjord Region of East Greenland«, in: Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift 4, pp. 444-45. — (1966-67): Svalbard. Svalbards historie 1596-1965, vols.1-3, Oslo. — (1977): Mitt liv i og for polartraktene, Bergen.

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Karlsen, Silje Solheim (2014): »Fangstmannsbiografien og heltelitteratur. Med et skråblikk på sjangeren: Wanny Woldstad, Henry Ette, Thorleif Bjertnes og Henry Rudi«, in: Nordlit 32, pp. 1-16. Lachmann, Renate (1993): »Kultursemiotischer Prospekt«, in: Anselm Haverkamp/ Renate Lachmann (eds.): Memoria. Vergessen und Erinnern, München, pp. xvii-xxvii. Lewander, Lisbeth (2008): »Snälla flickor åker inte till Sydpolen. Kvinnliga polarfarares reseskildringar 1830-2000«, in: Åsa Arping/ Anna Nordenstam/ Kajsa Widegren (eds.): Moderniteter: Text, bild, kön, Gothenburg, pp. 283-95. Menne, Eyvind Sverre (1995): »Kvinne i guttas land«, in: Asker og Bærums budstikke, 10 March. Mikkelsen, Peter Schmidt (2008): North-East Greenland 1908-60: The Trapper Era, Cambridge. Mills, William James (2003): Exploring Polar Frontiers: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2, Santa Barbara, CA. »Reale damer på utstilling« (2011): in Aftenposten 21.03.2011. Ritter, Christiane (2010): A Woman in the Polar Night (orig.: Eine Frau erlebt die Polarnacht, 1938), translation by Jane Degras, Vancouver, BC. Rossnes, Gustav (1993): »Norsk overvintringsfangst på Svalbard 1895-1940«, Oslo. Ryall, Anka (2015): »A Deviant in the Arctic« in: Tiina Mäntymäki/ Marinella Rodi-Risberg/ Anna Foka (eds.): Deviant Women: Cultural, Linguistic and Literary Approaches to Narratives of Femininity, Frankfurt a.M., pp. 171-90. Røer, Paul (1939): »Over Polhavet med juletre i bagasjen«, in: Alle kvinners Blad 51, pp. 22-42. Skarstein, Frode (2006): »Erik the Red’s Land: The Land that Never Was«, in: Polar Research 25.2, pp.173-9. Smith, Sidone (2001): Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing, Minneapolis. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988): »Can the Subaltern Speak?«, in: Cary Nelson/ Lawrence Grossberg (eds.): Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Basingstoke, pp. 271-313. Spufford, Francis (1996): I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, London. Steedman, Carolyn (2001): Dust, Manchester. Stoler, Laura Ann (2002): »Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance«, in: Archival Science 2, pp. 87-109. Woldstad, Wanny (1956): Første kvinne som fangstmann på Svalbard, Oslo. Woolf, Virginia (2009): Flush, Oxford.

An Arctic Archive for the Anthropocene The Svalbard Global Seed Vault R EINHARD H ENNIG

I NTRODUCTION In 2000, Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer argued that through human activity our planet had entered a new geological era for which they proposed the name ›Anthropocene‹. They gave as a reason for this that humans had taken into use most of the planet’s resources of among others fossil fuels, arable land and drinking water, multiplied the rate of species extinction many times over, and changed the composition of the planet’s atmosphere and thus the global climate through the massive release of greenhouse gasses. The Anthropocene concept and with it the notion that the human species has become a geological force has since received widespread scientific and scholarly attention (e.g. Zalasiewicz et al. 2008; Steffen et al. 2011), and increasingly attempts are made to even communicate the concept and its implications to a broader public. Thus the Deutsches Museum in Munich displayed a special exhibition titled ›Welcome to the Anthropocene‹ (5 December 2014 – 30 September 2016). Amid this exhibition’s many examples of how humans are changing the planet’s ecosystems to the worse stands out one example of human farsightedness and caring for future generations: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This Vault is located close to the town of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen. With more than 860,000 different samples of seeds from all around the world by January 2016 (Crop Trust 2016), it houses today the largest collection of crop seeds worldwide. It is sometimes referred to as a ›gene bank‹ or ›seed bank‹, which means a facility for maintaining crop diversity through storing and conserving seeds in a frozen state. Such conservation is regarded as highly necessary, because due to the industrialization of agriculture, only very few crop varieties are

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in commercial use today while most traditional crop varieties are no longer cultivated. Yet these traditional variants can possess qualities which may become valuable again for food production under changed socio-ecological circumstances in the future. Gene banks therefore both conserve crop seeds and provide access for the use of the stored genetic material. More than 1,700 such institutions exist around the world. The Seed Vault, however, is not a gene bank in this conventional sense. Instead, it serves as a backup for the actual gene banks, as it stores duplicates of their seed collections. Such a ›reinsurance‹ is considered to be necessary, since material stored in individual gene banks can be exposed to risks from wars, natural catastrophes or simply bad maintenance due to insufficient funding or equipment failure for example. In case a certain crop variety were lost both in situ – in the actual environment – and ex situ – as seeds archived in a gene bank –, this particular variety could then be restored using the backup copy from the Vault. Svalbard was chosen as the location for the Vault because it is far away from the world’s areas of conflict and unlikely to be exposed to any natural catastrophes. Also, despite its remoteness, Svalbard is easily accessible because of the infrastructure in place, which facilitates the transporting of seeds. Norway, to which the archipelago belongs, is the world’s highest developed country according to the United Nations’ Human Development Index (UNDP 2015) and is therefore expected to be able to guarantee both political stability and a well-functioning administration. Additional safety for the seeds was achieved through excavating the facilities for the Vault into a mountainside. After the entrance portal, a 100 meters long tunnel leads towards three storage rooms, which together have the capacity to store 4.5 million different seed samples. Although an artificial cooling system is used to keep the temperature inside the Vault at -18° Celsius, the location’s natural qualities contributed to its choice of place: it is estimated that if the electricity supply should fail one day, the permafrost inside the mountain would still keep the seeds in a frozen state for about 200 years, even in the case of a substantial warming of the climate (Fowler 2008a: 191). The Vault has received considerable media attention since the start of construction in 2006 and the formal opening in 2008. Many newspaper articles, several documentary movies1 and a richly illustrated book by Norwegian writer and photographer Pål Hermansen (2013)2 deal with the Vault. It has even appeared in

1

For example, Seed Warriors (2009), directed by Katharina von Flotow and Mirjam von Arx, Prosperous Mountain (2013), directed by Heidi Morstang, and Seeds of Time (2014), directed by Sandy McLeod.

2

The book’s Norwegian title is Frø til verden. In the same year, an English version titled

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works of fiction, such as the novel Chimera (2011) by Norwegian writer Gert Nygårdshaug, in the cartoon series Futurama (2010), and – in modified form – in the fictional framing narrative of the semi-documentary film The Age of Stupid (2009). As Cary Fowler, one of the project’s initiators, wrote already in 2008, the Vault »has captured the public’s imagination more than almost any agricultural topic in recent years« (Fowler 2008a: 190). Since very recently, the Vault is moreover increasingly highlighted explicitly as an admirable human achievement representing a ›good‹ Anthropocene. The above mentioned Anthropocene exhibition at Deutsches Museum, US nature writer Diane Ackerman’s book The Human Age (2014: 154-155), and the international online project »Seeds of a Good Anthropocene«, which aims at presenting positive visions of the future in order to counterbalance dystopian scenarios (Peterson 2015), all praise the Vault. But why is the Vault considered to be such a notable representative of the Anthropocene? What exactly constitutes the Vault’s symbolic potential with regard to this concept and its implications? I will in the following argue that the Vault in the aforementioned portrayals is represented in such a way that it can satisfy expectations of both those who promote a ›good‹ Anthropocene, of those who are worried about the Anthropocene’s socio-ecological implications, and even of those who criticize or reject the Anthropocene concept altogether. This is due to the Vault being interpreted in such a way that it reconciles apparently contradictory notions of the Arctic, of the relation between non-human nature and human culture, of optimism and pessimism, and of the role of the national and the global.

T HE A RCTIC An obvious connection between the Vault and the Anthropocene concept arises from the former’s location. Built close to the town of Longyearbyen and thus at 78° northern latitude, the Vault is truly an Arctic archive, and the Arctic is arguably the most ›Anthropocenic‹ part of the planet. It has in recent years not only been called the place with »the world’s most severe toxic contamination« (Cone 2005: 2), affecting mammals and humans depending on Arctic animals as food. It is also warming much faster than the rest of the planet, measurable and indeed very visible through the rapid decline in the amount of polar sea ice, the receding of glaciers and the thawing of permafrost soils. Moreover, shipping in previously

Seeds for the World was published. I will, however, in the following refer only to the Norwegian version. All translations from the Norwegian in this article are my own.

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impassable parts of the Arctic, such as the Northern Sea Route, is gradually becoming possible, and resource competition in the region is increasing, as the Arctic nations start exploiting resources such as oil and natural gas lying under the seafloors, which are now becoming accessible through the melting of the sea ice. Environmentalists fear that the use of these resources will contribute to even more global warming, and also warn that an oil spill in the Arctic would lead to irreparable ecological damages (e.g. Henningsen/Römmelt 2011: 200-202). As a result of these ongoing changes, the Arctic is today looked upon as a ›showcase‹ for climate change and as »an illustration of Earth having moved into a new geological era that has been called the Anthropocene« (Christensen et al. 2013: 164). Yet the picture of the Arctic usually drawn in connection to representations of the Vault is a very different one. Hermansen, for example, states about Svalbard that »up here, there’s still ice age«3 (2013: 85). The photographs included in his book do not show melting glaciers, but instead seemingly intact Arctic landscapes characterized by glacial ice, mountains covered in snow, colorful vegetation and a huge variety of wildlife such as walrus, Arctic foxes, polar bears, reindeer, and snow grouse. These photographs convey an impression of Svalbard as an undisturbed nature idyll – an »Arctic oasis«4 (98), as Hermansen himself calls it. He further supports this impression through his texts, when he for example writes about Svalbard that »this Arctic world is the host landscape for the Global Seed Vault – a world as far removed and different as possible from all noisy metropolises where the other seed banks lie. Up here, nature is ruling, while people only play a peripheral role«5 (85). In this way, Hermansen evokes an image of the Arctic that is very different from the one connected to the Anthropocene concept and the anthropogenic environmental change the latter implies. He presents the Arctic as a remote region that is practically free from human influence – even as the exact opposite of human civilization. In this way, he connects to late 19th and early 20th century images of the Arctic as an idealized counterpart of a rejected urban modernity (see e.g. Ryall/ Schimanski/Wærp 2010). In doing so, Hermansen uses a very conventional symbolism of ice and snow as embodiments of purity, beauty and innocence – a symbolism which also can be found in media reports about the Vault, some of which

3

»Her oppe er det fremdeles istid«.

4

»En arktisk oase«.

5

»Denne arktiske verden er vertslandskapet for det globale frøhvelvet – en verden som er så fjern og forskjellig som tenkelig fra alle summende metropoler, hvor de andre frøbankene ligger. Her oppe er naturen i førersetet, mens menneskene bare spiller pikkolofløyte bakerst i orkesteret.«

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even claim that Arctic nature itself in the form of polar bears is guarding the seeds stored inside the Vault (e.g. Lamprecht 2006). The Arctic as a whole and Svalbard in particular appear thus in such portrayals of the Vault as unaffected by anthropogenic environmental change – as, so to say, pre-Anthropocenic. Representing Svalbard in this way means, however, to ignore not only the ongoing environmental changes, but also the human part in the archipelago’s environmental history. After Svalbard‘s discovery by William Barents in 1596, local populations of whales, walrus, reindeer and birds were relentlessly exploited until long into the 20th century. The result was a drastic decline and the near extinction of several species, from which the once vast populations have never managed to fully recover – despite the hunt having been strictly limited for many decades now. Huge amounts of bones still visible in the landscape testify to this past. Even though the hunt has ended, Norwegian and Russian coal mining, which has been conducted on Svalbard on a commercial scale since the early 20th century, continues to the present day, and there are no plans to abandon it (McGhee 2006: 175189). The picture of Svalbard as a ›natural‹ place on which humans have had no considerable influence is thus hardly true. Today, climate change adds to the changes caused by human activities in past centuries. In 2013, reports about a dead polar bear found on Svalbard made it into the international media. The bear is believed to have starved due to the increasing lack of sea ice, on which the species depends for hunting seals (Carrington 2013) – one of many examples of how the polar bear in recent years has become a symbol of the connection between global warming and the threat of species extinction. In addition, there is evidence of Svalbard’s polar bears’ health being affected negatively by high concentrations of chemicals such as PCB in their bodies (Cone 2005: 38). Against this background, Hermansen’s assertion that »Svalbard is today the world’s most excellent place for watching the polar bear in its authentic environment«6 (2013: 98) may appear as almost ironic. The reality of global warming is not denied in Hermansen’s book. Yet although the author acknowledges in his texts that climate change will probably have detrimental environmental effects even on Svalbard, he does not comment on the causes of global warming or on possible mitigating measures, but instead presents an easy relief from this threat – at least as far as Svalbard is concerned: seeds of Arctic plants from the archipelago are stored inside the Vault so that »most of them can be reinvigorated after a long slumber deep inside the gray mountain«7

6

»Svalbard er i dag verdens fineste sted å se isbjørn i sitt rette miljø«.

7

»De fleste av dem skal kunne vekkes til live igjen etter en tornerosesøvn langt inne berget det grå.«

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(112). Archiving seeds in the Vault thus appears in Hermansen’s book as an allround solution not only to conserve food crops, but also to save some part of the Arctic flora for an undefined future. Problematic developments connected to the Anthropocene, such as anthropogenic climate change, are in Hermansen’s book alleviated through the Vault, which is portrayed in such a way that it reconciles pre-Anthropocenic with Anthropocenic notions of the Arctic.

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A philosophical implication of the Anthropocene which is frequently emphasized by scholars in the environmental humanities is that, as a concept, it »undermines the nature/culture distinction itself, the difference between natural history and human history« (Clark 2014: 86). According to Christian Schwägerl, »the Anthropocene idea [...] firmly links humans with everything that goes on around them and integrates humans into what used to be called the natural world« (2013: 32). As human activities are changing nature on a geological scale, it can no longer be differentiated between what is artificial or influenced by human activities and what is ›natural‹. The Vault could be considered as an especially plausible manifestation of this indistinguishability of nature and culture. It makes use of its site’s ›natural‹ qualities in form of a mountainside and of the permafrost there in order to store plant seeds in a deep frozen state. Thus it may be tempting to compare it to so called ›natural archives’‹ such as ice caps or peat bogs. Yet the seeds inside the Vault are kept not in ice or soil, but in uniform boxes neatly put into metal shelves – quite similar to how documents in conventional cultural archives are stored. Also, conscious selection takes place: only seeds of food crops are to be stored inside the Vault. Despite originating from wild plant species, these seeds are not the product of spontaneous evolution but of purposeful breeding in order to serve human needs. It could therefore be argued that the Vault is a combination of a natural and a cultural archive: that in it, human culture and non-human nature are harmonically and inextricably united. Yet the notion that the Anthropocene concept would make the nature/culture distinction obsolete is not as widely accepted as one might assume. Timothy LeCain, for example, criticizes the term Anthropocene as being »unapologetically anthropocentric« (LeCain 2015: 3). In his view, the Anthropocene concept legitimizes human domination over nature through overemphasizing humans’ ability to form the environment according to their own needs through technology. The concept would thus even be reinforcing the nature/culture distinction (LeCain 2015:

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21-22). Through this critique of anthropocentrism, LeCain links the discussion of the Anthropocene concept to questions of environmental ethics. Environmental ethics asks which values and norms should define our approaches towards non-human nature (Ott 2010: 8). These approaches can differ considerably depending on which types of ethical arguments for the protection of the non-human environment (or of certain parts of it) are taken as point of departure. So called anthropocentric arguments relate to the value of the environment for human beings. This value can be instrumental or functional, as in the case of natural resources that are necessary for the fulfillment of basic human needs, such as air, water and food (Ott 2010: 82-83). Anthropocentric arguments can thus establish a right of all human beings to the conservation of nature and the environment as far as these constitute resources of vital importance for them. Moreover, such arguments allow an extension of ethical responsibility towards future generations: all concepts of sustainability represent an anthropocentric environmental ethics, as they are explicitly motivated by the needs of human beings both in the present and in the future (Sarkar 2012: 160). Biocentric and ecocentric environmental ethics are based on different points of departure. A biocentric ethics means that all life forms have an intrinsic value, and an ecocentric ethics would claim the same for ecosystems in their entirety. Intrinsic value implies a strong normative position and that everybody has duties towards what is endowed with this sort of value (Ott 2010: 102-103). A biocentric or ecocentric ethics is most often associated with the so called deep ecology movement, whose founding father is the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (19122009). Næss advocated »biospherical egalitarianism« as a basic attitude and the recognition of an »equal right to live and blossom« of all organisms instead of the prevailing rule of humans over all other life forms (Næss 1973: 95-96). It is obvious that the construction of the Vault was motivated by an anthropocentric environmental ethics. With the mentioned exception of some plant seeds stemming from Svalbard itself, only crop seeds are stored inside the Vault. These are conserved in order to ensure their continued potential availability for food production. The seeds embody a resource which is to be conserved for future generations who might need them to fulfill their basic needs. In this sense, the Vault represents an attempt to contribute to long-term sustainability within agriculture. Such an anthropocentric environmental ethics is predestinated to invite objections from those who adhere to a biocentric or ecocentric ethics. Thom van Dooren, for example, argues that selective ex situ conservation as it is practiced in gene banks and in the Vault represents a reductionist understanding of nature and a practice which cannot substitute for in situ conservation of biological diversity. From van Dooren’s point of view, it is not enough to save genetic information of

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crop seeds that serve as resources for humans. Instead, non-human organisms should be regarded as being »valuable in and of themselves« (van Dooren 2009: 108), irrespective of their potential use value. This is clearly a bio- or ecocentric argument, and it can be found even in a fictional text using the Vault as a motif, namely in Norwegian writer Gert Nygårdshaug’s ›eco-thriller‹ Chimera (2011). This novel is set some 15 to 20 years in the future, at a time in which ecosystems are undergoing tremendous changes due to the effects of global warming. The text focuses on scientists based at a research station in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they are busy registering species found on site. In their time, the Vault has been opened for the storage of all kinds of seeds – irrespective of their use value: »Seeds from every single plant and bush were sent to the international seed depot that Norwegian scientists had established under the tundra on Svalbard«8 (Nygårdshaug 2011: 82). From these scientists’ point of view, biodiversity in general should be protected, not only species that can contribute to feeding humans (107). The Vault has thus in Nygårdshaug’s novel been transformed from an anthropocentric into a biocentric project in – an archive based on the acknowledgement of an intrinsic value of all life forms and dedicated to their conservation. It so to say makes the distinction between an anthropocentric and a biocentric environmental ethics obsolete, since it fulfills the demands of both. Two seemingly contradictory ethical approaches to the environment are thus reconciled through the motif of the Vault. The practicality of conserving all kinds of seeds inside the Vault is, however, not discussed in the novel, and neither is the question of what these would be stored for eventually if the original ecosystems – such as the rainforests – were not preserved at the same time. The Vault appears thus here – similarly as in Hermansen’s book – as a simple quick fix to actually very complex social and environmental problems.

W ORST C ASE S CENARIOS AND THE G OOD A NTHROPOCENE In the texts analyzed here, the Vault is also reconciling expectations of environmental catastrophe with optimistic views of the future in a very similar way as the Anthropocene concept itself does. Most or all of the changes that Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) name as indications of the Anthropocene, such as global warming

8

»Frø fra hver eneste plante og busk var sendt til det internasjonale frødepotet som var etablert av norske forskere under tundraen på Svalbard«.

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and species extinction, are usually considered to be highly problematic and as possibly leading the world into a socio-ecological catastrophe. As Timothy Clark notes: »The major irony of the Anthropocene is that, although named as that era in the planet’s natural history in which humanity becomes a decisive geological and climatological force, it manifests itself to us primarily through the natural becoming, as it were, dangerously out of bounds, in extreme or unprecedented weather events, ecosystems being simplified, dieback, or collapse«. (Clark 2014: 79)

Yet simultaneously the Anthropocene concept seems to facilitate an enormous confidence in the human ability to develop technological solutions for all sorts of environmental problems (LeCain 2015: 4). There are thus many proponents of what often is called a »good« or even a »great« Anthropocene, who argue that the ›Human Age‹ offers unprecedented chances to shape the planet according to human desires (e.g. Ellis 2012; Schwägerl 2013; Ackerman 2014; Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015). The Vault, as it was and is presented in the media, is connected to both anxiety about the future and to such unrestricted optimism. A rhetoric referring to the anticipation of catastrophe has accompanied media coverage of the Vault ever since the start of construction in 2006. The two most common metaphors used for the Vault are of Biblical origin: it is frequently called a »Noah’s ark for seeds« and a »doomsday vault« (e.g. Mellgren 2006). In this way it becomes linked both to the Flood in the Book of Genesis and to the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. As a response to these metaphors, Fowler has repeatedly emphasized that the Vault was not built in anticipation of a global catastrophe, such as a nuclear war. According to him, the main reason why copies of crop seeds should be stored inside the Vault is the everyday loss of crop seed varieties in gene banks having to do with »institution specific management, infrastructure, and funding problems« (Fowler 2008b: 12), as well as risks from military conflicts and natural disasters in some parts of the world.9 It is thus locally or regionally limited loss of genetic diversity that the Vault is intended to protect the seeds against – not a looming worldwide ›apocalypse‹. It might be, however, that Fowler – contrary to his intention – himself has fueled speculations about global disaster, for example

9

The first and so far only withdrawal of seeds from the Vault was requested in 2015 by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, which, having previously had its headquarters in Aleppo in Syria, had become affected in its work by the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 (see Robins-Early 2015).

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through stating that the Vault »would likely survive almost anything« (Fowler 2008b: 15) and that even the most powerful bombs existing today could not manage to destroy the Vault if dropped directly on the mountain in which it is located (Fowler 2008b: 19) – as if there might indeed be anybody planning to bomb the Vault. The use of the aforementioned metaphors for the Vault has at any rate not diminished. Of course, a rhetoric of looming catastrophe has accompanied environmental discourse for a long time, with e.g. the study The Limits to Growth (1972) as an early example. Today, catastrophic environmental expectations seem to be flourishing more than ever, as among others a marked increase in novels, movies and computer games based on such scenarios indicates (Almond 2013). In many if not most cases, such scenarios – whether scientific or fictional – are supposed to function not (or at least not only) as a prediction, but rather as a warning. Ecocritical scholar Lawrence Buell even states that »apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal« (Buell 1995: 285). The assumption is, then, that catastrophic future scenarios will encourage action precisely in order to prevent them from ever becoming true. They would then not be intended to produce fatalism and adaptation to a declining environment, but to encourage action in order to create a different future than the one predicted if business-as-usual is continued (Killingsworth/Palmer 1996). An example of recent environmentalist fiction that, interestingly, includes an Arctic archive as a central element of a narrative of global environmental catastrophe is the British film The Age of Stupid (2009) directed by Franny Armstrong. This film is set in the year 2055, at a time in which the earth’s ecosystems and human civilization have been entirely destroyed by runaway climate change. The main character is an old archivist, working in what is called the »Global Archive« (TC: 00.03.19), an institution storing humanity’s entire cultural heritage – artworks, books, films and other media – mainly in digital form. Through watching ›old‹ video footage from the mid 2000s, the archivist tries to find out why humans didn’t save themselves and their civilization despite knowing what was happening and having had the possibility to change the run of things. The motif of the »Global Archive« functions therefore in the film as a warning to today’s humans that future generations will be informed very well about everything their ancestors did and will condemn them for it – unless the necessary action against resource depletion, species extinction and climate change is taken timely enough to prevent the catastrophic future scenario from becoming reality. It serves as evidence of present day humans’ guilt against future generations, and at the

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same time as an admonition for those living in the present to do the right thing before it is too late. This »Global Archive« is in the film located on an artificial platform »800 kilometers north of Norway« (TC: 00.03.23), and thus probably on the Svalbard archipelago. It is never explained in the film why precisely this location was chosen. Yet it is quite likely that the placing of the fictional »Global Archive« was directly inspired by a real-world archive on the same archipelago – the Vault, which was constructed and opened precisely during the time the film was produced. The »Global Archive«, however, serves not the same purpose as the Vault. The largely digital archive in The Age of Stupid is not even on the fictional level itself conserving biodiversity or any kind of utilizable resources for future generations. The only thing it can do is to inform humans in the future about what went wrong, and to – in the best case – encourage conservation measures in the audience’s present in order to avoid a looming socio-ecological catastrophe. The goal of conservation is therefore not achieved through this archive itself. This is different in the case of the Vault: other than the fictional archive, it exists as a real, material entity, and it is not intended as a call to action, but is itself part of conservation measures thought to be necessary in order to secure the future availability of a certain resource – the genetic variety of food crops. This means also, however, that while in the case of the fictional archive, the worst-case scenario it is part of may indeed encourage people to take action for a different future, with regard to the Vault, the Biblical apocalyptic rhetoric applied to it is likely not to achieve such an effect – as the metaphors used for describing the Vault indicate. In the Bible, both the Flood and doomsday are unavoidable. Even Noah – although favored by God – could do nothing to prevent all humans and terrestrial animals not accommodated aboard the ark from drowning (Genesis 6: 7-8). And according to the Bible, doomsday has long been determined by God (Mark 13: 32). It can therefore be neither prevented nor delayed by human action. The underlying narrative of the apocalyptic metaphors used for the Vault is therefore that the world existing today is unavoidably going to be destroyed. What the Vault – as it is represented in most media reports – adds to this narrative is the idea that it might be wise to carry at least some valuables through the time of decline and catastrophe in order to be able to start anew in an anticipated postcatastrophic world. While Noah took animals on board of the ark, the Vault protects crop seeds from an expected disaster. The necessary conservation measure – storing seeds inside an Arctic archive – is thus already taken care of. With a »Frozen Garden of Eden« (Goodall 2014: 118) available, as the English primatologist Jane Goodall, using another Biblical metaphor, calls the Vault, no other efforts

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would be needed. A »doomsday vault« would thus not necessarily encourage humans to environmental action. Instead, storing some seeds inside this »ark« appears as the only meaningful thing to do in view of challenges such as climate change and species extinction. The media reports’ portrayals of the Vault reconcile thus somewhat paradoxically anxieties about the future and anticipations of global catastrophe with an optimistic confidence that the necessary precautions are already taken and that business can continue as usual.

F ROM S PECIES

TO

N ATION

As has been repeatedly emphasized, the Anthropocene concept requires humans to adopt a truly global perspective not only on environmental change, but also on humans themselves as a species and on the ways in which this species is changing the planet (Chakrabarty 2009: 213). As Clark expresses it: »The Anthropocene represents, for the first time, the demand made upon a species consciously to consider its impact, as a whole and as a natural/physical force, upon the whole planet – the advent of a kind of new, totalizing reflexivity as a species. Individual acts of generosity, cultural change, national achievement, and so on, now become something that must be conceived at this higher, unprecedented level of self-reflection.« (Clark 2014: 86)

Yet such calls for a ›species perspective‹ have also been criticized as blurring uneven social and national responsibilities for the problematic developments that led to the Anthropocene, and as drawing away attention from that e.g. the negative effects of climate change do not equally affect the entire human species, but rather hit many of those hardest who are the least responsible for causing them. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, for example, point out that it had been only a very small part of the human species – those capitalists who had the necessary financial means – who in the 18th and 19th centuries started and carried out the transition to fossil fuel based economies, which frequently is named as the actual initiation of the Anthropocene (e.g. Crutzen/Stoermer 2000; Steffen et al. 2011). Malm and Hornborg also emphasize that enormous differences concerning the amounts of greenhouse gas emissions exist both historically and contemporary between nations and within individual societies (Malm/Hornborg 2014: 64). According to them, therefore, »species-thinking on climate change is conducive to mystification and political paralysis. It cannot serve as a basis for challenging the vested interests of business-as-usual« (67). It should also not be overlooked that, while inter-

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national institutions for dealing with many environmental questions exist, the implementation of measures takes usually place at the national level, and national policies for e.g. mitigating climate change are not necessarily based on ›species thinking‹, but often rather reflect specific national contexts and interests. Such inherent contradictions and ambivalences concerning the global and the national can also be seen in many portrayals of the Vault. Establishment and operation of the Vault itself are based on an international initiative and managed jointly by the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (a cooperation between Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international organization founded by among others the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and financed by a huge variety of donors from around the world. The Vault is supposed to enhance food security worldwide and deposits can be made free of charge, thus making differences between nations with regard to financial capacities irrelevant and helping in particular developing countries to secure the genetic diversity of their food crops. The Vault could thus be interpreted as a manifestation of truly global, Anthropocenic ›species thinking‹. Yet despite all this, the Vault is commonly described as though it was a solely Norwegian institution – »the Norwegian government’s farsighted gift to the world«, as US nature writer Diane Ackerman calls it (2014: 155). This is also how it is represented in Nygårdshaug’s novel. The text’s central character is a zoologist called Karl Yver Lyngvin, who originally is from Norway, and the reader is told about the Vault that it is »an institution, which Karl Yver Lyngvin – as a Norwegian – of course was extremely proud of«10 (Nygårdshaug 2011: 82). Such national pride concerning the Vault is also clearly discernible in Hermansen’s book. Hermansen calls the Vault »the world’s most important room«11 (2013: 155). He states that huge international attention is desirable from a Norwegian point of view and calls the Vault an »important and positive ›trademark‹«12 for Norway (139). According to him, when the idea for the Vault came up, it had been obvious »that Norway should take up a natural role as a leader«13 (126) in the project, and that »the Vault fitted well in as part of Norway’s longstanding commitment precisely to contribute to international cooperation for biological diversity«14 (126).

10 »Et foretak som Karl Iver Lyngvin – som nordmann – selvfølgelig var svært stolt av«. 11 »Verdens viktigste rom«. 12 »En viktig og positiv ›merkevare‹«. 13 »At Norge burde innta en naturlig lederrolle«. 14 »Passet hvelvet fint inn som en del av Norges mangeårige engasjement nettopp for å bidra til internasjonalt samarbeid for biologisk mangfold«.

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The background of such statements is formed by the dominant conception of Norwegian national identity. Besides a national self-image as one of the world’s most democratic and egalitarian countries, the view that Norway, as a small country without a colonialist past, can – and should – take over an exceptional international responsibility through altruistically supporting peace, democracy and human rights worldwide has been advocated since at least the end of the Second World War (NOU 2003: 51-52). Norway was one of the United Nations’ founding members in 1945 and has ever since been one of their most important financial contributors (Leira 2007: 20). The idea of Norway as a nation of peace is even older, as it traces back to ›national hero‹ Fridtjof Nansen’s commitment to refugee and famine relief after the First World War (Leira 2007: 11). The Nobel Peace Prize, annually awarded in Oslo since 1901, contributes further to an image of Norway as an international promoter of peace. In the 1990s, this image was reinforced through Norwegian mediation between Palestinians and Israel in the so called Oslo Accords (Eriksen et al. 2003: 449). The Norwegian state is also acting as a supporter of poor countries and as a global promoter of human rights (Leira 2007: 16). Norwegian development aid started in the 1950s and was expanded considerably in the following years, so that Norway in relation to its GDP became one of the largest donor countries around 1980 (Furre 1993: 293). Besides material support, the promotion of democracy and human rights became the central task of Norwegian development aid from the 1990s on. Not only is the state active in this field, but also a large number of NGOs and volunteers, who raise considerable funds for these purposes (Tvedt 2010: 480). Development aid plays thus a far more central role in the Norwegian public than in those of other countries (Tvedt 2010: 482). The national self-image as an altruistic helper meets broad approval in the population and is supported by all political parties, with the exception of the right-wing populist Progress Party (Leira 2007: 17). Historian Terje Tvedt has coined the critically intended term »national regime of goodness« for this consensus between people, political parties and government (Tvedt 2010: 80). The »regime of goodness« is, however, not limited to peace facilitation and development aid, but manifests itself also in an image of Norway as forerunner of global environmental protection. This image arose at the latest when the former minister of the environment and then Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland chaired the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development from 1983 to 1987. As a consequence, Brundtland was – in Norway – called »the world’s minister of the environment«15 (Eriksen et al. 2003: 464). In

15 »Verdens miljøvernminister«.

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addition, Norway has since the 1990s been presenting itself internationally as a decided supporter of a strong global climate protection agreement. This commitment became during the 2000s explicitly linked to the conservation of rainforests and thus of global biodiversity: through the so called Climate and Forest Initiative, Norway provides several billion U.S. dollars as compensation for countries such as Brazil and Indonesia if these in return ensure the protection of rainforests on their state territories (Klima- og miljødepartementet 2014). This initiative is regarded as »an important part of the green and altruistic Norwegian self-image« (Nilsen 2010: 54). It can therefore be said that taking over extraordinary humanitarian and environmental responsibility in a global context forms an integral part of what is understood as Norwegian national identity today. There has, however, also been put forth critique against this self-perception through pointing to where Norway draws the funds for its international involvement from: the extraction and export of fossil fuels. Oil and natural gas extraction on the Norwegian continental shelf started in 1971 in the North Sea, and within few years it became the country’s most important economic sector (Furre 1993: 351). Via ownership of the undersea resources and through the state-owned oil company Statoil, the Norwegian state ensured that it received the bulk of the revenues, which soon constituted an important part of the national budget (Furre 1993: 360). In 2009, more than 50 per cent of Norwegian export earnings came from the petroleum sector and about 15 per cent of all jobs in Norway were directly or indirectly bound to it (Schiefloe 2010: 3435). Already in the 1970s, however, environmentalists criticized the Norwegian oil industry, who they said was badly prepared for possible accidents and endangered marine ecosystems (Berntsen 2011: 259). Yet despite higher environmental risks in colder waters, oil well drilling north from 62 degrees North latitude was permitted in 1980 (Furre 1993: 357). Today, Norwegian petroleum production is still expanding northwards. Natural gas production and the search for oil as far north as the Arctic Barents Sea have been initiated in recent years (Berntsen 2011: 329). Environmental NGOs in Norway fear that an oil spill in Arctic waters would damage the marine ecosystems there irreparably. Moreover, Statoil is increasingly criticized for its activities abroad, which are not subject to Norwegian environmental standards. An example is the mining of tar sands in Canada, which is considered to be the most environmentally harmful way of petroleum production (Curtis 2010: 17). In view of anthropogenic climate change and its predicted consequences, parts of the Norwegian environmental movement even doubt the country’s right to continued petroleum and natural gas production in general.

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Often, a contradiction between a fossil fuel economy on the one hand, contributing directly and indirectly considerably to global warming, and the Norwegian selfimage of altruism and global environmental commitment on the other hand is pointed out. Concerns have been uttered that Norway’s current material affluence and the social changes it has brought with it – such as a very high level of consumption – might endanger national identity. Eriksen et al. (2003: 476), for example, write that the oil wealth is »an embarrassing defeat for the Norwegian selfimage of careful modesty, of the belief that we are more reasonable than others.«16 Yet the authors also assume that this wealth in turn increases a felt need to help less privileged people in order to not be perceived as corrupted by material affluence (436). Such a need for national self-affirmation is discernible also as the background of both Nygårdshaug’s and Hermansen’s depictions of the Vault as a particularly important manifestation of Norwegian altruism and environmental commitment. Hermansen endorses the Norwegian »regime of goodness” when he – in response to conspiracy theorists who claim that Norway has evil secret plans for the seeds inside the Vault – writes that »maybe it simply appears to be too good to be true that a state can behave future-oriented and altruistic, for the best of humankind?«17 (139). He emphasizes that the Vault is especially important for poor countries who themselves lack the resources for proper gene banking and thus profit enormously from being allowed to store crop seeds inside the Vault free of charge (129). That Norway’s fossil fuel based economy contributes considerably to global warming – one of the main threats to agriculture particularly in those countries the Vault is especially supposed to help to increase food security – is mentioned in neither Hermansen’s nor Nygårdshaug’s works; nor is the risk that Norwegian oil drilling might pose to the Arctic environment, among others in the Barents Sea very close to Svalbard itself. Instead, the Vault serves in both texts as the ultimate confirmation of Norwegian ›goodness‹ and altruistic ›species thinking‹. It is thus also used implicitly as a means of denying any specifically Norwegian responsibility for global warming and other problematic aspects of the Anthropocene that arise from the use of fossil fuels and from the high consumption rates of the wealthiest part of the human species. It can therefore be said that the Vault – as it is represented

16 »Et pinlig nederlag for det norske selvbildet av forsiktig nøysomhet, for troen på at vi er fornuftigere enn andre.« 17 »Kanskje virker det rett og slett for godt til å være sant at en stat kan opptre framtidsrettet og altruistisk, til menneskehetens beste?«

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in these texts – is used in order to reconcile the antagonisms of Anthropocenic ›species thinking‹ and nationalism, and to deflect attention from the contradictions between both.

C ONCLUSION Essentially, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is an Arctic archive that contributes to the conservation of crop seeds’ genetic variety. Yet in the media as well as in fictional and non-fictional portrayals, it becomes much more than that: an outstanding symbolic and material representation of the Anthropocene and of all the implications and inherent contradictions that this concept of a new geological era brought about by human activities comprises. The Vault is used in order to restore an image of the Arctic in general and of Svalbard in particular as pre-Anthropocenic, as being unaffected by human civilization and by detrimental environmental change. The Vault’s mixture of ›natural‹ and ›cultural‹ characteristics can be interpreted as an expression of the Anthropocenic indistinguishability of human culture and non-human nature, and in the analyzed texts, the Vault even serves as a motif that reconciles apparently antagonistic positions in environmental ethics, such as anthropocentrism and biocentrism. Anxieties about a possible global environmental catastrophe and the technological optimism characteristic for notions of a so-called ›good Anthropocene‹ are likewise reconciled in many portrayals of the Vault. Finally, the global ›species thinking‹ that the Anthropocene concept is supposed to encourage is brought together with a specifically Norwegian form of nationalism that at the same time facilitates and legitimates a continuation of business-as-usual concerning the use of fossil fuels and the maintaining of high levels of material consumption – and thus of human practices that are not only responsible for problematic environmental changes, but that even counteract the Vault’s purpose of increasing food security on a global level. The contradictions and ambivalences inherent to the Anthropocene concept are thus bundled and intensified in the analyzed representations of the Vault, which may justify positing it as an especially significant materialization of the new geological epoch. This is also the case in a 2010 episode of the US animated science fiction series Futurama, which is set in the 31st century. In this series’ 101st episode, titled »The Futurama Holiday Spectacular«, it is Christmas and one of the characters sorely misses a pine tree for the celebration. The problem is, however, that pine trees have been extinct for more than 800 years. Yet as the Professor – a mad scientist and one of Futurama’s main characters – explains: »There is one hope – and as

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usual, it’s Norwegian!« (TC: 00.02.41). Consequently, the crew travels to Svalbard in order to obtain pine tree seeds from the Vault. Yet these turn out to be contaminated through germs from the nearby Germ Warfare Repository. This causes the pine trees to grow and spread at an extremely rapid rate until they cover the entire Earth. Though this at first seems to return the planet to a pleasantly green, wildlife-filled state, it soon turns out that the trees’ uncontrolled growth produces too much oxygen in the atmosphere. When robot Bender lights a cigar, it therefore ignites the air and burns the entire planet. Through its parodic approach, the episode highlights thus many of the inherent contradictions and problematic ambivalences on which the notion of the Vault as an Arctic archive with an extraordinary significance for the Anthropocene is based.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Ackerman, Diane (2014): The Human Age. The World Shaped by Us, New York/London. Almond, Steve (2013): »The Apocalypse Market Is Booming«, in: The New York Times Magazine 27.09.13, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/magazine/the-apocalypse-market-is-booming.html, accessed online May 2019. Asafu-Adjaye, John, et al. (2015): An Ecomodernist Manifesto, http://www.ecomodernism.org/s/An-Ecomodernist-Manifesto.pdf, accessed online May 2019. Berntsen, Bredo (2011): Grønne linjer. Natur- og miljøvernets historie i Norge, Oslo. Buell, Lawrence (1995): The Environmental Imagination. Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Cambridge, Mass. Carrington, Damian (2013): »Starved polar bear perished due to record sea-ice melt, says expert«, in: The Guardian 06.08.13, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/06/starved-polar-bear-record-sea-ice-melt, accessed online May 2019. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2009): The Climate of History: Four Theses, in: Critical Inquiry 35, pp. 197-222. Christensen, Miyase/ Nilsson, Annika E./ Wormbs, Nina (2013): »Changing Arctic – Changing World«, in: Miyase Christensen/Annika E. Nilsson/Nina Wormbs (eds.): Media and the Politics of Arctic Climate Change, Basingstoke, pp. 157-171.

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Clark, Timothy (2014): »Nature, Post Nature«, in: Louise H. Westling (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge, pp. 7589. Cone, Marla (2005): Silent Snow. The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic, New York. Crop Trust (2016): Svalbard Global Seed Vault, https://www.croptrust.org/whatwe-do/svalbard-global-seed-vault/, accessed online May 2019. Crutzen, Paul J.; Stoermer, Eugene F. (2000): »The ›Anthropocene‹«, in: Global Change Newsletter 41 (May), pp. 17-18. Curtis, Mark (2010): Doublethink: The Two Faces of Norway’s Foreign and Development Policy, Oslo. Ellis, Erle (2011): »The Planet of No Return. Human Resilience on an Artificial Earth«, in: Breakthrough Journal 2, http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/the-planet-of-no-return, accessed online May 2019. Eriksen, Trond Berg; Hompland, Andreas; Tjønneland, Eivind (2003): Et lite land i verden. 1950-2000, Oslo (= Norsk idéhistorie 6). Fowler, Cary (2008a): »The Svalbard Global Seed Vault and Crop Security«, in: BioScience 58.3, pp. 190-191. — (2008b): The Svalbard Global Seed Vault: Securing the Future of Agriculture, http://www.croptrust.org/documents/Svalbard%20opening/New%20EMBAR GOED-Global%20Crop%20Diversity%20Trust%20Svalbard%20Paper.pdf, accessed online May 2019. Furre, Berge (1993): Norsk historie 1905-1990. Vårt hundreår, Oslo. Goodall, Jane (2014): Seeds of Hope. Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants, New York. Henningsen, Thomas/Römmelt, Bernd (2011): The Arctic. Treasure of the North, Munich. Hermansen, Pål (2013): Frø til verden. Svalbard globale frøhvelv, Oslo. Killingsworth, Jimmie M./Palmer, Jacqueline S. (1996): »Millennial Ecology. The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming«, in: Carl George Herndl/Stuart C. Brown (eds.): Green Culture. Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, Madison, Wis., pp. 21-45. Klima- og miljødepartementet (2014): Klima- og skogsatsingen, https://www.regjeringen.no/nb/tema/klima-og-miljo/klima/klima--og-skogsatsingen/id2000712/, accessed online May 2019. Lamprecht, Bill (2006): »Arctic Vault is Designed to Save World’s Seeds«, in: St. Louis Post-Dispatch 19.06.2006.

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LeCain, Timothy James (2015): »Against the Anthropocene. A Neo-Materialist Perspective«, in: International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 3.1, pp. 1-28. Leira, Halvard (2007): Norske selvbilder og norsk utenrikspolitikk, Oslo. Malm, Andreas; Hornborg, Alf (2014): »The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative«, in: The Anthropocene Review 1.1, pp. 62-69. McGhee, Robert (2006): The Last Imaginary Place. A Human History of the Arctic World, Oxford. Mellgren, Doug (2006): »Norway to House Seeds in Doomsday Vault«, in: USA Today, 19 June, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2006-06-19norway-noah-seeds_x.htm, accessed online May 2019. Nilsen, Torbjørn Tumyr (2010): Landscape of Paradoxes. The Norwegian Climate and Forest Initiative, Master’s thesis, Senter for utvikling og miljø, Oslo. NOU - Norges offentlige utredninger (2003): Makt og demokrati. Sluttrapport fra Makt- og demokratiutredningen, Oslo. Nygårdshaug, Gert (2011): Chimera, Oslo. Næss, Arne (1973): »The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary«, in: Inquiry 16, pp. 95-100. Ott, Konrad (2010): Umweltethik zur Einführung, Hamburg. Peterson, Garry (2015): Svalbard Global Seed Vault, http://goodanthropocenes.net/2015/09/30/svalbard-global-seed-vault/, accessed online May 2019. Robins-Early, Nick (2015): »Syrian War Causes the Global Doomsday Seed Vault’s First Withdrawal«, in: Huffington Post 22.09.15, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/global-seed-vault-svalbardsyria_us_560152ebe4b00310edf87694, accessed online May 2019. Ryall, Anka/Schimanski, Johan/Wærp, Henning Howlid (2010): »Arctic Discourses: an Introduction«, in: Anka Ryall/Johan Schimanski/Henning Howlid Wærp (eds.): Arctic discourses, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, pp. ix-xxi. Sarkar, Sahotra (2012): Environmental Philosophy. From Theory to Practice. Chichester, West Sussex. Schiefloe, Per Morten (2010): »Oljelandet«, in: Ivar Frønes/Lise Kjølsrød (eds.): Det norske samfunn, Oslo, pp. 19-40. Schwägerl, Christian (2013): »Neurogeology: The Anthropocene’s Inspirational Power«, in: RCC Perspectives 3, pp. 29-37. Steffen, Will; et al. (2011): »The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives«, in: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369, pp. 842867.

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Tvedt, Terje (2010): »Det nasjonale godhetsregimet. Om utviklingshjelp, fredspolitikk og det norske samfunn«, in: Ivar Frønes and Lise Kjølsrød (eds.): Det norske samfunn, Oslo, pp. 479-503. UNDP (2015): Norway, http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/NOR, accessed online May 2019. van Dooren, Thom (2009): »Genetic Conservation in a Climate of Loss: Thinking with Val Plumwood«, in: Australian Humanities Review 46, pp. 103-112. Zalasiewicz, Jan; et al. (2008): »Are we now living in the Anthropocene?«, in: GSA Today 18.2 , pp. 4-8.

F ILMS The Age of Stupid (2009) (GB, D: Franny Armstrong) The Futurama Holiday Spectacular (2010), in: Futurama 6. (USA, D: Ray Claffey)

I CE – M ESSAGE ( S ) OF A M EMORY M EDIUM

From Prague to Greenland: Ice Memories in Libuše Moníková’s Novel Treibeis (Drift Ice) U LRIKE V EDDER

I CE : A RCHIVE

OR TRACELESSNESS ?

»The universe of musical art is a landscape of death. White deserts, ice, frozen rivers, creeks, lakes! Huge Arctic plates, transparent down to the bottom, not a single paw print of the predatory polar bear. Only the geometrically arranged cold. Dead straight penetrating frost lines. Dead silence. You can press all ten fingers against the snow for hours, and yet the ice will not show any mark of a print.« (Jelinek 1992: 101)1

This is what the pianist and composer Clara Schumann, protagonist of Elfriede Jelinek’s play Clara S., musical tragedy (1981), states. By doing so, she designs an arctic landscape, which is characterised as a »landscape of death«. This can be understood as a reference to a deadly threat, which exists in the shape of a »geometrically arranged cold«, an inhumane cold. At the same time, the Arctic is represented as a »landscape of tracelessness«: the ice doesn’t show any marks and therefore doesn’t retain any memory of those who had exposed themselves to it – you can press all ten fingers against it and the ice will bear no trace. A perfectly arranged yet unimpressible landscape of ice and death which will always remain traceless, which is »transparent down to the bottom«, without exposing the processes and operations, the projections and destructions, the inclusions and exclusions the icy, magnificent landscape is due to. Jelinek’s play draws a strong image about the destruction of female creativity in the world of musical

1

All translations by Margret Smith, Berlin.

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art, and about the abysses of the worship of genius2. In Jelinek’s plays, the frozen landscape is neither an ›empty area‹ – an area of ›white stains‹ which is undiscovered, innocent, and waiting to be discovered and appropriated (by heroic masculinity) – nor is it a »replete area« (an icy archive, which retains memories of the aforementioned conquests or other stories in the permafrost). Instead of using Arctic topoi like discovery/conquest and archive, Jelinek’s play rather alludes to topoi of tracelesness and lostness or disappearance respectively: it is the completion of self in an untouched landscape in which one can get lost – »lost in Greenland« (Moníková 1992: 216), as the protagonist in Libuše Moníková’s novel Drift Ice, and who in the end imagines getting lost between drifting icebergs and ice sheets. All the stories about people who disappear in the perpetual ice form a distinct archive in which the castaways are present, and each in their own way: they stand between the living and the dead, they are remembered, missing, wanted, they cannot be found and yet aren’t dead. In short, their relationship to the living is a »relationship of absence«, as Detlef Kremer remarked of Kafka’s novel Der Verschollene / The Man Who Disappeared (Kremer 1994: 239). In literary and cultural history, the ice and iciness have taken countless topical and metaphorical meanings of which some I would like to recall: Iciness is repeatedly seen as a metaphor for social isolation (think of Heinrich Heine’s Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen / Germany. A Winter’s Tale, 1844, but also of Wilhelm Müller’s and Franz Schubert’s Winterreise / Winter Journey, 1824/1827); it testifies, as does the coldness of heart, the incapability for romantic love and its discourses; it acts as a harbinger of death. The cold points to the representativeness of sublimity or heroic manliness which Inge Stephan has analysed in her essay on the ›cult of cold‹ in literature produced around 1900 (Stephan 2008). The hegemonic ambitions as well as the colonisation of so-called ›white spots‹ that come along with the imagery is, in the context of a gender perspective, literally overcoded. It is associated with the virile habitus of a »Cool Conduct«, which should ensure survival. Helmut Lethen has analysed the Cool Conduct (»Kältelehren«) as being a habitus of the New Objectivity of the 1920s and has, also in this context, elaborated paradox gender codings, or in short: the male subject needs to be cold from the inside, and, in order to survive, remain warm from the outside; warmer than the icy cold of his environment (Lethen 1994). The imagery of femininity is also ambiguous: femininity may on the one hand be attributed with »female warmth«, and yet on the other hand be represented by the figure of an ice queen, who reigns in a cold manner.

2

In the play, these abysses are defined by the appearance of the artists Robert Schumann und Gabriele d’Annunzio.

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A particular situation as well as a strong image – similar to that of the Arctic in Clara S. – we encounter in Elfriede Jelinek’s reprise of the Wilhelm Müller/Franz Schubert Winter Journey, a theatre play with the same title which was produced in 2011. The last scene of the play refers to the last song in the Müller/Schubert cycle, namely to the »Hurdy-Gurdy Man«, who stands on the ice with bare feet, having given up, and »lets it all go by, everything as it will.« In Jelinek’s play it is an old female writer, who, as it says, has been beneath the ice, »in the cold dark water for long already« (Jelinek 2011:125). It is not by chance that both plays are about female characters, about female artists. Ice, cold, and the Arctic are, as mentioned before, on the one hand always gender coded, and on the other hand, considering the perspective of archiving, associated with tradition and canonisation at the same time – a process which is extremely precarious for female artists. This is also shown in the figure of the elderly female author in Jelinek’s Winter Journey who is »beneath the ice«: she is not dead, nor is she frozen, but she continuous to speak. She is the one who sings about the memories of what the forgetful world doesn’t want to know – even if it is not audible at the surface of the water, as her counterpart in the text puts it: »You are already in dark water beneath the ice, [...] you are calling up from the bottom, from afar into the distance. But there is no one anymore.« (Jelinek 2011: 124f.). It is an image which again reflects the tension between the tracelessness and the memory which will both be the centre of my article. The figure appears as one who is lost beneath the ice, and of whom it is said »what you speak of, empty fare« (Jelinek 2011:127), yet she may possibly be heard subcutaneously. The dark water carries the acoustic noise; it forms a kind of undercurrent, an image for another tradition, »from afar, into the distance«. At the end, I will come back to this image.

A BOUT M ONÍKOVÁ ’ S W ORK Despite the cosmopolitan nature of Libuše Moníková’s works – from Greenland to Siberia and Japan – they mainly revolve around one place: Prague. Born there in 1945, Moníková left the city in 1971 to move to the Federal Republic of Germany and started publishing literary texts, which are written in German, and which often centre on traumatised characters who have faced violence and exile, but which also display a humorous writing, a rich intertextuality and a quality of writing which excels theoretically and aesthetically. At least two aspects should be pointed out here. In Moníková’s writings, topics like memory, archive, tradition, and the act of forgetting are of utmost importance. This is shown in her great novel The Facade

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(Die Fassade, 1987), in which memory and remembrance are materialised through the façade of a Bohemian castle which consists of thousands of cassettes with historical and mythological motives. These cassettes are being restored, which in the novel offers the possibility of depicting processes of remembrance, forgetting, and reinventions, and to mount elements from all kinds of knowledge systems, discourses and subjective remembrances. Spatial and textual order are in this context closely related. The parataxis of cassettes on the façade of the castle corresponds with the paratactical narration of the stories, motives and figures. The façade does not merely function as a projected area for restored, fictitious, and cited pictures and emblems, but also as a materialisation of the paratactic mode of narration which I will later demonstrate in the example of the Arctic drifting ice in Moníková’s Greenland-novel. Before that, however, I would like draw the attention to another point about Moníková’s writing which is important in this context. In her texts, topographies of cold and heat, such as ice deserts and sand deserts consistently play a role in the context of the memory topos. In her 1996 novel Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht), the female protagonist, who had emigrated from Prague following the Prague Spring, returns to her hometown in the early 90s. Yet she is a stranger; present and memory do not correspond. During a fever, a dream transports her into the scorching hot Valley of the Queens in the Arabian Desert in the form of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, whose traces of memory are extinguished immediately after her death. In the novel it says: »I already hear them sanding everything – the portraits on the walls, the statues, my obelisks, the inscriptions, my cartridges. The nephew is in a hurry.« (Moníková 1996: 120) All traces of the pharaoh are extinguished – but it is that very act which reinforces the memory of her; that is how Ingeborg Bachmann put it in her novel The Book of Franza (Das Buch Franza) which among others treats the obliteration of Hatshepsut: »he has forgotten that at the spot where he extinguished her, she remained.« (Bachmann 1995: 274) She is readable, because there is nothing left where she is supposed to be. The desert is therefore a site of awareness where the processes of extinction and those of reading/remembering take place – a site which is perfectly suited for projections and inscriptions, but also for disappearing or going missing, no matter if it consists of sand or ice. This is also shown in Moníková’s last novel The Stagger (Der Taumel), which has been published form her estate in 2000; Moníková died in Berlin in 1998. In the novel, the Arabic desert works as a counter image to the »dismal temperate zones of Central Europe«, in which the plot of the novel takes place, namely the Prague of the 1970s. It is also a counter image to the ›leaden time‹ of a so-called normalisation, and the spying, chicanery, and control which comes along with it, and which corresponds to the

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indifference and dreariness of the population. Sand and ice deserts are also shown as extreme places, which challenge the forgetful ›normalisation‹. The way in which the different connotations of ice, cold, desert and space etc. can be tied with concepts of archive and remembrance on the one hand, and the act of forgetting, and disappearance on the other, I will now describe in more detail using the example of Moníková’s novel Treibeis (Drift Ice).

D RIFT I CE The novel is about a Czech exile called Prantl who, after a stopover in England, ends up in Greenland where he works as an English teacher. Although he had as a soldier been decorated for his achievements against the German occupation, and although he, after 1945, had been an archivist for the Czech intelligence, Prantl has to leave Prague in 1948. When being asked upon his arrival in England if he had handed over information from the archive to the British intelligence service, he only laughs: »They already had everything!« (Moníková 1992: 179). The plot of the novel takes place in 1971 with Prantl standing in front of the class by the black board and explaining Elizabethan Theatre to them. The first three sentences already revolve around memory, its dangers, and its transformations: »In front of the blackboard of the school in Angmagssalik, East Greenland, hangs a large picture of the Swan Arene in London, a simplified copy of the drawing, which Arend van Buchel has produced after the original sketch made by Johannes de Witt in 1596. The Chinese whispers of the copyists of the past centuries have generated their latest version: a hypertrophic stage [...], which forges into the room at the cost of everything that doesn’t play. It seems not to accept any spectators; in case some accidentally [...] find themselves in the room, they would be absorbed by the happenings in the centre, and would be left back at the periphery, crushed and exsanguinous, crammed into the tier of the gallery, exhausted by the spectacle.« (Moníková 1992: 5)

The London Swan Arene (which has repeatedly been the setting of the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s famous Globe Theatre) symbolises a mnemonic theatre; mnemonic techniques which have been applied during the Renaissance especially, but also in the construction of the Globe Theatre.3 Therefore, right in the begin-

3

See the two chapters »Renaissance Memory: The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo« and »Fludd’s Memory Theatre and the Globe Theatre« in Yates (1996).

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ning of the text, an institution, or a strategy of the memory respectively, is mentioned, which will be followed by others in large numbers: archive, museum, memory-games, and so on. Furthermore, these first lines draw an image of a dangerous relationship between a dominant centre and a ›crashed‹ periphery. It is not least the archive of European literary history we are dealing with as the text alludes to Shakespeare’s Theatre as much as – as you see at the end of the quotation – Franz Kafka’s narrative in Up in the Gallery (Auf der Galerie). After all, the first lines of the novel mention the numerous transformations that remembrance, memory, tradition and archive are subject to. Contrary to the claim that, according to Freudian psychoanalysis, nothing is ever lost in the memory, although the remembrance does not simply recite past events but rather reconstructs them on an even bigger scale than we are aware of, it is what Moníková calls the »Chinese whisper of the scribes« who do convey information, yet also distort, falsify, and fabricate in a way which results in the constant emergence and revision of documents, which gradually transform the cultural archive they are stored in. In the school scene, this process is continued when the drawings of the London Theatre by the Inuit students rather resemble an »oversized Igloo« (Moníková 1992: 6). You can accordingly see that remembrance, memory, tradition and archive are referring to each other, yet at the same time have to be distinguished. The disparateness displayed in the sceneries of mnemonic techniques and cultural tradition ties the novel to the Arctic ice; not as solid material, as perpetual pack-ice or permafrost, but rather with all its transformation, its cracks, and its mobility: while Prantl lectures about the manifold Elizabethan theatre scenes, about confusing traditions, wrong location plans and faulty copies, in a far too detailed manner, he has the edges of drifting icebergs before his eyes: »Through the window Prantl sees a 20 meter tall iceberg with a jagged surface and sharp edges, gleaming greenish in the sun, and being followed by a smaller one which is snow-white« (Moníková 1992: 13). Following a colleague's complaint that the students couldn’t relate to the subject matter, Prantl responds that »if they are overflown with bombs without being asked, the may also learn what theatres were built of in the past.« (Moníková 1992: 9) Prantl thereby refers to the crash of a B-52 bomber, which was carrying four hydrogen bombs, in January 1968 at Thule, the Greenland base of the US Air Force. The radioactive contamination of the environmental and radiation damage, especially among unaware Greenlandic helpers, were covered up. It was not until almost 30 years later (in 1995) when the Danish public learned of »Project Crested

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Ice«, during which 5,000 US-soldiers removed 9,000 cubic meters of snow. In Moníková’s novel, which was published three years before the revelations, it says that: »Prantl remembers the night in January three years ago, when in the midst of a darkness which was lasting for months, the sky was aflame, ablaze with light, and when the blazing wreckage parts were marking the Dundas skyline. Before they could be recovered far out in the Baylot-Sound and near the Wolstenholme island, the heavy parts had melted deeply into the ice and were thus not retrievable.« (Moníková 1992: 20)

The inaccessibility of the ›non-traceable‹ wrack corresponds with the act of forgetting and repression of the accident and its aftermath. It evokes the image of an icy archive, whose materials and contents do not perish but yet aren’t accessible. This image is also valid for Prantl’s own life story. At one point it says: «He has put his own memories on ice for 20 years, into the deep continental ice of Greenland.« (Moníková 1992: 190) To archive memories means to keep them and to shed them at the same time. This logic shows that exile can be depicted with the image of ice and glacification – but I will come back to that later on. Moníková’s novel, however, is not interested in static images and fixed metaphors, but in the momentous instant in which the ice begins to move. This happens first at the level of the plot, but also on the representative level of the strong imagery associated with the Arctic ice, on the level of the mnemonic topoi, and on the level of the written form of the novel. At the plot level, Prantl is forced to attend a teacher‘s conference in Austria. He initially resists: »I do not want to go to Europe, I have not been there in seven years, it isn’t necessary.« (Moníková 1992: 26) He doesn’t want to move from the edge of Europe to its centre, from the periphery to the middle. When he leaves after all, he meets Karla, an exiled Czech, and during the summer of the same year 1971 they travel together towards Italy. Both meander through their memories and stories, through narrated times and spaces, myths, films and museums. On the way, they consequently lose sight of their destination: Italy. Prague becomes a new destination: the lost place that the text is heading to without ever reaching it. The Prague in the text is an imaginary city which can only be reached in a respective remembrance – but the remembrances don’t conform because they refer to different historical points in time, before 1948 or the late 1960s respectively: »They reach a point where each pictures a different country which they call Czechoslovakia, and with a crooked mouth even ›home‹« (Moníková 1992: 215). What from the East Greenland perspective was called »Europe«, seemed to, as seen from the edges, have definite contours. But the closer one gets, the further,

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the less visible it becomes. In the novel The Facade, the question »Europe, what is it?« can only be answered from a geological point of view: a »tectonic plate«, »extremely stable« (Moníková 1987: 257). But even this stability is no longer permitted in the novel Drift Ice – everything is off-centre. The text and its topography, its narration and the characters, are marked by borders and edges: drifting icebergs that don’t assemble to one panoramatic landscape; torn scraps of a film which don’t form a story; two homeless protagonists, who have found no history, two homeless protagonists of whom Karla says: »There is only us left and we aren’t much good. A stuntwoman who has resigned… [...] And a crippled teacher, lost in Greenland.« (Moníková 1992: 216) At the same time, when their exuberant stories and traumatic memories interrupt and drift apart aimlessly, the conversation, which moves in circles, moves along those borders and edges. In this respect, the title of the novel alludes to its mode of narration, and therefore the drifting ice itself can be called a memorial figure, which refuses the notion of an orderly remembrance, of archives, which are on hand, and of an encyclopaedic memory. These are replaced with drifting ice, which is characterised by a complex and moving, but also brittle and highly dangerous, remembering and telling, which on the one hand preserves and hands on information (and corresponds with the imagery of an Arctic archive), but on the other hand gives an account of subjects getting lost and at the same time furthers their disappearance. The novel stages this tension over and over again. In the first part, when Prantl is still in Greenland, it says: »A kayak among icebergs makes its way through the drifting ice. This may possibly be the reason why he lives here – the contradiction which is yet so coherent: alongside the big ships, the kayaks and umiaks have no chance of getting as close to the ice chunks.« (Moníková 1992: 38)

Prantl observes the drifting ice continuously: »The iceberg crackles and rustles, moves; the Inuit say it is speaking to them. It often makes sudden moves, tilts over and takes along the boat.« (Moníková 1992: 87) Finally, at the end of the novel, in Austria, Prantl envisions one last ride on a kayak into the drifting ice. Having played one last game with Karla, he collects the cards of the Greenland-memory game: »The last pair, two icebergs – he places them next to each other so that they form a passage, just suitable for a kayak. He can hear the crackling of the ice, the murmur of the steep walls, which eventually form a roof above his head and which, in a moment of breathlessness, darken the sky. [...] The icebergs begin to rock, the ice sheets start to move, slide on top of

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each other, crack with a thundering sound and obstruct the passage. The kayak glides, it is still able to move, it is sucked into the vortex of seething ice water.« (Moníková 1992: 207 ff.)

The imagination ends with a picture in which the kayak collides with the drifting ice and sinks. Again, we are confronted with a protagonist who – as in Elfriede Jelinek’s Winter Journey – is »already in the dark water beneath the ice« and from there articulates difficult memories of the history of violence of the 20th century in Europe. This is the position of him, who has stored the subjective and collective traumatic experiences of the Arctic ice which he can neither forget nor put to rest by reminiscing and thus coming to terms with them. Notwithstanding the all too smooth image of records of the 20th century which are archived in the perpetual ice, in Moníková’s novel the ice is broken and is set in motion in the shape of loosely drifting ice masses. While the Arctic icebergs, as it says in the novel, »circle the earth in accordance with Wegener’s continental drift« (Moníková 1992: 209), the protagonist heads towards a dangerous confrontation of centre and periphery, as I have previously shown in the example of the image of the Swan Arene. This does not lead to the reconstruction of fragmented memories into an overall picture or to the regeneration of the inwardly paralysed subjects. However, what is created is a complex narrative, which puts the Arctic into a tense relationship with various topoi of memory and cold: on the one hand the mnemonic theatre, the memory-game, the archive, the museum, that is, institutions and strategies of the memory which are associated with a dialectic between preservation and oblivion, and on the other hand a paralysation caused by a trauma, the suspended life in exile, the theories of ›cool conduct‹ and their own concept of a survival in the ice. Interestingly, this complex narrative is put into perspective by a protagonist, who is characterised as »lost in Greenland«. This opens up the narration to a wide range of meanings which span from the radical disappearance in terms of a protagonist’s suicidal disappearance in the ice – which happens in his own imagination – up to a life on the periphery of civilisation; the polar exile, which, from the point-of-view of the cultural Continental European centre, appears to be neglected and forgotten.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Bachmann, Ingeborg (1995): Das Buch Franza, in: Robert Pichl/Monika Albrecht/Dirk Göttsche (ed.): »Todesarten«-Projekt, vol. 3, München/Zürich. Jelinek, Elfriede (1992): »Clara S., musikalische Tragödie«, in: Jelinek: Theaterstücke, Reinbek, pp. 63-101. — (2011): Winterreise. Ein Theaterstück, Reinbek. Kremer, Detlef (1994): »Verschollen. Gegenwärtig. Franz Kafkas Roman ›Der Verschollene‹«, in: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.): Sonderband Franz Kafka (=Text und Kritik), München, pp. 238-253. Lethen, Helmut (1994): Verhaltenslehren der Kälte. Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen, Frankfurt a.M. Moníková, Libuše (1987): Die Fassade. M.N.O.P.Q. Roman, München/Wien. — (1992): Treibeis. Roman, München/Wien. — (1996): Verklärte Nacht. Roman, München/Wien. Stephan, Inge (2008): »Eisige Helden. Kältekult und Männlichkeit in den Polarphantasien von Georg Heym«, in: Ulrike Brunotte/Rainer Herrn (eds.): Männlichkeiten und Moderne. Geschlecht in den Wissenskulturen um 1900, Bielefeld, pp. 271-285. Yates, Frances A. (1996): The Art of Memory, London.

Myth of Preservation: Images of Ice, Snow and Glaciers as Metaphors for Memory in PostHolocaust Literature and Art (Sebald, Celan, Bałka) A SAKO M IYAZAKI

I NTRODUCTION »Zuerst sagt mir der Name gar nichts. Kalisch. Er ist wie eine Speise, die man aus dem Gefrierfach nimmt, geruch- und geschmacklos. Beim Auftauen geht dann ein leichtes Aroma davon aus. Von ganz weit her probier ich ihn, abschmeckend. Weil er gefroren war und jetzt wieder auftaut, hat er den Geruch des Februarwinds von 1945 bewahrt, als uns alles gelang.«1 (Klüger 1994: 181-182)

Assmann points out that this image of melting and smelling is similar to the famous description of memory in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time where the smell of a madeleine triggers a remembrance (Assmann 1999: 168). In Proust’s novel, the protagonist doesn’t immediately recognize which of his memories is related to the smell and tries to find out. Proust’s narrator then compares the consequent process of remembering with an anchor coming up from the bottom of the

1

»At first, the name meant nothing to me. Kalisch. It is like a dish which you take out of a freezer – without smell and taste. When it defrosts, an aroma drifts slightly. I try to taste it, from a distance. Because it was frozen and comes up again now, it has the smell of the February wind in 1945 as we succeeded in everything.«

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water to the surface. Assmann categorizes this image into the metaphor group »Ausgraben« (digging up) (Assmann 1999: 163). The metaphors of freezing and melting as well as sinking and coming up to the surface suggest an illusory notion of memory that forgotten information can be preserved and found. Assmann refers to Friedrich Georg Jünger’s concept of »Verwahrensvergessen« (preserving forgetting), which occurs without our perception, as does the type of memory suggested by these metaphors. According to Jünger, not only knowledge, but also thought, perception and feelings can be preserved: »Wahrgenommenes, Gedachtes, Gewußtes wird verwahrt, dazu jede Willensregung, die ins Bewußtsein kommt, Gefühl und Empfindung also.«2 (Jünger 1957: 19)

While Assmann treats Jünger’s concept in connection to her own concept of »Speichergedächtnis« (storage memory) (Assmann 1999: 161), I would like to emphasize the mythical dimension of the concept of preservation more critically. Jünger describes the dynamism of remembrance as a returning of preserved information (Jünger 1957: 18, 23). However, the notion that the information was preserved is constructed after it is remembered. This post facto construction doesn’t guarantee that the remembered information will be identical with its source in the past. This is what Jünger ignores. The concept of memory as something preserved is based on a myth of authenticity. In the case of a memory of one’s own experiences (from one’s childhood, for example), its character as a retrospective construction seems to be more apparent. As contemporary memory studies postulate, memories are deformed and changed. They are constructed under the influence of the context in which they are remembered. In literature and art, images of ice, snow or glaciers appear as metaphors for illusory notions of memory such as this. These images are connected to the desire to preserve the past, what has been lost, or something transitory like one’s childhood or a lost love. However, in the post-Holocaust context, such motifs are confronted with complex problems: On the social level, there is a strong ethical coercion not to forget the Holocaust (Weinrich 2000: 228-256). On the personal level, survivors of that generation face the possibility of trauma and also might desire to forget or suppress memories. When it comes to transmitting traumatic memories to others, especially beyond generations, the notion of the preservation of memories can be criticized and shown to be impossible. How is this conflict, or the crisis

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»What is perceived, thought, known is preserved, also every movement of one’s will that comes to the consciousness, feeling and emotion.«

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of the notion of preserved memories, represented in literature and art in the postHolocaust context? Since images of ice, snow or glaciers appear as metaphors for the illusory notion of memory preservation, its crisis is also signaled in these figures. In the following paper, I will show examples where these figures indicate situations where the notion of preserved memory is shaped by tensions, conflicts and contradictions.

L OST C HILDHOOD F OUND : T HE I MAGE H OARD IN S EBALD ’ S A USTERLITZ

OF THE

S QUIRREL

»Aber wenn alles weiß sein wird, wie wissen dann die Eichhörnchen, wo sie ihren Vorrat verborgen haben? Ale když všechno zakryje sníh, jak veverky najdou to místo, kde so schovaly zásoby?«3 (Sebald 2003: 295)

In W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, an image of a squirrel »hoard« under the snow is overlapped with the childhood of Austerlitz, the protagonist. For more than fifty years he suppressed the fact that he spent his first five years in Prague before being raised in Wales by his adoptive parents. He was actually one of the children who were sent to England with the »Kindertransport« mission in 1938 and 1939 to escape persecution by the Nazis. His discovery of this past is triggered by his mental problems and also by a series of coincidences. Austerlitz tells the narrator about this story in detail and also about his search for traces of his parents. The narrator describes in German what Austerlitz told him in French and English. In this sense, the narrator plays the role of a reporter and a translator. The narrator and Austerlitz meet many times beginning with their first encounter in 1967 in Antwerp, when they were both on a trip, and later in England where both live as immigrants. A particularly long section of the text is dedicated to reporting what Austerlitz told the narrator when the narrator visited his home in London in 1997. According to this section, it was in 1992 that Austerlitz noticed that he had forgotten his origins in Prague: In the Liverpool Street Station in London, he »saw« an image of a child arriving there and of a couple waiting for the child. He noticed that it was an image of him and his adoptive parents on the day of his arrival. Then he heard about a ship named »Prague« on the radio in an antique shop by chance, and felt that this had to do with his own past. In the narration

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»But if it’s all white, how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard?« Translation by Anthea Bell (2001: 204).

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about this story, the notion of preserved memory seems to be reproduced. However, in the process of remembering, the past is transformed into fragmentary objects that can be seen, heard, and finally investigated. While he may actually have been the person arriving there in 1938, in the present he occupies the position of a witness of his own remembered scenes. The image of the boy he »saw« from an external perspective is an image he had never seen before. In this sense, his act of remembering creates new images in such a way that they seem as if they were not new. The next spring, in 1993, Austerlitz visits Prague to investigate his and his parents’ past. To begin with, he gets the address of the apartment where he lived with his real parents in the 1930s from the state archive in Prague. He went there and met an old neighbor, Věra, who turns out to have been a friend of his mother Agáta, an actress, and cared for him often as a nurse. During his five days in Prague, he visits Věra four times. Although Věra’s memory must have been deformed and (re-)constructed under the influence of the present situation, what she says appears as a repository of Austerlitz’s past, because it is the only information which he can rely on, as J. J. Long points out (Long 2007: 161-162). The conversations with Věra bring up further memories and amplify the illusory notion that the memories were preserved somewhere and found again. However, the unreliable dimensions of memory are also noticeable in the narration. As I mentioned above, the narrator allegedly reports and translates what Austerlitz said. In addition, he interpolates some of the photographs Austerlitz gave him (Sebald 2003: 15) into the narration he relates. In this way, the narrator insists on the authenticity of the setting that he is reporting and retelling. He emphasizes this by using the phrase »Austerlitz said« frequently. His excessive desire for a realistic setting and his claim that his reports of events are accurate reveal contradictions. For example, in the passage where the question about the squirrel hoard appears, the »very words« of Austerlitz as a child are presented and then repeated also in Czech. »Und dann erzählte mir Věra, sagte Austerlitz, wie wir im Herbst oft von der oberen Umgrenzungsmauer des Schönborngartens dem Eichhörnchen zugesehen hätten beim Vergraben ihrer Schätze. Immer, wenn wir danach wieder nach Hause kamen, mußte ich dir, […], vorlesen aus deinem Lieblingsbuch, das vom Wechsel der Jahreszeiten handelte, sagte Věra […], und immer, wenn wir zu der Seite kamen, sagte Věra, sagte Austerlitz, auf der davon die Rede war, daß der Schnee durch das Gezweig der Bäume herabrieselt und bald den ganzen Waldboden bedeckt, hätte ich zu ihr aufgeblickt und gefragt: Aber wenn alles weiß sein wird, wie wissen dann die Eichhörnchen, wo sie ihren Vorrat verborgen haben? Ale když všechno zakryje sníh, jak veverky najdou to místo, kde so schovaly zásoby? Genau

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so, sagte Věra, habe die von mir immer wiederholte, stets von neuem mich beunruhigende Frage gelautet. Ja, wie wissen die Eichhörnchen das, und was wissen wir überhaupt, und wie erinnern wir uns, und was entdecken wir nicht am Ende?«4 (Sebald 2003: 295)

In this passage, we can see the fictional dimensions of memory as something preserved. According to what is said in this passage, the »very words« of Austerlitz as a child must actually have been repeated three times: They are repeated firstly by Věra in 1993, from a distance of almost sixty years, and secondly by Austerlitz in 1997 in the conversation with the narrator. Austerlitz argues that he understood what Věra said in Czech when he saw her again though he spoke mostly in French himself because Věra also speaks French, since she studied Romance philology in Prague in 1930s. Maybe he could understand what she said in Czech, but could he repeat the words in Czech literally? – He grew up in Wales, speaks Welsh, English and French at the level of a native speaker and seems to have had no connection with Czech for more than fifty years. It is worth doubting whether Austerlitz could really have repeated the »very words«. It is even more implausible that the narrator can repeat them. Although the narrator doesn’t reveal much information about his own biography, it is mentioned that he comes from Germany, is born around 1944, has lived in England since the 1970s and can speak French, but not so well. Austerlitz and the narrator spoke in French when they first met as travelers in Belgium, and later in English after Austerlitz reveals that he lives in England. There is no sign that the narrator can repeat the »very words« in Czech. Rob Kohn argues that the multilingual elements foreground the unreliability of the narrator (Kohn 2012). This is right, but the multilingual elements are not the only elements that throw doubt on the narrator’s claim that he is able to accurately repeat others’ words. Even if there were not the multilingual problem, the length and accuracy of the

4

»And then, said Austerlitz, Věra told me how in autumn we would often stand by the upper enclosure wall of the Schönborn Garden to watch the squirrels burying their treasures. Whenever we came home afterwards, I had to read aloud from your favorite book about the changing seasons, said Věra, […] and she added that I never tired of the winter pictures in particular, […] and Věra said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it’s all white, how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard? Ale když všechno zakryje sníh, jak veverky najdou to místo, kde so schovaly zásoby? Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end?« Translation by Anthea Bell (2001: 204).

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sentences about what Austerlitz said makes it appear doubtful that they could be memorized and repeated so perfectly. The narrator pretends to be a realistic reporter and reproduces the illusory notion of preserved memory. What he narrates reveals its own contradiction in a performative way. But what is originally said is impossible to know once it is mediated, like the squirrel hoard that has disappeared deeply under the snow.

A C ORPSE D ISCOVERED D R H ENRY S ELWYN

IN A

G LACIER

IN

S EBALD ’ S

While the image of squirrel hoard in Austerlitz symbolize the absence of the original and its persistent trace, an allegorical image of transformed traces is shown in Sebald’s short novel Dr Henry Selwyn, the first of the four texts in Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants). In the closing passages, the narrator finds a newspaper article reporting that the remains of an alpine guide, Johannes Naegeli, who went missing in 1914, were found after 72 years in the form of »a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots«. »[...] fielen meine Augen auf einen Bericht, aus dem hervorging, daß die Überreste der Leiche des seit dem Sommer 1914 als vermißt geltenden Berner Bergführers Johannes Naegeli nach 72 Jahren vom Oberaargletscher wieder zutage gebracht worden waren. – So also kehren sie wieder, die Toten. Manchmal nach mehr als sieben Jahrzehnten kommen sie heraus aus dem Eis und liegen am Rand der Moräne, ein Häufchen geschliffener Knochen und ein Paar genagelter Schuhe.«5 (Sebald 1994: 36-37)

These are the last sentences of the short novel, followed by a photograph of a newspaper article in which a photograph of a living man on a snow-covered mountain is printed. As many researchers point out, Hannes Veraguth among others, the figure of discovered remains refers to the short story Unverhofftes Wiedersehen (Unexpected reunion) (1811) by Johann Peter Hebel (Veraguth 2003: 38). In Hebel’s

5

»[…] my eye was caught by a report that said the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier, seventy-two years later. And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.« Translation by Michael Hulse (1996: 23)

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text, the body of a Swedish man who went missing in a mine eight days before his wedding is discovered after fifty years, preserved perfectly in vitriol water. The protagonist is a bride who stays single and doesn’t forget their love for fifty years. She is an old woman when she sees her dead fiancé again, and she promises the body that he won’t be alone in the grave for long. Here, the image of the preserved body corresponds to the notion of an unchanging love. In contrast to Hebel’s story, the return of the dead in Sebald’s text has a more indirect and contingent character. Firstly, the photo of an alpine guide is in the newspaper as a mediated image. It seems uncertain, whether this man in the photo whose back can only be seen could really be Naegeli who went missing in 1914.6 Secondly, the relationship between the narrator and the discovered body is indirect, unlike that of the engaged couple in Hebel’s story. He has never met Naegeli. He heard of him 16 years before from his neighbor Selwyn, who died soon after that. What does the narrator’s incidental encounter with the newspaper article

Illustration 4. (From The Emigrants)

6

For the reader, the mediation is doubled because the photo of the alpine guide is reproduced as a reproduction of a photo of the newspaper story (see Illustration 1). Although the content of the newspaper corresponds to the description in the text, the handwritten note and the date stamped on the top of the newspaper imply that the newspaper has been reproduced from a library or an archive. This contradicts the narrator’s explanation that he bought it in Zurich. Silke Horstkotte discusses this contradiction (Horstkotte 2009: 109).

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mean? Not only the personal relationship, but also the relationship among the narrated events is characterized by indirectness and contingency. Let us follow the story in order to compare the notions of memory in both texts from the aspect of indirectness. The narrator and his wife Clara move to Hingham, England, in 1970 because of the narrator’s job, and rent a room in a house called Prior’s Gate for eight months until Clara buys another house in the same town. During their stay, Henry Selwyn, the husband of the owner of Prior’s Gate, is visited by an old friend and decides to invite the narrator and his wife over to share the dinner. As Selwyn’s friend leads the conversation to Switzerland as their »common issue«, Selwyn talks about his experience in Bern: He spent a year in Bern as a graduate student after finishing his study of medicine at Cambridge in 1913. In Bern, he often went climbing with a mountain guide named Johannes Naegeli who was 65 years old at that time. Selwyn, in the beginning of his twenties, was fond of him and had such a good feeling in his company that he never experienced another of its type either before or after. In 1914, he had to leave Switzerland and go to war as an English soldier and Naegeli went missing. For him, the separation from Naegeli was more painful than from the Bernese woman who became his wife later. When he hears that Naegeli has probably fallen into the Aare glacier in the Alps, he feels as if he is »buried under snow and ice«. »Naegeli ist nämlich kurz nach der Kriegsmobilmachung auf dem Weg von der Oberaarhütte nach Oberaar verunglückt und seither verschollen. Es wird angenommen, daß er in eine Spalte des Aaregletschers gestürzt ist. Die Nachricht davon erhielt ich in einem der ersten Briefe, die mich als Kasernierten und Uniformierten erreichten, und verursachte in mir eine tiefe Depression, die fast zu meiner Dienstentlassung geführt hätte und während der mir war, als sei ich begraben unter Schnee und Eis.«7 (Sebald 1994: 24-25)

The image of a place »under snow and ice« rhetorically corresponds to more than just his »deep depression«. It also implies that for Selwyn the memory of Naegeli is both preserved and concealed. In the subsequent narration, it becomes clear that he is actually dominated by concealed memories.

7

»Not long after mobilization, Naegeli went missing on his way from the Oberaar cabin to Oberaar itself. It was assumed that he had fallen into a crevasse in the Aare glacier. The news reached me in one of the first letters I received when I was in uniform, living in barracks, and it plunged me into a deep depression that nearly led to my being discharged. It was as if I was buried under snow and ice.« Translation by Michael Hulse (1996: 15).

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After the narrator and Clara leave Prior’s Gate in May 1971, Selwyn visits them in their new house regularly to give them the vegetables he grows. When Clara is not there, Selwyn tells the narrator that he cannot stop remembering his experience of emigration in 1899: »Jahrzehntelang seien die Bilder von diesem Auszug aus seinem Gedächtnis verschwunden gewesen, aber in letzter Zeit, sagte er, melden sie sich wieder und kommen zurück.«8 (Sebald 1994: 31) According to his »Geständnis« (confession), which is reconstructed by the narrator, Selwyn left a village near Grodno in Lithuania with his family when he was seven, and was shipped to the USA but landed in London. During his life in England, Selwyn didn’t point out his background as an immigrant from Eastern Europe. Before starting his study of medicine, he changed his name from Hersch Seweryn to Henry Selwyn, which sounds more English. After the First World War, he got married to the woman from Bern. He concealed his »Herkunft« (origin) from her for a long time. Their relationship as a couple collapsed later, but he cannot say whether the concealment of his origins and the later revelation of his »Geheimnis« (secret) played a role. Selwyn commits suicide shortly after his »confession« in 1971. In the text, there is no explanation why the events happened or what caused them. It remains unknown why Selwyn’s family left Grodno in 1899,9 or why Selwyn cannot say anything about the Second World War and the following years even if he would like to. We could consider that an enormous number of people who were identified as Jews by the Nazi’s racist definition were deported to death camps, also from Grodno. But we cannot conclude whether this tragedy makes him silent. Moreover, the narrator’s past is spoken of only a little, indirectly and fragmentarily. The narrator and his wife may come from Switzerland, this can be assumed by their conversation at the supper with Selwyn and his friend. Why did

8

»For years the images of that exodus had been gone from his memory, but recently, he said, they had been returning once again and making their presence felt.« Translation by Michael Hulse (1996: 18-19).

9

According to Yannay Spitzer, the exodus of Jewish people from the Jewish dwelling areas in the Russian Empire was motivated both by economic reasons and pogroms beginning in 1881. There were yet few pogroms in the northern areas including Lithuania in the 1880s, in contrast to the southern areas. In his view, »the post-1881 migrants did not come from areas that had experienced pogroms […]« although the possibility cannot be ruled out that the pogroms in the south induced the migration from the north. (Spitzer 2014: 27)

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they leave Switzerland? Why do they live in England? The lack of such information prevents the narrated events from being able to be used to construct a dramatic correlation of events and causality in the story, in contrast to Hebel’s story. Fifteen years after Selwyn’s suicide, the narrator remembers him by chance, when he is on a train from Zurich to Lausanne, near Bern. »Doch haben, wie mir in zunehmendem Maße auffällt, gewisse Dinge so eine Art, wiederzukehren, unverhofft und unvermutet, oft nach einer sehr langen Zeit der Abwesenheit. Gegen Ende Juli 1986 hielt ich mich einige Tage in der Schweiz auf. Am Morgen des 23. fuhr ich mit der Bahn von Zürich nach Lausanne. Als der Zug, langsamer werdend, über die Aarebrücke nach Bern hineinrollte, ging mein Blick über die Stadt hinweg auf die Kette der Berge des Oberlands. Wie ich mich erinnere oder wie ich mir vielleicht jetzt nur einbilde, kam mir damals zum erstenmal seit langem wieder Dr. Selwyn in den Sinn.« 10 (Sebald 1994: 36)

It is remarkable that the narrator emphasizes that he remembered Selwyn by chance, completely »unexpectedly«. The location near Bern may have triggered the memory. But the narrator doesn’t reveal why he traveled there and whether his journey has something to do with his (supposed) origin in Switzerland. In addition, this event is followed by another unexpected remembrance: »Three quarters of an hour later« in the train, the narrator’s eyes fall on that article in the newspaper he bought in Zurich. How do both »unexpected« events – the narrator’s remembrance of Selwyn and his encounter with the newspaper article – relate to each other? It would be no surprise if the order were reversed – if the narrator found the article at first and this reminded him of Selwyn so that the first event caused the next. It could be more dramatic if it were Selwyn who finds Naegeli’s photo on the newspaper. It could even be a typical romantic story if Selwyn were female, and if their age difference were smaller. What is avoided is not just the construction of a causal relationship among the events in the story, but also the possibility of a teleological

10 »But certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence. In late July 1986 I was in Switzerland for a few days. On the morning of the 23rd I took the train from Zurich to Lausanne. As the train slowed to cross the Aare Bridge, approaching Berne, I gazed way beyond the city to the mountains of the Oberland. At that point, as I recall, or perhaps merely imagine, the memory of Dr Selwyn returned to me for the first time in a long while.« Translation by Michael Hulse (1996: 23)

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interpretation, which is in contrast to Hebel’s story in which the failed marriage leads to a »reunion« afterwards.11 In this text, the illusory notion of preserved memory is reproduced only when it comes to Selwyn’s remembrance of traumatic experiences like his emigration and farewell to Naegeli. The narrator takes a distance from the notion of the preservation of memory and also from making connections and giving meaning to the events. The discovered objects, a few bones and a pair of boots, cannot be put in any meaningful constellation. The person who concealed Naegeli’s memories in his mind – »under snow and ice« – is dead. Such concealed memories are characterized by radical indirectness and multiple mediation once their traces are revealed to others.

I MPOSSIBILITY OF T RANSMITTING THE E XPERIENCES THE D EAD IN P AUL C ELAN ’ S E IS , E DEN (I CE , E DEN )

OF

In Paul Celan’s poem Eis, Eden (Ice, Eden), written in 1960, ice also appears as a figure that isolates memories from their previous constellation. In this poem, the image of ice seems to symbolize the impossibility of accessing the memories of the dead. Based on the historical context, we can think about the Jews who died in the concentration camps, like Celan’s parents for example. Unlike the »postmemory« transmitted from survivors to the second generation, even if it is made up of a projection of the desires and needs of the second generation (Hirsch 2012: 39, 48), the transmission of the memories of the dead is characterized more radically in Celan’s text as an impossibility. Ice, Eden

Eis, Eden

There is a Land Lost,

Es ist ein Land Verloren,

Moon grows in the reeds,

da wächst ein Mond im Ried,

and this is frozen to death with us,

und das mit uns erfroren,

it glows around and sees.

es glüht umher und sieht.

11 Meyer-Sickendiek argues that Hebel’s »unexpected reunion« is a model of the remembrance of childhood found in Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Berlin Childhood around 1900). Benjamin characterizes remembrance of one’s own childhood as »Erlösung« (»redemption«) as a kind of an incidental rescue afterwards. (Meyer-Sickendiek 2010: 278, 324-326).

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It sees, for it has eyes,

Es sieht, denn es hat Augen,

That are bright earths.

die helle Erden sind.

The Night, the night, the alkalis.

Die Nacht, die Nacht, die Laugen.

It sees, the Eye-child.

Es sieht, das Augenkind.

It sees, it sees, we see,

Es sieht, es sieht, wir sehen,

I see you, you see.

ich sehe dich, du siehst.

The ice will rise, Before this hour is through.

Das Eis wird auferstehen, 12

ehe sich die Stunde schließt. (Celan 1996: 33)

The landscape of »a Land Lost« depicted in the first stanza is frozen. But its visual image is not clear: A moon is growing larger, something is burning and seeing in the night. A moon is not the moon that rotates around our planet. Is this moon an astral body? If not, does the word »moon« represent something else metaphorically? What is the relation between the »moon« and »bright earths« in plural? In the third stanza, we are confronted with the problem of how to imagine that the ice in question will rise. Considering that the German word »auferstehen« (in the English translation »rise«) is associated with the Resurrection of Christ, it seems that the verse speaks of a revival of the frozen dead in the consciousness of those who remember them. The poetic words aren’t connected with their referents in everyday life. It is apparent that none of the simple vocabulary words like »moon«, »earth«, »eye«, »ice« or »night« have the same referents that they do in everyday life. Therefore, it doesn’t make much sense to imagine what the »eye-child« must look like. It is a being that claims attention and revives itself in the consciousness of the living like a Christkind (Christ child), and this is why it is named as such. Guided by the image of freezing (in the first stanza) and the rising/reviving ice (in the third stanza), we can interpret the pronoun »it«, the subject of seeing and also called »Augenkind« (eye-child), as an abstract existence of uncountable

12 My own translation of Celan’s poem, guided by the translations of Michael Hamburger (1996: 177) and John Felstiner (2001: 155), but preferring the word-for-word meanings over the reproduction of the meter and rhyme in order to show my analysis clearly.

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anonymous dead people. »It sees« can be understood in the sense that the collective existence of the dead claims our attention, the attention of the living. »We see« indicates the moment when we notice and recognize their claim and their presence. When such a recognition occurs, as described in the last stanza, this situation can be seen as the revival of the ice in the sense that the dead returns to our consciousness. In this image, the figure of ice preserves the mere existence of the dead who claim their presence or their revival in the consciousness of living people. The contents of their memories appear inaccessible – the ice doesn’t melt and is still frozen even if it is in the process of rising/reviving. This inaccessibility is related to the fact that people were murdered as an anonymous collective in the concentration camps. Even if they are remembered as a group of victims, their individual memories cannot be transmitted. In this way, the image of ice symbolizes not only the presence of the dead but also the inaccessibility of individual memories. Moreover, the image of ice in this poem seems to also be connected to the unavailability of the habitual referents of the poetic words. As pointed out above, it is apparent that the words in this poem don’t refer to concrete objects as they would in an everyday context. In his essay about Celan’s long poem Engführung (Stretto), Peter Szondi emphasizes that the poem is neither a mimesis nor a representation, but becomes its own kind of autonomous reality (Szondi 1973: 52, 77). Szondi points out that some words in Stretto are so obscure that we should consider their obscureness instead of fixing their meanings (Szondi 1973: 90-91). According to Szondi, this has to do with Celan’s attempt to keep the death of the concentration camps from being poeticized. In Stretto, it’s not the referents of the words, but their relationships and constellations that lead to a kind of recreation of the world based on the reality of the poem. The new world in Stretto is called »Tausendkristall« (thousand crystal) and characterized by purity, that is, lack of a context (Szondi 1973: 7789). Winfried Menninghaus argues that the geological vocabularies that emerge in many poems by Celan and to which ice, snow, glacier and stone belong, not only signal the »crystal purity« of linguistic autonomy, but also refer to the hardship of the social (especially fascist) relationships (Menninghaus 1980: 113). Menninghaus sees that, in Celan’s poetry as a whole, the theme of the Holocaust overlaps with the image of the Fall of Man and the confusion of languages that is its consequence. In the scheme of the history of Salvation, overcoming the experience of fascism must lead to the restoration of a paradise where language functions not as arbitrary signs that are connected to their referents only habitually, but as »names« that embody their referents in the sense proposed by Walter Benjamin

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(Menninghaus 1980: 52, 55). In this aspect, Menninghaus sees Celan’s acceptance of Walter Benjamin’s notion of language as name. The movement to the restoration of a paradise embodied by an autonomous language order can also be seen in the poem Ice, Eden. From this viewpoint, »ice« followed by the word »Eden« has a similar sense of purity as the »thousand crystal« in Stretto as highlighted by Szondi and also shares the connotations that Menninghaus sees in the geological figures in many texts by Celan. At any rate, the figure of ice in Ice, Eden seems to refer to such a metapoetic dimension, so that not only memories but also the referents of the poetic words turn out to be unreachable. However, there are also differences among the poems. According to Szondi, the long poem Stretto doesn’t end simply with the creation of an autonomous order. After the verses about this order, the eighth section of the poem (»VIII. Partie«) fixes the historical context in describing the wall of a concentration camp and using the word »Hosianna«, a Hebrew word of prayer (Szondi 1973: 100101). In contrast, the much shorter poem Ice, Eden doesn’t contain any language that determines the historical context so concretely. While the eighth section of Stretto reveals that the word »Asche« (ash), which appears in the fifth section, is related to the death in the crematoriums, the word »die Laugen« (the alkali) in Ice, Eden has no sense of being directly connected to any certain historical context. In this poem, the intention to diffuse the referential function of words is dominant until the end. This intention is evidently detectable in the text’s generation process: In the second to last version of Celan’s manuscript, it is clear to which noun the demonstrative pronoun in the third verse, »der«, and the personal pronoun in the fourth verse, »er«, refer, because both pronouns are masculine and the only masculine noun in the text is »ein Mond« (a moon). In this version, it is »a moon« that has eyes and is seeing. In contrast, in the final version of the text, the pronouns are neutral, »das« and »es«, and cannot refer to »a moon«. Problematically, there are too many neutral words in this poem: »ice«, »Eden«, »reeds«, »land«, and »child«. The second last version of the manuscript

The final version of the manuscript

Eis, Eden

Eis, Eden

Es ist ein Land Verloren,

Es ist ein Land Verloren,

da wächst ein Mond im Ried.

da wächst ein Mond im Ried,

Und der mit uns erfroren,

und das mit uns erfroren,

er geht umher und sieht.

es glüht umher und sieht.

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Er sieht, denn er hat Augen,

Es sieht, denn es hat Augen,

die voller Zapfen sind.

die helle Erden sind.

Die Nacht und ihre Laugen.

Die Nacht, die Nacht, die Laugen.

Sie wächst dein Herz blind, Kind.

Es sieht, das Augenkind.

Er sieht, er sieht, wir sehen,

Es sieht, es sieht, wir sehen,

ich sehe dich, du siehst.

ich sehe dich, du siehst.

Das Eis wird auferstehen,

Das Eis wird auferstehen,

wenn sich der Himmel schliesst.

ehe sich die Stunde schließt.

(Celan 1996: 33)

The diffusion of references is especially consistent in Ice, Eden, and this corresponds with the image of ice that encapsulates objects and conceals their contents. The usual referents of the words become unavailable, and so do the individual memories of the dead. Ice in Celan’s poem emphasizes the presence of unavailable contents.

A GAINST »S PURENSICHERUNG « (»P RESERVATION E VIDENCE «)? (B AŁKA )

OF

Miroslaw Bałka’s video installation, Winterreise (Winter Journey) (2003), calls the relation between ice and traces of the past into question visually. The title of the installation refers to Wilhelm Müllers series of poems Winterreise that was published in 1824 and became famous when it was set to music by Franz Schubert (1827). The work consists of three short films of snow-covered landscape. Each of them is projected on the wall of the exhibition room and runs repeatedly, so that only one wall of the room is left bare, a wall with a door to the other exhibition spaces. 13 Two of the films show a snow-covered landscape with several deer standing behind barbed wire. The third is a landscape with a frozen pond in the center.

13 I saw this installation as part of the exhibition Fragment at the Akademie der Künste Berlin in 2011. Eleonora Jedlińska describes the same work as seen at an exhibition in Krakow (Jedlińska 2006: 449-450).

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Illustration 2. (Winterreise, »Bambi«)14 Illustration 3. (Winterreise, »Pond«)15

The place that can be seen in the films is the former concentration camp Birkenau that made up the huge complex of death and labor camps along with Auschwitz. The two films with deer in them are titled »Bambi« and, according to BaIka, refer to the historical coincidence that the beginning of the Holocaust in Europe (the Wannsee conference) and the Disney film Bambi in the USA are both dated from 194216 It seems an ironic coincidence that »Bambi« and »Birkenau« are connected to each other not only by the date but also by the same initial – »B«, also the highly symbolic letter found in the name of the pesticide »Zyklon B«. In the third film »Pond«, there is no trace of atrocity to be seen at all, though it is said that the ashes of the cremated were thrown into the pond (JedliJska 2006: 449). In the films, there isn’t any sense of the »aura« that is, according to Aleida Assmann, expected by some people in the »Gedächtnisort« (memory place) in the form of an original atmosphere that can be only perceived at the site itself and cannot be mediated (Assmann 1999: 331). In BaIka’s films, the place is cut off, we see only a small part of the landscape. If we didn’t have the information as a

14 Filmstill see in article https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/dec/15/ miroslaw-balka-topography, accessed online May 2019. 15 Filmstill see in article http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/dec/20/miroslawbalk-althamer-polish art#img-1, accessed online May 2019. 16 BaIka mentions this simultaneity in an interview in December 2011 in ExBerliner with Susanna Davies-Crook: http://www.exberliner.com/whats-on/art/interview%3AMiros AMiros%C5%82aw-Ba%C5%82ka/, accessed online May 2019.

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subtext, we couldn’t even guess that the place is a former concentration camp. In Bałka’s films, snow and ice on the pond appear as symbolic figures that call into question the notion of »Spurensicherung« (preserving traces). This unavailability of any trace seems to correspond to Wilhelm Müller’s Winter Journey where the lyric subject, a man wandering in the winter landscape, laments his lost love. In the fourth of 24 songs, it is indicated at the beginning that he is searching for traces of the girl in snow in vain: Ich such’ im Schnee vergebens

Vainly I search for

Nach ihrer Tritte Spur

A trace of her steps

Wo sie an meinem Arme Durchstrich die grüne Flur.

In the snow-covered meadow, Where we strolled arm in arm.17

He finds no traces but preserves »her image«: the image of frozenness leads to the illusion that the memory can be preserved:18 Mein Herz ist wie erstorben,

Her image stares coldly

Kalt starrt ihr Bild darin;

From my chilled heart.

As suggested by the title of this song, Erstarren (Numbness) – a word which implies solidification in German – the lost object becomes a static image for the subject. In this moment, time is stopped and the present is isolated from its continuity with the past. The absence of traces is necessary for this type of remembrance because traces of the original would bring different temporal layers into play and prohibit the notion of the preservation of memory. In the snow-covered landscape in Bałka’s films, a traveler obsessed by remembrance such as this is not represented. In contrast to Müller’s song, the absence of traces in the landscape neither solidify any certain images nor preserve them. They may remind us of some information about the concentration camp, but it is not

17 Müller’s text (Schubert’s version) with the English translation by Louise MacClelland Urban (Müller 2003: 30-38). I added the line breaks. 18 Ulrike Vedder analyses the figure of cold in this song as a poetic figure that enables the lyric subject not only to preserve the image of his lover but also to speak of his pain. She also points out the many functions of cold as it appears throughout the whole song cycle of Winter Journey. (Vedder 2010: 135-138)

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determinate. In this sense, ice and snow in Bałka’s films don’t reproduce the notion of preserved memories anymore. They rather connect the place to other contexts: to Bambi by Disney and to Winter Journey by Müller and Schubert.

C ONCLUSION So far we have examined both the notion of the preservation of memory and that of memories shaped by the impossibility of preservation. In Sebald’s long novel Austerlitz, the illusory notion of the preservation of memory is reproduced in relation to the protagonist, Austerlitz, who once forgot his childhood in Prague. Because of the oblivion of his memory and the absence of actual traces of things, which is implied metaphorically in the image of the squirrel hoard under snow, the images of his childhood that come to him when he is around sixty years old appear as if they were authentic. There is no counterevidence to stand against what has been found ›again‹. This mechanism is partially similar to the text of Wilhelm Müller’s song »Numbness« in which the lyric subject searches for traces of the girl in vain while »her image« gets solidified in his mind. Both examples suggest that the absence of traces of the past helps to construct the notion that memories have been preserved. This mechanism also works for the protagonist in Sebald’s short novel Dr Henry Selwyn. Selwyn removed the traces of his immigration from Eastern Europe by changing his name, acquiring English and concealing his origin for an extended time. In his case, the act of concealment is important so that his memories appear to be preserved and return to him traumatically in his old age. In addition, he couldn’t tell anyone his sorrow when he got the news that the alpine guide Naegeli went missing in 1914. This can also be understood as kind of memory that is both concealed and preserved at the same time. Once traces of the past are mediated, the notion of memory as something preserved falls into crisis. In Sebald’s Austerlitz, the narrator’s claim that he is reproducing others’ words reveals its contradiction. This draws attention to the fictionality of the narration and the impossibility of preserving transmission. In Sebald’s short novel Dr Henry Selwyn, the crisis of the notion of preservation is represented by the metaphorical image of Naegeli’s remains as nothing more than a few bones and a pair of boots, in contrast to Hebel’s image of a totally preserved body. In Celan’s poem Ice, Eden, the image of ice embodies the presence of the dead on the one hand and on the other hand the impossibility of transmitting their individual memories, and this corresponds to the indeterminate referents of some of the

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words in the poem. In Bałka’s installation Winter Journey, the notion of the preservation of traces is also called into question. In these works, we have also seen that images of ice and snow are characterized by their function in relation to de-contextualization and deformation. Ice isolates traces from their former contexts. On this point, many of these works compete with the idea of the Romantic imaginations. We have closely seen the apparent contrast between the remembrances of the dead in Sebald’s Dr Henry Selwyn and the »unexpected reunion« of an old woman with her dead fiancé in Hebel’s short story. Klaus Voswinckel compares Celan’s poem with works by Novalis in which a series of similar motives appear, and emphasizes that the intention to achieve the euphoric status in Novalis is refused in Celan’s work (Voswinckel 1974: 83, 85). In Bałka’s installation, a snow-covered landscape doesn’t reproduce the image of solidification found in Wilhelm Müller’s Winter Journey. While images of ice and snow in the works of the first half of the 19th century are connected to a desire to preserve a lost love or to secure the continuity of one’s self, these images in the post-Holocaust context are more ambiguous: On the one hand, they reproduce the traditional notion of preserved memory when it comes to issues like the recurrence of trauma or the recovery of repressed memory. On the other hand, they reveal the contradiction, fictionality and impossibility that are inherent in the notion of the preservation of memory, especially when it comes to the transmission of memory.

B IBLIOGRAPHY P RIMARY L ITERATURE Celan, Paul (1996): Die Niemandsrose. Vorstufen – Textgenese – Endfassung, bearbeitet von Heino Schmull, Frankfurt a. M. — (1996): Paul Celan. Selected Poems. English Translation by Michael Hamburger, London. — (2001): Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, English Translation by John Felstiner, New York/London. — (2003): Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt a.M. Klüger, Ruth (1994): Weiter leben. Eine Jugend, München. Müller, Wilhelm (2003): Schubert’s Winterreise. A Winter Journey in Poetry, Image, and Song. Poems by Wilhelm Müller. Transl. by Louise McClelland Urban, London. Sebald, W. G. (1994): Die Ausgewanderten. Vier lange Erzählungen, Frankfurt a.M.

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— (1996): The Emigrants, English Translation by Michael Hulse, New York. — (2001): Austerlitz, English Translation by Anthea Bell, New York. — (2003): Austerlitz [2001], Frankfurt a.M.

S ECONDARY L ITERATURE Assmann, Aleida (1999): Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, München. Cumming, Laura (2009): »Miroslaw Balka and Pawel Althamer«, in: The Guardian 20.12.2009, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/dec/20/miroslaw-balkalthamer-polish-art#img-1, accessed online May 2019. Davis-Crook, Susanna (2011): »Disassembling Bambi«, in: ExBerliner 7.12.2011, http://www.exberliner.com/whats-on/art/interview:Miros%C5%82awBa%C5%82ka/, accessed online May 2019. Hirsch, Marianne (2012): The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York. Jedlińska, Eleonora (2006): »Memory Regained – Art after the Holocaust. Some Examples from Poland«, in: Frank Grüner/Urs Heftrich/Heinz-Dietrich Löwe (ed.): Zerstörter des Schweigens. Formen künstlerischer Erinnerung an die nationalsozialistische Rassen- und Vernichtungspolitik in Osteuropa, Köln/Weimar/Wien, pp. 443-455. Jünger, Friedrich Georg (1957): Gedächtnis und Erinnerung, Frankfurt a.M. Horstkotte, Silke (2009): Nachbilder. Fotografie und Gedächtnis in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur, Köln/Weimar/Wien. Kohn, Rob (2012): »Giving Voice to Uncertainty. Memory, Multilingual and Unreliable Narration in W. G. Sebald’s ›Austerlitz‹«, in: Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 2, pp.33-48. Long, J. J. (2007): W. G. Sebald. Image, Archive, Modernity, New York. Menninghaus, Winfried (1980): Paul Celan. Magie der Form, Frankfurt a.M. Meyer-Sickendiek, Burkhard (2010): Tiefe. Über die Faszination des Grübelns, München. Searle, Adrian (2009): »›Bałka's Bambi at Birkenau‹. Deer eating grass, a pond in a woodland, a distant bell . Adrian Searle is gripped by Mirosław Bałka's eerie death camp videos«, in: The Guardian 15.12.2009, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/dec/15/miroslaw-balka-topography, accessed online May 2019.

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Spitzer, Yannay (2014): Pogroms, Networks, and Migration. The Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire to the United States 1881-1914, http://yannayspitzer.net/research-papers/, accessed online May 2019. Szondi, Peter (1973): Celan-Studien, Frankfurt a. M. Vedder, Ulrike (2010): »Kältelehre der ›Winterreise‹«, in: Colloquia Germanica 43, 1/2, pp. 131-145. Veraguth, Hannes (2003): »W. G. Sebald und die alte Schule. Schwindel. Gefühle, Die Ausgewanderten, Die Ringe des Saturn und Austerlitz. Literarische Erinnerungskunst in vier Büchern, die so tun, als ob sie wahr seien«, in: Text + Kritik 158, pp. 30-42. Voswinckel, Klaus (1974): Paul Celan. Verweigerte Poetisierung der Welt. Versuch einer Deutung, Heidelberg. Weinrich, Harald (2005): Lethe. Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens, München.

V IDEO Bałka, Mirosław (2003): Winterreise (Bambi, Bambi, Pond), video-installation, first exhibited at Starmach Gallery Krakow. .

Investigating the Labоratory of Popular Arctic Narrative in Russian Literature from the 1930s to the 1950s1 E LENA P ENSKAYA

I would like this study to be perceived in a dialogue with the works published in Arctic Discourses collected works (Ryall/Schimanski/Wærp 2010). In the City of the Sun on Ice: The Soviet (Counter-) Discourse of the Arctic in the 1930s, Susi K. Frank traces the very specific contours of Soviet discourses of Arctic in the Stalinists 1930s with their narrative transformation of Arctic space into integral part of national Soviet space. Frank examines both non-fictional and literary representations of the Chelyuskin expedition under Otto Schmidt for their transformations of Arctic space and contrasts Western-European conceptions of the lonesome Arctic explorer-hero – envisaged as a specifically capitalist explorer in the Soviet discourse with the privileging of the collective aspects and social sides of expeditions. Thus, Frank singles out three types of the Arctic narrative, which are geographical, diachronic and transformative. (Ryall/Schimanski/Wærp 2010:17) We also consider the results of studies devoted to the transformation of writing and narrating the North. For example, in the course of the Chelyuskin expedition, writing – both as a social practice and as a basic device of modern media communication technology – was used to turn the Arctic and a separate ice floe into an instrument for the production of the »Soviet«. The researchers compare the Chelyuskin expedition and its narrative modelling to the story of Robinson Crusoe,

1

This article is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE).

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which Michel de Certeau analyzed in his function as promoting capitalist expansion. (De Certeau 2013) Like Leningrad under siege, the ice-floe was a sort of island in a state of emergency. The everyday writing of the Chelyuskinites in their isolated Arctic camp simultaneously reflected and constituted the anthropological experience of the writers. However, in this case researchers discuss the construction of the »bright Soviet future«: The Arctic ice-floe as a collective project embodied the utopian creation of the new Soviet person. (Orlova 2016) In my research I am investigating minor narrative strategies, which occur on the periphery of those three mainstream types. Apart from the declared description methods, there also appeared alternative, incidental, unmanifested ones. (Kirschbaum 2014) They have been showing through and changing since the postwar 1950s. Therefore, my goal is to see how the Arctic narrative developed and evolved throughout the last 30 or 40 years of the Soviet era. Analysis of 2,753 literary texts, articles, memoirs and letters, published and archived, has provided material for the picture described below, which reflects the presence of ›Arctic discourse‹ in the Soviet society and is supported by various sources.2 As we can see, the Arctic issue became omnipresent in cultural and political practices of the time in the late 1920s and had a series of climaxes in the 1930s-1940s. Its popularity peaked in the mid-1950s and then dropped dramatically. Let’s analyze these ups and downs of the Arctic issue and its modifications.

2

This diagram is constructed by the author of the article on the basis of the analysis of sources using the tools of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. www.ruscorpora.ru/.

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We can suppose that thirty years of active Arctic intervention into cultural and political spheres of the Soviet life resulted in a convergence of Arctic genres, in a conflict, or even a competition, between the ›micro-Arctic‹ and the ›macro-Arctic‹, which provided for turbulence and split the holistic Arctic narrative. Component parts of the latter were scattered around the social and cultural map of the 1930s-1950s as mosaic pieces, creating a polymorphic and colorful picture that combined extremely different hues, from absurd and parody to detective investigations. The Arctic and the North are known to be regarded in a few coordinate systems in the Soviet Union. The first dimension has to do with history: we could speak of ›Retro Arctic‹. The issue of the North was not only a geographical and social problem; it was also associated with political collisions, repressions and disastrous twists of history. Indeed, the northern part of Russia has been labeled as a source of threats and troubles, as a place of exile and death since the 18 th century (cf. Laruelle 2014). The Decembrist Revolt of 1825, as well as subsequent executions and exodus of the convicts to northern settlements and Siberia, enrooted repressive connotations in cultural and political traditions of Russia. These associations first came to surface almost unnoticed in the 1920s-1930s and got a new birth in the late 1950s-1960s. (cf. McCannon 1998) This can be proved by a new wave of interest towards historical novels describing events in the North. Ivan Lazhechnikov’s The House of Ice about Anna Ioannovna, about Bironovshchina, about the horrible Ice Palace symbolizing martyrdom and death suffered by protagonists, was republished 137 times between 1921 and 1932. The year 1951 witnessed publication of Decembrists as Explorers of Siberia by Lydia Chukovskaya (she had started writing the book before the war broke out). It should be pointed out that the author brought together three threads, namely those of Arctic discoveries made by Russian travelers, of the rich Siberian territories and of the rich new Russian literature. She saw the Decembrists’ role as one of global importance, since they made a breakthrough by pioneering the whole new cultural continent. The Arctic dimension serves as background for Chukovskaya’s book. Tekhnika Molodyozhi and Ogonyok magazines published texts related in some or other way to the Arctic almost regularly from 1955 to 1959. These were mainly essays, reportage and commented documents as e.g. in Tekhnika Molodezhi: Y. Kryuchkov, Za bortom – goluboy continent (A Blue Continent Overboard) (1959); in Ogonyok: S. Morozov, Russkoye serdtse (The Russian Heart) (1959) and Sud’ba podviga (The Fate of Heroic Deeds) (1959); K. Cherevkov, Pochta

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kapitana Ponomaryova (Captain Ponomaryov’s Mail) (1956); M. Zlatogorov, Poyezdka na Pechenegu (A Trip to Pechenega) (1956); N. Kolobkov, Vesna ozhidayetsya burnaya… (It’s Going to Be a Turbulent Spring...) (1956) and Korabel’ny lager’ (The Ship Camp) (1956). The latter article begins with a question and contains enciphered information about the involvement of GULag convicts: »Do you believe Dudinka-Norilsk is the world’s most northern railway? If so, you are wrong. A 70-kilometer railway was built (in fact, by prisoners using their spades and picks) in 1937 to connect the village of Nordvik in the Khara-Tumus peninsula bordering on the Khatanga Bay with the village of Kozhevnikovo on the bank of the eponymously-named bay until the early 1950s. During the war, people (again, prisoners) mined salt and coal, drilled boreholes, performed construction works, repaired ships and fueled Soviet and American steamboats delivering materials supplied under land-lease to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk by the Northern Sea Route.« (Korabel’ny lager, 1956) (Transl. E.P.)

Arctic camps, some of the most dreadful ones, were situated in the North, at 74o N latitude. We should mention one of the latest important research works, the collective volume ›Vragi naroda‹ za polyarnym krugom (›Public Enemies‹ Beyond the Polar Circle) (Romanenko/Larkov 2010). The collection consists of eleven essays under the common theme of the history of repressions against Soviet polar explorers and indigenous peoples of the North during the Bolshevik government. The central essay that lent its name to the collection is the first attempt to summarize the documented information about unjustified political repressions against Soviet polar explorers, providing data on more than 1,000 repressed people. The essay Iz kamennogo veka ‒ za kolyuchuyu provoloku (From the Stone Age – Behind the Bars) summarizes materials about repressions against small indigenous peoples of the Soviet North. Archived materials discovered by Fyodor Romanenko allowed to reconstruct the history of the 1934 Nenets uprising. Some essays are devoted to repressions against members of the two famous Arctic expeditions: rescue of the group of Italian General Umberto Nobile who flew to the North Pole in the airship Italia in May 1928, and the Soviet expedition led by Otto Schmidt, head of the Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route, on board of Chelyuskin. Nordviklag is one of the most severe GULag blank spots, which are hardly known to the public. How many other camps like that were there in the Arctic? Lazar Brontman mentioned those camps in a concealing way in his intimate diaries. His contemporaries called him »the king of Moscow journalists« (Matsuyev 1981:41). Brontman lived and worked for about 25 years in the very thick of

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things, regularly supplying the Soviet readers with his editorials (pseudonym Lev Ognev). During the »boom of records« in the 1930s, Brontman went just about everywhere. He joined Ushakov’s expedition to the Arctic organized to search for Sannikov and Gillis Lands, then he went to the North Pole and drifted on Papanin’s ice station (after participating in rescuing Sedov’s group). Brontman was assigned the Head of Information Department in Pravda newspaper just before the war. He kept his diaries from 1932 to 1947. We learn from his notes that it was as early as in 1934 that a special purpose camp was created in the Varnek Bay of Novaya Zemlya. The prisoners of the camp mined for polymetallic ores in a 100 meters deep mine. Brontman described quite precisely how Chkalov, Potanin and Major General Mazuruk transported ore samples which had been mined by the convicts to the mainland. Brontman’s’ diaries were not published until 2007 (Brontman 2007). Historical characters regained their popularity during the war. Polar explorers of the past take a special place among them. A specific genre of historical hagiography was born. Boris Genrikhovich Ostrovsky, author of Velikaya Severnaya Ekspeditsiya (The Great Northern Expedition), was one of the renowned masters of the genre of »oLerk« (sketches). (Ostrovsky 1937) His biographical cycle of works about vice-admiral Stepan Makarov was widely published in the late 1940s. A kids’ version could be found in Murzilka and Pioner children’s magazines. An individual book about Makarov was published in 1951. Another dimension, or coordinate system, is represented by a powerful bunch of literary works of various genres K science fiction novels and short stories, poems, novellas K written in socialist realism traditions. The key features are described in detail by Susi Frank (2010) and Tim Youngs (2010). I am not dwelling upon these works here. They supported and developed the trends towards creating a new human hero integrated into the specific Soviet world, of which the conquered Arctic became a part. Yet another dimension resonating with the two above is of great interest to us. I would call it the ›everyday Arctic‹, the ›privatized Arctic‹, the ›domesticated Arctic‹. The intervention of the Arctic into the Soviet everyday life appears underestimated so far, as does the power of the ›Arctic enchantment‹. At that time, Soviet Russia was actively participating in the international invasion of the North Pole, developing its own plan to conquer the Arctic. It should be noted that this ambitious political project penetrated into a number of spheres of Soviet life, exerting a powerful conceptual and visual influence on them. Thus, the project is rather hard to localize. It shaped education, healthcare, science and everyday life. We can even talk about the Arctic hypnosis witnessed in every corner of the country during 1930s-1950s.

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Thus, the Russian State Museum of Arctic and Antarctic was founded in 1930 as a special part of the Soviet Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (Dukalskaya 2010: 34). After being overhauled, the Arctic and Antarctic Museum was opened for visiting in 1937. Meanwhile, the museum employees were developing the scientific concept, collecting and preparing exhibits, creating the static exhibition. Establishment of the museum was performed with active participation of Arctic scientists and explorers: Otto Schmidt, the first Head of the Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route, Rudolf Samoylovich, the first director of the AARI, Yuly Shokalsky, member of the Academy of Sciences, research scientists of the AARI Vladimir Wiese, Yakov Gakkel, Alexander Laktionov, Nikolay Pinegin, and others. From the moment of opening, the museum scientists tried to react promptly to all important events in the Arctic. Thus, an exhibition devoted to the work at North Pole-1, the first manned drifting station (May 1937-February 1938), was opened as soon as in September 1938. The exhibition displayed the living tent of the North Pole-1 members, their possessions, equipment and tools. Neighbored by a collection of realist paintings and graphic artworks, those exhibits represent unique artifacts confirming that the Arctic issue was privatized by the art. The Arctic became ubiquitous. Food industry started using deep freezing technologies. Satiation and abundance are symbolized in Soviet natures mortes showing beef carcasses hanged in butcher shops. There was a wide circulation of photos and graphic pictures of the Grocery Store No. 1 (Eliseevsky Gastronom) in Gorky Street and of the Mikoyanovsky Meat Processing Plant, the key food distributor for the whole country. Mishka Na Severe (Bear in the North) chocolate sweets have been produced at Krupskaya Confectionery Factory since 1939. There used to be more sweets associated with obsession for the North and the Arctic. Alexei Ignatyev (1877-1954), writer and diplomat, recalls in his memoirs Pyat’desyat let v stroyu (Fifty Years of Service) the magic taste of Arktika candies that had been popular before the war (Livanov 1985:256). »Конфеты съедались, но бумажки с надписью ›Красный мак‹ или ›Арктика‹ храни3

лись на память в рабочих семьях как драгоценная святыня.« (Ignatyev 1986: 543).

3

The candies were eaten, but the wrappings with the names ›Krasny mak‹ (Red Poppy) or ›Arktika‹ (The Arctic) were preserved in workers’ families like precious relics. (Transl. E.P.)

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Another fact also proves expansion of the Arctic cold. The AII-Union Scientific Research Institute of the Refrigerating Industry (AUSRIRI) was founded under the All-Union Organization for the Refrigerating Industry on 16 May 1930 by decision of the Narkomtorg USSR. The main subdivisions of the Institute were formed between November 1930 and December 1932. Food freezing techniques expanded to the south in 1933-1940, when branch institutes were opened in Odessa, Krasnodar and Tbilisi. The efforts of the AUSRIRI, the Leningrad Institute of Refrigeration Industry and the Research and Development Institute for Meat and Fish Processing were systematized to give birth to professor Mikhail Tuchschneid’s book called Kholodil’naya Tekhnologuiya (Refrigeration Technology), the first study ever that synthesized national and foreign practices of the time. (Belozerov 2010) The first generation of commercial refrigeration units and chiller display cabinets was developed in 1934-1935 to be produced by the Krasnyi Fakel Factory, the first Moscow dry ice factory commissioned in 1933. However, it was only in the 1950s that mass production of ZIS, Sever and Saratov refrigerators became possible. Beginning from the 1930s, cryogenics were developed also for medical indication. Vladimir Negovsky, famous emergency physician and member of the Academy of Sciences, investigated the use of cold and freezing techniques in the field of anesthesiology. In his experimental studies related to recovering from coma and clinical death, he also used ice. (Negovsky 1991) Some memoirs of discussions with Negovsky can be found in the abovementioned Lazar Brontman’s Diaries. Cold water dousing treatment became popular around the same time, in the 1930s. Polar bear clubs, all-union communities of ice swimmers also emerged in the 1930s, attracting a huge number of people. Let me give some examples from the field of education. We should remember that the Soviet geography and cartography canon was elaborated between 1930s and 1950s and was often promoted at school. The joint resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union and the Central Committee of the Communist Party »On Teaching Geography in Primary and Secondary Schools« came into force on 17 May 1934. It was by far not the first intervention, but the authorities in geographical school education defined it as a turning point in Soviet geography policy. Geographical schoolbooks compiled in accordance with the Resolution survived over twenty republications and determined geography teaching canons in the Soviet Union for the next thirty years.

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Officially, geography and cartography became the points of interest due to the successful rescue of the Chelyuskinites. Covering the rescue operation became an unprecedented experience for the Soviet print media of that time. During three months, the symbolic event was described using cartographic, geographic and other special terms required to evaluate the importance of the event and the extent of Soviet heroism. Geographical terminology was the authorities’ official language throughout the rescue operation, while the map was supposed to serve as a media tool to consolidate the imaginary community. The discursive effect of the Chelyuskin story was tremendous. (Cf. Orlova 2008 and 2016) The Arctic invasion became one of the key subjects in the developing Soviet folklore. The Chelyuskin Expedition had an exceptional significance. On February 15, 1934 all major newspapers published Otto Schmidt’s radio message about the steamship‘s sinking and the governmental order to set up a commission for the rescue of the crew. From that day, various Soviet newspapers published regular news about the Chelyuskinites and the measures taken to help them out (almost every day in major newspapers and weekly in regional ones). In May, the crew was coming back to Moscow by train across the whole country, and every city welcomed them in triumph. Korney Chukovsky cited a five-year-old boy’s poem Chelyuskintsy-Dorogintsy in Literaturnaya Gazeta on May 26. (Chukovsky 1934: 5) The crew’s coming back to the capital was covered in detail by major print media and was widely discussed in literature. On June 18, Literaturnaya Gazeta published welcoming words to Chelyuskinites from Alexei Tolstoy, Mikhail Gorky, Alexei Novikov-Priboy and Nikolay Ushakov’s poem Chelyuskinskoye (Ushakov 1934: 3), while Pravda magazine published Sergei Mikhalkov’s poem Kuryersky about the train bringing the crew back to Moscow. Marina Tsvetaeva wrote a poem called Chelyuskintsy in October 1934. The festive trip back home was covered extensively and provided for another giant folklore wave. The first soviet »novinas«4 about the Chelyuskinites came up in the course of the expedition, but were recorded as late as 1937, three years after the crew came back. The heroic expedition was praised by M.S. Kryukova, narrator of folk tales from the Winter Coast of the White Sea in Arkhangelsk Oblast, and by Matvey Samylin, narrator of folk tales from Zaonezhsky District of the Karelian ASSR. Kryukova’s novina was published in Novyi Mir in May 1937, while Samylin’s novina appeared in Studencheskiye Zapiski Filologicheskogo Fakulteta

4

A »novina« is a genre of soviet oral folk art, in which the contemporary theme is presented in the archaic form of epic folklore tradition.

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LGU the same year (Kozlova 2009). Thus, domestic folklore attitudes arose from the ›backward‹ expedition that turned the Chelyuskin voyage into a triumphant celebration and created a nationwide euphoria over it. Further investigation into the subject provides a few more additional aspects missed out by major dimensions. It is in children’s books that domestication of the Arctic is shown, on the one hand, as having a heroic and instructive nature, while on the other hand, as quite an ordinary everyday process. This refers us to Lazar Lagin’s novel Starik Khottabych (Old Man Hottabych). The first version was written in 1938 and published chapter by chapter in Pionerskaya Pravda newspaper and Pioner magazine. Another edition was published in 1940 and was significantly extended by the author in 1955. (Lenobl 1957) The researchers rightly believe that the novel Old man Hottabych combines the features of several genres – travelogue and Bildungsroman, as well as adventurous novel (Gluschenko 2015). But along with the stable elements of traditional genres, there are features of Soviet culture of the 1930s, which turn a fairy tale into a current affairs chronicle or a newspaper story. The conquest of the Arctic is one of the most popular topics of public discourse of the mid 1930ies that united generations. No wonder then that the magazine Pioner in September 1938 opens with the wishes of Papanin for the new school year. Papanin himself cheerfully admonishes students, recalling that another white spot disappeared on the geographical map, and the North Pole has got its own »voice« now and is easy to detect for students even on the most »dumb« map. (Papanin 1938: 3) The motif of the Arctic is one of the central issues in the novel. The fantastic journey to the Arctic fulfills the function of a plug-in novel. Narrative description includes several layers: documentary, conceptualizing the Arctic chronotope etc. However, the changes did not affect the story line where the protagonists go for an Arctic excursion on the Ladoga ship. As we remember, there are some notable people, real heroes of labor of the Soviet Union on board. But here the trip rather looks like a tourist travel. The author mentions the exact time: mid-July, when the best employees of Moscow and Leningrad receive an award – a ticket to travel to the Arctic on the icebreaker »Arctic«.5 (Lagin 1953: 59) A real tourist trip. At the end of the trip, the sailors find a bottle and let another genius out. He turns out to be Hottabych’s brother. But from the very beginning accurate identifiable facts

5

Khottabych was reading, »the ice-breaker ›Ladoga‹, chartered by the Central Excursion Bureau, will leave Arkhangelsk for the Arctic. Sixty-eight persons, the best workers of Moscow and Leningrad, will spend their vacations aboard it.« (Transl. E.P.)

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are provided to improve the reliability. The concrete topography of Moscow is indicated – streets, houses, institutions, so that the portrait of the city of the 1930s could be recognized by contemporaries. Note that the author emphasizes more than once that his story is deeply true. The story ends happily: everyone is back home, and none of their families wonder where they had been for so many days and why they actually had to go to the Arctic. 6 (Lagin 1953: 79). Space in this novel opens up from the capital to the North Pole. And there is another narrative layer that helps strengthening the reliability and credibility of the descriptions – the psychological layer. The author describes the contrasting changes in the mood of the characters.7 (Lagin 1953: 75) There are also several inserted stories in the novel – a meeting of Hottabych and his brother amidst the ice of the Arctic, and the author discussing different versions of how they found themselves in the Arctic with the protagonist Volka.8 (Lagin 1953: 75)

6

»If any of the readers of this really truthful story are in Moscow on Razin Street and look in at the offices of the Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route, they will probably see among the dozens of people putting in applications for work in the Arctic an old man in a straw boater and pink slippers embroidered in silver and gold.« (Transl. E.P.)

7

»At first, Vol‘ka was so touched by this unusual meeting of brothers in the midst of the Arctic icebergs, and so happy for Hottabych’s sake, that he completely forgot about the unfortunate Zhenya. ›Now I know how you came to be in the Arctic.‹ ›The Gulf Stream, the warm current which brought you to the Arctic from the Southern Seas.‹ If Khottabych had had time to tell his brother that the Arctic Sun shone twenty-four hours a day at this time of the year, then all was lost. At any rate, their relatives and friends accepted it as a matter of course that the children had been in the Arctic, without questioning how in the world they had ever booked berths on the ›Ladoga‹. After an excellent dinner, the children told their parents the story of their adventures in the Arctic, keeping almost true to the facts. They were wise enough to say nothing about Khottabych.« (Transl. E.P.)

8

»At first, Vol‘ka was so touched by this unusual meeting of brothers in the midst of the Arctic icebergs, and so happy for Hottabych’s sake, that he completely forgot about the unfortunate Zhenya. ›Now I know how you came to be in the Arctic.‹ ›The Gulf Stream, the warm current which brought you to the Arctic from the Southern Seas.‹ If Khottabych had had time to tell his brother that the Arctic Sun shone twenty-four hours a day at this time of the year, then all was lost. At any rate, their relatives and friends

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On the one hand, the author gives numerous descriptions of the extraordinary phenomena of the Arctic where the sun shines the whole summer all around the clock. But, on the other hand, the attractiveness of the novel for the readers increases with the explanations that time and again comment and resolve the descriptions of the mysterious and fantastic9 (Lagin 1953: 87). The transformation of the extraordinary into the everyday, of the Arctic into an integrated part of the inhabited zone is emphasized in the concluding part of the novel: Hottabych gets employed in the Arctic, and anyone can find him at the reception desk of the Glavsevmorput, (the Soviet organization in charge‹ of the Arctic.10 (Lagin 1953: 79). The culmination of the Arctic matters is given with humor and at the same time seriously.11 (Lagin 1953: 89) Sometimes the Arctic itself appears to be toylike and full of magic. Around the same time, one year before the war broke out, Valentin Kataev wrote his fairytale Rainbow Flower about little girl Zhenya who found herself on the North Pole (Kiziria 1985). Children’s magazines Murzilka, Pioner and Veselye Kartinki published Arctic-related stories, poems, songs and pictures every year, beginning from 1936. There is one more aspect of domesticating the Arctic issue.

accepted it as a matter of course that the children had been in the Arctic, without questioning how in the world they had ever booked berths on the ›Ladoga‹. After an excellent dinner, the children told their parents the story of their adventures in the Arctic, keeping almost true to the facts. They were wise enough to say nothing about Khottabych.« (Transl. E.P.) 9

»His appearance alone, with the long grey beard reaching down to his waist, a sure sign of his undoubtedly advanced age, is a great hindrance in finding employment in the harsh conditions of the Arctic.« (Transl. E.P.)

10 »If any of the readers of this really truthful story are in Moscow on Razin Street and look in at the offices of the Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route, they will probably see among the dozens of people putting in applications for work in the Arctic an old man in a straw boater and pink slippers embroidered in silver and gold.« (Transl. E.P.) 11 »But the trouble is the old man has decided he wants to get a job in the Arctic honestly, without any fakery at all.« (Transl. E.P.)

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A familiar, everyday, ›homely‹ Arctic can be found in Platonov’s Schastlivaya Moskva (Happy Moscow) (1935), where ›Arctic discourse‹ is referred to as a feature of the epoch, of the city life and of the communal apartments. (Platonov 1999: 34)12 Platonov describes it even more sharply in his earlier story Antiseksus (1926) telling about patented goods that are in demand both in Arctic and Antarctic. (Platonov 1991: 79)13 In addition to all different forms of domesticating the Arctic satirical strategies completed the spectre of familiarizing the formerly utmost sublime subject. In Konstantin Vaginov’s novel Garpagoniana (1934), Zhulonbin is trying to seduce a girl by using Arctic-related terms in a senseless way. (Vaginov 1983: 67)14 Taking off heroic excitement, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov in their novel Zolotoy telyonok (The Golden Calf) (1931) describe the biography of Sevryugov, the ›ice hero‹, who became famous by flying over the Arctic. Satiric inclusions of the Arctic subject are always present in the story. (Ilf/Petrov 2006: 341)15 The ending of this novel resembles the ending of the story of Voltaire's Candide. Here also the Arctic becomes an integral part of the Soviet political Odyssey, combined with robinsonade. In conclusion, I think this overview could give an impression of the range of formats and devices by which the Arctic was addressed in the 1930ies as well as

12 »People were having tea with their families or friends, charming girls were playing piano, opera and dancing music could be heard from radios, young men were arguing about the Arctic and the stratosphere, mothers were bathing their children, and two or three counter-revolutionaries were whispering, having placed a burning Primus stove on a chair by the door to make their words undecipherable to the neighbors…« (Transl. E.P.) 13 »The demand for our patented products exists everywhere from the Arctic to the Antarctic, not excluding the savage countries between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.« (Transl. E.P.) 14 »›In the meantime, I’ve been to Egypt and I am very intrigued by the tomb of this innovator. Neither is she interested in the Arctic.‹ ›Have you been to both Egypt and the North Pole?‹« (Transl. E.P.) 15 »Had Sevryugov had a fame less than the one he had earned with his remarkable flights over the Arctic, he would have never seen his room again, he would have got lost in a whirlpool of barratry and would have called himself the ›damaged party‹, instead of the ›brave Sevryugov‹ or the ›ice hero‹, till the end of his life.« (Transl. E.P.)

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of the popularity the topic could gain in these years. It should have become clear how manifold and diverse the devices of integrative symbolical domestication were, and how necessary it is to differentiate where former research has identified only general tendencies. It should have also become clear that the Arctic as one of the most effective symbolical tools of the public discourse at that time served as a laboratory of national narrative. It allowed for modelling several of the ideologically most important concepts such as »soviet heroism«, »nature as man’s most important enemy that should be combatted and defeated«, and, last but not least, »nature and the environment as an object at man’s disposal for complete transformation«. (cf. de Certeau 2013: 244) The examples given above should have demonstrated that in this process all the Arctic topoi that had been encoded in European literatures since the times of romanticism have been re-actualized in the Soviet context, but either they have been transformed into stereotyped clichés or completely semantically transformed. A good example in this context is the topos of the Arctic as a blank sheet. In Soviet context this topos is implemented in manifold and at the same time very specific ways: In order to describe the given environment as suitable for creating a world from scratch; in order to demonstrate that soviet transformation and building up the new world requires a daily Herculean effort; in order to demonstrate that physical work is as well a tool of spiritual and ideological transformation; and that the soviet project of re-building the world includes an anthropological dimension at its core. We can now say with confidence that it is not by chance that the Arctic issue has become so relevant for public discourse in the course of the 1930s to 50s.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Belozerov, Georgii (2010): »K 80-letiyu Vsesoyuznoy Organizatsii Kholodil’noy Promyshlennosti [The 80th Anniversary of the All-Union Refrigerating Industry Organization]«, in: Imperiya Kholoda 4, pp. 3-5. Brontman, Lazar (2007): War Diary by a Pravda Correspondent, Moscow. Certeau de, Michael (2013): Izobretenie povsednevnosti. 1. Iskusstvo delat‘, russ. transl by D. Kalugin/N. Movnina, Sankt-Peterburg (French orig.: L’Invention du Quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de Faire, Paris 1990).

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Cherevkov, K. (1956): »Pochta kapitana Ponomaryova«, in: Ogonyok 12, pp. 2324, http://www.from-ussr.com/article_info.php/articles_id/47/article/Pochtakapitana-Ponomareva, acessed online April 2019. Chukovsky, Korney (1934, May 26): »Chelyuskintsy-Dorogintsy«, in: Literaturnaya Gazeta 382.66, p. 5. Dukalskaya, Marina (2010): »K 80-letiyu Rossiyskogo gosudarstvennogo muzeya Arktiki i Antarktiki«, in: Rossiyskiye polyarnye issledovaniya 85.2, pp 54-55. Fesenko, Emilia (2015). Attraction of the North. Archangelsk. Frank, Susi K. (2010): »City of the Sun on Ice: The Soviet (Counter-) Discourse of the Arctic in the 30s«, in: Anka Ryall/Johan Schimanski/Henning Wærp (eds.) (2010): Arctic Discourses, Newcastle, pp. 106-131. Gluschenko, Irina (2015): »Travelling through Space and Time in: L. Lagin‘s Old man Hottabych«, in: Detskije Chtenija 8.2, p.124. Ignatyev, Alexei (1986): Pyat’desyat let v stroyu (Fifty years of service), Moskva. Ilf, Ilya/Petrov, Yevgeni (2006): Zolotoy Telyonok (The Little Golden Calf), Moskva. Kirschbaum, Heinrich (2015): »›Nekrolog allegorii: O tanatopoėtike severa v lirike Nikolaya Zabolockogo«, in: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 4/134, http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2015/4/22k.html, accessed online May 2019. Kiziria, Dodona (1985): »Four Demons of Valentin Kataev«, in: Slavic Review 44.4, pp. 647-662. Kolobkov, N. (1956): »Vesna ozhidayetsya burnaya…«, in: Ogonyok 15, p. 8. »Korabel’ny lager’« (1956), in: Ogonyok 34, p. 6. Kozlova, Irina (2009): »Sovetskiye skaziteli o pokorenii polyarnogo Severa (North Pole Invasion in Folk Tales of Soviet Narrators)«, in: Aktual’nye problemy sovremennoy fol’kloristiki i izucheniya klassicheskogo naslediya russkoy literatury. Sbornik pamyati Y.A. Kostyukhina, Sankt-Peterburg, Tropa Troyanova, pp. 143-162. Kryuchkov, Y. (1959): »Za bortom – goluboy continent«, in: Tekhnika Molodezhi 7, pp. 11-14. Lagin, Lazar (1953): Starik Khottabych (Old Man Khottabych), Moskva. Laruelle, M. (2014): Russia’s Arctic Strategies and the Future of the Far North, New York et al. Lenoble, G. (1957): »Zhanr – novella – pamflet« (The Novel-Pamphlet Genre), in: Novyi Mir 3, pp. 238-240. Livanov, Vasily (1985): »Bogatstvo voyennogo attashe« (Wealth of a Military Attaché), in: Vasily Livanov: Legenda i byl’ (Legends and True Stories), Moskva, pp. 120-309.

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Matsuyev, Nikolay (1981): Russkiye sovetskiye pisateli 1917-1967: Materialy dlya bibliograficheskogo slovarya (Russian Soviet Writers of the 1917-1967: Materials for a Biographic Dictionary), Moskva. McCannon, J. (1998). Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union (1932-1939). Oxford University Press, New York et al. Mikhalkov, Sergei (1934, June 18): »Chelyuskintsy«, in: Novyi Mir, pp. 3-4. Morozov, S. (1956): »Tri dreifujushije stancii«, in: Ogonyok 15, p. 4. — (1959a): »Russkoye serdtse«, in: Ogonyok 2, pp.17-18. — (1959b): »Sud’ba podviga«, in: Ogonyok 15, p. 16. Negovsky, Vladimir (1991): »Klinicheskaya smert’ glazami reanimatora« (Clinical Death Through the Eyes of the Resuscitator), in: Chelovek 2, pp. 43-52. Orlova, Galina (2008): »Sovetskaya kartogtafiya v stalinskuyu epokhu: detskaya versiya« (Soviet Cartography in the Stalin Era: A Kids Version), in: Neprikosnovenny zapas 2, pp.85-101. http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2008/2/or7. html, accessed online May 2019. — (2016): »Farming of the polarwriting: medialization of Chelyuskins Robinsonade«, in Novoye Literaturnoye obozrenije 3/139, pp. 205-227, http://www.zh-zal.ru/nlo/2016/3/hozyajstvo-polyarnogo-pisma-medializaciya-chelyuskinskoj-robinz.html, accessed online May 2019. Ostrovsky, Boris (1937): Velikaya Severnaya kkspeditsiya (The Great Northern Expedition), Moskva. Pilnyak, Boris (2007): Zavolochye, Moskva. Papanin, I. (1938): »Nu, rebyata…« (Address for the new school year), in: Pioner 9, p. 3. Platonov, Andrei (1991): Antiseksus, Moskva. — (1999): Schastlivaya Moskva. Povesti, rasskazy, lirika (Happy Moscow. Short Stories, Novels, Lyric Poetry), Moskva. Romanenko, Fyodor/Larkov, Sergey (2010): ›Vragi naroda‹ za polyarnym krugom (›Public Enemies‹ Beyond the Polar Circle), Moskva. Ryall, Anka/Schimanski, Johan/Wærp, Henning (eds.) (2010): Arctic Discourses, Newcastle. Ushakov, Nikolay (1934, June 18): »Chelyuskinskoye«, in: Literaturnaya Gazeta 393.77, p. 3. Vaginov, Konstantin (1983): Garpagoniana, Ann Arbor. Youngs, Tim (2010): The Conquest of the Arctic: The 1937 Soviet Expedition/ Arctic Discourses, Newcastle. Zlatogorov, M. (1956): »Poyezdka na Pechenegu«, in: Ogonyok 50, pp. 13-1

Archives of Knowledge and Endangered Objects in the Anthropocene From Chernobyl to Polar Landscapes in the Work of Lina Selander and Amy Balkin L ISA E. B LOOM

In what ways can art portray »the violence of delayed effects«? (Nixon 2011: 23) a phrase used by Rob Nixon in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor? (Nixon 2011: 2-3) How might it do so in a way that goes beyond the socio-political phenomena in question to address the emotional disturbance of living amidst these delayed effects? In what ways can environmental and climate change that still can’t be seen or felt introduce an age of dread and change our perceptual habits much as, say, Marshall McLuhan felt that new technology such as the telegraph did in an earlier era?

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This article focuses on environmental work by artists and filmmakers that attempts to visually address new forms of art, seeing, feeling and sociality that are coming into being in the age of the Anthropocene.1 In what follows, I bring together issues in ›critical climate change‹ scholarship to examine aspects of feminist and environmentalist art from Chernobyl to Polar landscapes in the work of Swedish artist Lina Selander and US artist Amy Balkin. Compared to the scientific communities, artists’ communities tolerate and even encourage eccentric practices and even aesthetic extremism in the name of innovation. Though the art world has not engaged fully with these critical global issues, some artists around the world are working on these problematics that are so critical to our times of how to represent the delayed effects of these environmental disasters that are at once intimate yet far-off in time. The two artists that I discuss focus on the debris left behind in the wake of extreme industrialization and modernization, and are linked by a shared interest in the archive as a product of both earth and culture transformed by environmental and climate change. Selander’s black and white silent film titled Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut (2012) draws from specific methods of montage in the history of cinema, characteristic of Soviet montage (Vertov and Eisenstein) and tries to create an aesthetically rich and provocative film and art installation. Balkin’s ongoing work A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting by contrast is anti-aesthetic and more conceptually driven and is preoccupied with questions of time, perception, and shifting notions of nature and mobilizing citizens around climate change. Both Selander’s and Balkin’s work is about archives, debris and endangered objects and create messages from a feared future that is almost now. Both works suggest that

1

This article builds on research from my first book Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (Bloom 1993), a special issue of a journal, The Scholar and the Feminist, at Barnard College co-edited with Elena Glasberg and Laura Kay (Bloom, Glasberg, and Kay 2008), a more recent article written collaboratively with Elena Glasberg in 2012 titled »Disappearing Ice and Missing Data: Visual Culture of the Polar Regions and Global Warming« (Bloom and Glasberg 2012), and a book project that is tentatively titled Contemporary Art and Climate Change of the Polar Regions: Gender After Ice (Bloom 2016). Gender on Ice invited us to think how conventional narratives about science, travel, gender, and race, as well as concepts of nationhood, attitudes towards nature, technology, and the wilderness were being reimagined during the late 19 th

and early 20th century. Springboarding from the earlier study, the new book draws on

a range of representations within contemporary art production to rethink these narratives as the polar regions have shifted from the last space of heroic exploration to the first place of global decline. Cf. also Bloom 2018.

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places like Chernobyl, Kivalina, Alaska, and Antarctica are utterly transformed from what they used to be and are constantly in flux, as a result of the terrifying side effects of the current extreme state of industrialization.

L INA S ELANDER ’ S L ENIN ’ S L AMP G LOWS IN THE P EASANT ’ S H UT (2012): R EMNANTS FROM AN I NDUSTRIAL D REAM THAT HAS G ONE A WRY Lina Selander’s film and art installation Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut (2012) deals with the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine and the present and future force of that disaster’s ongoing perculations. 2 Time is used in a haunting way in her work as she wants us to see that the history of electricity, as well as the role of the mediums of film and photography, have a host of potent valences at different points in history including their connection to a utopian dream of the future that started with the first decade of the Soviet state. Selander’s montage approach explores the gaps and absences drawn from these historical and technological shifts and makes us notice how conditions shift according to the medium. As, for example, how the scale of the production of electrical energy changes from the monumental dam project of Dziga Vertov’s film that she references into the nuclear power plant in her own. She also wants us to see how she is doing something radically different from the Soviet filmmakers that she cites in her cinematic work in light of her environmentalist perspective. This comes through in the way she uses radiation as a metaphor for the archive she creates. Whereas her art installation gives centrality to radiation’s traces literally taking the form of black shadows on a series of light sensitive white developing paper exposed to uranium rocks; her film creates a wider context for the cinematic and historical visual inscription of the history of electricity and how it is linked to the history of cinema, photography, as well as extreme industrialization. Her installation, Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut (2012) is borrowed in its entirety from an intertitle in the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s 1928 film

2

This work has been exhibited at The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2011); Manifesta 9, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. The Deep of the Modern, Genk, Belgium (2012); Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden (2014), The 8th Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Seoul (2014). It appeared at the Venice biennale 2015 Arsenale, 9 May - 22 November 2015. The film can be seen online at: https://vimeo.com/28228797, accessed online May 2019. For the catalogue on this work, see Holmberg 2013.

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The Eleventh Year. She also uses other Vertov intertitles throughout such as »Half way between Dniepro-Petrovsk and Zaporozkie the Wild river rushes over the rocks«, »We construct«, »Here electrical energy emerges«, to remind us that in Vertov’s film »man« has successfully brought nature to heel through iconic structures of monumental modernity. The footage that she uses from The Eleventh Year presents an optimistic celebration of the achievements and glories of the USSR in the eleventh year of the revolution, notably innovations in hydroelectricity (dams), irrigation, and electrification. One is instantly put in mind of Lenin’s famous claim that »communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country«. (Lenin [1920] 1966: 408) Juxtaposed to the images from The Eleventh Year are a number of shots that record the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, an event that precipitated in part the fall of the Soviet Union. There is contemporary footage of the abandoned city of Pripyat where Selander photographed the contaminated zone (Illustration 1); images from the rescue efforts of the Ukrainian coal miners who helped with the remediation work at the disaster site and later lost their lives from their exposure to the radiation; and artifacts from the Chernobyl museum in Kiev that administered the historical heritage of the accident where we see photos of the workers from memorial displays and photographs. (Illustration 2)

Illustration 1. The Chernobyl Nuclear

Illustration 2. The Chernobyl

Power Plant Exclusion Zone Residential

Museum, Display of Medals.

Building. Image: Lina Selander.

Image: Lina Selander

Selander’s montage by virtue of this simple juxtaposition moves us away from a celebratory modernity of political utopias from the early 20th century that Vertov’s film documents. It exemplifies a more reflexive modernity where we think about the environmental impact of human, technical, and industrial actions and disasters like Chernobyl in terms of conditions where health, safety, and environmental regulations were absent, lax, or poorly enforced. However, her focus is less on sending a ›message‹ but drawing us in to her fascinating set of images to notice

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unexpected aspects of the meltdown, such as, the out-of-date machinery in the control room of the reactor that might have contributed to the disaster taken during a reconstruction of events leading to the accident, (Illustration 3) or, that the Ukrainian workers who died were given medals for their work that were displayed at the Chernobyl museum. (Illustration 2) One of the eeriest and most unexpected moments in her montage is when the silence of the film is disrupted half-way through with the sudden outburst of a symphony orchestra from Vertov’s film, and the accompanying kitsch celebratory footage of a model of Chernobyl presented as if it is a sacred achievement from when the nuclear plant first opened. (Illustration 4)

Illustration 3. The Chernobyl Museum,

Illustration 4. The Chernobyl Museum,

Reactor Control Room: Reconstruction

Model of Reactor 4. The Sarcophagus.

of Events Leading to the Accident.

Image: Lina Selander

Image: Lina Selander

Selander’s own work borrows from this earlier history of modernity and in a certain way she has not given up entirely on some aspects of it, such as regarding the film medium as an important tool. Vertov’s famous statement, »I am an eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see« introduces the new technology of the camera as the promise of a radically new way of seeing, or even existing. (cf. Vertov’s Kino Eye 1924). For Selander, the camera is less a propaganda tool in the service of a ›simple modernity‹, but more a critical apparatus that enables her to tell a layered and provocative story of eerie remnants from an industrial dream that has gone awry. By re-editing sequences from Dziga Vertov’s film celebrating the technologies of the future from the first decade of the Soviet state with contemporary footage that details the failure of that dream, Salander turns the history of photography and cinema into an archive of knowledge and disappearances. This, too, is important to Balkin’s A

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People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting which is a collection of potential disasters and disappearances. Yet, Salander is more interested in how to represent the failure embedded in the old archive of modernity using cinematic montage to tell the dark side of Chernobyl. Throughout her film there are a number of images that register an eerie feeling of dread; such as her footage of the cold deserted industrial landscape of Pripyat with a focus on its strangely beautiful empty buildings, landscapes and decay (Illustration 1), and of a former abandoned archive with paper and documents chaotically scattered all over the floor (Illustration 5) and an image of boxes falling down that in itself is an extraordinary image of what was once an otherwise neatly ordered museum archive coming apart (Illustration 6). Throughout her film and installation there is a contrast between still and moving images, between the cinematic and the photographic, and between the positive and the negative. Her film abandons the machine-like perspective of Vertov’s camera movements and slows down the sequencing of images, using still images to emphasize the decay and death of environmental ruin in photographs of buildings, xrays and fossils.

Illustration 5. The Chernobyl Nuclear

Illustration 6. The Swedish Museum of

Power Plant Exclusion Zone Library.

Natural History, Department of Palaeo-

Image: Lina Selander

botany. Image: Lina Selander

Selander is also interested in the complex history of visuality connected to the elusive phenomenon of radiation and what one cannot see as the negative effects of the triumphant industrialization from an earlier era. Such as the fallout of cesium - the lethal radiation that was released but cannot be captured on film, but lives on in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where she filmed abandoned horses whose survival eerily suggests life in the future, but in a contaminated environment bereft of human life. (Illustration 7)

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Illustration 7. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion Zone: Animals not Evacuated Become Wild. Image: Lina Selander

A strong component of Selander’s work is the aesthetic experience of viewing these disturbing juxtapositions of debris and waste that are made to disappear in the larger context of other extinctions, many of which persist in the form of fossilized remains. For this reason, it is not surprising that the centerpiece of her exhibit are shadow-like traces on white developing paper from uranium rocks, a method that recalls how nuclear radiation was discovered by the French scientist Henri Becquerel during his experiments with photographic plates. (Illustrations 8-9) Here the photographic image is connected to the scientific discovery that made it possible to make visible and catch power and harness it as an energy source. But, in this context it is the way that these black images are both aesthetically pleasing and at the same time have a disconcerting history that pricks the viewer. These black traces evoke prior historical eras and prior extinctions referencing Chernobyl as a near present extinguishing event. They share a kinship with the ghost-like fossils, skeletons and the x-ray photographs in her film in which we are drawn into seeing the beautiful contours of plants and a skeleton (taken from Vertov’s film) that belongs to a 2000 year old Scythian from another geological age or the bone structures and internal organs of animals, fish and birds. (Illustrations 10-11)

Illustration 8. The Hogstromer Medico-

Illustration 9. The Swedish Museum of Natural

Historical Library. Image: Lina Selander

History, Plant Fossils. Image: Lina Selander

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Illustration 10. Installation of Lina

Illustration 11. Detail from installation of Lina

Selander’s works on photographic paper of

Selander’s works on photographic paper of

traces from Uranium Rocks. Manifesta 9

traces from uranium rocks. Manifesta 9 The

The European Biennial of Contemporary

European Biennial of Contemporary Art, The

Art, The Deep of the Modern, Genk,

Deep of the Modern, Genk, Belgium (2012).

Belgium (2012). Image: Lina Selander

Image: Lina Selander

A MY B ALKIN : W HAT WILL BE A GE OF C LIMATE C HANGE ?

THE

A RTIFACTS

OF OUR

There is a surreal aspect to the premise of Balkin’s work as well, but as a conceptual archive project it draws on a different tradition than Selander’s as it projects the high cost of modernity through a future map of risk. Unlike Selander who has us look at the relationship between the history of technology and its visual inscriptions in relation to its ruinous environmental repercussions, Balkin’s work takes another turn and tackles the issue of environmental risk directly. The focus of her work is rather how to represent environmental damage yet to come, a task that has often been relegated to the realm of science fiction writers, often with powerful results. Balkin complicates in her work this notion of the future through rethinking the genre of the post-apocalyptic. There is a jarring aspect to the premise of Balkin’s A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting which is a growing collection of items contributed from places around the world that may disappear due to the effects of climate change. Her archive is comprised of things that in her words »are intended to form a record of the future anterior, prefiguring forseen or predicted disappearance and related displacements, migrations, and relocation.« (Kopel 2014) One of the problems in trying to communicate the threat of global climate change is that it still can’t be seen or felt – since the violence in some cases is delayed, the argument goes. Climate change is only recently starting to impose itself as a practical problem for most of the US population and its leaders, but for decades parts of Alaska and other areas in the Arctic and Antarctic have been

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sinking and only recently have extreme weather events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy manifested a dramatic change in climate and geological structure in the Continental US for both the Gulf Coast and the Northeastern and Southeastern Atlantic coastlines. The work of Amy Balkin’s A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting is an archive literally of ›debris‹ – the things that are already left or will be abandoned in the wake of environmental destruction. The collection contains objects from the Arctic and Antarctic as well as other parts of the world like Mexico City that is famously sinking as it is built on a swamp. A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting is actually one of a number of conceptual archives made by artists in the US for public use.3 Balkin’s project’s particular focus is on the slow-motion violence of climate change often discounted by dominant structures of perception but one that is relayed by ordinary people who as non-experts or non-scientists are often not seen as authoritative witnesses. In this conceptual work, emphasis is put on documenting, analyzing and archiving everyday occurrences often dismissed from memory and policy planning by framing them as accidental, or random. The archive focuses on the inequitable exposure to climate-related losses for diverse communities and is displayed at libraries, galleries and online. 4 (Illustration 12) It is comprised of both statements by the contributors that provides an explanation of why they contributed to the archive and the significance to them of the artifacts they donated. For the purposes of this paper I am focusing on two of the contributors from the Arctic and Antarctic. In all, this is a small sample of the contributors to this ongoing project from diverse locations around the world such as New York City, New Orleans, Mexico City, Huaraz (Peru), and from countries like Nepal and Senegal, Greenland and Tuvalu, Australia, Cape Verde, Cuba, Germany, Italy and Panama.

3

Some of the more well-known ones include the Archive of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and its digital Land Use Database, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

4

The archive is available online at www.sinkingandmelting.tumblr.com; it is or has been exhibited at the Prelinger Library, San Francisco; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; the Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg, Germany; the Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space, New York; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; Science Gallery, Dublin; Anderson Gallery, VCUarts, Richmond VA, Austrian Cultural Foundation, New York. This interview project was initiated as part of the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.

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Illustration 12. Scientific Sample Bottle, Antarctica Collection, Amy Balkin’s »A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting«. Contributed by: Micaela Neus with Caroline Lipke. Photo: Mary Lou Saxon

A NTARCTICA As is well-known, Antarctica sits on the forefront of climate change. As of May 2014 when the announcement was made that the retreat of ice in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica was unstoppable, there has been much concern about what this disappearance will trigger and what it will mean for rising sea levels worldwide. Balkin’s project focuses on the complex ecology of spectatorship in local situations and what is often dismissed from memory from the ongoing damage inflicted by climate breakdown. Micaela Neus, a contributor to Balkin’s archive from Antarctica, addresses the disturbances of living amidst the ongoing effects of the melting as a worker in Antarctica: »Everyday sees a little loss, if you know how to measure it. Some of my co-workers remember when the sea ice grew so thick every winter, they could ski out to neighboring islands on their day off. Others have to spend hours chipping away ice-melt from under buildings because the snow pack actually thawed enough to flow as water into the wrong places before refreezing. That’s what we see as workers. The scientists say the same things except they get grants and make graphs.«5

Micaela comments on the everydayness of the loss and how what she notices as disappearing is now part of her daily life and routine as she notices that more time is spent dealing with the changes and the ways her activities are curtailed because

5

See Micaela Neus’ contribut ion to Balkin’s archive available online at www. sinkingandmelting.tumblr.com.

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of the loss of ice. She chooses for the archive abandoned tools such as a discarded wrench, a nap hook that came from a boat when collecting specimens, and used scientific sample bottles that are unremarkable in themselves as they are used by the hundreds in Palmer Station on Anvers Island (one of the research sites where scientists are building up a detailed knowledge of phytoplanktom, one of the microscopic food webs in the Palmer Deep). (Illustration 13) It is significant that the objects she has chosen for Balkin’s archive are utterly replaceable objects from the collective scientific community that she is part of and whose job is to document everything: »These objects come from daily life around the station; they are things commonly encountered by workers and scientists alike. None of these objects were ›mine‹ in the conventional sense, and yet they were, because so much of our living is communal by necessity. These particular objects would otherwise have been discarded, but the same goes for their replacements.«6

For Micaela these ordinary objects, since they were replaceable and not noticeable as missing, were beyond our sensory ken, but by choosing them for the archive she offers us a different kind of status of unseen objects as crucial witnesses to our inhuman future.

Illustration 13. Carved whale vertebra,

Illustration 14. 5 A People's Archive of

Kivalina Collection, Amy Balkin’s

Sinking and Melting (State: From the

»A People’s Archive of Sinking and

Majuro Declaration to COP19 Warsaw),

Melting«. Contributed by: Christine

Amy Balkin et al. (2011-ongoing). Instal-

Shearer. Carving by Russell Adams Jr.

lation, dimensions variable.

Photo: Mary Lou Saxon

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

6 See Micaela Neus’ contribution to Balkin’s archive available online at www. sinkingandmelting.tumblr.com.

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K IVALINA , A LASKA Kivalina lies approximately 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle, on the tip of a thin, 8-mile long barrier reef island in Alaska. The population of about four hundred residents is primarily Inupiat. There is an urgency in Kivalina – since the village is just one of thirty-one Inuit settlements that scientists believe will be destroyed by the effects of climate change within the next 10 years. The army corps of engineers built a sea wall in 2008 to defend it against the storms, but that hasn’t protected the island from flooding. Caught within gray areas of US and tribal political representation, Kivalina has been struggling to relocate for almost two decades with little success, as climate change comes more quickly and severely, putting the entire village in danger. The residents are living in a slow-motion disaster that will end, very possibly within the next ten years or sooner, with the entire village being washed away. The discarded objects used for scientific experiments from Antarctica collected by Micaela Neus contrast markedly with the very specific hand-carved whale vertebra that Christine Shearer contributed to the archive from the village of Kivalina where she spent time researching her book Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (2011). (Illustration 14) Whereas objects connected to scientific work are fitting artifacts from a continent with no native population that was designated in 1959 as a space for »peace and science«, they would be inappropriate for Kivalina. As Kivalina’s Alaskan history has to do with a more complex history of native peoples that goes back thousands of years to some of the first settlements in the Americas. Christine Shearer has chosen a whale carving for the archive and explains her choice this way: »I purchased this whale bone carving from Russell Adams Jr., a Kivalina resident in his 40s whose family has lived in the area for generations. I was in Kivalina to do research on the Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil et al. lawsuit. But after talking to residents like Russell I realized the full extent and immediacy of the danger they face from climate change – not just the threat of losing their homeland, but their entire culture and way of life. The whale bone for me symbolized this way of life and the thousands-year Arctic culture the people are striving to preserve, which I describe in the book Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (2011).«7

7

See Christina Shearer’s contribution to Balkin’s archive available online at www.sinkingandmelting.tumblr.com.

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Here we have a different perspective on the specific loss of the native village of Kivalina from the point of view of an outsider who wrote a book about Kivalina’s climate change induced erosion and the larger history of how Kivalina residents have been struggling to relocate for almost two decades with little success. 8 Here Shearer emphasizes the perverse unintended consequences of the eroded coastline of Kivalina. She is concerned about the displacement of indigenous peoples and the erasure of ways of life that has been sustainable for millennia. Like many Alaskan Native villages, Kivalina has retained a largely subsistence lifestyle that is now changing. Eating and hunting whale meat was part of that legacy. That is why her contribution to the archive of a hand-carved whale bone as an artifact seems significant but also again somewhat ordinary, as part of an everyday life of subsistence that no longer exists. For such an Inupiat community, environmental sensibilities and practices have always existed, but they were often directly entangled with ongoing, everyday struggles for survival including hunting whales in the past. The inclusion of such an object into the archive brings into the discussion a different, more intimate perspective on witnessing and a way to address changing indigenous ways of life, community displacement and climate change in the context of a poor island native experience. But how does a small island like Kivalina which has contributed very little to global warming emissions, and has very little money or power, come up with the resources to make visible the slow violence that is destroying their island? Kivalina’s extreme plight speaks to the representational challenges posed by slow violence, the focus of Balkin’s archive. It was once widely assumed that native or tribal societies were destined to disappear. But it is not just economic and political forces that are completing the work of destruction but rather climate change itself. *** Amy Balkin’s archive refers to our present as well as future disasters. These collected objects are messages from a feared future that redraws the map and redraws

8

See Shearer 2011. According to Shearer, what is currently happening in the Arctic is essentially a question of environmental, and, more specifically, of climate justice. To get attention for their predicament in 2008, the village sued 24 oil companies, including – ultimately unsuccessfully – ExxonMobil in US district court in 2009, arguing that their emissions were responsible for climate change and that they knowingly misinformed the public about this fact. The village of Kivalina was denied legal standing to bring the case, because the judge argued that global warming is too ubiquitous to be ›fairly traceable‹ to the defendants’ emissions, as required for standing.

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the present. While this project might look like another memorial project, conceptually it is more provocative and more original. Instead, it draws our attention to what it means to think beyond normal human time frames and remap cultural memory in order to generate urgency in a different present tense. Her project brings about a perceptual awareness in the present about a shift in how we perceive and inhabit environmental time by producing connections between different parts of the globe to better understand disasters that are impending and those that are still far in the future, between those areas that are most in danger now and those that still have more time. Her archive that consists of people noticing and documenting changes already happening due in part to climate change is also designed for a culture that isn’t good at facing the distant future and distant problems. It shifts our awareness in the present to make us understand that we are faced with a time-short problem of climate change where we have a very limited window to act that is steadily closing.

C ONCLUSION Selander’s and Balkin’s viewpoints suggest some important new directions in contemporary art, and in the process, their work makes us think about how to represent environmental crises discounted by dominant structures of perception. Both deal with threats that can’t be seen or felt, and in the case of climate change the final full catastrophic violence is delayed. These events, like the poison itself from the radiation of Chernobyl, or, the potential damage from climate change are suspended in a state of environmental, political, and ecological irresolution. Both works focus on remnants or debris – the negative matter produced in these disasters’ wake – and question who bears the social authority of witnessing. In each case, neither are about single events that can be told from one narrative perspective. Yet, their innovative approaches are directly pertinent to bringing to the forefront a transformed aesthetic and political sensibility of how to render visible the ongoing damage inflicted by environmental and climate breakdown.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Bloom, Lisa (2019): Polar Aesthetics: Feminism and the Polar Crisis in the Arctic and Antarctic, Durham. (forthcoming) — (2018): »Hauntological Environmental Art: The Photographic Frame and the Nuclear After-Life of Chernobyl in Lina Selander’s ›Lenin’s Lamp‹«, in: Journal of Visual Culture 17.2. (Affect at the Limits of Photography), pp. 223-237. — (1993) Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions, Minneapolis. Bloom, Lisa/Glasberg, Elena (2012): »Disappearing Ice and Missing Data: Visual Culture of the Polar Regions and Global Warming«, in: Andrea Polli/ Jane Marsching (ed.): Far Fields: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles, Bristol. Bloom, Lisa/Glasberg, Elena/Kay, Laura (2008): Introduction to Special Issue: »Gender on Ice: Feminist Approaches to the Arctic and Antarctic«, in: The Scholar and the Feminist 7.1, http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/ice/intro_01.htm, accessed online May 2019. Holmberg, Helena (2013): Lina Selander. Echo. The montage, the fossil, the sarcophagus, the x-ray, the cloud, the sound, the feral animal, the shadow, the room, and Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut, Stockholm. Kopel, Dana (2014): »What Will Have Been: Interviews on a People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting», in: The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics, and Culture, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/06/art/what-willhave-been-interviews-on-a-peoples-archive-of-sinking-and-melting, accessed online May 2019. Lenin, Vladimir (1966): »Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks« [1920], in: V.L.: Collected Works, vol. 31, April - December 1920, ed. and trans. by Jullius Katzer, Moscow, pp. 408-426. Nixon, Rob (2011): Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, Mass./London. Shearer, Christina (2011): Kivalina: A Climate Change Story, Chicago.

F ILM Odinnadcatyj god (The Eleventh Year) (1928) (UdSSR, R: Dziga Vertov)

Natural Archives as Counter Archives: Gulag Literature from Witness to Postmemory1 S USI K. F RANK

I NTRODUCTION : S OME R EMARKS ON T HE N OTIONS A RCHIVE AND N ATURAL A RCHIVE

OF

From the perspective of disciplines like geology or historical zoology Arctic permafrost soil serves as an archive that provides huge amounts of research data. Their extraction and processing have laid the foundation for the writing of earth’s history, the history of climate, of tectonic shifts and of life in this region. From the 18th century onward the developing discipline of »natural history« used and conceptualized it as a »natural archive«.2 In our days the global significance of the Arctic has changed: While still remaining an important archive for geologists who investigate core ice, the Arctic has also become part of the UNESCO protected (natural) world heritage. And this heritage is in great danger: Arctic warming is one of the most prominent topics in the daily news today, and not only because the Arctic is the region where global warming proceeds most quickly but because its permafrost soil in the process of melting threatens to start a feedback process by which huge amounts of methane gas would be set free and accelerate global warming. The protected heritage zone thus turns out to be a ticking time bomb.

1

In a certain sense this article continues my argumentation in the article »Ice as a literary motif in Soviet Arctic Modernities« that contributed to Arctic modernities. There I also write about Sergei Lebedev’s novel, but under a different angle. (cf. Ryall/Hansson 2017: 16-38)

2

Cf. Rudwick (2005: 218f.), Fritscher (2009: 203f.) and, specifically to the notion of »natural archive« cf. Georg Toepfer’s article in this volume.

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In my article I want to take up the discussion about the notion of natural archives and – by means of an analysis of two representative texts of Russian literature – add a theoretical aspect that so far has not received the attention it deserves: The relation between archive and heritage/legacy. In the context of today’s far advanced discussion about the archive, one has to make clear which of the two main notions of the archive one is referring to: the archive ›verbatim‹ as a concrete state institution, or – after Foucault – the archive in a broader and mostly metaphorical sense as a medium and mechanism of storage and re-actualization that decides what can be known. From both points of view the archive is an effective instrument of power: power of the state or even power over the mind. Ever since antiquity, the archive as an institution served to guarantee the stability of jurisdiction, the legal system, the state, of state order and the ruling class. As Ulrich Raulff put it, they constitute the institutionalized juridical, social, and cultural memory of a state.3 Archives were and are the storage place for indispensable strategic knowledge and also security skills. According to this institutional notion, archives preserve the past with the aim of making it useful for the present and the future. In this function archives themselves represent a kind of heritage in two respects: institutional heritage and its content, i.e. the heritage of knowledge, skills of power, and cultural values. As a heritage the archive is a place where various social interests coincide: the democratic interest in transparency, the legal requirement of justice, the interest in the stability of legal processes, political stability and state sovereignty that archives as guardians of the state’s secrets guarantee, but also the civic interest in the preservation of cultural memory.4 But in situations where a (totalitarian) state abuses archives in order to falsify history, counter-archives can become instruments of resistance.5 And in case the legitimacy of the state has been challenged, if the state is subjected to a fundamental criticism and the political system changes, archives lose their stabilizing function and their heritage is abandoned as well. New archives then have to be built to enable documentations and investigations of the failed state. If the old archives are not destroyed, they transform themselves into relics, into monuments of the fallen state and as storehouses full of sources that are of high value for critical investigations, too. They become a kind of legacy that is there, does not simply

3

Cf. Raulff 2016: 117.

4

Cf. Raulff 2016: 124.

5

Cf. Raulff 2016: 120.

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disappear, that cannot be denied and has to be handled somehow, though it can be used as an evidence of illegitimate power. When Arlette Farge stated that archives deliver the primary, the raw material, a kind of »fossilized reality«6, she like Michel Foucault did not have in mind a passive storage house, but an active power. (Foucault 1981: 187) Stating that archives inform the usage of what they contain, Foucault not only decisively widened and abstracted the notion of archive, but transformed it into an epistemological metaphor7. Delineating his notion of archive from the traditional understanding as a passive storage house, on the one hand, and from its understanding as an instrument of state power (the institution), on the other, Foucault ascribed to the archive a certain agency on its own: In his opinion the archive decides, it is/gives the rule of what can be said and what cannot. According to Foucault the archive cannot be grasped analytically, neither in its totality nor in its entire dynamics. Foucault called the »discipline of exploring the archive«8 – of exploring the options for statement it offers – the archive’s »positivities« and its discursive formations, »archeology« in order to turn traditional (= narrative) historiography upside down and to deconstruct the illusion of linearity and teleology to which historical narratives pretend. Referring to Freud9 and to Nietzsche’s notion of »critical history« 10, Foucault suggested to take archival sources no longer as »documents« – as something we can simply read –, but as »monuments« (Foucault 1981: 15), as fragments-relics that have to be deciphered and thus cannot easily be integrated into a grand narrative. In fact, he understood the archive as the »medium of history«.11 Archives as places of a higher »concentration of the real« became for Foucault objects of hope for deeper historical insight. (Ebeling/Günzel 2009: 18-19) In

6

Cf. Farge (1989:18): »The archive petrifies moments (of reality) contingently and

7

Cf. Lepper/Raulff (2016: 21ff.).

8

Cf. Foucault 1981: 190.

9

As we know, Sigmund Freud used the term »archive« as a challenge for »history« and

without any order.« (Transl. S.F.)

»memory« and developed psychoanalysis as an archivological approach (Cf. Ebeling / Günzel 2009: 9ff.) that aims at detecting and interpreting all traces of the repressed past (Stingelin 2016: 25-26.), whereby Freud defined the repressed as that which has been »archived in another way« (ibid.). 10 Cf. Nietzsche 1980: 243-334. 11 Cf. Ebeling/Günzel 2009: 14.

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Freud’s and Foucault’s sense »archives« resemble an active instance that »generates modi of history« (Ernst 2002: 92) and respectively »constitutes knowledge« (Ernst 2002: 39) on its own. Aleida Assmann, who together with her husband Jan Assmann is the most famous theoretician of »cultural memory« of our days, shifted the emphasis to the archive as an institution of memory: the archive as an instrument of »memory control« (Gedächtnisniskontrolle), as an instrument for the construction of a cultural heritage, as a storage house of all we can get to know about history, and the only and best instrument to provide evidence of the past. It is very useful to differentiate like Assmann does between the archive as a political instrument of power (stabilization) – as such it serves as a kind of »functional memory« (Funktionsgedächtnis) – and the archive as »storage memory« (Speichergedächtnis) which provides the material to investigate history. It is quite significant that Assmann pays attention to the moment of change I mentioned above: when due to a radical change in the political system archives lose their value and function of power and control, they transform themselves into storehouses of historical sources the value of which depends on their ability to provide evidence on the past. Then the question arises whether the archives that lost their original function are of any further value or turn out to contain only useless rubbish, and whether the useless archive provides the information historians of the new times are interested in or not. Assmann argues that some parts of the archive that has transformed into »storage memory« and became useless in the primary sense may possibly be transformed into a new »Funktionsgedächtnis«: namely as »cultural heritage«.12 She mentions situations when an illiberal or totalitarian regime typically restricts access to archives and as much as possible reduces institutions of »storage memory« in favor of »functional memory«, but she does not take into account the case if an archive that has become a useless relic contains information about the illegitimate former regime, about its crimes against humankind etc. In this case the archive turns out to be a legacy the new society can hardly deny and has to cope with. None of theories of the archive mentioned so far consider the possibility of natural archives. In this volume natural archives such as permafrost soil or ice cores are discussed under the perspective of their theoretical comparability with the archive as a political and a cultural institution. As Georg Toepfer points out, natural deposits and traces of physical conditions of the past can be seen as archives even in Wolfgang Ernst’s sense – who from the point of view of his theoretical approach

12 Cf. Assmann 1999: 343ff.

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does not accept the existence of »natural archives« – because like regular archives they are »closely connected to human action in the two directions of their genesis and use. […] natural deposits and traces are established as archives not before their later use«. And: »Natural archives come into existence by being extracted and processed from natural structures and by being used in an argument or the execution of administrative acts, for example in the political discourse about measurements to be taken against climate change.«

From this perspective, the archive, whether it is cultural or natural, is necessarily constructed and »nature has no archive by herself but only by humans using their objects as such.« I think we can gently relativize this suggestion in two respects: In the paragraphs above I tried to argue that due to historical change archives that once were useful institutions may lose their function and be transformed into relics, but these relics may keep or take on new significance in a new cultural context and may not be ignored. At this point Freud’s notion of the unconscious as what has been repressed and archived/stored »in another place« and may thus become noticeable through symptoms comes into play. Secondly, I suggest that under this angle, natural archives gain new significance as not intentionally constructed mnemonic storage that was not assumed to stabilize state power but instead functions as a mnemonic medium that preserves all kinds of traces from the past, regardless of whether they stem from earth’s history or from human deeds, and keeps them as a heritage that, on the one hand, is simply there, but that on the other hand, can also gain agency of its own. Permafrost soil – irrespectively of whether in the form of ice cores and sediments – and the frozen mammoths or corpses of Gulag victims that are preserved by it can be understood as a natural archive in this sense. But in the case of Gulag victims that were not stored in the ground in order to be preserved, permafrost turns out to be a counter-memory that may help the traumatized, or, as an unintended archive, it may become a troublesome legacy. The two literary texts I am going to analyze, by means of fictional narration, reflect on the notion of natural archive and its potential to function as a countermemory. Referring to the natural archive of Arctic permafrost, Varlam !alamov develops a poetics of witnessing, whereas Sergei Lebedev, representing the postmemory generation, develops a performative poetics of mourning and repentance.

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V ARLAM Š ALAMOV ’ S K OLYMA T ALES When Varlam Šalamov (1907-1982), an author with literary roots in the 1920s and 30s, started to write his Kolyma Tales in the mid-1950’s, he had spent more than twenty years as a political prisoner in Soviet (Siberian) labor camps. In his prose, and also in an important metatext which is called »On Prose«, Šalamov tried to find a language to describe the situation of ultimate dehumanization he had experienced. His aim was to bear witness, to let the text – despite its fictional dimension – become an authentic document of the experience of its author. Šalamov started his literary career in the historical context of Stalinism when nature was seen as an enemy, a stubborn object that had to be mastered and the Arctic was conceptualized as the frontier of Soviet civilization, as the ultimate playground of MAN’s control over nature.13 – But in the 1960’s and 70’s, when Šalamov wrote most of his Kolyma Tales, ecological movements and movements for the protection of the historical monuments of the Soviet Union opened up a more critical perspective on the conquest and victory over nature. The way Šalamov envisioned the Arctic contributes to this new critical perspective from the point of view of those who were banished to the Gulag for political reasons. Šalamov interpreted permafrost soil not as an object of human domination but as something that has an agency of its own: as a medium of conservation, and therefore memory, that preserves evidence and thus creates an archive of all the crimes against humanity the Soviet totalitarian rule had committed in this region. In the literary imagery of his Kolyma Tales and in some of his poems, Šalamov foregrounds three different aspects of the Arctic landscape and its climate, including ice and snow: first, the Arctic’s hostility that poses a deadly threat for human beings, especially those who were coerced to work under such conditions. This imagery has a long tradition in Russian literature going back to Romanticism: on the one hand, during the Napoleonic wars, the climatic conditions of the Russian/Arctic North were thought of as a symbol of national strength; and, on the other, they served to poetically underline the cruelty of the Siberian exile to which the Decembrists were sentenced after their uprising in 1825. Šalamov could not but pick up this tradition, though he added two other aspects by which he accentuates the Arctic landscape as a memory-scape: for example, the following verses from the poem »Стланик« (The stone pine), which may serve

13 I elaborated on that attitude towards the Arctic and nature in general in my article in Arctic discourses (cf. Frank in Ryall/Schimansky/Waerp 2010: 106-132).

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here as one example among many, resonate with the topos of the hostile and deadly Arctic climate: »R\VW / mVQ OQ [SXN iNbf Y ]\_Y, / nQbRgfoQiN ibNpONiN XZVW« (There / Where there is no pain and no suffering / From the lethal terrible ice) (Transl. S.F.) A second set of images evokes the Arctic as a landscape without memory where ice and, especially, snow covers everything and thereby deletes any traces of the past; a landscape of (seeming) emptiness where everything drowns and by and by disappears. An example of such imagery is e.g. !alamov’s poem »qW]fRZ T_bSXW TRNXZ_N pXW«: Memory has veiled

qW]fRZ T_bSXW TRNXZ_N pXW

much evil;

rQp hYTXW Y ]QbS.

her long lies leave nothing

sTa-RN ^YpOZ XiWXW, XiWXW.

to believe.

tQR Qc [NXZuQ gQbS.

There may be no cities

nN^QR, OQR OY iNbNVNg,

or green gardens;

tY TWVNg pQXQOSe,

only fields of ice

v ^YgW XYuZ TYXW XZVNg

and salty oceans.

v ]NbQc TNXQOSe.

The world may be pure snow,

nN^QR, ]Yb – NVOY TOQiW,

a starry road;

wgQpVOWf VNbNiW.

just northern forest

nN^QR, ]Yb – NVOW RWciW

in the mind of God.14

s `NOY]WOZQ rNiW. (!alamov 1998)

In Ljuba Yurgenson’s view, »the landscape that lacks any signs of presence« (Jurgenson 2017: 107) most adequately represents the convict’s liminal experience: as if the landscape itself, by means of its emptiness, denied the convict’s fate and thereby ‘deletes’ his existence even more. Rossen DGagalov identifies the »empty landscape« as a key-figure of !alamovs’s poetics, though he does not connect it to memory. Instead he classifies !alamov as an existentialist:

14 Translation: Robert Chandler, »Times Literary Supplement« (March 7, 2014). To the notion of memory in !alamov’s poetry cf. Thun-Hohenstein 2019.

292 | S USI K. F RANK »Пустота является доминирующей метафорой и определяющим структурным принципом шаламовских новелл: именно в снежной пустыне Колымы, где обычно происходит действие, человек оказывается один на один с Пустотой. Пространство и Время, в рамках которых происходит встреча, абстрактны и универсальны, что подчёркнуто частотой употребления таких слов, как ›везде› и ›вечно‹.« (Džagalov 2007: 70) »Emptiness is the dominating metaphor and the defining structural principle of Shalamov’s stories: in the snow desert of Kolyma, which provides the arena for most of his tales, the human is confronted face to face with the lonely desert. Space and time that frame the confrontation are abstract and universal, which is underlined by recurrent words like ›everywhere‹ and ›forever‹.« (Transl. S.F.)

In my opinion, it is most interesting that Šalamov again and again juxtaposes the – mostly snow-covered – surface of the earth with what is below, the underground. And more than once this imagery gains a metapoetic dimension: in the opening tale »Trampling the snow« (Po snegu), when Šalamov equates the snow-covered field with an »empty piece of paper«15; or in »Sherry Brandy« where he compares the artist not to Orpheus, but to Pluto who climbs »the surface of the earth from hell, far below«.16 In the following lines from Šalamov’s famous story »The glove« (Перчатка) it is not even snow, but grass and the famous Russian weedy flower »Ivan čaj« (Fireweed) that delete the traces of the past. Calling it an »enemy of the archive«, Šalamov makes the memory(-deleting) dimension of the landscape explicit: »Документы нашего прошлого уничтожены, караульные вышки спилены, бараки сровнены с землей, ржавая колючая проволока смотана и увезена куда-то в другое место. На развалинах Серпантинки процвел иван-чай – цветок пожара, забвения, враг архивов и человеческой памяти.« (Šalamov 1998, 2: 279-307) »The documents of our past are deleted, the watchtowers sawn off, the barracks razed to the ground, the rusty barbwire reeled up and brought somewhere else. On the ruins of Serpantinka blossomed Ivan čaj – the flower of fire and of oblivion, the enemy of the archives and human memory.« (Transl. S.F.)

However, it is the motif of permafrost soil that allows the author to pinpoint the opposition between the empty – covering, hiding – surface and the underground

15 Cf. Toker 1997: 195. 16 Ibid.

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that turns out to be a storehouse full of relics and traces. This juxtaposition culminates in the permafrost motif and becomes figurative: a set of images that symbolizes the tension between a politics of concealing crimes, of repressing their memory, and the memory of the regime’s traumatized victims who cannot repress that memory because its engraved in their body and mind even then though they do not wish to remember it. Most of all in the cycles »PerLatka« (The glove) and »Artist lopaty« (The Virtuoso Shovelman17) from the early 1970s !alamov foregrounds the apocalyptic connotations of ice. The Gulag world is a world where nothing (material, physical) disappears or rots because ice preserves everything, including every trace of violence and crime: corpses, body parts, and the marks of violence on them. Every being is preserved exactly in the state in which he or she died. The dead in the permafrost are »netlennye« – unrotten, undecayed –, forever present. Without further explanation, !alamov uses the word that usually describes the according characteristic symptom of the saints in Christian mythology – »netlennost« (imputrescibility) –, but »veLnyi« (eternally) here is the epitheton by which the climatic quality of the soil is classified: »[…] Ye Rb\`S [\V\R OQRXQOOS gTQiVW – ]QbRgQjS gQhONc ]QbpXNRS.« (Zagovor Yuristov) (!alamov 1998, 1: 154) »The Serpentinnaya was the famous prison for trials and sentences, where so many people had perished […]. Their corpses still hadn’t decomposed. Actually, their corpses would be intact forever – they were the dead men of the permafrost.« (The Lawyer’s conspiracy, 2018: 186) »[…] pQ]Xf OQ `bYOY]WXW ]QbRgQjNg: Y] T\^VQOW [SXW OQRXQOONTRZ – g gQhONc ]QbpXNRQ MbWcOQiN lQgQbW.« (Kak eto naLalos‘) (!alamov 1998, 1: 381-390) »The pit, once it was full of corpses, was filled by dumping stones over them, but the ground still refused to accept the corpses. They were doomed to be imperishable in the Far North’s permafrost.« (How it began, transl. Rayfield 2018: 471)

The dead resemble the living exactly: their skin is dry and scratched, their eyes as hungry as ever: »In Kolyma bodies are consigned not to the earth but to the stone. Stone preserves and reveals secrets. Stones are more reliable than earth. Permafrost preserves and reveals secrets. Every one of those close to us who perished in Kolyma, everyone who was shot,

17 Transl. by John Glad.

294 | S USI K. F RANK beaten to death, exsanguinated by starvation, can still be identified, even after decades. […] The corpses wait in the stones, in the permafrost. […] Stone and the north resisted man’s handiwork with all their strength. They did not want to let corpses into their depths. Stone, once it had given way, had been defeated and degraded, promised that it would forget nothing […]. The earth had opened and shown its underground stores, for the Kolyma’s underground stores contain not just gold, not just lead, not just wolfram, not just uranium but undecomposed human bodies.« (On lend-lease, 2018: 432) »На Колыме тела предают не земле, а камню. Камень хранит и открывает тайны. Камень надежней земли. Вечная мерзлота хранит и открывает тайны. Каждый из наших близких, погибших на Колыме, – каждый из расстрелянных, забитых, обескровленных голодом – может быть еще опознан – хоть через десятки лет. […] Трупы ждут в камне, в вечной мерзлоте. […] Камень, Север сопротивлялись всеми силами этой работе человека, не пуская мертвецов в свои недра. Камень, уступавший, побежденный, униженный, обещал ничего не забывать, обещал ждать и беречь тайну […]. Раскрылась земля, показывая свои подземные кладовые, ибо в подземных кладовых Колымы не только золото, не только олово, не только вольфрам, не только уран, но и нетленные человеческие тела.« (Po lendlizu) (Šalamov 1998, 1: 350-357)18

Again and again, Šalamov hints at the apocalyptic potential of these preserved bodies. In the end, the permafrost ice must one day disclose its secrets. At this point Šalamov explicitly mentions the Day of Judgment and Resurrection: »Эти человеческие тела ползли по склону, может быть собираясь воскреснуть.« (Po lendlizu) (Šalamov 1998, 1: 350-357) »These human bodies were crawling down the slope, perhaps about to be resurrected.« (2018: 433) »Труп Леонова увезли, чтобы привязать ему на левую ногу бирку с номером личного дела и зарыть в камни вечной мерзлоты, где покойник будет ждать до Страшного Суда или до любого другого воскресения из мертвых.« (Večnaja merzlota) (Šalamov 1998, 2: 367-371)

18 To these ›undead‹ of the frozen world corresponds the constitution of living people: Although yet alive they very much resemble the dead. The so called »dochodjaga«s are nothing else than living dead: »Андреев был представителем мертвецов. И его знания, знания мертвого человека, не могли им, еще живым, пригодиться.« (Šalamov 1998, 1: 166)

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»They carted away Leonov’s corpse in order to fix a little card with his process number on his left foot and bury him in the stones of permafrost soil, where the dead will wait for the Last Judgement or any other form of resurrection from the dead.« (Permafrost) (Transl. S.F.)

In »PerLatka« (The Glove) !alamov introduces yet two additional semantic aspects that complement the memory semantics of ice and permafrost. »PerLatka« tells an individual tale of resurrection which underscores biographical experience and – metapoetically – hints at the possibility and quality of writing on the topic of Gulag. The underlying story is simple: !alamov relates the story of a skin disease called »pellagra«, during the course of which skin peels away, to the situation of the writer who is a victim and an eye-witness of the Gulag. The phantasm of the story is the imagery of the skin pathologically peeling away like a glove from one whole hand: »mVQ-RN gN XZV\ ebWOfRTf bSjWbT_YQ ]NY `QbhWR_Y, N[XQiWguYQ ]NY `WXZjS jQXSe RbYVjWRZ uQTRZ XQR RQTOQQ XWc_NgNc _N^Y …« (!alamov 1998, 2: 279) »Somewhere in the ice my chivalric gloves are preserved, that covered my fingers thirty six years ago more tightly than a kid’s skin …« (The Glove) (Transl. S.F.)

As a result, the »gloves« shed by the narrator (who meanwhile has returned home) remain in Siberia. One of them is fortunately conserved by the permafrost somewhere in the tundra. The other rests as a kind of »living exhibit« in a »real« museum, the regional museum of the Gulag administration in Magadan. In this instance !alamov equation of the »real« museum with permafrost soil is not a mere metaphor: »qQbhWR_Y {RY ^Yg\R g ]\pQcON] XZV\« (These gloves live in museum ice). Thus, the gloves are also part of the living dead, or rather the »undead« of the Gulag world. The fact that the hand is the instrument of writing prompts some metapoetic reflections. Presenting himself as a »factographer« and »faktolog«,19 the narrator questions the possibility and legitimacy of writing about his detention in exile when there is no (real) archive to consult, when there are neither official docu-

19 » VNgQbfa `bNRN_NXZONc pW`YTY, TW] `N `bNPQTTYY PW_RNibWP, PW_RNXNi, ON hRN VQXWRZ, QTXY {RYe pW`YTQc OQR. tQR XYhOSe VQX, OQR WbeYgNg, OQR YTRNbYc [NXQpOY [...].« !alamov 1998, 2: 279) (I trust the record, being myself a factographer, a factologist, but what is to be done, if there aren’t any records. No personal records, no archivs, no patient history [...]. Transl. S.F.)

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ments nor personal records to view, when the buildings themselves have been destroyed and their ruins have been overgrown with grass and … »Ivan-čaj«. (cf. quote above) Šalamov comes to the conclusion that the »glove« that stayed in the ice is the only authentic evidence or testimony of his Gulag days, and therefore in fact a »document« in »prose«: »Сама перчатка была прозой, обвинением, документом, протоколом.« (Šalamov 1998, 2: 279-307) (The glove itself was prose, was an accusation, a document, and a record.) (Transl. S.F.)

The narrator calls it an »exhibit of the fantastic realism of my reality at that time, (an exhibit) that in its turn waits, like tritons or coelacanths, to be transformed from coelacanths into latimeria« (here Šalamov refers to some of the oldest living organisms on Earth that have existed practically unchanged for 400 million years).20

20 »[…] свидетельство, документ, экспонат фантастического реализма моей тогдашней действительности, ждут своей очереди, как тритоны или целоканты, чтобы стать латимерией из целокантов« (Šalamov 1998, 2: 279). There is an important correspondence between Šalamovs apocalyptic semantization of permafrost and some reflections at the beginning of Solženicyn’s Archipelag Gulag: Reporting on a scientific journal article (the Academy of Sciences journal Nature) about an incident of gold diggers in the Far East who found in an ice lense of permafrost soil pieces of 10 000s of years old frozen fish, the author draws attention away from what the article intended to say (how long fish can be conserved) to the people. The story that they were so eagerly eating this fish has to be exposed as a hint at who they are: they are convicts of Gulag like all people working on the Kolyma and like he himself was for several years. Then the narrator takes the picture of fish as a remnant of long forgotten times, as the only testimony of these times and transposes it to himself as a witness of Gulag, of an institution that systematically deleted all printed and written documents, the traces of all the crimes: »In the course of this period some of the islands of the Archipelago have shuddered and dissolved and the polar sea of oblivion rolls over them. And someday in the future, this Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants like some improbable salamander. I would not be so bold as to try to write the history of the Archipelago. I have never had the chance to read the documents. And, in fact, will anyone ever have the chance to read them? Those who do not wish to recall have already had enough

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Acquiring legitimacy by means of the glove, the narrator answers the question that, before the background of everything that preceded it, seemed unanswerable: »rSXY XY ]S? €RgQhWa: ›[SXY‹ – TN gTQc gSbWpYRQXZONTRZa `bNRN_NXW, NRgQRTRgQOONTRZa, NRhQRXYgNTRZa VN_\]QORW.« (!alamov 1998, 2: 279) »Did we exist? I answer: Yes, we existed – with all the significance of a record, the responsibility and the exactness of a document.« (Transl. S.F.)

Explicitly as well as implicitly, !alamov’s tales presume the Arctic permafrost to be an archive: not as an archive in the sense of the institution that stabilizes power structures for the future, but rather as an archive in the sense of Freud: An archive whose legacy persists, – or, in the case of the victim-survivor, a trauma – that cannot be denied but instead has to be worked through. In this sense, !alamov credits permafrost as a natural archive with an agency of its own. Ice, a natural mnemonic medium, is conceptualized as nature’s weapon against oblivion. Nature itself »fights with all its strength […] man’s handiwork« (Transl. S.F.) (i.e. it attempts to cover up the crimes of the totalitarian state), as !alamov writes.21

time- and will have more-to destroy all the documents, down to the very last one. I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there […] So perhaps I shall be able to give some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander-which, incidentally, is still alive.« (Solzhenitsyn 1974: X) (» OQ VQbpO\ `YTWRZ YTRNbYa dbeY`QXWiW: ]OQ OQ VNTRWXNTZ hYRWRZ VN_\]QORNg. tN _N]\-OY[\VZ _NiVW-OY[\VZ – VNTRWOQRTf XY?. Å RQe, OQ ^QXWaoYe slq€nvtdz‚, VNgNXZON \^Q [SXN (Y QoQ [\VQR) gbQ]QOY \OYhRN^YRZ gTQ VN_\]QORS VNhYTRW. lgNY NVYOOWVjWRZ XQR, `bNgQVQOOSQ RW], \TgNYg OQ _W_ `NpNb, OQ _W_ `bN_XfRSc TNO, ON `NhRY `NXa[Yg RNR \bNVXYgSc ]Yb, RQ`QbZ QoQ `N-ThWTRXYgN]\ N[NbNR\ TRWg VNgQbQOOS] ]ONiYe `NpVOYe bWTT_WpNg Y `YTQ], -- ]N^QR [SRZ T\]Qa f VNOQTRY hRN-OY[\VZ Yp _NTRNhQ_ Y ]fTW? – QoQ g`bNhQ] ^YgNiN ]fTW, QoQ g`bNhQ] Y TQiNVOf ^YgNiN RbYRNOW.« [orig. capitalized] (SolGenicyn 2006: 7) 21 The fact that !alamov in another much earlier written text, his poem »Atomic poem« (1954), which adopts an apocalyptic tone, ascribes nature quite explicitly the role of an important – in fact: the last – agent of human history, makes my argument more reasonable and shows that the idea of nature’s own agency is of more general significance for !alamov: rSRZ ]N^QR, \ `bYbNVS QTRZ/ ƒQXWOZQ T OW]Y ThQRS TgQTRZ/s PYpYhQT_N] fgXQOZQ// wW [QpOW_WpWOONTRZ \[Ycj,/ wW gTQ]Ni\oQTRgN R\`Yj/ v pW V\uY bWTRXQOZQ.// wW gTa XaVT_\a XN^Z, N[]WO,/ qbYbNVW ]TRYRZ Xa[Nc Yp TRbWO/ Å^Q

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In Šalamov’s tale, only ice and permafrost as forces of nature provide help and hope for the political convict: as a medium of conservation they build up a natural archive that bears evidence to all the Gulag-victims and thus guarantees remembrance. By preserving evidence (the glove), permafrost not only legitimizes, but even demands recording and narration, even though the events recorded are long past. In this way, ice appears to function as a medium that allows the victim whose life has been broken to be resurrected and to continue his life beyond the rupture of the Gulag, and, by writing about the experience, to integrate that life into his biography. What happens here confronts the way the Arctic has been conceptualized throughout the epoch of modernism: i.e,, as the epitome of nature viewed as the fierce enemy of the human race that either simply threatens its existence – as was the case in the depictions of the victims of banishment to Siberia in Russian literature since the 18th century – or as an object of conquest and taming, as heroic official Soviet literature of the 1930’s envisioned it. At first glance Šalamov simply appropriates the tradition of Romanticism, of which Kondratij Ryleev’s narrative long poem Vojnarovskij is an example. Šalamov’s Gulag convict is shown as a »dochodjaga« or the equivalent of the »Muselman« in Holocaust literature, a creature completely dehumanized less by torture than by the climatic conditions. However, in the context of Stalinist Arctic discourse where the convicts served as an instrument for fulfilling the plan of man’s victory over the harsh natural conditions, Šalamov’s image of the Gulag shows the convict not only as a victim of harsh nature, but also by the environmental conditions his long-term accomplices. As was the case in earlier Siberian convict stories, Šalamov’s Kolyma Tales depict the conditions of the fierce Arctic climate as one of the main enemies of the Gulag convicts. However, in the long run they turn out to have provided the best conditions for preserving testimonies and giving evidence about the crimes against humankind that have been committed there. Šalamov, by conceptualizing ice as a medium of memory and permafrost soil as a natural archive that both hides and reveals as it chooses, exposes ice as a problem for the Stalinist totalitarian regime. As a memory medium, permafrost ice bears witness to what has happened and

давно готова. (Šalamov 2013: 55) (Maybe nature intends to settle the scores with us/ In physical appearance // For the unpunished murderers,/ For the might of the blockheads/ And for the rottenness of the soul.// For all that human lies and cheating,/ Nature is ready to retaliate against any country) (Transl. S.F.).

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thus enables the narrator to announce, at the end of the story, the »principle of a new era«: the evidence held in the ice forces one to accept of the fact that with Gulag, humanism has come to an end. What !alamov called the »ice museum« proves to be one of the most important archives of Stalinism.

T ROUBLESOME L EGACY F ROM A P OSTMEMORY P OINT OF VIEW : O N S ERGEI L EBEDEV ‘ S N OVEL O BLIVION (! "#$#% &'()#*+, ) Following Marianne Hirsch’s definition22, Sergei Lebedev’s (*1981) first novel Oblivion (2010) is a »postmemory novel«, a novel about the Soviet Gulag from the point of view of a generation for whom the fall of the Soviet Union represented the first life-changing experience, while the history and trauma of the Gulag are a legacy that has to be handled in some way. »I became a heir […] in fact, the only thing I inherited was the secret of Grandfather II’s life […]« (2016: 87). »zW_ f TRWX OWTXQVOY_N] […] Y PW_RYhQT_Y f OWTXQVNgWX RNXZ_N RWcO\ ^YpOY sRNbNiN VQVW […]« (2012: 118).

The novel tells the story of the narrator’s investigation into the real identity of his »second Grandfather«, who in fact is an »adopted grandfather« (priemnyi deduFka) who died when the narrator was still a child. Gradually it is revealed that the most important authority figure of his younger days was a Gulag-commander in the Soviet Arctic. Lebedev’s imagery of Arctic ice and permafrost is clearly build upon !alamov’s. At the same time, given to his postmemory point of view, Lebedev puts the notion of heritage at the center of his narrative. In order to reflect upon the Gulag from a postmemory perspective, Lebedev plays with at least three dimensions of heritage/inheritance – the physiological, the symbolical and the juridical – and combines these with a reflection on the archive in Foucault’s sense of the term. I now want to elaborate on Lebedev’s postmemory response to !alamov and analyze how Lebedev uses the concept of the archive to polemicize with conventions of current forms of »easy« historical narration. Already during the initial framing

22 Cf. Hirsch 2008: 107.

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part of the novel, three different semantic dimensions of »heritage/inheritance« are brought together in one sentence: »[…] you see your body, your memory, your fate as predestination: the inheritance of blood, the inheritance of memories, the inheritance of other lives – everything wants to speak, seeks to complete itself, to happen to the end, to be recognized and mourned.« (2016: 20) »[…] ты видишь свое тело, свою память, свою судьбу как предуготовление: наследство крови, наследство воспоминаний, наследство чужих жизней« (2012: 21)

Here cultural and biological semantic dimensions of the word »наследство« (inheritance) merge. In the second novel’s chapter, the narrator’s childhood memories are mixed up with reflections on the wish to repress all unwelcome memories among the community of Soviet datcha-owners as part of their customary, unspoken codex of secrecy. »Все предпочитали не знать, не говорить, не сообщать, забыть […]« (Lebedev 2012: 117) »Everyone preferred not to know, not to talk, not to inform, but to forget […]« (Lebedev 2016: 87)

Even though the child does not as yet know anything about the identity of Grandfather II, these strange obscurities and taboos provoke the suspicion of an awful secret and a wish to shed light on it. Already at that time a gap of incomprehension opens up between the narrator who longs to find out the secret and the adults around him who wish to forget and indeed prove able to do it. By means of the fictional story of »Grandfather II«, Lebedev’s novel corroborates Marianne Hirsch’s suggestion that in the case of postmemory, the legacy concerns all members of the younger generation, not only the blood relatives of the victims or the perpetrators. At a certain point the protagonist’s adopted grandfather turns out to be the only one who can save his life by a blood transfusion. As a result, the grandfather dies and the narrator-protagonist becomes, despite himself, his real, consanguineous grandson: »Thus my existence coincided with his existence, and I was never just myself again – Grandfather’s II blood which saved me, circulated in me« (2016: 84) »Так мое существование совместилось с его существованием […] Во мне обращалась кровь Второго деда, спасшая меня« (2012: 113).

On the one hand, the remembering narrator interprets his choice of a profession – he is a geologist – as an instinctive attempt to flee from his (grandfather’s) past and his inheritance: geology forces him to travel far away to the utmost periphery

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of the country. On the other hand, it retrospectively turns out to be an, as yet unconscious, decision to accept grandfather’s legacy and to shed light on his mysterious past: »[…] my work in distant places was just a path for returning to from what I had hoped to escape. But I returned a different man, ready to accept and assume my inheritance […]« (2016: 93) »[…] gO\RbQOOQ iNRNgS] `bYOfRZ Y Yp[SRZ VN _NOjW gS`WguQQ ]OQ OWTXQVTRgN.« (2012: 122)

At this point the story becomes legible along metaphorical lines: the spatial movements visualize temporal movements. The narrator’s journey to the earth’s outer periphery and his digging into the soil – geology and archeology here coincide! – are clear visualizations of movements in time, of the process of digging up the hidden traumatic past that has to be worked through. In the end, the novel suggests that the narrated »travelogue« is equivalent to a ritual that repeats, re-enacting an original »act«. All of a sudden the narrator understands that he is going down the same path the Gulag convicts have gone, and by doing so he symbolically accepts the legacy of a perpetrator (his adopted grandfather) that makes him repeat the path of the victims: »But it was important to repeat someone’s path, to follow step by step […]« (2016: 101). »YONiVW gW^ON `bNTRN `NgRNbYRZ hQc-RN `\RZ, `bNcRY g TXQV« (2012: 132-133). This repetition is nothing but a ritual act of mourning and repentance, an act that replaces an ordinary burial the Gulag victims have not got. In the end the narrator turns out to be his adopted grandfather’s heir even in a juridical sense: after the death of Grandfather’s II housekeeper he inherits his apartment: »The apartment passed to me by Grandfather’s II will […]« (2016: 106): »I realized I had to go to the city where all these letters found in my Grandfather’s II desk were written, I had to find the one who sent them. […] this was the only way to find out something from the past. […] now I sensed that this path had opened.« (2016: 145)

Lebedev’s narrator compares his inheritance (Grandfather II’s apartment) to different state institutions charged with the preservation of the cultural »heritage«,

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such as an »ethnographical museum«, or even the local library. When he investigates the history of the Arctic city where this Gulag-Camp was located (part 4), the narrator cannot find anything of significance for his search. Instead he succeeds in interviewing the archivist of the local mine. Whereas the arbitrary memory modelling strategies of the museum and the library cover up and conceal rather than reveal the truth, the archivist’s personal memory proves to be more trustworthy: not only does he provide reliable information about where the Gulagdocuments really are, he even remembers that the narrator’s grandfather was the camp’s commander from the very beginning. (2016: 262) The narrator also critically refers to the archive as an institution of memory controlled by the state. Thus he points out that the moment when the archives could fulfill their true task and play an important role for the politics of the state – the only moment when it seemed possible that professional historians could bring to light the whole truth – passed very quickly. This opportunity was missed and all documents were again closed in the archives, turned into »dead paper« (»мертвая бумага«, 2012: 263) and probably disappeared forever. »Now, two decades since the former regime had ended, there was nothing shockingly new among the files in the cardboard folders; but the point was that none of the cases had seen the light of a uniquely precise moment of history, at the only time when they could have changed anything; […] But now it was only dead paper« (2016: 198). »Теперь, спустя два десятилетия, как кончилась прежняя власть, среди дел в картонных папках не было ничего ошеломительно нового; вышли книги, открылись – частью – центральные архивы; но суть их была в том, что все эти дела не увидели свет в какой-то уникально точный момент истории, в то единственное время, когда они могли что-то перерешить […] А теперь это была только мертвая бумага;« (2012: 263).

The narrator juxtaposes the archive as an institution and an instrument of power in Russia to the testimonial archive of human eyewitnesses. The protagonist refuses to visit the archive. Instead he seeks out the author of the letters to Grandfather II as an eyewitness who is able to give evidence about what really happened. The narration of this man, who at the time when the protagonist was a little child worked as head of the execution team, recalls the memory of the narrator and allows him to remember in detail the events of the tragic fate of Grandfather’s II family. He also remembers how the members of the family passed away within a few months, and how Grandfather II himself survived for another few years but went blind.

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Besides the archivist, yet another eyewitness assists the narrator on his mission to find out the truth: the tombstone sculptor. It is he who tells the protagonist about the real end of Grandfather’s II family, it is he who tells him that after his wife’s death, Grandfather II sent a couple of so called »kulaki« (wealthy farmers) to an island amidst the Arctic sea where they miserably perished. The only archive the narrator can rely on, the only ›archive‹ that really gives evidence about the past and which therefore becomes hardly bearable for him, is the natural archive that surrounds him on his trip through the Arctic. Lebedev confronts the unreliability and the inaccessibility of archives as state institutions with the sincerity and the ineluctability of the natural archives around him. In the first of three successive dreams the narrator reflects upon traces and the media preserving them and thereby mediate information about the past to the presence and future: stone, petroglyphs (2016: 357), the soil that archeologists dig (2016: 169170) and, finally, permafrost. When he for the first time is confronted with petroglyphs, often the only form of messages Gulag convicts could leave, the narrator suddenly understands, what deep regret («skorb'») means. Lebedev transforms the traditional metaphor of the »book of nature« into the »archive«. One may »read« the world in order to understand it, but first one has to investigate it in detail, investigate all traces on the surface and uncover all layers of the earth. The notion of archive has been widened and now includes the whole world, all kinds of media-inscriptions, remains, »monuments« in Foucault’s sense, that do not allow for immediate deciphering. The novel as such is built upon the notion of archive, which here includes even – and first of all – those remains that are excluded from the official institutions of cultural memory. Lebedev directs the reader’s attention towards the »archive of things«, as his reflections about the »nail« significantly demonstrates. (2016: 100ff.; 2012: 132ff.) The narrator considers the nail to give best evidence of the fact that the labor-camp as an institution has been invented by humans. When in the beginning of part 3 of the novel the narrator juxtaposes cities, i.e., places completely constructed by men, with »naturally« grown places of nature, the artificial and to a certain degree arbitrary language of architecture turns out to be an instrument of concealment. In contrast »natural« places and environments reveal their history and their significance themselves. In their case everything is clear and laid bare. (g `bYbNVQ gTQ NhQgYVON, gTQ »NTRWQRTf g N[OW^QOONTRY, RW] OQXZpf OYhQiN T_bSRZ pW WbeYRQ_R\bNc […]«, 2012: 122) Whereas the truth about the (history of the) cities has to be reconstructed on the basis of archival documents, in nature, everything is obvious without any alienation. Investigating the taiga from the air-plane, the narrator – like a geologist or an archeologist –

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finds out more about the Gulag than he could have found out from books. (2016: 123) It is also the perspective of a geologist that puts him on the right track for finding out about Grandfather’s II deeds. In Lebedev’s novel the natural environment is represented as an archive that lies bare and is as such not encoded: it can be opened by everybody. But first it has to be found. Stumbling into a deep sinkhole that makes the layer of the permafrost subsoil visible, the protagonist unexpectedly finds himself surrounded by all the frozen corpses of Gulag victims. With his own eyes he sees that the permafrost sediment consists more or less of nothing but human bodies. »The funnel was filled with corpses; the permafrost had preserved them.« (2016: 277) »Воронка была полна мертвецов, вечная мерзлота сохранила их нетленными.« (2012: 393)

There he recognizes that »knowledge without insight« is a deadly virus, … »I realized, […] I bore the virus of knowledge […] something was still not completely understood and without that understanding the knowledge was deadly« (2016: 281). »Я почувствовал, что […] во мне – вирус знания […] что-то еще было недопонятно, и без этого понимания знание оказывалось гибельным […]« (2012: 401).

… and that to »completely« understand means to accept co-responsibility for all that happened in one’s country, to admit the inherited guilt. Down in the ice-hole, confronted with all the dead people, the narrator suddenly recognizes what the word »imputrescibility« actually means in the given context. He understands that in this case what he sees has nothing in common with what Christian mythology ascribes to martyrs and saints, and that the dead in front of him have simply been »deprived of death«. (2016: 277) (»лишенность смерти«, 2012: 393) He understands that these people are »undead« also in a rather unromantic way: They still wait to be buried and it’s up to the survivors to take over the duty to bury them in dignity. The narrator’s descent into the hole in the permafrost thus has to be read as a kind of katabasis into the tsardom of death. The mystical communion with these dead people and the narrator’s unexpected rescue replaces the ritual of burial:

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»I was in the belly of the earth; my brothers lay here, and their imperishability was not the incorruptibility of sainthood, but the absence of death. […] death had not reached its conclusion […]. A man dies but not the ones around him, they must complete the deceased’s terminal work with grief and bereavement: the services held on the ninth day, the fortieth day are part of the event of death performed by the living.« (2016: 277-78) »zW_Y] N[bWpN] NOY TNgQbuWaR ›TN[SRYQ T]QbRY‹.« (2012: 393-394)

He fulfills what has not been done before, he does his ‘duty’ and, as a result, gets rid of the inherited guilt: »I realized, I was mad, I bore the virus of knowledge that should not be passed to the living; […] I felt my madness recede, its fever leave, and the blood of Grandfather II […] was no more that blood in me.« (2016: 281; 290) »[…] RQ`QbZ, XQ^W g uXa`_Q, […] h\gTRg\f g TQ[Q [Qp\]YQ […] f No\RYX, hRN [Qp\]YQ NRTR\`WQR […] Y _bNgY gRNbNiN VQVW […] {RNc _bNgY [NXZuQ OQR gN ]OQ.« (2012: 414)

However, the only reason why the narrator succeeds in fulfilling his obligation to mourn is the fact that fate »called on him« (»T\VZ[W N_XY_O\XW QiN«), that his inheritance insisted and led him come here, find out, let himself be convinced by the evidence of the visual inspection and act. To summarize, we might say that whereas !alamov develops a poetics of witnessing (cf. Frank 2013: 31-50 and Thun-Hohenstein 2013: 10-30), Sergei Lebedev proposes a specific model of postmemory that faces the task of coping with an uneasy legacy. The novel claims to be more than just a novel. The story of the journey, the detection and working through of the protagonist’s (but not only the protagonist’s) »inheritance« turns out to be the performative act of a ritual, a ritual of mourning and of repentance. Following the ring structure of the novel’s continuous inner monologue, and starting over after having read the novel, the reader recognizes what could be guessed from the very beginning: Already in the first chapter Lebedev calls his novel a »monument« and a »wailing wall«, i.e. an immaterial lieu de mémoire whose aim it is to replace the non-existing real/official monuments23:

23 Cf. Nina Frieß’ somewhat different reading (2016: 297).

306 | S USI K. F RANK »this text is a memorial, a wailing wall, for the dead and the mourners have no other place to meet except by the wall of words …« (2016: 20) »и этот текст как памятник, как стена плача, если мертвым и оплакивающим негде встретиться, кроме как у стены слов«.

It is clear that this means nothing else than the equation of the protagonist’s/narrator’s act with an act of reading: to read the novel is tantamount to performing the ritual of burial. In my opinion the performative character of Lebedev’s Oblivion provides us with the paradigm for a new postmemory genre that could be called »monumentnovel« and as such could be compared e.g. to Maria Stepanova’s Pamjati pamjati, but opposes itself to other strategies in contemporary Russian literature to deal with the problematic or/and traumatic past, such as the »magical historicism« diagnosed by Aleksandr Etkind for novels by Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Pelevin, but also to the Gulag-narrations of Zakhar Prilepin or Guzel’ Jakhina and other kind of conventional new realist prose.

C ONCLUSION What might be the conclusion to be drawn from these exemplary readings of Šalamovs Kolyma Tales and Lebedevs Oblivion for the general theoretical question regarding the »archive«, the »natural archive« and the relation between archive and heritage/inheritance? When both Šalamov and Lebedev highlight the importance of recognizing the Arctic permafrost as an archive, they touch on a theoretical aspect of the notion of archive that neither Foucault nor Derrida, nor any other archivologist, have raised before. For both Šalamov and Lebedev understand the permafrost archive as a counter-archive that despite all human attempts and despite nature’s complicity to delete traces allows for giving evidence about the Gulag crimes. Both writers acknowledge the significance and respectability of the natural archive when they demonstrate that, despite all human efforts, human must accept nature as an agent of history. By ascribing to nature an agency of its own, Šalamov turns the modernist attitude towards nature upside down. As is the case in Šalamov’s Kolyma tales, the »archive« is a key-word in Lebedev’s novel too, both metaphorically and literally. However, Lebedev goes further because he belongs to a later, postmemory generation and therefore is no eyewitness himself. This is why he creates a link between the notion of archive and the notion of heritage/inheritance/legacy. As a result, the archive turns out, for Lebedev, to be the medium of an inheritance/legacy that does not allow for being repressed or deleted, a past that insists on its significance for the present and that the people living now have to

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face and work through. Lebedev’s »monument-novel« is therefore far from being a heroic hymn; it is rather a lament and a ritual of repentance. As !alamov and Lebedev clearly demonstrate, in a situation where state politics aim at deleting any traces the Gulag system left behind, and where there are no archives or museums that would document its history, the archive of the relics frozen in the permafrost soil had/s to replace ordinary archives. Only this archive can, like a »museum of cruelty« (!alamov), provide evidence of what really happened. Where the truth is repressed, this »random« natural archive can and should be recognized. On the one hand, Lebedev’s and Sallamov’s use of the words »archive« and »museum« is obviously metaphorical. On the other hand, frozen corpses are no less worthy of being named and archived than fossils or ice cores, even where they are not used for processing data in the sense of geology. Furthermore, their conservation in the ice makes them a »fact« comparable to any kind of protocol or document registered and included in a regular archive. 24 When we speak today of the archive as a memory medium (Ebeling 2016: 128) then at least per analogy we can also speak of the permafrost and the Arctic ice as a memory medium. Lebedev’s correlation of archive and inheritance/heritage sheds new light on the temporality of the archive. Wolfgang Ernst and Knut Ebeling describe this as a crucial factor in how the archive functions: the archive collects things in order to determine what may happen in the future.25 »By encoding the present the archive becomes part of the reality that it is going to change.« (Ebeling 2016: 129) But the temporality of the archive may also involve other correlations of past, present and future that all have to do with the fact that the temporality of archives is about the co-presence of the non-contemporaneous. As an effect of this specific temporality, archives preserve and mediate cultural values from the past for the future, or, in case the archive gets out of control or loses its function, it may just demonstrate the incompatibility, the gap between the past and the present, whereby in the archive the past is still present. These last two aspects of the temporality of the archive relate it to the notion of heritage/legacy. In the first case, the archive represents a key part of what officially is conceptualized as »cultural heritage«, including the most important values that determine it. This is what Aleida Assmann wrote about. In the second case, the archive of the former, the fallen state turns out to be an unwelcome legacy, or – seen from the opposite perspective – a counter archive that is able to give evidence of the serious misconduct and responsibilities of the fallen state.

24 Cf. Vismann 2011. 25 Cf. Ernst 2002: 92.

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This last constellation, when the archive makes obvious the co-presence, but at the same time the unbridgeable difference, between the layers of time past and present, also allows for a comparison between our age and Romanticism when the fascination with the preserving power of ice (in poetry as well as in science) began. The Romantic imagery of freezing and petrification was a symbol of the futility of any effort to overcome transience and to visualize the longing for eternal (co)presence. Meanwhile today’s reflections on the correlation between archive and heritage/legacy shed light on the other side of this temporal dimension of the archive: whereas romanticism longed for the cancellation of the gap between the two different time layers, for the reunion of the non-contemporaneous in a lasting present, today’s ice-archive-imagery faces the necessity of dealing with the copresence of an insisting and yet unresolved past.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Assmann, Aleida (1999): »Archiv«, in: A.A.:, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, München. Džagalov, Rossen (2007): »Varlam Šalamov i puti sovetskogo ėkzistencializma«, in: K stoletiju so dnja roždenija Varlama Šalamova. Materialy konferencii, Moskva, pp. 55-72. Ebeling, Knut / Günzel, Stephan (eds.) (2009): Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten, Berlin. Ebeling, Knut (2016): »Archiv und Medium«, in: M. Lepper /U. Raulff, (eds.): Handbuch Archiv. Geschichte, Aufgaben, Perspektiven, Stuttgart, pp. 125130. Ernst, Wolfgang (2002): Das Rumoren der Archive. Ordnung aus Unordnung, Berlin. Farge, Arlette (2011): Der Geschmack des Archivs [orig. 1989], Göttingen. Foucault, Michel (1981): Die Archäologie des Wissens [orig. 1969], Frankfurt. Frank, Susi K. (2010): City of the Sun on Ice: The Soviet (Counter-) Discourse of the Arctic in the 1930s, in: Arctic modernities, Cambridge, pp. 106-132. — (2013) Varlam Šalamovs Arbeit an einer Poetik der Operativität, in: S.F./ S. Schahadat (eds.): Evidenz und Zeugenschaft, (Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 69), München, pp. 31-50. — (2017): Ice as a Literary Motif in (Post-)Soviet Arctic Modernities, Cambridge, pp. 16-38.

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Freud, Sigmund (1999): Der Man Moses und die monotheistische Religion [1939], in: S.F.: Gesammelte Werke. Chronologisch geordnet, Bd. 16, ed. by A. Freud (et al.), Frankfurt, pp. 101-246. Frieß, Nina (2016): Inwiefern ist das heut interessant? Erinnerungen an den stalinistischen Gulag im 21. Jahrhundert, Leipzig. Fritscher, Bernhard (2009): »Archive der Erde: Zur Kodierung von Erdgeschichte um 1800«, in: S. Günzel /K. Ebeling (eds.): Archivologie: Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten, Berlin, pp. 200-219. Hirsch, Marianne (2008): The Generation of Postmemory, in: Poetics Today 29.1, pp. 103-128. Jurgenson, Ljubov‘ (2017): »PejzaGnaja zarisovka kak metatekst v proze !alamova (A sketch of the landscape as a meta-text in Shalamov’s prose)«, in: »Zakon soprotivlenija raspadu« Osobennosti prozy i po#zii Varlama !alamova I ich vosprijatie v naLale XXI veka. Sbornik nauLnych trudov, Praga – Moskva, pp. 99-109. Lebedev, Sergei (2012): Predel zabvenija, Moskva. — (2016): Oblivion, transl. by Antonina W. Bouis, New York. Lepper, Marcel /Raulff, Ulrich (eds.) (2016): Handbuch Archiv. Geschichte, Aufgaben, Perspektiven, Stuttgart. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1980): Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen. Zweites Stück: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben [1874], in: F.N.: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, Bd. 1, ed. by G. Colli/M. Montinari, München, pp. 243-334. Raulff, Ulrich (2016): Gedächtnis und Gegen-Gedächtnis: das Archiv zwischen Rache und Gerechtigkeit, in: M. Lepper/ U. Raulff (eds.): Handbuch Archiv Geschichte, Aufgaben, Perspektiven, Stuttgart, pp. 117-124. Rudwick, Martin J.S. (2005): Transposing History into the Earth, in: ders., Bursting the Limits of Time. The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, Chapter 4, Chicago – London, pp. 181-238. Ryall, Anka/ Schimanski, Johan/ Wærp, Henning Howlid (2010): »Arctic Discourses: An Introduction«, in: A. Ryall/J. Schimanski/H. Howlid Wærp (eds.): Arctic discourses, Newcastle upon Tyne, pp. ix-xxi. !alamov, Varlam (1998): Sobranie soLnenii v 4-x tomach, ed. by I. Sirotinskaja, Moskva. — (2013), Sobranie soLinenii v 6-ti tomach, t. 6: Stichotvoreniia, ed. by I.P. Sirotinskaja, Moskva. Shalamov, Varlam (1994): Kolyma Tales, transl. by John Glad, London. — (2018): Kolyma Stories, transl. by Donald Rayfield, New York.

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Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (1974): The Gulag Archipelago. An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-II, transl. by Thomas P. Whitney, New York (et al.). Solženicyn, Aleksandr (2006): Archipelag Gulag 1918-1956. Opyt chudožestvennogo issledovanija, vols. 1-2, Ekaterinburg. Stingelin, Martin (2016): Archivmetapher, in: M. Lepper/ U. Raulff (eds.): Geschichte, Aufgaben, Perspektiven, Stuttgart, pp. 21-28. Thun-Hohenstein, Franziska (2013): Varlam Šalamovs Arbeit an einer Poetik der Operativität, in: Frank, Susi K. / Schahadat, Schamma (eds.): Evidenz und Zeugenschaft, (Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 69), München, pp. 10-30. — (2019): Zlopamjatnoe telo. Pamjat‘ i telo v tvorčestve V. Šalamova, (manuscript) Berlin. Toker, Leona (1997): »Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose. From the Perspective of Gulag Testimonies«, in: Poetics Today 18, pp. 187-222. Vismann, Cornelia (2011): Medien der Rechtsprechung, Frankfurt.

Contributors

Lisa E. Bloom is the author of the book Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (Univ. of Minnesota Press 1993) where she reveals how conquest of the North Pole, represented in popular print and visual media, has shaped American national ideologies. Among her other publications are the books With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (1999) and Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity (2006). She has been writing extensively on critical gender studies, history of art, Polar Regions, as well as contemporary art and film. Currently she is a scholar in residence at the Beatrice Bain Research Group in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her new book Polar Aesthetics in the Anthropocene is forthcoming.

Knut Ebeling is a specialist in the field of archive theory. He is now professor of Media Theory and Aesthetics at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin. From 2002 to 2008 he has been working in the project Archives of the past (»Archive der Vergangenheit. Wissenstransfers zwischen Archäologie, Philosophie und Künsten«) at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. He is author of numerous articles and publications in the field of archive theory as e.g. Die Aktualität des Archäologischen – in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten (editor) (2004), Das Archiv brennt (together with Georges Didi-Huberman) (2007), Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten (co-edited with Stephan Günzel), (2009). He is the author of the two-parts volume Wilde Archäologien 1. Theorien materieller Kultur von Kant bis Kittler, (2012) and Wilde Archäologien 2. Begriffe der Materialität der Zeit von Archiv bis Zerstörung, (2016). His recently published book is There Is No Now. An Archaeology of Contemporaneity (2017).

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Wolfgang Ernst is professor of Media Theories at Humboldt University Berlin. He is major specialist in media archaeology as a method of scholarly inquiry. His research focus covers also theory of technical storage, technologies of cultural transmission, micro-temporal media aesthetics, critique of history as master discourse of cultural and technological time, and sound analysis from a media-epistemological point of view. Among his numerous publications is the book Digital Memory and the Archive (edited by Jussi Parikka) (2013), Sonic Time Machines. Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity (2016) and The Delayed Present: Media-Induced Tempor(e)alities & Techno-traumatic Irritations of the Contemporary (2017).

Susi K. Frank holds the chair of East Slavic literatures and cultures at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research fields are Russian (language) literatures, literatures in (post)imperial contexts, poetics (topoi and visual formulas) and politics of memory, geopoetics and geopolitics. She contributed to the collective volume Arctic discourses (edited by Ryall/Schimanski/Wærp) (2010) and participated in the research group »Arctic modernities« at the Norges Arktiske Universitet in Tromsø (UiT). Among her recent publications are Bildformeln in den Erinnerungskulturen Osteuropas (2017) and Evidenz und Zeugenschaft (2013). Forthcoming is her co-edited volume Körper. Gedächtnis. Literatur in (post)totalitären Kulturen.

Peter Hemmersam holds a PhD from Aarhus School of Architecture (2008). He teaches urban design and urban design theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). Among his research interests are urban design, digital cities, Arctic urbanism, and the peri-urban landscapes of the Oslo region. He is the head of the Oslo Centre for Urban and Landscape Studies (OCULS) at AHO. He is currently co-conducting the research projects »Strategies for Digital Urban Services«, »Arctic City« and »Displacement, placemaking and wellbeing in the city« at the OCULS. Among his recent publications is the book Future North: The Changing Arctic Landscapes (together with Janike Larsen) (2018).

Sabine Hänsgen is a slavic scholar, cultural and media historian, a specialist in performance art and an artist herself. She also works as a translator and curator of exhibitions. Since the mid-1980s she has been participating in the performances of the group »Collective Actions«. She is the author and co-editor of the many

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anthologies like Kulturpalast (1984), Moskau Moskau (1987), Lianosowo (1992), catalogues like Präprintium (1998), Sovetskaya vlast i media (Soviet Power and Media, 2006), and monographs like Der gewöhnliche Faschismus (2009), and Yuri Albert. Fragen der Kunst (2014). At the moment she conducts the project »Performance art in Eastern Europe« lead by Sylvia Sasse at the University of Zurich.

Reinhard Hennig is associate professor of Nordic literature at the University of Agder, Norway. He holds a PhD in Scandinavian studies from the University of Bonn, Germany, and is cofounder and coordinator of the »Ecocritical Network for Scandinavian Studies« (ENSCAN). His main research interests are environmental change in history and literature, the Anthropocene, contemporary literature from Northern Europe, and Old Norse literature and culture.

Judit Hersko is an installation artist who works in the intersection of art and science. She is known for visualizing climate change science through art and narrative and has received international recognition. In 1997 she participated at the Venice Biennale representing her native Hungary and in 2007 her work was featured in »Weather Report: Art and Climate Change«, curated by Lucy Lippard for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. After receiving the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Grant in 2008 she spent six weeks in Antarctica working with scientists. Her work is rooted in extensive research, as well as in a playful exploration of materials and phenomena of light, shadow and transparency. Hersko is currently professor in the Department of Art, Media and Design at California State University San Marcos, where she initiated the »Art and Science Project«. Among her most recent digital media installations is the platform Anna’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2011) and 400 parts per million (2016).

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen is professor of intellectual history at the Nord University in Bodø. He was a post-doctor of media studies and information science at the University of Bergen from 2006 to 2008, a visiting scholar to Freie Universität Berlin (2009), lecturer in the History of Ideas at the University of Oslo 2010-11, and from 2011 to 2014 he held the Henrik Steffens Chair of Northern European Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on media history and media theory, modern intellectual history of France, Germany and Norway, and on freedom of speech and cosmopolitanism. In 2010 he contributed to

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the volume The Archive in Motion: New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices (edited by Eivind Røssaak) (2010). Among his recent publications are the books Right Wing Populism and Extremism. Civil Society challenged by Old Ideologies and New Media (co-editor and contributor) (2015) and After Charlie Hebdo. Freedom of speech in historical light (2016).

Janike Kampevold Larsen has a background in literary studies and is now specializing in landscape theory and conceptualization of contemporary landscapes. She is associate professor at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape of Oslo School of Architecture and Design and has been visiting scholar to Columbia University, University of Essex and UC Berkeley. Among her recent publications is the book Future North: the changing Arctic landscapes (2018) (co-edited with Peter Hemmersam) and a book chapter in a co-edited book Landscapes on Hold. The Norwegian and Russian Barents Sea Coast in the New North (2017). Currently she is research fellow at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, leader of the RCN-funded project »Future North« and the coordinator of the Tromsø Academy of Landscape and Territorial Studies.

Harald Østgaard Lund is a photographer and filmmaker. He directed, among others, the feature film Halvveis til Haugesund (Halfway to Haugesund) (1997). He also works as a curator. In 2008 he co-curated the exhibition and co-edited the book 80 Million Pictures Norwegian cultural history photography 1855–2005 (together with Jonas Ekeberg) for the Preus museum. The exhibition and the book show photography as an omnipresent force in Norwegian society and are an important contribution to the history of Norwegian Photography. Among his recent publications is the book Norske Polarheltbilder 1888-1925 (edited by Siv Frøydic Berg) (2011), that analyses the classic images from Nansen's and Amundsen's polar expeditions.

Asako Miyazaki is associate professor of German literature and Area Studies at the Osaka University. She is lecturer at the Graduate School of Language and Culture. She has studied in Tokyo and Berlin and holds a PhD in German literary studies from the Humboldt-University of Berlin. Her research currently focusses on culture and memory studies, German Literature and history of East Germany.

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She is also member of »Japanische Gesellschaft für Germanistik« (Japanese association for German language and literature studies ) (JGG). In 2010 she received an award by the »Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Germanistik in Japan e.V.« (The Association for promoting German Language and Literature in Japan ) for her research. In 2013 her book Brüche in der Geschichtserzählung: Erinnerung an die DDR in der Post-DDR-Literatur was published at Königshausen&Neumann (Würzburg).

Elena Penskaya is professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (HSE) and head of the School of Philology. She is also member of the HSE Academic Council. She is the deputy editor-in-chief of the Editorial Office of the Journal Voprosy Obrazovania (Educational Studies Moscow). 2015 she has participated in the research group »Arctic modernities« at the Norges Arktiske Universitet in Tromsø (UiT). Currently she works as academic supervisor for the project laboratories on Yury Lyubimov’s Work and on Director’s Theatre of XX-XXI centuries.

Anka Ryall is literary researcher within the subject English and professor of humanistic gender research in Tromsø and Oslo. Among her research fields are travel literature with an emphasis on gender and the North and literary modernism, focusing on Virginia Woolf. From 2013 to 2016 she has been leading an international research project entitled »Arctic Modernities« at the Norges Arktiske Universitet in Tromsø (UiT). The project has published theme numbers by Nordlit 35 (2015) and Acta Borealia 33.2 (2016). Anka Ryall is co-editor of the conferencevolume Arctic Modernities (Cambridge 2017). She is the editor-in-chief of the journal NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (together with Beatrice Halsaa, University of Oslo).

Johan Henrik Schimanski is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo and visiting research Professor of Cultural Encounters at the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests include border poetics, Arctic discourses, literary exhibition practices, science fiction and postcolonialism. He has participated in the research projects »Arktiske diskurser« (Arctic discourses) and »Arctic Modernities« at the University of Tromsø, and the current contribution is based on research for the latter. He currently co-conducts the research project »TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums« at the Sogn og Fjordane University

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College in collaboration with the University of Oslo (The Research Council of Norway, FRIPRO program, 2016-2019, together with Ulrike Spring) and leads the workshop series »Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing: Contemporary Public Migration Narratives in Europe« at the University of Oslo, University of Eastern Finland, University of Jyväskäla and Dalarna University. Recent and forthcoming publications include Passagiere des Eises: Polarhelden und arktische Diskurse 1874 (2015, with Ulrike Spring), Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections (2017, edited with Stephen F. Wolfe) and »Playing the Arctic: Arthur Ransome’s Winter Holiday« (forthcoming).

Sven Spieker teaches in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in modern and contemporary art and culture, with an emphasis on Russia and Eastern Europe, and has a special interest in issues related to documentary and knowledge production. Spieker's latest book publication is an edited volume devoted to the relationship between art and destruction (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2017). The monograph The Big Archive (2008) focused on the archive as a crucible of European modernism. Spieker is the founding editor of ARTMargins Print and ARTMargins Online. His current projects include a Critical Anthology of Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe and a study of education-based art in the 1960s.

Ulrike Spring Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oslo and visiting research Professor of History at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her research interests include Arctic history, travel cultures, history of knowledge, and exhibition practices. She has been a participant in the research projects »Arktiske diskurser« and »Arctic Modernities« at the Arctic University of Norway, and the current contribution is based on research for the latter. Currently she is working on a research project on Arctic tourism at the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th century and co-managing the research project »TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums« (FRIPRO, 2016-2019) together with Johan Schimanski. Among her recent publications are Passagiere des Eises: Polarhelden und arktische Diskurse 1874 (2015, with Johan Schimanski), Expeditions as Experiments: Practising Observation and Documentation (2016, edited with Marianne Klemun) and Early Mass Tourism at the North Cape: Infrastructure, Environment and Social Practices (2017).

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Georg Toepfer is biologist and philosopher. He is associate director of the Leibniz Center of Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin (ZfL). Currently he is leading the research project »Life Lessons and the Art of Life. Translating Life into Philosophy and the Arts« as well as »The Shifting Borders of Biology«. Among his research fields are anthropology and philosophy of biology, he is co-editor of the volume Philosophie der Biologie – Eine Einführung (2005) (together with Ulrich Krohs).

Ulrike Vedder is professor of German literature at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. She is chair of the Faculty of Language and Literary Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of genealogy and gender, literature and knowledge, and literature and material culture. Among her publications is the book Das Testament als literarisches Dispositiv. Kulturelle Praktiken des Erbes in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, (2011). She co-edited, among other publications, Handbuch Literatur & Materielle Kultur (together with Susanne Scholz) (2018) and Konversionen. Erzählungen der Umkehr und des Wandels (together with Elisabeth Wagner) (2017).