Are mirrors real?

As we concluded our lecture this week we ended with the thought-provoking question, “Is data more like a mirror or a chessboard?” As I thought more about the question and looked over the slides and the reading material, it caught my attention that the direct quote refers to archives, rather than data...

Before discussing the concepts of mirror and chessboard, it strikes me that we use the terms “data” and “archives” interchangeably. Yet, this feels wrong, like we have missed some essential quality of an archive by equating it to data. Substantively, one might argue that archives include all types of information, ranging from documents to photographs, artefacts, etc.. In contrast, perhaps data is numeric or can be reduced to something more quantifiable. But as our ability to handle multi-modal data increases, this distinction feels a little arbitrary.

The word archive seems temporally different - you can almost smell the dust, whereas data feels more current, more reflective of the now. And yet, upon reflection, we know that this can’t be true; while data may include very recent events, it is still only a reflection of what has passed - it is not the now.

With that settled, we have archives acting as a proxy for data; what can we learn from the history of archives? At school, one is always taught about the value of the primary source (vs secondary source) in the context of history and epistemic truth. It is as if, by going to the primary source, we might learn what happened or at least get a more accurate account. So, too, is the promise of the archive that these documents reveal the details as they happened, that by peeling them back, we can somehow step back in time and gain access to a neutral past that we can recreate and assess first-hand. If that were so, then archives would be operating as mirrors, reflecting the past into the present such that we could analyse the events as if they were occurring right here and now.

But, not only is that not how archives work, it is also not how mirrors work…

Let’s start with archives. Archives are not neutral; they are the product of myriad decisions made by the person producing the documentation, curating the archive (deciding what to keep and discard) and, importantly, where to store the archive. History reveals the power that follows the creation, movement and storage of archival information, indicating how it was and is used to drive a variety of political and social agendas. The fact that archives were kept hidden from the public (and continue to be) further demonstrates the power that archives have in determining who controls the information, who can get the information, and when. How the information is then used is also highly intentional, often serving the interests of those who control the archives, for example, in the histories of intelligence and insurance.

In the chessboard metaphor, there are many contenders for who the chess pieces are (the original people being captured in the archives, the people being misrepresented by the “facts” in the present; and the general public); regardless of roles, one can make a case that the overall usage of archival information is political and intentional, rather than neutral.

The question, however, is whether archives or data, for that matter legitimately be mirrors. Does the concept of mirror work in this context? If we consider a mirror a surface on which to see one’s reflection, then someone is already doing the “seeing”. The act of seeing, however, is not as passive as it may seem; seeing is not neutral. We see what we want to see. We see what we already see. And so the aphorisms go on. The point is that seeing, even in real-time, is interpretive; it is meant to be. A Derridian reading would argue that expecting us to capture a moment as immovable and not open to interpretation in the future would violate that memory/experience. In his writing about impressions, Derrida conveys the essence of “moment” - how the transition from now to then, from the present to history, is so fleeting as to leave the subtlest trace behind. It would be impossible to capture this in any way that would allow you to recreate it as if it were happening again now. Thus, there is no mirror. There is no neutral replay of an event. It is all interpretation.

But how do we then move from either documenting nothing (that would make for an empty history) or operating from a level of relativity that means we can’t aggregate data? How do we make any meaning of what has gone before us? We do so with reflexivity. We know that our interpretation is just that, an interpretation, but we actively seek out our own bias and seek epistemic humility (if truth is illusory).