seminar afterthoughts - on surrogates

Borgman uses the term “surrogate” with some frequency, and I’d like to push that notion a bit further. Given that, with Vectors, we were examining works that could not be reproduced in any other medium, I am curious to probe the limits of replacing one medium with another, and how, in particular, that might prove challenging from an archival perspective. It seems the common attitude toward the digital has been less about its own language or medium expressivity, but its ability to replicate or translate preexisting forms. As Nicholas Negroponte argues, “The medium is not the message in a digital world. It is an embodiment of it. A message might have several embodiments automatically derivable from the same data.” (Negroponte, Being Digital, 71) For him, the encoding of sounds, images and text into data effects a democratization of information, erasing difference. But such digital “surrogates” are inevitably incomplete; Borgman notes that text in digital reproduction (a la Project Gutenberg) versus the materiality of the printed book coveys different types of information for various kinds of researchers (216-217). Not to make too fine a point on this but I think that surrogate is the appropriate term, pointing to the replacement of the original object, but also offering a different mode of encounter, as in the case of a OCR-scanned book whose binding and heft might be unknown, but is now searchable for key terms.

I’d also like to consider that surrogate objects are by no means specific to a digital culture; facsimiles and other types of reproductions have long been a staple of mass-reproduced objects and archival preservation practices. An interesting case in point: the Très Riches Heures, by the Duc de Berry, is considered so rare and delicate an object that it is not allowed access by anyone. In an extreme case of archival protection, the volume (of which there is only one) is only available in facsimile, which raises the question of whether the book exists at all, or indeed, how it exists. Michael Camille argues, after Benjamin, that the mechanical reproduction of this object, “rather than wrenching the artwork from the ‘domain of tradition,’ is a means of reproducing tradition itself.” (Michael Camille, "The 'Tres Riches Heures': An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Critical Inquiry 17:1 (Autumn, 1990), 73) Camille’s shift away from the object itself onto the social practices surrounding it is a deft move; his essay asks: how do objects circulate, what kinds of significations do they accrue, and what else does a “frozen” representation capture other than an image of an inaccessible book? And relaying this inquiry back to this consideration of digital surrogates, what practices might be preserved in the digitization of major libraries and archives, or is there something completely different about the digital? Does the democratized fluidity of digital surrogates suggest a different kind of “capture”? What exactly is lost in the gap between original and surrogate?

an inaccessible image: the Très Riches Heures