Polytemporality, implacement and possession in The Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive

Anamnesia:Unforgetting

Anamnesia:Unforgetting

Polytemporality, implacement and possession in The Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive

Anamnesia:Unforgetting

VIVO Media Arts Centre

47 A Concise History of the Satellite Video Exchange Society (Sharon Bradley)

17 We Come From Here (Amy Kazymerchyk)

41 In the Present as Well: Polytemporality and Archival Anamnesia (Donato Mancini)

115 Whats a sentient being like you doing in an incarnation like this? (Alex Muir)

171 Dispatches: of wrested resumption, in time and area (Cecily Nicholson)

227 Interview with Crista DahlContents

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A Concise History of the Satellite

Video Exchange Society Sharon Bradley

VIVO Media Arts Centre, governed by the Satellite Video Exchange Society (SVES), is Vancouvers first media arts access centre, and one of the oldest artist-run centres in Western Canada. The society was incorporated on July 23, 1973, following the Matrix International Video Exchange Conference and Festival.

Held at the Vancouver Art Gallery and organized by Michael Goldberg, Patricia Hardman and Noelle Pelletier, the Matrix Conference took place over the weekend of January 20 and 21, 1973 and was attended by over 160 participants from North America, Japan, England, and France. In order to gain admittance to the conference, each attendee had to deposit a videotape that was duplicated and exchanged with other visitors.

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Video Out, now fully articulated the society as a centre for artist-run production, exhibition, and distribution. A third move was initiated eight months later, when the owners decided to occupy the space.

In 1988, SVES relocated down the block to 1102 Homer Street, a 4,000-square-foot facility with ample room to house the tape and print libraries, multiple viewing stations, post-production suites, a graphic design and print production area, a video production and exhibi-tion studio, and staff offices.

In the years following the post-Expo 86 sale of the Expo land bank along North False Creek, gentrification reshaped the architecture and economy of Yaletown. In 1993, SVES was evicted and the building was reno-vated for an architecture firm. After a discouraging search, Rick Erickson purchased 1965 Main Street, with plans to provide a long-term, stable lease to SVES. The buildings interior was renovated to facilitate the many services the society offered. SVES staff managed the storage facility on the ground floor to supplement its income. The new centre was opened in June 1993. In October of that year, the society hosted a month-long twentieth anniversary exhibition titled, Video In: 20 Bold, Brash & Beautiful Years in its new location.

In 2007, the staff and board of SVES proposed a renaming and rebranding of the organization to rep-resent the breadth of contemporary media art being produced and exhibited at the centre; and to bridge the division between the exhibition, production, edu-cation, and distribution departments. Video In/Video Out became VIVO Media Arts Centre. In December 2010, VIVO inaugurated The Crista Dahl Media Library &

A group of artists who connected at the conference: Michael Goldberg, Paul Wong, Rene Baert, Richard Ward, Charles Keast, Annastacia McDonald, Janet Miller, Patricia Hardman, Paula Wainberg and Shawn Preus, incorporated the Satellite Video Exchange Society, and sought out a publicly accessible location to house the newly formed video library.

On August 1, 1973, SVES moved into its first home at 261 Powell Street between Main Street and Gore Avenue in Japantown. They opened to the public on September 17 of that year. As it was located in a renovated rooming house, and some members resided in newly built lofts, it became known as Video Inn. Video Inn provided a free videotape library and view-ing space, Portapak cameras and editing equipment to the community.

On September 15, 1980, SVES added a new department to its services, Video Out International Distribution, to circulate the video library to festivals, galleries, libraries, and educational resource centres inter-nationally. The addition of a distribution department meant greater exposure and increased income for artists, contributing to a wider acceptance of video as an art form.

By the mid-1980s, ongoing problems with mice and cockroach infestations became unbearable. A series of burst pipes and floods initiated a search for a new location. In February 1987, SVES made a brief move to 1160 Hamilton Street. The former warehouse was in the heart of Yaletown, an industry and manufacturing district. A name change followed the move. The double n was dropped, shifting Video Inn to Video In. Video In/

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of an international selection of video artists, activists, and media producers. The project began when 1,000 postcards were mailed out internationally, soliciting contributions from interested parties. The first edi-tion included 171 entries, and subsequent editions listed over 500 addresses. The directory encouraged the free exchange of non-commercial video, while promoting an international network to share ideas and resources. Following the incorporation of SVES in 1973, the society took over the production of the directory, which was eventually replaced by the Video Guide. In total, eight editions of The International Video Exchange Directory were produced between 1971 and 1981.

Video Guide / The Video Guide was printed quarterly by SVES. It was published regularly from 1978 to 1992, and featured interviews, reviews, listings, and articles profiling local and international video culture. At its peak of production, the Video Guide was distributed to every country, with the exception of Iran and Cambodia for political reasons.

Archive, a collection of over 4,000 international video-tape titles, numerous special collections, and thou-sands of print and image documents.

A Glossary of Terms

Below are explanations of some of the materials pro-duced by SVES, referenced or reproduced throughout this publication.

Day Books / The day books were journals kept by SVES staff and volunteers from 19731987 to communicate on a day-to-day basis. Notes in the day books track who was working at and visiting the centre, rants, gossip, repairs and maintenance, relevant events, and news items.

Tape Viewing Logs / From its inception, SVES video-tape library has been accessible to the public. In the early and mid-1970s, when video playback equipment was uncommon in most households, people could ac-cess the viewing stations for free at Video Inn to watch non-commercial documentary and art videotapes. Patrons included artists, students, international guests, and residents from the diverse surrounding neighbour-hood. Staff tracked usage, and then referenced the statistics to create lists of the top ten most viewed videos of each year.

The International Video Exchange Directory / First released in 1971 by artist Michael Goldberg and Image Bank, The International Video Exchange Directory was a publication listing the names and contact information

We Come From HereAmy Kazymerchyk

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Since our first prospective discussions about curating in The Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive in January 2012, we have returned to the questions: why are we compelled by the archivespecifically the first decade of SVES consciousnessand why now?

Amongst pages of notes Ive written in response to these questions, I have highlighted one line: It is the movements we are involved in now that draw our attention to movements in the past.

We are the curators and coordinators of Anamnesia: Unforgetting: Donato Mancini, Alex Muir, Cecily Nich-olson, Sharon Bradley, and myself. Our movements are the collaborations we have united in, the discursive and aesthetic projects we have contributed to at VIVO, and the conversations we have taken up with concentric communities. Weve come together now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. We look to move-ments of the past, in this case the work and culture that artists, activists, and cultural workers from SVES early history were producing, because we imagine our time here as part of a continuum of friendships, prac-tices, and commitments.

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ing, and the restrictive contract that accompanied it, positioned VIVO to stage a reflective and critical forum in which artists and cultural workers could consider their production in relation to the events and systems around them. In fall 2009, a collective began meeting to strategise VIVOs activities during the 2010 Winter Olympics.5 Our position became SAFE ASSEMBLY, a consortium of discursive practices uniting performance artists, media journalists, cultural theorists, visual art-ists, housing rights activists, architects, and poets. We gathered to demonstrate VIVOs legacy as an artist-run centre committed to critical dialogue, artistic experi-mentation, and the responsibility to respond.

Cecily Nicholson and Alex Muir were members of SAFE ASSEMBLYs organizing collective. Muir was already an active member at VIVO. He had participated in a Technical Internship (2008) and SLAB 2: Votes for Sleepwalkers (2008), and was working as an event technician and exhibition preparator. With an inter-est in tracing the precedents for VIVOs response to the 2010 Winter Olympics, he curated Primer, a programme of videos drawn from the early 1980s that provided varying sightlines into histories of Vancouver and politicised aesthetic practices.6 He also built and programmed SAFE ASSEMBLY RADIO with Brian Beaudry and Kristen Roos; a project informed by his collabora-tion with Beaudry and Brady Marks on Soundscapes at Vancouver Co-operative Radio.

Cecily Nicholson entered VIVOs community through SAFE ASSEMBLY. As a poet, cultural critic, and femi-nist activist, Nicholson contributed to the collective by establishing and strengthening relations with other Olympic resistance initiatives in the city. Nicholson,

It could be said that the foundation for our collabora-tion on Anamnesia was laid in August 2008 when VIVO hosted the Kootenay School of Writings (KSW) N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921 Positions Colloquium. Kika Thorne was VIVOs Curator/ Programmer at the time. Hosting the Positions Colloquium exemplified her curatorial philosophy that media art is a dialogic medium, allied with other dialogic disciplines, and the communities that coalesce around them. Donato Mancini, Nicholas Perrin and Andrea Actis programmed the Colloquium. Andrew Klobucar, Rita Wong and Jeff Derksen contributed to curating, and moderating panel discussions, and presentations.1 Like Thorne, the coor-dinators and moderators of the Colloquium positioned poetics in dialogue with decolonization, Post-Fordism, performance art, neoliberalism, and the production of public space. VIVO has maintained ongoing relation-ships and collaborations with many of the poets and writers that presented at the Colloquium.

Early in Thornes tenure she established a conceptual framework for her curating titled An Age That Has Lost Its Gestures. Thorne took up Giorgio Agambens proposition that life becomes indecipherable when ac-tion is lost to power, to draw attention to the value of artist-run cultures founding processes, and the impact of their entropy. Within this rubric Thorne cultivated programming that reflected VIVOs critical opposition to Cultural Olympiad and affiliated funding, initiated in 2006 by Curator/ Programmer Julie Gendron and VIVOs Management Collective.2/3/4 This gesture drew directly from SVES early political consciousness that Crista Dahl speaks to in depth in her interview; one that continued to resonate with the 20062010 Man-agement Collective. Refusing Cultural Olympiad fund-

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Muirs curatorial interest in The Crista Dahl led to his position as Video Outs Distribution Assistant. He became intimately involved in videotape restoration and preservation, and apprenticed with Gerry Law-son from the Museum of Anthropology to repair our -inch open reel video decks, and restore our earliest tapes. Muir continued to curate from The Crista Dahl, co-programming the Top Ten series (2011) with Video Out Coordinator, Sharon Bradley, as well as numerous offsite initiatives.11 Since 2010, Muir has facilitated No Reading After The Internet, a monthly salon for com-munally reading cultural texts.12

Donato Mancini presented a talk titled Signs of Counter-Protest for SAFE ASSEMBLYs Evening News, which analysed acts of resistance to resistance against the Olympic Games throughout history. He has continued to initiate and participate in collaborations between VIVO and Vancouvers poetry and literary communities. As DJ PunDit, he curated an evening of revolutionary music for Imminent Future (February 2011). With Am Johal he co-programmed An Evening of Revolutionary Poetry (November 2010).13 He also launched his book of textual and visual poems, and conceptual writings on statistics, food, capitalism, death, and lists titled Buffet World at VIVO (May 2011).14

We can see reflections of the videos curated for An-amnesia: Unforgetting in the cultural conditions, social concerns, and aesthetic inquiries of Mancini, Muir, and Nicholsons cultural production at VIVO. Of par-ticular note is their range of inquiry and collaboration with disciplines outside of media art production. This has been a part of the cultural ecology of SVES from its inception.

Nicholas Perrin, and Am Johal coordinated the Evening News, a nightly report and dialogue forum for activists and cultural workers who were also responding to the Olympics. She also read with Stephen Collis and Roger Farr for Short Range Poetic Device, a series of live readings that aired on SAFE ASSEMBLY RADIO.7

I collaborated with Thorne, Muir, and Nicholson as a member of SAFE ASSEMBLYs organizing collective, and in the weeks leading up to the Olympics, took over Thornes tenure. Along with the title, I was endowed with the gestures and relationships she had rooted. In the years following, I have developed numerous events and projects with Mancini, Muir and Nicholson. Together we have inquired into the ways that art can symbolically and concretely introduce new frames of interpretation and conjur new propositions within art, poetics, and politics. We have continued uncovering the gestures of our age.

Nicholson continued working with Nicholas Perrin, Am Johal, and Althea Thauberger to produce the series Imminent Future (February/November 2011).8 Nicholson and Ivan Drury performed a collaborative poetry reading (January 2011), which was co-presented by Urban Subjects and KSW, and preceded Urban Subjects residency and emergent exhibition 602,000 Works on Housing (January-April 2011).9 Nicholson also read with Stephen Collis, Mercedes Eng, Ray Hsu, Reg Johanson and Kim Minkus at To The Barricades (May 2011).10 In her tenure as a Coordinator of the Downtown Eastside Womens Centre, Nicholson programmed a screening of Survival, Strength, Sisterhood: Power of Women in the Downtown Eastside by Alejandro Zuluaga and Harsha Walia, at VIVO (February 2011).

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contemporary social movements, politicisation, and cultural production. Durham, a former Director of the International Indian Treaty Council, member of the American Indian Movement, and contemporary artist, embodies continuity and allegiance between political and aesthetic commitments. Audre Lorde offers one of the most affirming declarations for poetryand by extension, symbolic productionas vital for existence.

Nicholsons curatorial approach is informed by her critical and poetic writing practice. She has done more than just assemble excerpts of videos to facili-tate a digestible viewing; she has intervened as a poet to construct a continuum between the material and ideological attributes of video documents, dispatches, communiqus, and broadcasts from 1970s American civil rights activism, Indigenous resistance, prison justice, and the movements she is a part of. Nicholson acknowledges the traction between poetics, experi-mentation, and resistance in media production in the late 1960s and 1970s, that is still palpable at VIVO. She suggests, with the support of Davis and Durham, that we have to trust the confusion and commit to the enduring process of coming together.

There is no simple call for solidarity. A methodology for enacting solidarity cannot be prescribed and is, criti-cally, a matter of ongoing relations. (Nicholson 179)

SVES has always welcomed artists who work at the margins of contemporary art movements, due to aes-thetic or political differences, health and mental health concerns, economic and social barriers, or critical and disruptive identities. Byron Black was certainly one of the outsiders who frequented SVES (though he never

Nicholson introduces her thoughts on her programme Dispatches: wrested resumption in time and area, by articulating the plurality of her social and political identity and allegiances. She affirms her solidarity with anti-gentrification struggles in Vancouvers Downtown Eastside, multiply-oppressed women, hybrid identities, and Indigenous peoples resistance. With thoughtful reverence, she places her body in time and place, naming the locus from which she approaches The Crista Dahl. She articulates her concerns about communication and solidarity between art and activist communities, torn between aesthetic judgment and embodied critique, and the many unresolved struggles within her purview.

Immersed in concerns of war and aware of cultural process as labour, my curatorial efforts in this project are earnest and given towards work that is hopefully legible and resonating within my wider communities, most of them founded in ongoing struggles.... I have a selection of ten videos spanning 19731979 in hand to render some meaningful arrays of figures in time and places relevant to civil and Indigenous rights move-ments. Edifying and beautiful overtones are clear and present.... Through multiscalar and discontinuous reflection on movement, the story of these documents contributes perspective on multiculturalism and revolution with the video medium both analogous and functional. (Nicholson 173, 175)

Nicholson includes writers and artists such as Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Jimmie Durham in her inquiry on the reciprocity between medium and message, the symbolic and concrete. Davis reminds us to con-sider experimental approaches to civil rights organis-ing in the 1960s and 1970s, as lessons for confronting

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The broadest contours of the history of the era would suggest that the we of artist collectivity would undergo considerable streamlining as the years pro-gressedas befits the broader socioeconomic story-line, from which artists are certainly not exempt. For all the provocations to appropriate the means of com-munication and cultivate ourselves as supple, enabled subjects, it must be remembered that the machina-tions of the state and corporations were equally savvy and attuned. The allegorical figure of the artist as secret agent is met by a state all too happy to formally capture the public territory that the agent has tac-itly conceded in their decision to remain clandestine. The vision of the savvy producer who is able to per-form comfortably across multiple mediums, roles, and languages, echoes eerily today in the swelling class of precarious labour. (Muir 147)

Blacks anachronistic practice influences Muirs experi-mentation with conceptual and theoretical notions of the archive in visual, literary, music, and moving pic-ture cultures. His inquiry can be read in the mandate for No Reading After The Internet: a monthly salon for communally reading cultural texts, with an inter-est in reforming publics, and experimenting with the act of reading, as its own media form, in our moment. By physically gathering and reading aloud from a range of texts that collate art history, visual culture, media theory and political history, we contest our mutual skepticism of medias manifest destiny. Inspired by early film and video artists like Byron Black, who took cues from the camra-stylo, the pen pal, the written word preceded by the spoken, and the symbolic image, we work towards reclaiming the gesture of media.

felt he belonged here), and the society remained one of Blacks active penpals through the 1980s.

Black took up the proclamation that video, as an affordable, accessible, and portable medium, could accelerate global unity (also one of SVES founding values). His video mail art and television broadcasts speak to a moment when international travel, cor-respondence and collaboration were kinetic, and the vernacular of movement was a part of the emerging medium. Forty years later, Black continues to travel, collaborate with locals in countries around the Pacific Rim, and evolve his practice to twenty-first century online forums for media correspondence.

While it is true that digital media (via analogue video) has created some forms of global community, and expanded access to communication, and social broad-cast, it has done so at an expense. Media experimenta-tion has entrenched artists and producers in product dependency. Consumption, not correspondence, has become the incantation of techno-capital. Blacks idealistic vigor for internationalism in the 1970s and 1980s was always bent by skepticism towards the global media sphere. Pragmatically, Black has worked as a media educator to push back against the imperial conditions that foster technologys proliferation. In his video work, the tenor of his derision has always been a harmony of gallows humour, bouffant, and counter-orientalism. Muir takes up Blacks practice at this mo-ment because the critique in his work, displaced in its time, has caught up with the present.

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present, enacting the concrete events of restoring, watching and reading.

In line with Mancini, Nicholson, and Muir enact concre-tisation in the archive by attuning to the polyrhythms present in the videos. In Dispatches: wrested resump-tion in time and area, Nicholson works with the con-centric temporalities of political movements, and the overlapping strata of duration, materiality, and address. In Whats a sentient being like you doing in an incarna-tion like this? Muir draws on global temporalities of Blacks forays through Indonesia, Thailand, and Japan, and the paradoxes of a perpetual outsider.

Mancinis programme Year of The Strike, Hour of The Knife connects Santiago, Chile, and Vancouver, Can-ada, as two strategic centres for the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. The multifarious rhythms that flow through these works address the scars of struggle and protest across the landscape, the body, and the city. Following the rhythm of The Crista Dahls international catalogue, and the global agenda of neoliberalism, the programme zigzags across borders and cultural contexts between 1975 and 1989.

Mancini also traces the continuity between the emer-gence of neoliberalism and the current socio-political and economic climate. In winter 2009/2010, the BC Liberals arts and culture funding cuts, followed by a significant rent increase (catalysed by development speculation of South False Creek and Mount Pleas-ant where VIVO is located) had significant ideological and financial impact on SVES. There is no doubt that the BC Liberals social and cultural policies, the Olym-pics, and Vision Vancouvers collusion in the subse-

Byrons work registers the latest innovations in the cycles of the aestheticisation of politics. A practice steeped in a conversation about image and persona intently observes the celestial rising of the concept of brand to the lofty plateau of the state itself. Reflecting on this exponential change in scalewherein all space is subject to polish, and monuments are designed for their legibility to global jetsettersByron writes in a tape description for Collapse of Time that, it was a sad day when the bottom fell out of the world but after all its only an upside-down smile a mile wide. (Muir 145)

The Collapse of Time that Black speaks of may be the command of abstract over concrete time. As Mancini elaborates, abstract time is measured by the clock, and tied to the rhythms of production determined by industrialisation, the march of progress into modernisa-tion, and global capitalism. In this paradigm, time equals value. As a time-based medium made of cheap, con-sumptive materials, with an unbridled capacity to ar-ticulate time, an archive of video is an archive of timeindeed one that threatens to become abyssal. Taken one step further, anamnesiac or a pathological inability to forgetin this case born of a pathos to record, to document, to archive. Mancini acknowledges that although the video archive does not produce capital as such, it is a material symbol of capital via abstract time. Thus the video archive, in this case The Crista Dahl, can be used as a site of resistance against capital.

In the archive, the act of resistance against abstract time is enacted through curating, a hostile, violent cutting across the abstract grid with the temporal knife of the concrete (Mancini 86). The temporal knife is the concrete body of the curator, in the concrete

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quent development boom are conjunctive. Indeed, this pattern of causality can be traced to the BC Social Credit Governments 1983 Restraint program. Pre-mier Bill Bennett announced roll-backs to education, social service, environment, and culture programs, and deregulated labour laws and union contracts, to open provincial resources and services to private corpora-tions. His budget shuffle also financed the presenta-tion of Expo 86, which like the Olympics, introduced the province to global investors. The most recent wave of restructuring, mega-events, and development is undoubtedly part of a thirty-year-plus continuum of neoliberal reformation.

In revisiting Lorna Boschmans Your System Stinks: A Video About Welfare Rights (1989) and Rich Rommells Expo Forever (1987), reality takes on an anamnesiac haze. The transpiring crisis within which media artists, producers, and cultural workers established SVES, has precipitated the conditions we continue to work within today.

When lacerated by the temporal knife of concrete time we see so poignantly the continuum between past movements and our own. SVES history has left an indelible print on its contemporary culture. We only hope this poignancy continues to be felt, by the future, towards the work that we were doing, when we were here.

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5. SAFE ASSEMBLYs program-ming was organised by Am Johal, Amy Kazymerchyk, Lois Klassen, Alex Muir, Cecily Nicholson, Nicholas Perrin, Emilio Rojas, Kristen Roos, Althea Thauberger, Kika Thorne, and cheyanne turions, with support from VIVOs Manage-ment Collective and Board of Directors. Together we pro-grammed: Afternoon School, Safe Faade, Primer, The Evening News, The White Pillows and Covering Up.

6. Primers programme: Ay Sudamerica! (1981) by C.A.D.A, Persons Unknown (1980) by Ken Kuramoto, B-84: Leaving the Ground (1981) by Byron Black, Our Noblest Aspirations (1984) by Andreas Nie-man, Vancouver Canada or They Chant Fed Up (1980) by Kim Tomczak.

7. Clint Burnham, Jeff Derksen, Kim Duff, Reg Johanson, Donato Mancini, Naava Smolash and Rita Wong also read for Short Range Poetic Device.

8. Imminent Futures inquiry pronounced: If we no longer hold assumptions about The End of History, progress, or the legitimacy of an avant-garde, then the ques-tion must be posed: Who are we? What is the worth of the poet in a society that already knows better than itself? Who can and who cant imagine a future? What is so terrible about the Terror? Wheres the comedy in apocalypse? Their Febru-ary 2011 event presented: Candace Hopkins, Joshua D. Goldstein, Jerry Zaslove, Fiona Jeffries, Tania Wil-lard, Charles Demers, DJ PunDit, the real featur-ing the unreal and Christie Lee Charles. In November 2011 they presented: Harjap Grewal, Tone Olaf Nielsen, Raymond Boisjoly and Glen Coulthard.

9. Urban Subjects is Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen and Helmut Weber. 602,000: Works on Housing also included the exhibition of Bitter/Webers video works (19972000); the production of But life is not changed magically by a poetic act; screening of Living Mega-Structures (2003/2004) fol-lowed by a panel discussion with Ivan Drury and Amy Kazymerchyk; and lecture on

NOTES

1. Positions Colloquium presenters: Andrea Actis, Michael Barnholden, Dodie Bellamy, Colin Browne, Clint Burnham, Jules Boykoff, Ted Byrne, Louis Cabri, Peter Cole, Stephen Collis, Peter Culley, Michael Davidson, Stacy Doris, Ivan Drury, Laura Elrick, Roger Farr, Robert Fitterman, Maxine Gadd, K. Lorraine Graham, Maxwell Heller, Franois Houle, Reg Johansen, Kevin Killian, Brian Kim Stefans, Andrew Klobucar, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Manci-ni, Sachiko Murakami, Sianne Ngai, Pat ORiley, Nicholas Perrin, Judy Radul, Lisa Robertson, Kaia Sand, Colin Smith, Rod Smith, Julianna Spahr, Catriona Strang, Rodrigo Toscano, Aaron Vi-daver, Mark Wallace, Darren Wershler-Henry, Tyrone Wil-liams, Rita Wong.

2. Overlapping VIVO Man-agement Collective members 20062010: Sharon Bradley, Jen Fisher, Julie Gendron, Emma Hendrix, Amy Kazymer-chyk, Velveeta Krisp, Kath-erine Lee, Asa Mori, Dinka Pignon, Gabriel Schroedter, Kika Thorne.

3. VIVO Board Members 20062010: Todd Davis, Lois Klassen, Krisztina Laszlo, David Lee, Tiina Liimu, Alanna Maclennan, Heather McDermid, Mark Penner, Carmen Pollard, Andrew Power, Judy Piggott, Holly Schmidt, Georgia Scott, Rafael Tsuchida.

4. This decision also re-flected VIVOs position that funding schemes such as the Cultural Olympiad that were not administered by arms-length arts and culture funding bodies, would eventually result in a loss, or redistribution, of operational funding for arts, as monies shifted to the hands of politically and economically motivated players. Indeed, cuts to the BC Arts Council and BC Gaming did occur in winter 2009/2010. Not accepting Cultural Olympiad funding, plus these operational cuts, and a simultaneous rent increase, put VIVO in an in-credibly vulnerable position that demanded an equally active operational response by the Management Collec-tive and Board of Direc-tors, behind the scenes of SAFE ASSEMBLY and well after its conclusion.

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the Revolutionary Impera-tive by Neil Smith. Urban Subjects worked in collabo-ration with the 2011 Olym-pic Tent Village Coalition and the Downtown Eastside Neighborhood Council.

10. Part of La Commune: Paris 1871 / Vancouver 2011. Programmed by Stephen Col-lis. Co-presented with Simon Fraser University Depart-ment of History, English and French.

11. Screenings were pro-grammed from lists of the top ten videos screened in: 1974, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1982 and 1990.

12. No Reading was an adaptation of Thought on Film, a communal reading series that was curated by cheyanne turions at Cine-works Independent Filmmak-ers Society from 20082010. Alex Muir, Kika Thorne and Amy Kazymerchyk collabo-rated with cheyanne on its programming. When cheyanne left Cineworks in 2010, VIVO adopted the series and shifted it to reflect our cultural position.

13. The invitation read: In times like these, it is impossible to be too politi-cal, too literal, too di-rect, or too vulgar. So help us bring a little concrete to the city of abstractions, a little historical tex-ture to the city of glass. Test what its possible to feel. Make a scandal of your sincerity. In counter-celebration, join us for a night of revolutionary po-etry. Twenty Vancouver writ-ers and artists will weep and wail poems of revolution by (such poets as) Amiri Baraka, Pier Paolo Paso-lini, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Edwin Rolfe, Kenneth Rexroth, Cesar Vallejo, Tsang Ke-chia, Huddie Ledbetter, Osip Mandelstam and Paul luard.

14. Published by New Star Books (Vancouver).

In the Present as Well: Polytemporality and Archival AnamnesiaDonato Mancini

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It was in the year of the strike. The city lay, a patient stripped of coverings, in the landscape. Fever dreams of birds long flown south. Now the streets exploded with people. (Remco Campert)

It is now or never, the hour of the knife, The break with the past, the major operation. (C. Day Lewis)

Time as Plural, Differential

Polytemporality. Also called, in the late work of Henri Lefebvre, polyrhythmia. Or, in the language of busi-ness and communications, find the term polychronal-ity. Time as multiple. Multiple concurrent temporalities. Multiple concurrent rhythms. Overlapping. Knots of time. Apparent paradoxes. Temporal riddles. Nested temporalities. Entangled temporalities. Intersecting narrative trajectories unfolding in the same space. Unrelated events crossing without conjunction. Tra-jectories nearly crossing paths. Divergent histories.

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and in everyday life. As Stuart Elden writes, summariz-ing a position of Lefebvres: Social, biological, physi-cal and cosmic times, played out in cycles or linear progressions, demonstrate that time is already plural and differential (28). Even without the greater densi-ties introduced by diegetic time (time as represented in narrative content), the climate-controlled room of The Crista Dahl is like a cavern dripping with temporal traces, glinting with promises. Human labour time. State time. Commodity time. Historical time.

Early twentieth century anxieties about the capacity of photographic technologies to produce a crisis of time-sense and of cultural meaning, through limitless representation of contingent details, are arguably be-ing realized today in the archives and archival practices I term anamnesiac. Anamnesia is the loss of amne-sia. Versus the loss of memory, anamnesia is the loss of forgetting. Broadly, then, the anamnesiac archive has forgotten how to forget. There is a widespread obsession with a kind of archival totality, an appar-ent desire to photograph or videotape everything, and archive every squiggle down to the most minor digital syntagm. Founded in 1973, The Crista Dahl (at that time called the Satellite Video Exchange Library) is historically poised at the start of the ongoing long neoliberal moment (Derksen 20), one effect of which is a result of the increasing dominance of abstract time in neoliberal culture and related technological innova-tionsthat many archives make an abyssal turn into anamnesia. Anamnesiac archives are, in identifiable senses, symptomatic materialisations of abstract time ideology (which consolidates time as value, in a par-ticular sense tied to capitalist production) and so can be used simultaneously as a site or act of resistance

Counter histories. Struggles between abstract time and concrete time. Body as the site of time-struggles. To reflect on the problem of time is to reflect on lived polytemporality. The quotidian experience of time as multiple.

Theorists of moving picture media (in particular, video and film), and theorists of the archive can never circle far from issues of time, temporality, and, therefore, polytem-porality. Mary Ann Doane, in The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, reflects on the cinematic archive, specifically in terms of its poly-temporality. Noting shifts in the understanding of time, provoked by the invention of cinema, she writes that:

The archive is a protection against time and its inevi-table entropy and corruption, but with the introduc-tion of film as an archival process, the task becomes that of preserving time, of preserving an experience of temporality, one that was never necessarily lived but emerges as the counterdream of rationalisation, its agonistic undersidefull presence. In its indexical dimension, film functions as the empty deictic signifier, the this or that which can theoretically be filled with any content whatever. But once it is allied with that content, it is the imprint not only of the content but of the temporal moment of the imprinting, of a now which has become a then, but which, in its screening, becomes a resurrected revivified now. (223)

The thickly polytemporal condition of the moving pic-ture archive is precisely what confronts a curator in The Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive. My own time in The Crista Dahl has pierced me with a new awareness of polytemporality in film and video, social struggles,

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Time is indescribable except by elaborate and particular representational mediation, indescribable without its articulations. In Lefebvres most succinct formulation, rhythm is movements and difference in repetition (90). Rhythm, in Lefebvres usage, is the very mediation and articulation of time that makes time thinkable. (Perhaps think of rhythm as a description of time.) Rhythm is times legibility, to the exact human extent that time has any legibility whatsoever.

Lived polytemporality is the central locus of analysis in Lefebvres rhythmanalytical method. He almost scoffs at the question of its importance: Polyrhythmia? It suffices to consult ones body; thus the everyday reveals itself to be a polyrhythmia from the first listen-ing.... Polyrhythmia analyses itself (16). Rhythmanalysis is the study of polytemporality; it is the conception that grasps the simultaneity and intertwinement of several rhythms, their unity in diversity (77). The hu-man body is always the base of Lefebvres method of rhythmanalysis. Although part of the lexicon of rhyth-manalysis is drawn from classical music and aesthetics, his project is neither aesthetic nor formal. Lefebvres practical hope is that through his method of descrip-tive critique, the dominance of abstract time (centred in the clock) might be unseated, to restore concrete time (centred in the body) to experiential dominance. His project is to make the body again the principal measure of time, and to see social time reorganized in the interest of the natural body, rather than in the in-terest of capitalist production. Stated in this form, his program sounds moderate, but its true implications are radical, due to the revolutionary systemic changes that would be required to reorganize social time according to the rhythms of the human body.

to the ideology it realizes. The anamnesiac archive appears to re-concretise time in evidentiary form, at a cultural moment when concrete time-sense is increas-ingly diffused, while performing the capitalist logic of time=value to absurd extremes. If time=value, and if the archive (especially the moving picture archive) stores time, storing everything (photographing, film-ing or videotaping everything) appears to make value (potentially) limitless. Moving picture media provide ideal content for this monstrous archive, aggravate its fevers, and collude with the logics that give rise to it. Yet moving picture media and archives can also func-tion as important tools in oppositional time-struggles.

As Hell, Without a Protective Shield

In Henri Lefebvres late work, he overtly takes up the analysis and study of polytemporality. He does so not only as the focus of a particular book, but in outlining what he regards as a new epistemology. Lefebvres opening re-marks in Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life announce: This little book ... proposes nothing less than to found a science, a new field of knowledge: the analy-sis of rhythms; with practical consequences (3). Among Lefebvres contributions to thought about time is the turn he makes in Rhythmanalysis away from the general term time, towards the more specific term rhythm. Although to stay in synch with archive theory and moving picture theory I use rhythmia and temporality as near-synonyms, I welcome Lefebvres innovation. Rhythm is a better concept for analyzing polytemporality than time alone. This is the case for a reason articulated in other-wise incompatible theories of time: time is unthinkable.

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pictorial spaces of Boschs larger paintings, swarming with temporal multiplicity, emblematize the quandary rhythmanalysis would solve: is it possible to apprehend polytemporality synthetically? That is, is it possible to apprehend times actual multiplicity and effective unity in the same instant? For Lefebvre, if a synthetic appre-hension is to be possible, externalization and distantia-tion are crucial, because: when rhythms are lived, they cannot be analysed (88). Time is unthinkable; rhythm is time experienced across the distance of mediation by events. Rhythm describes time in times language. In trying to think polytemporality without mediation, without externalisation and distantiation, there is a risk of being merely overwhelmed by multiplicity of the actual, possible and past as they jostle in the terrain of purview.

Sigmund Freuds understanding of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, his archival concept of memory and forgetting, is premised on such issues of mediation: fixation, framing, filtration. To Freud, competing overabundant stimuli must be filtered, or the subject risks a maddening de-gree of overstimulation. While the unconscious gapes like an unlimited archive, admitting traces of all experi-ences, the conscious mind acts as a protective screen to filter out for apprehension only legible, narratable strands from a constant influx. As Doane writes:

Freud claims ... that Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function in the living organism than reception of stimuli ... [The external world] is en-visioned as a surplus of stimulations, an overwhelming mass of energies perpetually assaulting the subject and liable to break through its defences. (42-43)

The analysis of polytemporality, then, must start with the question: how is polytemporality embodied in the quotidian? Lefebvre writes that:

Rational, numerical, quantitative and qualitative rhythms super impose themselves on the multiple nat-ural rhythms of the body ... though not without chang-ing them. The bundle of natural rhythms wraps itself up in rhythms of social or mental function. Whence the efficiency of the analytic operation that consists in opening and unwrapping the bundle. (9)

Time is always lived in the body, and in the plural. Con-fronted internally and externally with the actual condi-tion of lived polytemporality, theories of time explode into proliferate names for modes of time. Several of these are often observed unfolding in the same brack-eted space, in various relationships. Relationships of uneasy accord, direct antagonism, or aloofness. Some names: Concrete time. Lived time. Cyclical time. Calen-drical time. Charismatic time. Apocalyptic time. Sacred time. Social time. Free time. Historical time. Archival time. Profane time. Abstract time. Rational time. Work time. Homogeneous, empty time. Notional time. Capi-talist time. Commodity time. Linear time. Palpable time. Plastic time. Narrative time. Adventure time. Mytho-logical time. Diegetic time. Musical time. Screen time. Cinematic time.

At least two major representations of polytemporal-ity show the condition not as a vibrant bundle to be unwrapped, but as an explosive nest of too much, too many, too soon, too often: the paintings of Hiero-nymus Bosch, and the Inferno of Dante Alighieris Divine Comedy. The simultaneously flattened and deep

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tion from the classical past, Virgil shows these sights to Dante to point towards the latters possible futures, and the probable futures of humanity. The air is filled with a tumult that will whirl forever, never resolving, ongoing in the boundless spaciousness of Hell, while the air itself is turbid, static. There are no stars by which to chart times passage, nor ones to navigate this array of temporalities. The sky is an abyss from which, and into which everything seems to fall. Hell is both filled beyond bursting with individual narratives in concrete time and somehow also outside of normal biological time. Yet the tortures of the damned are inflicted upon corpo-real bodies: a sublimely distended pseudo-biological time in Hell gives eternal time its torturous rhythm. Sighs and lamentations echo. Dante hears the sounds of agony marking time as those sounds decay through hellspace. Utterances suggest a past, pronouncements a future, anger and words of suffering an agonizing present. Time here has many timbres. Voices wail, like a weird lachrymose song; hands beat, as if beating time in brutal accompaniment. These temporalities, these rhythms, do not synchronize, but invade the travellers mind in an arrhythmic cacophony. Dante weeps.

As both Freud and Lefebvre knew, to think about polytemporality is to flirt with dangers of hypersignifi-cation, of overstimulation, of limitless representation. Like Freud, Lefebvre suggests that individual humans are bound to hide their own temporal plurality even from themselves, against the genuine risk of subjec-tive unravelling. He writes that We contain ourselves by concealing the diversity of our rhythms: to our-selves, body and flesh, we are almost objects (10). In rhythmanalytical practice, Lefebvre uses careful acts of framing to distance analyst from subject, while set-

Consciousness, the upper screen of the mind, there-fore functions, to keep off injurious effects from without, and is a protective shield against stimuli (43). The conscious mind hides immeasurably more than it reveals. Indeed when the screen comes down, even briefly, the multiplicity that breaks throughis revealedmay be hellish.

This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimu-lation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield. (Doane 43)

When Dante, as hero and narrator of the Inferno, enters the ante-Hell, the Freudian protective shield of his consciousness comes down dramatically. Distance and boundaries collapse in the boundless space of abyss. He is assaulted by multiple, divergent temporalities.

Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries were echoing across the starless air, so that soon as I set out, I wept. Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements, accents of anger, words of suffering, and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands all went to make a tumult that will whirl forever through the turbid, timeless air, like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls. (21)

Here sounds move in all directions. Sounds come from all directions. Voices are heard near and distant, each sounding out from a unique narrative of mortal sin and eternal punishment. Dante is himself in motion, with the revenant Roman poet Virgil as his guide. An appari-

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conceptual but vivid way, it is enough to look carefully at the surface of the sea. Waves come in succession: they take shape in the vicinity of the beach, the cliff, the banks (79). Even more striking (certainly more amusing), Lefebvre demonstrates rhythmanalysis on the following page by inventing a scene/screen remi-niscent of the opening of David Lynchs film Blue Velvet (1986), lacking only the modernist severed ear:

Now look around you at this meadow, this garden, these trees and these houses. They give themselves, they offer themselves to your eyes as in a simultaneity. Now, up to a certain point, this simultaneity is mere appearance, surface, a spectacle. Go deeper. Do not be afraid to disturb this surface, to set its limpidity in motion. Be like the wind that shakes these trees. Let your gaze be penetrating, let it not limit itself to reflecting and mirroring. Let it transgress its limits a little. You at once notice that every plant, every tree has its rhythm. And even several rhythms. Leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds. On this cherry tree, flowers are born in springtime along with leaves that will sur-vive the fruits, and which will fall in the autumn, though not all at once. Henceforth you will grasp every being, every entity and every body, both living and non-living, symphonically or polyrhythmically. You will grasp it in its space-time, in its place and its approximate becoming. (80)

Three pages later, his figuration of the rhythmanalyst as poet and artist, producing the object of study just as much as he/she reveals the object, becomes almost overtly that of rhythmanalyst as filmmaker or videog-rapher: We can also conceive of beings whose vision would extend further. Above all, we can make cameras

ting a definite limit on which rhythms he coaxes into purview. Each of the practices of psychoanalysis and rhythmanalysis involve a cautious process of recov-ery of the archived, hidden or reified, that necessarily screens out more than it admits, forgets more than it remembers.

Screen as Screen

Although throughout Rhythmanalysis Lefebvre repeat-edly critiques the ideologies and reifications of image-based thinking, the analogies he turns to in demon-strating his method are, nevertheless, cinematic and pictorial. It is through mostly unacknowledged analo-gies with moving picture media that Lefebvre begins to make polytemporality safely apprehensible. The analyti-cal analogy he overtly proposes is with polyphonic or contrapuntal music, yet of four main demonstrations of rhythmanalytical technique, three are blatantly picto-rial or cinematic rather than musical. The entirety of Chapter 3 of Rhythmanalysis, Seen From the Win-dow, sets the rhythmanalytical scene in the movie screenlike frame of a window pane, through which Lefebvre contemplatively unwraps a select bundle of the competing rhythms that constitute the city. Paris becomes a moving-pictorial scene, as it were; the win-dow pane, as frame, as narrative purview, screens out enough that he can undertake effective rhythmanaly-sis. In his succinct addendum chapter The Rhythmana-lytical Project, Lefebvre provides two method demos. The first uses the moving picture analogy of waves observed from a sea shore, in a passage that begins: To grasp rhythm and polyrhythmias in a sensible, pre-

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as an archive of time itself. Video extends, expands and complicates this temporal phenomenon further. Yet, as Roland Barthes indicates in Camera Lucida, the still photograph is already the site of an exquisite polytem-porality. In his theory, the punctum is an arresting, con-tingent detail that pierces through the photo into the viewers perception. As Doane notes, Barthes locates a type of punctum that is actually a synthetic perception of polytemporality. In section 38, Barthes writes:

I now know that there exists another punctum (an-other stigmatum) than the detail. This new punctum, which is no longer of form of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (that-has-been), its pure representation. (96)

What is piercing about this chronopunctum is that it shockingly injects polytemporality into his awareness, piercing the screens/screens of the conscious mind. That is to say when Barthes writes about time, he is writ-ing about lived polytemporality, time as paradoxically plu-ral. The chronopunctum dominates the following section of Camera Lucida, centred on Alexander Gardners 1865 Portrait of Lewis Payne, where Barthes writes that

the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: this will be and this has been. I observe with hor-ror the anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me of death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence ... I shudder ... every photograph is this catastrophe. (96)

It is not only that the photograph archives a trace of the past to serve it into the present, but that it

that actually extend this field. It persists nonethe-less with its limits, its bounds, its boundaries (83). For Lefebvre, then, as much as for theorists like Mary Ann Doane and Andr Bazin, moving picture media provide a positive analogy and analytic framework for screening (in both a Freudian and cinematic sense) the complexities of polyrhythmia/polytemporality. The framework at once reveals (for legible knowing), and conceals (for protective forgetting). As an analytical trope, cinema helps bind, bracket, and frame polytem-porality into a thinkable purview.

It is unfortunate that Lefebvre doesnt consciously take up moving pictures as his dominant analogy in Rhyth-manalysis. Just as rhythm is a superior concept for thinking time, moving picture media provide a superior analogy for thinking polytemporality. In content and viewing context, moving pictures are temporally denser than the polyphonic music Lefebvre uses as analogy. The temporalities of music, its rhythms, nest inside the already thick temporalities of the moving picture. As they enter the archive, and the space of the archival, the temporality of moving picture media becomes still more layered. It is in archival terms that Doane draws her important distinctions between photographic and cinematic representations of time. As Doane writes: While photography could fix a moment, the cinema made archivable duration itself.... What was registered on film was life itself in all its multiplicity, diversity and contingency (22). Cinema has been theorized as a durational performance of presence. That is, cinema stages a durational event through which the past invades the present. If photography is theorized as archiving time by the instant, cinema, the extension of photography into duration, has often been theorized

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The cinema engages multiple temporalities, and it is helpful, at least temporarily, to disentangle them. There is the temporality of the apparatus itselflinear irreversible, mechanical. And there is the temporality of the diegesis, the way in which time is represented by the image, the varying invocations of present, past, future, historicity.... And finally, there is the temporali-ty of reception, theoretically distinct but nevertheless a temporality which the developing classical cinema attempted to fuse as tightly as possible to that of the apparatus, conferring upon it the same linear predict-ability and irreversibility. (30)

Now add a few layers. Recorded sound (not inciden-tally, another medium of the temporal trace). Music (itself a self-sufficient bundle of polyrhythmia, nested within the cinematic rhythms). Abstract and concrete decay (the degredation of videotape or celluloid; the changes in image qualities across time due to changes in technology). It is possible that mainstream cinephilia, the ecstasy of the cinema, is provoked by a series of aggregated chronopuncta, drawn exhilaratingly through the forward motion of narrative. If so, each chronopunctum in cinema marks a slippage, whether the chronopuncta are deliberately staged for effect, or where the reifying effects of narrative momentarily fail to screen out the idiomatically thick polytemporal-ity of moving picture media.

seems to reveal a future anterior of a possible past. Barthes moment of insight is therefore like Dantes. He is shocked: for a moment the filter of his conscious mind is breached. Unlike Dantes sense of drowning immersion, Barthes realization is synthetic. He is not hurled into a semiotic cacophony. Barthes apprehends, in an epiphanic mode, a dense, singular instantiation of polytemporality. The wound is momentarily stagger-ing, but not overwhelming. In this sense, through the chronopunctum, the photo provides Barthes the ana-lytic analogue that makes him able to think polytempo-rality without being overwhelmed. It functions much as rhythm does for Lefebvre. It produces an articulating event, and thereby sets a frame. What for Lefebvre is a source of Rabelaisian sanguinity, for Freud anxiety, for Dante agony, for Barthes is a source of pathos.

Moving picture media only compound such polytem-porality. Mary Ann Doane returns to the problems of polytemporality through moving pictures and the archive multiple times in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, with Freudian anxiety more than sanguinity or pathos. Her exercise of unbundling temporalities is close to Lefebvres in method. Doane underscores how the time-struggles that take place within lived polytemporality have visible homologues in cinema, where abstract modes of time, machinic rhythms, jostle antagonistically against both narrative time and con-crete time. More significantly, she shows that main-stream narrative cinema is often geared towards an ideological screening out of polytemporality. Story can become one with the linear, machinic, trajectory of abstract time:

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consequently, either about the time-struggles arising from antagonisms between concrete time and abstract time, or about paradoxical positions on the past-present-future temporal axis. (i.e. Barthes this will be and this has been.)

In its cultural dominance, abstract time becomes the master temporality to which all others refer and defer. What is abstract time? Walter Benjamins term for abstract time was empty, homogeneous time. In a well-known passage from Theses on the Philosophy of History, he writes, against the abstraction of time, that: History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now (261). Homogeneous, empty time, or abstract time, or rational time, is conceived as an abstract grid outside all concrete events (Hanson 11). In everyday terms, abstract time is the time of the clock. Abstract time is a representational technology. Its ideal representative is the 24-hour digital clock. The clock itself appears to have been first invented to coordinate ritual activity in the medieval Christian mon-astery with its regular succession of daily prayers that had to be performed punctually (Hanson 6). Tied in its origins to cyclical and sacred time, abstract time later develops into a fully rationalized system that primarily serves industrial production, by facilitating the coor-dination of its schedules along the entire continuum of production; from the individual gestures of the worker, up to 100-year leases of resource-rich lands. Abstract time is an empty grid imposed to subdue and displace concrete time. Abstract time is self-referential. In turns it is even non-representational, since its sub-divisions represent only its own formal logic. (What the clock shows is itself, not time itself.) Although it

As Clock versus Corpse

Again: to think about time is to think about polytempo-rality. Lived polytemporality is the crux of the temporal human condition. Although lived polytemporality is a condition that precedes modernity, in modernity it be-comes significantly more painful. The shift into moder-nity is characterized by the development of abstract time, and the increasing imposition of rational time-discipline. It is a process that, as Stephen E. Hanson writes in Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions, as recently as the late nine-teenth century ... aroused active political resistance (1). Abstract time is developed as a tool to subdue and displace concrete time. Rational-time discipline subjects the concrete rhythms of the body to the rhythms of production, as measured by the clock. It is a mechanism of social control rather than ... a neutral indicator of the progress of modernisation (Hanson 8). Rational time-discipline is the subordination of body and behaviour to the measures of the clock, resulting in compound deferrals of concrete time. As rational time-disciplines and horological synchronization be-come hegemonic in industrialized society, the struggles between abstract time and concrete time become central to the experience of lived polytemporality. Whereas in pre-industrial society there was an uneasy (often painful) synchrony between various concrete temporalities, lived polytemporality today is specifically characterised by harsh dissynchrony, jarring arrhyth-mia. As Lefebvre writes, in rhythmanalytic terms, let us say that there is [now] a struggle between mea-sured, imposed, external time and a more endogenous time (99). Most thought about lived polytemporality is,

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discipline. And so on.) As many besides Lefebvre have noted, the brutality of this lies in the fact that in such a system the individual body is always less resilient than the total body of industry, and the effects of subordi-nation are inevitably dehumanising.

Time is value. The creation of value in the form of sur-plus and profit is the structural imperative of capitalism. The individual human body is absolutely subordinate to value-production, including the production of time-as-value. Recall Marx: Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most the incarnation of time. Quality no lon-ger matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day (qtd. in Lukcs 89). (One might now add second for second, status update for status update.) To consolidate labour time with value, to elimi-nate waste time from the system, labour itself (bluntly: life) must be stripped of qualities, in order to be made measurable in interchangeable, durational grains of value. Labour time (life-time) must become accountable in units of pure value. As Gergy Lukcs writes in Reifi-cation and the Consciousness of the Proletariat:

the period of time necessary for work to be accom-plished (which forms the basis of rational calculation) is converted, as mechanisation and rationalisation are intensified, from a merely empirical average figure to an objectively calculable work-stint that confronts the worker as a fixed and established reality. (88)

Against the limit-point of mortality, a lifetime-as-value is an exhaustible bank account. For capital, each work-ing life-time is coldly calculated as an investment risk. In either case birth and death are now seen as the ab-solute endpoints (Hanson 3) during which an individual

is first developed in reference to the cyclical, solar day (hence circular clock-faces), the relationship of production-indexed abstract time with the solar day is, at its most peaceful, a reluctant truce. With the rise to cultural dominance of abstract time, time is made in-creasingly standard, impersonal. (Abstract time, among other effects, works to reductively simplify time, to make it seem to be a unified field.) Abstract time is disconnected from both the body and from concrete events: no longer a medium in which the subject is situated ... [time] is externalised and must be consult-ed (Doane 7). Through extreme processes of pure differentiation and measurability (ibid.), it appears both inexorably linear, unidirectional, and newly plastic: a shapeable substance and sellable commodity. Ab-stract time makes time seem infinitely divisible. That is to say: in the service of industry, time is granulated into units (nuggets? slices? collops?) of value that may be bought and sold. In the final instance, time comes to seem an incarnation of value itself.

Time-struggles sharpen in modernity because abstract time is imperatively antagonistic to concrete time. Abstract time exists to subdue concrete time. The main site of time-struggle is the body itself, which becomes subject to the irreconcilable demands of warring temporalities, in a lived polytemporality where abstract time is an absolutist dominant. (In everyday terms: each time the alarm clock goes off before the body is sufficiently rested, a literal struggle is enacted be-tween the concrete time of the body [biological time] and the abstract time of capitalist production. Many of the extremist austerity measures being imposed and opposed in Greece in 2011 are designed to coerce lazy Greeks into stricter rational, productive time-

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In its struggle to subdue concrete time, capital neces-sarily makes the human body itself one of its principal foes. Ordinary, bodily events in concrete timeeven banal ones, such as going to the bathroom or becom-ing sleepy out of synch with a production sched-uleinterrupt and thus threaten the maintenance of linear time. (Linear time is the flow and accumulation of value.) In modernity, when abstract time becomes dominant, lived polytemporality therefore becomes an experience of struggle, if not sheer temporal agony. Lefebvre characterizes polytemporality as an antago-nistic unity of relations (5). It is a dissynchronous unity that includes many, often painful, events of slippage, breakage, dissonance. On a mental level, these daily slippages produce Barthesian/Dantesque/Freudian chronopuncta, which bring the time-struggles within lived polytemporality back to conscious attentionre-sounding the temporal cacophony into which the hu-man subject is plunged.

As paradigmatic media of time and polytemporality, which appear to make duration itself archivable, the complex pathos (and ecstasy) of moving picture media arises from time-struggles. Moving picture media vari-ously represent, stage, resist, editorialize and contrib-ute to temporal conflict. Conflict within time, about time. Sometimes time-struggles are the actual, overt subject matter of moving picture artworks. Elsewhere, time-struggles are the unstated, actual subject un-derlying narratives or formal operations conceived in other terms. As Doane suggests, distinctions can be drawn between specific works (or even entire aes-thetic tendencies) that aggravate polytemporality and those which formally and stylistically collude with the dominance of abstract time, particularly in their obei-

must contribute, willy-nilly, to the general production of value. (Even sleep time has been appropriated to value-production. Think of beauty sleep: beauty sleep is productive sleep.) The meaning of the individuals life is harshly calculated in equations of time-as-value. Hanson further draws clear lines, in Time and Revolu-tion, from industrial ideology of time-as-value to Prot-estant (in particular, Calvinist) theology. In Calvinism every second represented an opportunity to serve God through productive activityor reject God by wasting time in profane pursuits (16). Protestant work ethic brings granulated time-as-value into the realm of the sacred. (One might ask: at the gates of Capitalist-Protestant Heaven, will souls be confronted with a list of their sins or their accomplishments?) With time thus abstracted, rationalized and finally consolidated as value, the concrete events that articulate time (which produce rhythm) are mainly disruptions, error. Passag-es of non-value. Interruptions. Value-empty temporal units. Waste time.

What redoubles the brutality of rational time-discipline, then, is that the principal, most prolific source of error/time-waste in a rationalized system is the body of the employee. The human body. Abstract time versus concrete time=clock versus corps. Finally: corpse. As Lukcs writes:

[the] fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of its subject. In consequence of the rationalisation of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. (89)

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far-reaching ideological effects. Many of the effects will, as water flows downhill, serve to develop (in some cases, mutate) already dominant ideologies. As Lefeb-vre suggests, the impact of technological conquests does not make the everyday any more alive; it nour-ishes ideology (53). Clocks are a tool for representing time. As Doane writes: at the turn of the [twentieth] century time became palpable ... Time was indeed feltas a weight, as a source of anxiety, and as an acutely pressing problem of representation (4). As a repre-sentation comes to seem more obvious, spontaneous, unquestionable, transparent, etc., it is becoming more deeply embedded in ideology. Along this line, clocks and cameras are usually believed to measure and/or capture time (in the latter case even to archive time), rather than construct temporalities. That is to say, whereas these inventions seem to provide solutions to the problem of temporal representation, they only thicken lived polytemporality more by adding their own idiomatic temporal layers. The imposition of rational time-disciplines eventually leads to the spontaneous belief that abstract time is an objective, true mea-sure of time. Other (competing) temporalities become interferences, ornamental or legendary. In this process, the still camera becomes an extension of the clock. Its products, photographs, appear as evidence for the truth of the clocks granulation of time. The still camera seems to reveal what the clock seems to measure; it conflates concrete with abstract time, as if they are the same temporality. The moment photographic in-stant is misapprehended as times minimal unit (Doane 212), that ideological turn has come. Cinema, photog-raphys extension, becomes then misrecognized an archive of time as such, because it can represent not only instants, but durations. Yet to be sure: the pho-

sance to the rhythms of the cultural-technological apparatus of the camera. Even in conventional narra-tive cinema, however, the drama can often be read as allegorical of time-struggles, regardless of the direc-tors intention. Other works make intentional inter-ventions against the dominance of abstract time, as a symbolic form of time-activism related to practical time-activism. Practical time-activism is emblemized most succinctly in the struggles over the length and organization of the working day. In the British context, Hanson notes, for example, that [according to E. P. Thomson, in] resisting the demands of employers for efficiency in time use, workers demonstrated their autonomy and solidarity within the constraints imposed by the capitalist mode of production (8). In moving picture media, individual works may act out in the name of various concrete temporalities, or they may struc-ture the experience of duration in such a way as to help restore a meaningful concrete time-sense; they may polemically argue for reorganization of social time around the rhythms of the body, as Lefebvre does in Rhythmanalysis. Or they may stage lived polytempo-rality as one of the constitutive agonies of modernity, from any number of perspectives. In all of these cases, moving picture media provide rich analogues for think-ing about temporal social conditions.

Archive as Pledge, as Deferral

Although moving picture media can be liberatory tools in time-struggles, it is equally important to consider where camera and clock collude with ideologies of abstract time. Any major technological innovation has

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In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida writes under the assumption that the archive [is] an accumulation and capitalisation of memory (12). On the latter point, of archive as capital, Doane specifies Derridas notion of the archival wager: the archive is always a wager about the future: a future screening, a future interpre-tation. The artifacts significance is a function of what it will have meant (223). That is to say, the value of the archive is assumed in terms of the kinds of symbol-ic (and/or financial) returns it might bring in the future. A gamble. An investment. A wager. As Derrida suggests, The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future (18). To archive, in this sense, is to invest time, in the sense of pur-chasing something expected to rise in value. Meaning (as value) is torn away from concrete time, to merge with abstract time. As Marx, Lukcs, Wahlberg, Doane, Thompson and Hanson all reiterate, the abstraction of time in industry excites a desire to transform all of time into value. To eliminate all waste time. Rapacious archival desires, the varying archival fevers, excited by photography and cinema, are effectively an extension of the desire to eliminate waste time, thereby mak-ing all time valuable. In the latter part of the twentieth century, these fevers begin to reach the extreme temperature of a desire for archival totality. Doane characterises it as a desire to represent all time ... a dream of representation without loss (61). Under capitalism, the ideological arithmetic is forceful: if time=value, and all of time is archived, value itself is made limitless. Capitalism can grow forever. To Derrida, this is the inexhaustible economistic resource of an archive which capitalises everything, even that which ruins it or radically contests its power (13).

tographic instant constructed by a snapshot does not exist, in any sense, outside of its representation. The movement of a body through space is not a sequence of instants. Lived time is not a series of takes, scenes, or bracketed durations. Concrete time is not objec-tively divisible into minimal units or really into units at all, except by representational convention.

Cameras not only provide evidence for the ideol-ogy of time-as-value, but specific content for that ideology. Photographic instants and cinematic dura-tions are, literally, traded as value. As a 1940s cam-era advertisement says, much like an atomic clock photography can split a second into a million parts. If each of those million parts, as labour time or as photographic instants, can be sold and traded, each second potentially holds a million grains of time-as-value. Moments into loose change. Time into gold dust. A counter-echo of this is heard in the opening lines of Zoltn Zelks poem Nightmare and Dawn, where the splitting of the moment figures, instead, as the dramatic opening of apocalyptic or revolutionary time within capitalist time: The moments shattered ... / The minute splits, and swarms apart, / a thousand agitated ants (296). But as Kodaks golden instants (or the Portapaks silver durations) enter the space of the archival, as they become representations of something past; it is as if they actually accumulate more time (time now being misconstrued as a plastic substance). As they accumulate more timetime being valuetheir value rises. (Early cinema theory, for this reason, was hooked on the notion that cinema endows immortality to its subjects.) A string of equivalences is generated: time as value; memory as time; memory as value; and, summarily, archive as capital.

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thought that it was useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he scarcely would have finished classify-ing even all the memories of his childhood. (114)

Anamnesis: the loss of forgetting. Anamnesia: the condition of being unable to forget. It is for Funes not a practical nor mystical gift, but a mortal crisis of memory and legibility. At only 19 years old, the in-person memory-explosion is debilitating. He lives out the rest of his abbreviated life bedridden in a pitch dark room, sheltering from new stimuli. With this in view, I ask: were Freud and Borges prescient or cinephobic? Archivo-phobic? While Freud could perhaps not appreciate that the photographic frame and the temporal/narrative brackets of cinematic duration, for many thinkers, would seem exclusive and discriminating enough to contain the threat of oversignification, contemporary archival prac-tices may well be realizing his fears in concrete form.

Archive as Abyss

Alexander Stilles study Are We Losing Our Memory? or The Museum of Obsolete Technology is a worried overview of the state of the US National Archive (NA), as it was at the end of the twentieth century. The state of the NA, he frets, is symptomatic of a widespread archive fever that takes the form of a generalized desire for archival totality for limitless value. Funes the Memorious could be thankful he has only 70,000 mem-ories set to sort, versus the NA, custodian to 4 billion pieces of paper, 9.4 million photographs, 338,029 films and videos, 2,648,918 maps and charts, nearly 3 million architectural and engineering plans, and more than 9

Freud was apprehensive about cinema, out of fear that the new archival powers it possessed could produce an explosion of detail, of contingency, that would out-strip legibility. As Doane writes, The cinemas relation to legibility was ... an impossible one for Freud ... Its failure was an inability to abstract, a predilection for overpresence, for excessive coverage without limita-tion (26). Remembering and forgetting. Legibility is only possible if the frame is radically tightenedthe total archive, then, can only be a site of absolute illegibility. The implicit analogy Freud makes is with memory. For Freud, memory can only contribute to the formation of coherent subjectivity if most of the stimuli encountered in a life-time are forgotten. Each of the practices of psychoanalysis and rhythmanalysis involve a cautious process of recovery of the archived, hidden or reified, but one which still screens out more than it admits. If the screens were to come down completely in either case, the discourses that make the human subject cohere would disintegrate.

Freuds fear is figured in compact form by Jorge Luis Borges in Funes the Memorious. Funes, a youth of already prodigious memory, has a horse riding accident, from which he suffers a head injury and paralysis. When he regains consciousness, Funes both has acquired the ability to remember every detail of his life, and has lost the ability to forget any detail of his life. As Borges tells:

Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past recollections, which he would later de-fine numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the

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and Derrida. Hell is an archive. Abyssal is among the terms with which Derrida characterises the Freudian imagining of unconscious memory as holder of limitless, compounded traces.

It accumulates so many sedimented archives, some of which are written right on the epidermis of a body prop-er, others on the substrate of an exterior body. Each layer here seems to gape slightly, as the lips of a wound, permitting glimpses of the abyssal possibility of another depth destined for archaeological excavation. (20)

Anamnesiac, however, is perhaps better: the archive that has forgotten how to forget. To clarify: Anamnesisredacting its Catholic and Platonic associationsis rec-ollection (White 231); loss of amnesia (Dick 259); loss of forgetfulness (ibid. 366) or, in polytemporal terms, the future as a past present due to return (Derrida Acts 139). Anamnesiac (as antonym to amnesiac) sug-gests the memory sickness of being unable to forget.

So, consider: the abyssal archive. The memorious ar-chive. The anamnesiac archive. Many hyper-memorious archives like the NA already exist. Many others are growing in an even more vastly absorptive direction. Most significantly, digital/networked culture is daily, hourly, minutely, instantly, collaborating on the creation of multiple, interrelated digital archives of a scale that swallows the NA. (Certainly the tycoons at Google, Facebook and Twitter have hoarding fever, and are constructing their superarchive with governments support, and the volunteer labour of millions of users.) New media culture, including the so-called new securi-ty apparatus of mass (and auto-) surveillance, appears gripped with the feverish desire for archival totality.

million aerial photographs (303). Not only that, what is already stored in the NA is becoming less and less accessible. Storage consumes nearly half [the NAs] budget so, ironically, the more information it keeps the less money it has to spend on making it available to the public (303). The NAs paper archive is one thing; it might at least survive a few hundred years, during which time some narrative sense might be made. Yet the NA is increasingly an infernal forest of documents stored on late twentieth and early twenty-first cen-tury media which, as they become more convenient or inexpensive and are miniaturized, also become signifi-cantly less durable. Meanwhile, a whole range of tech-nologies, including entire computer platforms, under pressure of commodity time, are obsolesced in balletic concord with long- and short-view fiscal schedules. A vast amount of potentially valuable historical material is rendered, in the most literal sense, illegible. Merely reformatting these files onto current platforms or mediathemselves expected to be obsolesced within 5 to 10 yearswould absorb all the available labour time of the NA staff. Classifying even a small part of what is already housed in the NA, much less what is flow-ing in and promised, would require multiple scholars lifetimes. Rather than storing time, this type of archive would seem to consume time. Events classed as ephemeral, in another polytemporality, had an impor-tant function in articulating concrete time, a function intimately bound up with their (apparent) fleetingness. In an archive like the NA, ephemerality and memory are both implicitly totalized, and functionally obliterated.

Its vastness, practical illegibility, structural insatiability, explosive polytemporality, tempt me to dub this mode of archival practice abyssal, following Dante, Freud

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as transformative as the photograph (think of Face-book status updates, tweets, text messages). Yet the rhythms of these new units are, admittedly, less regu-lar than what Lefebvre calls brutal linear time. (One question might be: are these restoring some dimension of concrete time-sense, or are they abstract times ornamental dance-partner? Rhythms? Measurements? Both?) By these new means, which extend the differ-entiation and measurability of abstract time while com-plicating its rhythms, abstract time more successfully brackets concrete time, in the manner of a debt-like promise: save me for later, pal. The abyssal/anamnesiac archive thus materializes out of time-struggles, as part of a pattern of cultural responses to the dominance of abstract time. On the one hand it serves as storage, to save deferred concrete time for later (as commanded by these new technological means: pay attention to the blinking iPhone right now!, you may continue your conversation with your dying stepfather afterwards). More counteractively, the anamnesiac archive serves to literally re-concretize time in the form of its material evidence. Time progresses in the abstract but leaves concrete traces in the archive. As the still photograph provides evidentiary support for the abstraction of time, the anamnesiac archive is like the Valley of The Kings: mountainous evidence of the persistence of concrete time, while concrete time-sense atrophies throughout digital culture. The archive can stand as living/decaying proof of the persistence of concrete times in these digital times. Furthermore, in capitals need for new territories to exploit, it finds in the un-forgetting archive a natural resource that, to ideology, appears inexhaustible.

By abyssal archive or anamnesiac archive, then, I mean individual archives like the NA in particular, and, in gen-eral, widespread anamnesiac archival practices of the late twentieth century and (now) the digital/networked twenty-first. The archival turn since the early 1970s, when The Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive was established, has been increasingly towards insatiable absorption, though the march towards this archival moment arguably begins with the invention of photog-raphy. Stille speculates that this is partly an effect of new technological means stimulating commensurate desires: If everything is recordable, nothing matters except the act of recording itself (65-66). Yes, the desire for archival totality arises in relation to, are excited by, the technologies that make such totality conceivable: clocks, cameras and today, networked computers in their ideological service to capitalism. As Derrida writes, the means of the archive produce the archivable: the technical structure of the archiving also determines the structure of the archivable con-tent even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event (17). As the still cam-era produces the ideology of the captured/archived photographic instant, the archive anoints the docu-ments it contains as memory, and so as future value. Yet the desire for archival totality is also a symptom of time-struggles within lived polytemporality. On the one hand, as abstract time becomes more dominant, subduing concrete time, it experientially displaces concrete time as a debt-like deferral. (Abstract time cannot destroy concrete time, so it displaces it.) Today, in networked culture, granulated abstract time is cut even more finely (think of digital photography), or is reformed into new types of measuring units, potentially

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Moment by moment, Time envelops me like a stiffening body buried in the snow ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... Avalanche, entomb me in your fall!

To further differentiate the anamnesiac archive from precedent archival practices, consider Derridas read-ing of the archive as a place where the documents ... are only kept and classified ... by virtue of a privileged topology. They inhabit this uncommon place, this place of election where law and singularity intersect in privi-lege (3). If the old, even vast, imperial state archive of the type Derrida has in mind is a place of election, the anamnesiac archive is not a place in anything like the same sense. With total storage, the oppressive integrity of the imperial archive in which all the ele-ments articulate the unity of an ideal configuration (Derrida 3) mutates. The archive becomes open to the threats of secrecy and heterogeneity (or, in Doanes Freudian terms, contingency) that Derrida identifies as the main threats to the archive:

wherever secrets and heterogeneity would seem to menace even the possibility of consignation, this can only have grave consequences for a theory of the ar-chive, as well as for its institutional implementation.... In each of these cases, the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no imple-mentation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured. (5)

If the old state archive appears monologically oppres-sive, the anamnesiac archive becomes oppressive, instead, in its polyvalent yet massive disunity. Its for-

The polytemporalities of this late shift are distinct from those of early modernity. A sense of fatigued malaise suffuses Stilles study of the NA. The despair he an-ticipates, that which overcomes Funes the Memorious, is also strangely well figured in Charles Baudelaires poem Le Got du nant, translated as Craving for Oblivion or The Taste for Nothingness. (Note that nant/nothingness has strong temporal connotations in French.) Walter Benjamin comments on this poem in the reflection On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, collect-ed in Illuminations. Lived polytemporality in modernity is oriented around the experience of time-struggles between abstract and concrete time, and Baudelaire, in Benjamins view, is the paradigmatic poet of the nineteenth century. That is, he is poised at the start of the polytemporally thick urban modernity of today. Baudelaires Paris becomes what would be Lefeb-vre and Guy Debords Paris. In these new conditions, the narrator of Baudelaires poem lets abstract time vanquish him, as it were. A burn-out of time-struggles. About midway through, the poems narrator bids a di-rect, bitter farewell to concrete time. He will not fight any longer for a concretely meaningful time-sense:

Defeated mind, old plunderer! For you love has no more seduction than your sword. Farewell to lutes and trumpet calls alike such pleasures cannot tempt a sullen heart and even Spring has lost its sweet allure. (78)

With meaning torn from concrete time and consolidated with abstract time-as-value, the rest of life is but a prefigurative death. Snowflake by snowflake, instant by instant, tweet by tweet, granulated, abstract time begins to bury the exhausted narrator, like a corpse in the snow:

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When Doane writes that cinema embraces narrative as its primary means of making time legible (67), her emphasis is on how narrative can act, in a Freudian sense, to screen out potentially endless contingency. The threat [of cinema as archive] is that of an excess of designation, an excess of sensation that excludes meaning and control (31-32). This is why, Do