Chapter 11

The documentality of Mme Briet’s antelope

Bernd Frohmann

This chapter proposes a concept of documentality as a contribution to an emerging field of study about documents, what they are and what they do, and about the processes or events of documentation, how they function, and how they happen.¹ By resisting reductions of documents to vehicles transporting consciousness, intentional substance, or human speech from person to person, it helps materialize documentation.² It is developed here, not through familiar kinds of documents, but through Suzanne Briet’s idea of an antelope as a document.

The chapter builds upon the author’s previous work exploring how thinking about documentation in terms of “arrangements” directs attention to documentary agency.³ The primary characteristics of the concept of documentality are presented and the concept is situated in a conceptual and ethical space.

The antelope, documentality and documentary agency

Briet was a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris from 1934 to 1954, and an important figure in documentation and information studies, renowned for claiming in 1951 that a thing can be a document (Briet 2006). Her famous example was the antelope. She said it must be in a zoo, where it can function much like traditional documents because there it is in a space where it can easily be presented as evidence for knowledge claims. But her connection between documentation and evidence can be generalized to include a wide range of actual and possible nonevidentiary and nonscientific arrangements, such as artistic, creative, and imaginative ones, in which a thing’s documentary powers are exercised. The deeper point about Briet’s antelope is that something becomes a document by virtue of its arrangements with other things, not about a privileged form of those arrangements, such as their evidentiary functions.⁴ I take from Briet the idea that in complex arrangements things exercise documentary agency, which is capable of being detected, understood, and engaged in many different ways, and by many different kinds of actors, both human, and nonhuman. The problem is to show how a thing’s documentary agency, power or force – which I call its documentality – is exercised by virtue of those arrangements. By keeping the material thing at the center of our concern, the concept of documentality follows what I take to be the most important aspect of Briet’s idea of an antelope as a document. I am interested in traces as happenings, in how something gets written, or, in the widest sense, inscribed. My questions are, how does this “happening,” this event, occur? How do writing, traces, and documentation emerge from the interactions between a thing – this antelope – and other elements of its specific arrangements?

The concept of documentality is meant to contribute to thinking about documentation in its richness and complexity. It has four important features. First, documentality is a function that exhibits varying degrees of intensity in its modes of operation. Think, for example, of the frenzy of the disciplinary documentary apparatuses of apartheid South Africa or of the German Democratic Republic’s Stasi, where the collection, organization, and deciphering of the traces of obsessively defined categories of persons extended into the capillaries of everyday life – a documentary intensity whose modern manifestations extend at least as far back as the eighteenth-century physiognomic theories of Johann Casper Lavater (see Gray 2004; Ferenbok 2009), but whose origins, according to Valentin Groebner, were “thoroughly medieval” (2007, 8).⁵ The documentary apparatuses of less repressive régimes function in less intense, more moderate and indirect ways, and act at greater distances and less selectively.

Second, documentality is historically contingent, permitting spatial and temporal comparisons of the breadth, and extent of its exercise by various kinds of things: events, ideas, laws, works of art, animals, gardens, rocks, and gods. The actualization of the documentality of a particular thing varies across time and space as arrangements between it and other elements vary; specific modes of operation of documentality are therefore local and historical (for specific historical examples, see Chapter 6 of Frohmann 2004a, 2004b).

Third, documentality exhibits different levels of complexity. To understand its modes of operation one needs to follow complex arrangements between heterogeneous elements to discover how, at this time and place, in arrangements with which technologies, persons, groups, institutions, and conceptual elements a specific mode of documentality actually functions, with what intensity, and to what effect.

Finally, I intend documentality to denote a property of a specific thing or phenomenon: its power or force. This fourth aspect of documentality refers to a thing’s agency, which is exercised in its arrangements with other things. I propose these four aspects – functionality, historicity, complexity, and agency – as the principal characteristics of the concept of documentality.

Agency is perhaps the least intuitive of the concept’s features, and the one most likely to attract resistance, because we are not used to thinking about documents as agents (see also Frohmann 2007a). Following the path of Briet’s antelope, we travel to three selected sites along the way, to motivate the concept of documentary agency.

First site: primary and secondary qualities

Our first pause is at a specific philosophical place that helps us think about documentality as a property of a thing. The bifurcation of the properties of things into primary and secondary qualities traces a line of Western philosophy beginning with Democritus, through Descartes, Galileo and Newton, to its fullest development by Locke (and to its explicit rejection by Berkeley and Reid). Primary qualities belong to objects, whereas secondary qualities arise from the effects of objects on conscious human subjects. The two kinds of qualities are incommensurate. The former are the mathematical, measurable, and geometric properties of objects themselves. The latter are sensory properties, such as colors, odors, textures, and sounds. But only primary qualities express the objective reality of things; the sensory qualities through which we think we know them are merely effects on our sensory apparatus, manifested as subjective, mental representations.

Translating this bifurcation into documentary terms, we see that according to it what is important is not the thing, but the mental representations we gain from it and then transfer to some tangible medium. That is an old story, one to which we have long been accustomed. But Latour, following Alfred North Whitehead channeled by Isabelle Stengers, challenges this bifurcation to insist on the futility of a separation between representing subjects and a mute and meaningless nature. Latour quotes Whitehead – “the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon” (Whitehead 1920, 28–29, quoted in Latour 2004, 244) – and he adds his own example: “we are asked to consider that the nightingale sings only in our mind (or our brain) and not in the world out there because hearing a song is not part of the list of primary qualities” (Latour 2008, 38). If the antelope is as rich in properties as the nightingale’s song or the sunset’s red glow, this first pause on our path introduces us to philosophical allies who can help develop a concept of documentality that designates documentary agency as a real property of things themselves. The thing’s documentality is a property or attribute because it refers to the power or agency of the thing exercised in the varying intensities of its capacity to produce, afford,⁶ allow, encourage, permit, influence, render possible, block, or forbid the generation of marks, traces or inscriptions in its arrangements with other things. Briet’s insistence on the antelope as the initial, primary document and on the cascade of documents generated by humans who study the caged antelope as “secondary or derived” (Briet 2006, 10–11) can be read as foreshadowing such a concept of documentality.

Second site: of birds and bees

An implication of documentality’s being a property of a thing is that documentary agency does not require human subjects. Atoms interacting with radiation leave signatures, but the signature, mark, trace, or inscription of the atom’s individuality, singularity, and identity has nothing to do with human beings. The traces generated by territorial animals – by dogs, with urine, by wolves, with feces – mark their territory as clearly for other animals as No Trespassing signs mark a human’s private property. The plumage of birds and changes in colors of fishes manifest the documentality of these creatures.⁷

A specific form of the expressive powers of things to leave unique traces is noted in a news report on olfactory surveillance, which describes efforts of the German police to collect and archive human scents from political activists, a Chinese “scent bank” of odors collected from criminal suspects and crime scenes, the South African police’s overtures to a UK electronic nose company (apparently there are many such) to share its “odor signature” of black people, UK research into enrolling swarms of trained bees as allies in scent detection, and in the United States, not only bees, but moths and cockroaches as well (Marks 2008). Unique olfactory expressions of an individual human body manifest the body’s documentality in arrangements with the scent detection capacities of trained dogs, bees, moths, cockroaches, and the German police.

To say that documentality does not require human agency is not to deny that sometimes only an acute tuning of human consciousness can detect the world’s documentary agency. In Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental 9-h film on the holocaust, Jan Piwonski of Sobibór (the site of a Polish Nazi extermination camp), vividly recalls a peculiar silence. He reports that while the camp was constructed with slave labor, there were many sounds: commands, screams, and shots. But shortly after the first arrival of victims who packed the over 40 rail freight cars there descended upon the town a remarkable silence, one he called “an ideal silence.” Asked to describe it, he replied it was the sound of nothing; one heard nothing. This silence is an exercise of the documentary agency of an event: the extermination of more than 200,000 prisoners of the Sobibór camp. This “ideal silence” is an inscription of that event. It is a silence like no other, not, for example, the serene silence hikers experience in desolate terrain or at the mountain’s summit. To locate the documentary power of this silence in Piwonski’s mind erases the acute tuning of his consciousness to a material phenomenon: the causal relation between what happened in the camp and that remarkable silence. The documentality of extermination on the day Piwonski was attuned to discern it is manifested in the generation of a trace – that silence – which has a real, causal connection to a specific action: extermination. In the terms of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiology, the silence is an index of extermination. The symbol is related to its object by convention, the icon by resemblance, but of the index, Pierce says: “An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object” (Peirce 1960, 2:248). In another text, he expands:

Like the indexical relation between smoke and fire, the indexical relation between Piwonski’s “ideal silence” and its cause is independent of human agency. It is the product of the exercise of the documentality of an event occurring in the Sobibór concentration camp. The dematerialization of an event’s documentality by reducing the function of documents to the communication of mental representations avoids ethical and moral consequences of the erasure of the object or event that occasions attunement to it. Communication is but an accidental property of documentation.

Third site: the articulation of things

Latour’s insistence on the agency of things helps us think about documentality as a property of a thing, which is expressed in the augmentation or diminution of its capacity to act in its arrangements with other things. In the fourth chapter of Pandora’s Hope, Latour seeks an alternative to what he calls the “old settlement,” that bifurcation between active minds and mute, inert nature. His better settlement includes an “understanding of what the entities of the world do” (Latour 1999, 114) – that is, one in which things have agency.

One of his concepts that does the work is articulation. In his laboratory, Louis Pasteur presented to his lactic acid ferment the occasion to come into contact with other entities. By entering into new associations with them, the lactic acid ferment exercises its agency. Latour writes, “through the artifices of the laboratory, the lactic acid ferment becomes articulable. Instead of being mute, unknown, undefined, it becomes something that is being made up of many more items” (143). According to his relative ontology, the lactic acid ferment becomes more real the more articulable it becomes. He says the advantage of the concept of a thing’s articulation (his examples are scientific practices, but there is no reason to restrict the concept to them) is that it “[s]tresses the independence of the thing” (140; my emphasis). This independence is captured in the idea of documentality as referring to a specific actualization of the thing’s agency.

Latour’s case of Pasteur also references a more familiar sense of the thing’s documentality. Of the lactic acid ferment, he observes:

“[M]any more [journal] articles” (143) are among the “many more things” the lactic acid is made up of by coming into contact with them after the occasion of the laboratory set-up. The documentality of the lactic acid ferment is increasingly articulated as it enters into associations with more and more articles, with what scientists say, and with the development of a new scientific discipline. Briet noticed that the antelope’s documentality consists in a network of associations of the documentary kind; Latour notices the same phenomenon in the case of Pasteur’s lactic acid ferment.

On the documentality of things

I now want to bring the concept of documentality back to the antelope. There are over 90 species of antelope, each with characteristic size, shape, and habitat. Each species adapts its behavior, learning and strategies to its ecological niche, whether forest, swamp, desert, Savannah, steppe, or rocky terrain. Each animal expresses its uniqueness by its distinctive variations on these adaptations and through specific characteristics, such as gait, degrees of aggression or submission, defense strategies, and mating behavior that includes athletic dancing, plumage displays, and vocal challenges. Each combination of characteristics constitutes the individual animal’s “signature,” which creates affordances for specific kinds of interactions with other creatures, such as mates, competitors, predators, and humans with a variety of interests. If an antelope is covered by sediment soon after death, some of its remains become fossilized, leaving an external mold in the rock. Eventually the antelope’s remains disintegrate into molecules, but even then its chain of traces continues insofar as those molecules deflect the path of others. The antelope’s documentality consists in the entire chain of the antelope’s unique traces, from birth to death and beyond. Its traces express its documentality, which is a property of that antelope in its arrangements with elements of its ecological niche. Very little of its expression has anything to do with humans, and certainly none of it need have anything to do with humans, even though humans are given to inventing and installing trace-capturing devices at specific stages of specific material processes for their own documentary reasons.⁹ The world’s documentality not only overflows human interventions but makes them possible.

In “Deleuze and the genesis of form,” Manuel DeLanda presents an argument he makes elsewhere, against the “conception of matter as an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside,” replacing it by a concept of a real virtuality that “constitutes the nuomenal machinery behind the phenomena,” that is, behind reality as it appears to humans (DeLanda 1998). DeLanda writes that once we understand “the Deleuzian world of material and energetic flows,” we realize that this “real virtuality governs the genesis of all real forms,” and that “the genesis of form [is] not transcendental but immanent to matter itself.” He points to his familiar examples of soap bubbles and salt crystals; their respective forms as spheres and cubes are not imposed upon inert matter from without but are actualizations of the arrangements of their material and energetic flows. At the end of this chapter he makes a move that connects his reflections to documentality. To deflect any misunderstanding that by real virtuality Deleuze refers to digitized virtual reality, he remarks that nonetheless, since “real virtuality governs the genesis of all real forms, it cannot help but be related to virtual realities, not only those created by computer simulations, but also by novelists, filmmakers, painters and musicians.” It would follow that real virtuality governs the genesis of documentary forms. DeLanda goes on to say that the movement of thought “should be from a rich material world pregnant with virtualities” to literature, art, texts, discourses, and metaphors, rather than the other way around, when these are treated as forms imposed upon inert matter. Briet’s antelope leads thought about documentation to a rich material world pregnant with documentary virtualities.

My aim is to situate the concept of documentality in a conceptual space of agency, power, force, affect, materiality, potentiality, and real virtuality. Documents are things in Latour’s sense. For him a “thing” is the “matter of concern” that holds an assemblage together. A thing energizes or activates an assemblage; borrowing from Heidegger, he calls it a “gathering.” An object, by contrast, is “simply a gathering that has failed” (Latour 2004, 246). Latour’s “things” have some of the properties of those topological singularities that create the forms of DeLanda’s soap bubbles and salt crystals: they organize elements of an assemblage. Humans make documents and attune themselves to them, gather around them, wage disputes over them, enroll them as allies, and deploy them to direct and even to make up people, including ourselves.¹⁰ DeLanda and Latour’s meditations on materiality suggest investigations of a wide range of interesting and remarkable manifestations of documentary energies and intensities, and pose the task of creating concepts to articulate them.

The concept of the documentality of things has an ethical component. Because it cannot be developed here, I will just gesture toward it, first by reference to Heidegger’s “age of the world picture.” He argues that two decisive events of the modern age are the simultaneous transformation of the world into picture and man into a representing subject (Heidegger 1977, 133). “Representing,” he writes, is “an objectifying that goes forward and masters” (150); what it means to be becomes to be represented. Subjectivity gains in power to the degree that “the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man” becomes “the surest instrument of total, i.e. technological, rule over the earth” (152). The truth of being itself “will be given over to man when he has overcome himself as subject, and that means when he no longer represents that which is as object” (154). But in the age of the world picture, documentation is subordinated to and dominated by representation, thereby perpetuating modern western philosophy’s privilege of representation over being, and the technological domination of the world of things. When representation dominates, the master sign becomes Peirce’s icon:

In the age of the world picture, Hillis’s analysis of experience in web environments becomes a global condition: “the hallucinatory desire to make something present not only stand in for something absent but also to make it, experientially, equivalent to what has gone missing, remains elsewhere, or can never be” (Hillis 2009, 117; see also his paper in this volume).

My second reference is to Michel Serres’s small book The Natural Contract (1995). His powerful first chapter opens with an image from Goya: two combatants armed with clubs, battling each other but knee-deep in mud. They fight, oblivious to the earth swallowing them up. Serres finds in this ghastly image the catastrophe of forgetting “the world of things themselves” (Serres 1995, 2). Our wars, our economies, the footprint of humans gathered into what he calls “immense tectonic plates” (18), and our culture, which he says “abhors the world” (3) inflict immense, global, and likely catastrophic violence upon “the world of things themselves.” It is time, he argues, that we make a contract with the world: a natural contract, because “[w]hat was once local – this river, that swamp – is now global: Planet Earth” (3). To do so, we need to think beyond human subjectivity and hallucinatory desire, and engage a concern for the agency, materiality, and arrangements of things. I want to situate the concept of the documentality of Mme Briet’s antelope here, to direct some attention to and respect for this now fragile world of things, if only because reducing violence to it has become a matter of collective survival.

Notes

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