The Beginning of an Idea about an End: On Digital, Diasporic, Syrian Archives

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at two Syrian organizations, the Syrian Archive and Bidayyat, both founded in exile but operating at different ends of the archival scale, this article theorizes the idea of an archive as a horizon of expectation that orients activists toward future justice in the face of defeat. While Bidayyat primarily associates the power of the archive with the judgment of history and the Syrian Archive with legal judgment, their underlying idea of an archive gives activists a sense of an ending, even when justice proves elusive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Andreas Bandak, Christine Crone, and Nina Grønlykke Mollerup from “Archiving the Future,” who organized the workshop in September 2022 at the University of Copenhagen, which this essay emerged from. I’m grateful for comments, questions, and encouragement from participants Chad Elias, Uğur Ümit Üngör, Sune Haugbølle, Tom Keenan, Dima Saber, Christa Salamandra, Lisa Wedeen and the two anonymous peer reviewers, as well as edits and incisive readings by Rania Stephan, Victoria Lupton, and Janine Su.

Notes

1 See also the film project Our Memory Belongs to Us (Farah 2021), featuring Yadan Drajy and the “Daraa archive.”

2 For a critical discussion of the “cloud” and its limitless capacity for storage, see Hu (2015). For a discussion of the way a milieu and a technical system can exist in reciprocal relationships, see Larkin (2021).

3 See Haugbolle and Bandak’s (2017) exploration of these two senses of the term “end” in relation to revolution, drawn from Derrida’s (1969) distinction between eschaton and telos.

4 For a series of discussions on the “Arab Archive” since 2011, see the important collective volume The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows (Della Ratta, Dickinson, and Haugbølle 2020).

5 All quotations are from author’s interview, in Berlin, July 23, 2019.

6 All quotations are from author’s interview, Jeff Deutch, Syrian Archive offices, in Berlin, July 1, 2019.

7 For a reading of the Syrian Archive in terms of the relationship between activist agency and the structural constraints of commercial platforms, see Anden-Papadopoulos (2020). Internet governance has recently been discussed in terms of “four internets,” in which the particular balance between these three realms– technology, capital and the state–determines the kind of internet that arises (O’Hara, Hall and Cerf 2021). The confluence of constraints between new technologies and “neoliberal” economics has been captured by scholars such as Jodi Dean (2005).

8 https://medical.syrianarchive.org/. Accessed June 16, 2023.

9 See also Üngör (2019) and Iojain (2018).

10 For a recent engagement with imminence, see Bandak and Anderson (2022). I’m grateful to Nina Grønlykke Mollerup for this reference.

11 https://www.youtube.com/@Daraya4Media/videos

12 On Daraya and the experiments in revolutionary governance, see Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami (2016); Ayoub (2019); and Al-Khalili (2021).

13 For a recent example involving plans for the storage of nuclear waste, see Galison and Ross (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2018–2019); and German Orient Institute, Beirut Doctoral Fellowship (2019–2020). Drafting was supported by a Stipendiary Early-Career Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge (2022–2026), and “Views of Violence” Postdoc, University of Copenhagen.

Notes on contributors

Stefan Tarnowski

Stefan Tarnowski is currently an Early-Career Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, and a postdoctoral researcher on the “Views of Violence” project at the University of Copenhagen. He completed a Ph.D. in Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society in 2022. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]