Facture of the Archive

In popular usage, “Luddite” denotes a curmudgeonly hater of technology – someone backward-looking, ignorant, and ultimately ineffectual. The eponymous nineteenth-century saboteurs, however, were not opposed to technology tout court, but rather to mechanization in the service of capitalism, and instead of looking backward they were looking forward to a new world. This talk will present the Eclipse Archive – a shadow library of experimental literature – as a work bringing together the Luddites’ political analysis with the defining paradoxes of an avant-garde archive. Looking behind the interface to reveal the facture of the archive – its mode of construction and the invoiced receipts of its economic enmeshments – we will ask whether a 25-year-old website has relevant lessons for current projects in the digital humanities.