Some reflections on archives, bureaucracy, digital technology and plumbing

There will be no theses, antitheses, syntheses, here. Rather, this text is constructed from and held together as a series of 'non-totalizable fragments'. For Roland Barthes, a master fragmentist, fragmentary writing is 'a method of abrupt, separated, broken openings', a collection of interrelated but not necessarily connected lexias. Moreover, as Nietzsche (another master fragmentist) has revealed, fragmentary writing shifts registers, accommodating the poetical, the polemical, the philosophical, the autobiographical, the inventorial ... These fragments---or, given the theme of 'waste', these 'scraps' are six in number: bureaucratese, human remains, retrieval and loss, leaks, insurgent action, and economic rationalism. They are intended as provocations, 'pressure points' or 'sites' around which to reflect on the convergence of library archives (and in particular a key State repository), bureaucracy and digital technology. Barthes's fragmentary method seems fitting here, for these three---like the fragment itself---are 'non-totalizable', they add together but do not necessarily add up.