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Accepted Paper:
The State of Sound: Doing and Undoing Time in a Sound Archive
Katarzyna Puzon
This paper looks at a sound archive in Berlin and discusses how it grapples with the contentious heritage of knowledge production while handling ethical dilemmas and the possibilities of repair. To what extent (if at all) can time be undone in an archive? What might sound offer in this respect?
Paper Abstract:
The history of phonographic archives is inextricably linked with the arrival of the phonograph, as the name suggests. Anthropologists, along with musicologists, linguists and psychologists, made use of this technological invention. They employed the phonograph – and shortly after also the gramophone and other devices – to record and study sounds and store them in the newly established archives. The materials these archives hold were collected in a range of contexts, including in former colonies and prisoner-of-war camps in Europe, and some of their practices embodied a form of violence, not just recording and technological formatting but also the preservation of sound data.
This paper looks at one such archive in Berlin. I discuss how this archive grapples with its contentious heritage of knowledge production and handles ethical dilemmas and the possibilities of repair. To what extent (if at all) can time be undone in an archive? What might sound offer? What difference does it make in the case of the so-called ‘sensitive collections’? While things may be returned across space, time does not necessarily hold the same kind of redemptive power. There seems to be no return across time in this respect. Yet sound – and the sound archive, for that matter – offer forms of dealing with violent pasts ‘time-wise’, as I propose and will show in the paper.