All the moments of our lives: self-archiving from Christian Boltanski to lifelogging

Abstract

This article considers Christian Boltanski's Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–1950 (1969) as a programmatic statement on the personal archive. Responding to the recent explosion of interest in work which foregrounds the artist as curator or archivist, I consider Boltanski's ambition to record ‘all the moments of our lives’ as an engagement with archival practices which extends significantly beyond the ironic self-reflection on the archive in Boltanksi's work. Boltanski's 1969 comments both recall Bush's Memex and anticipate recent developments in personal archiving, in particular lifelogging and self-tracking. In this context, I evaluate Boltanski's ‘reconstitution’ and ‘vitrine’ works for what they say about the potential of lifelogging to create a comprehensive personal archive and in terms of their implicit critique of the idea of the quantified self. Despite its apparent proximity to Boltanski's concerns, the quantified self suggests a version of selfhood coextensive with data. Such a notion, I argue, is in fact inimical to Boltanski's vision of the archive, in which playful stagings of autobiography bear within them an ethical critique.