Abstract
The Archives de la Planète is a collection of visual material – about 100 hours of film, 72000 autochromes and 4000 stereoscopic images – established between 1908 androughly 1932. While the project was of Kahn’s inspiration (and also financed by him),the human geographer Jean Brunhes served as its scientific director. Its purpose was to document the diversity, but even more so, the underlying unity of human life and activity all over the globe. It seems thus fitting that Brunhes used a cartographic logicin mapping the “positive facts” of his science, relying on visual documentation. Thisarticle examines some of the temporal complexities and contingencies of representation inherent in the autochrome part of the collections. As archives within the archive, they upset the cartographic logic of the project.
Highlights
“The world is all that is the case” —Wittgenstein’s first theorem in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus— constitutes a barely hidden intertext when Horkheimer and Adorno define positivism as “the myth of that which is the case” in the Preface to the 1969 edition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (XII)
Brunhes, who had already gained considerable experience as a photographer for his own publications in the years before 1910, took over part of the technical training of the photographers and cameramen employed for the missions, he instructed them on the principles of human geography, so that they were able to follow the specific guidelines of the “Archives de la Planète” even when travelling without anyone to supervise their shootings (Beausoleil and Ory, Albert Kahn 190).[30]
The constructed “everyday” introduces an uncanny quality to the autochromes, viewed from the distance of roughly one hundred years: that which is supposed to be familiar, close or “known,” captured in the adjacent grains of the autochromes, the cartographical grid, and the classificatory system of human geography, appears as lost –in the double sense of “being impossible to locate” and “dead.” Both Kahn and Brunhes seem to have been aware of the contingencies of building, organising and preserving a collection, and of controlling its function, scope and meaning —which might have been the reason for the anxiety that transpires in some of their declarations
Summary
“The world is all that is the case” —Wittgenstein’s first theorem in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus— constitutes a barely hidden intertext when Horkheimer and Adorno define positivism as “the myth of that which is the case” in the Preface to the 1969 edition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (XII).
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