Performing the Past in Electronic Archives: Interdependencies in the Discursive and Non-Discursive Ordering of Institutional Rememberings

Abstract

This paper examines interdependencies in the discursive and non-discursive ordering of institutional memory in organizational settings. Issues of what happens to historical consciousness in the time of modern technology are examined with reference to how the past is used in the context of electronic archiving of email in corporate cultures. Drawing from ideas in the work of Martin Heidegger concerning interdependencies between the use of technology and the arts of the mind, we examine how the truth of matters is more than an issue of correspondence between language and reality, and more than the rhetorical deployment of what counts as true in establishing stake and interest. We analyse how the work of ordering the archive, which is driven by current projects in the organizations studied, takes place alongside the discursive work of remembering. We illustrate how, without the non-discursive labour of forging relations between components, there is no possibility of playing out evidential strategies that dominate the rhetorical performance of the past. What we call ‘mind’ and what we call ‘society’ emerge in this dual ordering. This dual work of ordering occurs through the joint operation of discursive and non-discursive practices, which together produce remembering and forgetting in a way that draws upon cultural resources at the same time as making sense in the flow of interaction, experiences and events.