its own' (Losey, 2015), a perspective drawn from speech act philosophy reminds us
that information is always linked to its contexts of origin and to the actions of
individuals in society. As historian John Tosh (2015, p. 108) noted, records are not
mere 'testimonies of events "out there", but parts of a process' of acting and
recording that can itself be the subject of inquiry. The propositions that people state
cannot be wholly separated from the people who state them or the systems of
representation in which they are entangled.
Revisiting 'information' from a speech act perspective
The class of assertive records includes (but is not limited to) records in which the
creator formally asserts a proposition describing a juridical action completed in the
past. Diplomatists, who call such records 'probative', insist that they are purely
evidentiary and that only a dispositive record can function performatively. But
assertions do not merely convey evidence or information; they have their own
performative characteristics. The formal document in which King Edward asserted
that he had given land to the bishop cannot simply be equated with the information
that the king made this gift, or even with the information that he asserted that he
had made it; rather, the issuing of the document performed the king's act of
assertion. Diplomatists analysing this document are likely to assume that the only
action of significance is the royal gift of the land; from the standpoint of diplomatic,
this assumption seems justified, because diplomatists understand that 'probative'
records were and are created to provide evidence of actions of this kind, and because
legal systems recognise the records' evidential role. From a speech-act perspective,
however, a record of this kind performs an action of its own. As Derrida (2002,
p. 113) observed, the inscription produces a new event.
Diplomatic analysis reflects diplomatists' legalistic view of records and responds to
the needs of those users (including lawyers, litigants, and legal historians) who view
records in a similar fashion. It appears less suited to many humanist contexts of
study, where users may wish to look at assertive records in alternative ways and may
perhaps be less interested in propositions than in the activity of asserting them or
the circumstances in which they were asserted. The law looks for verification, but an
act of asserting cannot be assessed in terms of truth or falsehood, qualities that
could apply only to the propositions stated or asserted. Assertive records display a
complex performativity, which cannot be encompassed by perceiving them simply as
probative or informational.
Of course, directive records, such as a summons to appear in court or an invitation
to give a lecture, are not statements of propositions; they are instructions or
requests. Similarly, a commissive record, such as a promissory note, or a declarative
record, such as a will, does not merely state that the creator of the record has made a
promise or bequeathed a watch; when the note is communicated or the will is
proved, the record creator performs the act of promising or bequeathing. We may
perhaps doubt whether an act of promising is sincere, but when we encounter a
record in which the creator says 'I promise we can hardly doubt that a promise
has been made (Yeo, 2010, pp. 105-106). Like acts of asserting, an act of promising,
ordering, or declaring cannot be judged using criteria of truth or falsehood, or of the
accuracy or inaccuracy of information. When such an act is performed, word and
deed belong together; the record is intimately involved in the action that it
represents. Although archivists have sometimes claimed that records are
'information aboutaction' (Upward, Reed, Oliver, Evans, 2013, p. 48; my
italics), speech act philosophy impels us to the view that every record is an
instrument of action. Records are not mere descriptions of actions or events; they are
part of the way in which business is conducted and lives are lived.
Rather than seeing information as content embedded in records at the point of their
creation, we may find it more profitable to associate information with uses of
records in their later life. Most obviously, users can employ a record to acquire
information about the action that its creator performed or the propositions that its
creator stated. They can use it in this way because the record is persistent; it
continues to represent the action after the action has been performed. If they have a
'directive' record that represents instructions I have given, or a 'commissive' record
that represents a contract I have agreed, they can use it to gather information about
my instructions or my agreement. If they have an 'assertive' record that represents
my action of stating a proposition, they can use it to gather information both about
the proposition and about my action in stating it.
However, they can also use records to acquire information about other topics: the
social contexts in which a record was made or kept, the record-making and record
keeping practices that were employed, the modes of life and thought of the people
who created it or are mentioned within it, the resources that were available to these
people, and much else besides. A user can garner a vast range of information from a
record, even when informing readers of a proposition was not its original purpose.
When users examine a record in which a writer stated a proposition about the world,
the information they can derive need not be confined to the proposition that the
writer sought to convey.
There is little to be gained from suggesting that records comprise information but
can also be used to garner other information. Instead, an understanding of records
founded on speech act philosophy allows us to see information as an affordance that
arises from engagement with records. Information, in this sense, is bound to
circumstances; it depends on the intellectual processes applied by the user and the
mental frameworks that users bring to the interpretation of the record, as well as on
the record's content and structure.16 A user can acquire different information from
a single record in different episodes of use. The information that one user derives
from this record may be very different from the information that another user
derives from it. Each user 'may see new information that no one else has seen
before' (Latham, 2011, p. 13). It may also be possible for a user to acquire similar
information from each of several different records.
Moreover, information is just one of many affordances obtainable from records.
As Terry Eastwood (1993, p. 112) noted, records 'frequently suffer from being
transformed into mere sources of information, when they are in fact much more
than that'. Records can afford, not only information, but evidence, accountability,
and senses of personal or social identity, as well as emotions, ideas, inspirations, or
archives in liquid times
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geoffrey yeo information, records, and the philosophy of speech acts
16 According to Jonathan Furner (2014, p. 166), this was the view of philosopher Agnès Lagache: 'Information
is in the receiver. Information arises from his reading. He creates it.'
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