archival body of knowledge have started to be seen as interconnected, overlapping,
in a continuous state of flux, and inseparable from the object they encapsulate, i.e.,
the record. Even diachronically considered, context does not change in a linear
fashion, with stages in which a realignment of all contexts takes place; instead, there
is change taking place at all times, a sort of perpetual contextual motion.
Challenging the documentary context
How about the documentary context? We have discussed how the definition of
context in the SAA glossary separated the documentary context from the other
surrounding circumstances of the records. The InterPARES understanding of the
documentary context identifies it with the traditional layers of arrangement (the
archival fonds and its internal structure). This documentary context is seen as the
result of a series of connections present in each and every record within a fonds.
The network of relationships that each record entertains with the records belonging
in the same aggregation is known as "archival bond" (Duranti, 1997, p. 215-16).
While the SAA definitions of record and context suggest a partial overlapping of
both concepts (context is an element of the record, along with content and
structure), Duranti sees them as separate: "The archival bond should not be
confused with the general tem 'context.' [C]ontext is by definition outside the
record, even if it conditions its meaning and, in time, its interpretation, while the
archival bond is an essential part of the record, which would not exist without it"
(Duranti, 1997, p. 217, emphasis in original).
The archival bond comes into existence the moment a record is created (i.e., the
moment the document becomes a record in connection with other records related to
the same function), and is "expression of the development of the activity in which
the document participates" (Duranti, 1997, p. 217). Among other characteristics,
the archival bond is "incremental" in the sense that it can "grow" beyond its initial
connection (in the same way that, to use a biological analogy, a neuron may keep
forming connections to other neurons through the life of an individual). However,
this "incrementality" is not a notion that traditional archival science has been keen
to explore. Since the archival bond is said to find expression in the records
classification code, which in turn reflects the functions and activities the records
participate in, the underlying idea is that the "originary" moment of records
creation, which is "determined" by the function performed by the record in that
moment, takes precedence over any future incrementality. The "necessity" inherent
in the nature of the archival bond projects a certain "immobility" onto traditional
conceptions of the documentary context. The originary context of records creation
that the archival bond establishes is in fact dynamic, but only in relation to the
"incremental" accumulation of records taking place during the ordinary course of
business generating any specific set of records. Following that moment, each linkage
among the records that belong to the same activity needs to be fixed in time and
space, and must remain stable over time, so as to allow the original context of
creation to be knowable.
Among the perspectives that could contribute to revisiting contemporary archival
diplomatics, MacNeil mentions "text and discourse analysis," which may help see
records as "communicative events and forms of social practice, respectively, and
provide alternative pathways to understanding the nature and purpose of records in
a range of record-keeping environments" (MacNeil, 2004, p. 228). Following
MacNeil's suggestion, we will now turn to concepts derived from other disciplines,
including linguistics and textual studies, with the aim of illustrating some of the
limitations of diplomatics and offering new tools for exploring what records are and
what they do.
One of the founders of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, held a view of
language that had intriguing commonalities with the diplomatic perspective of
records. Saussure emphasized the relational nature of the linguistic sign, based on
the idea that language was a generalized and abstract system, and that the signs in
any text were to be understood in their reference to the literary system out of which
the text had been produced. Signs lacked independent meaning, in the sense that
their meaning was enmeshed in the system of which they were a part. Saussure
conceived of the linguistic sign as a "non-unitary" and "relational unit, the
understanding of which leads us out into the vast network of relations, of similarity
and difference, which constitutes the synchronic system of language" (Allen, 2011,
p. 11). These views were adopted by modern literary scholars who looked at texts
under a similar systemic light. This systemic view is shared by diplomatics, which
sees the record also as non-unitary and relational by definition.
Saussure's perspective was criticized by linguistic scholars who, while following him
in accepting the relational nature of the linguistic sign and the literary text,
interpreted such relational character as emerging not from the abstractly systemic
nature of language but from its existence in "specific social sites, specific social
registers and specific moments of utterance and reception" (Allen, 2011, p. 11). In
particular, Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin rejected Saussure's "abstract
objectivism" for dismissing the social specificity that would give language its very
richness. "Linguistics, as Saussure conceives it, cannot have the utterance as its
object of study. What constitutes the linguistic element in the utterance are the
normatively identical forms of language present in it. Everything else is 'accessory
and random'" (cited in Allen, 2011, p. 17). In contrast, Bakhtin noted that what
makes words and texts relational is their "addressivity," that is, the quality of always
being directed to someone, which only manifests itself in concrete social situations
rather than within abstract systems.
Records and context from a genre perspective
Bakhtin's idea of language as a situated, dynamic, and dialogic phenomenon
influenced the development of a new stream of scholarship in the area of genre
theory known as Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) or New Rhetoric. In her article
"Genre as Social Action," American communication scholar Carolyn Miller (1984)
moved away from the formalistic and abstract understanding of texts characterizing
previous approaches, and shifted the focus of genre research to the "recurrent
situations" that produce "typified rhetorical actions," or genres (p. 159). RGS is
concerned with every-day communicative practices, both written and oral
(including all kinds of records, whether organizational or personal, formal or
informal), that take place in circumstances that are recognized as recurrent by those
who attend them (writers and readers, speakers and listeners). This recognition
archives in liquid times
182
fiorella foscarini and juan ilerbaig intertextuality in the archives
183
