In continuing the process of revisiting and fleshing out previous entries, I found myself questioning my reference to "the archive" in this entry:

"So what is the reterritorializing pair for the projected identity? It would seem that the natural pairing for this is the database as the deterritorialized archive."

After consulting Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge (from where I drew the term in the first place) I've realized I was tapping into something much larger than I meant to imply, but something very informative in its parallels to what I was writing about the projected identity.

Foucault's concept of the archive moves well beyond the physical collection of cultural products, rather the archive, in his sense, is a network of relationships that construct the terms in which statements are made and continue to exist: "...it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements." This not only bolsters my claim that the individual database is a deterritorialization of the archive, but it shows that the terms on which Foucault analyzes the archive's cultural role can be applied to the social web (Web 2.0 I suppose, though "the social web" is a bit more specific and a bit less buzzy) as a reified fragment of the archive.

How is it that we can see the social web (by this I am including social networking, the blogospheres, and web-based participatory media on the whole) as a reified fragment of the archive? I'm drawing this conclusion largely from their common, unfixed existence on a spectrum between structured elements and a lack-thereof:

"[T]he archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity....but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities..."(129)

This description of the conceptual form of the archive mirrors the idealized, and often actual, information architecture of the social web. Our collective information traces - identity tendrils - are neither completely hierarchized in their multiplicity (instead, existing in a flatter space emanating from an imagined center), nor completely amorphous in their lack of hierarchy. Instead we aim for a structure of malleable linkages forming multiple sets of relations.

To bring this back down to earth, to apply the theory to the practice of the social web, we have to see the construction of our projected identities (for more on this see this entry) as statements. The process of projecting identities is a process of stringing together statements. The MySpace page, the del.icio.us links, the blog, and all the sub-elements that go into their construction are essentially these statements that exist as part of a discourse within the archive as a whole. We cannot make statements outside of the archive, just as we cannot participate in the blogospheres outside of the social web. The social web, controls how and what statements we make at the same time as it is changed by our statements. This is the Web 2.0 ideal, the social web ideal and it reflects our discursive interaction with the Foucauldian archive.

Two further points suggest that the social web can be read as a reified fragment of the archive. First, though he states that we can never know the archive due to our existence within it, he does allow that fragments of the archive can emerge. I am certainly not trying to say that the social web is the archive, that would be irresponsibly reductive. I would like to say, however, that the social web allows a fragment of the archive for us to begin to know before the passage of time increases clarity through difference. Second, the formation of identity within the archive parallels the idea of identity projection. Foucault writes, "[it] does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks."(131) This demonstrates that our projected identity - as a multiplicity - cannot be reduced to a "fact of...identity." In our multiple interactions, in our multiple statements, the traces we leave do not lead to a cohesive center, a singular identity. Rather, identity in interaction within the social web is constructed as a collection of difference. The many tendrils of our projected identities indeed converge, but they do not converge in a singular "self." Instead, they converge onto the difference which ultimately defines us.

The trend that others (like Steve Rubel) have noticed of the expanding social web - beyond simply the blogospheres - ties into this because the further the social web expands, the more ways in which participation is possible, the more like the archive it becomes.