By fixing the existing modes of human life for the future, one also brings them
to an end; such is the paradoxical logic of the archive. This is consistent with the
archival function of selecting what to include as the past: This selection inevita-
bly turns the present into the past. The double temporality of Kahn’s, and prob-
ably any, archive, is that by collecting and storing material, it prepares for the
end of what it stores. Its end is the only reason for archiving it. To fix an image
of an event or a place is, ultimately, to make it disappear. These properties of the
archive become especially acute and interesting in the multiple media model of
Kahn’s project, since it is constructed on the separation between movement and
stillness. The time-based image continually supplements, contradicts and refers
to the still image, thus accenting the heterogeneity of the post-Gutenberg ar-
chive. The ephemeral moment of film is contrasted with the immobile, and“the
rhythm of life”is stilled in the encapsulated moment of the autochromes. Both
modes of inscription fix a time lost, but based on different temporalities.
The end of the various modes of life in the face of globalizing modernity is
not identical to the decline of the masses, however.In the process of industria-
lization of non-Western societies, life has become increasingly regulated accord-
ing to new structures of working time and leisure, housing principles are recon-
structed, etc., while the crowd remains the dominant figure of social life. The
masses become described, measured and visualized in photography, sound re-
cordings and cinema. The masses survive this first wave of globalization, as
documented and thereby accelerated in the creation of the Archives of the Pla-
net. As I will note later, a gradual process of dispersal of the masses began after
the Second World War. In the move away from the enclosing institutions of
what Foucault described as a disciplinary society, represented by the agglom-
eration of people in schools, hospitals, factories and prisons, towards a‘society
of control’, processes of individuation are transformed at a range of levels.In
short, globalization inpropelled the masses into the visible, whereas the
version disperses these same masses into individual reception and repre-
sentation, as epitomized by television, the personal computer and the Internet.
Modernity makes the end of the existing modes of life only a matter of time.
The global transformation of the local is the driving force of the archive, as it
anticipates the end of these life forms. Kahn’s archival impulse lies with the
approaching end, an invisible and unspoken element that nonetheless condi-
tions what is stored. This is an invisible element of the archive that is appre-
hended and anticipated through the phantom of the crowd in the autochromes.
The long exposure time of the color process blurs the masses in motion, render-
ing the fleeting presence of people as transparent spots in the image. This en-
capsulates the“media theory”of the Archives of the Planet. Film and photogra-
phy are not a full record of any event or any form of life, but rather a temporal
lack, producing specters of what once was. This is an archive for a future still to
“The Archives of the Planet”and Montage 215