Managing the flicker: continuum concepts and the formation of archives

This thesis is about creative evolution and about complexity. In it I write about things before the rules for writing about them have been established, and do so in evolving fashion. Accordingly the best starting point for reading it is probably the postscript where I view the thesis backward, and part five which if scanned quickly will indicate the massive amount of rules-writing ahead of the archival profession if they are ever to play a significant part in the archives formation issues involved in managing the infinitely expanding and indefinitely divisible continuum of recorded information that is engulfing us. In linear order, the first part sets out the journey within the writing of the thesis itself, and discusses one of my main starting points, the concept of recorded information as an authoritative resource, one which controls our life-chances. Part two looks at the conceptual base for Australian continuum practices in the 1960’s and 70’s, their collapse in the 1980’s, and their recovery in the 1990’s. Between them the parts set out the pragmatic base for the need for archivists to understand continuum thinking. The next two parts explore continuum concepts philosophically, attempting to add some transcendence into the pragmatism. The third part combs through some of the Bergsonist ideas in French literary philosophy in the last half of the twentieth century and points to the survival issues that are arising out of our society’s increasing incapacity to form their archives in ways that can help them meet the perplexing and expanding problems of our era. The fourth part moves from Bergsonism (the mysteries of the temporal continuum in which the archive controls the process of creative evolution) into Alexandrine thinking (Samuel Alexander’s less mysterious and even more challenging notion of the spacetime continuum as an explanation for the continuing and accelerating growth in complexity in all that surrounds us). One chapter introduces a key continuum concept, the need to take a perduring view of information objects; the other extends that perduring view across different disciplinary perspectives and points to a new sub-discipline, recordkeeping informatics, which can replace 11 records management at the imaginary (?) archival front end.1 The last two parts attempt to resolve questions about how to transfer archival practices into continuing frameworks that are flexible, multiple, and can be tailored for emerging and diverse circumstances. The fifth part uses a major form of continuum thinking in sociology, structuration theory, to suggest how we can write the rules for archiving processes during the twenty-first century in evolutionary fashion. The main institutionalising force in this process can be an archival use case strategy which will need to match the continuum in being infinitely expansive and indefinitely divisible. Part six reviews the thesis and its method before setting out in speculative fashion a continuing registrar’s project as a way of re-commencing recordkeeping actions for our times and places. The thesis in its entirety has been written to help me understand the Australian recordkeeping journey it documents, and to aid in the imagining of some new paths.