Archive That, Comrade!: Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance

by Phil Cohen

After a brief introduction that sets the contemporary scene of “archive fever,” this book considers the political legacy of 1960s counterculture for what it reveals about the process of commemoration. How far can the archive serve as a platform for dialogue and debate between different generations of activists in a culture that fetishizes the evanescent present, practices a profound amnesia about its counterfactual past, and forecloses the sociological imagination of an alternative future? Can the Left establish its own autonomous model of commemoration?

Genres: Nonfiction, History

160 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2018

About the author

Phil Cohen was a British cultural theorist, urban ethnographer, community activist, educationalist and poet. He was involved in the London underground counter-culture scene and gained public notoriety as "Dr John", a leader in the squatter's rights movement but is now better known for his work on youth culture and the impact of urban regeneration on working-class communities, particularly in East London, with a focus on issues of race and popular racism. More recently the scope of his work has widened to includes issues of identity politics, memory and loss, and the future of the Left in Britain. His most recent writing and research focuses on the transformation of object relations within digital capitalism, especially in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic and the environmental crisis. Most recently (2023) he has embarked on a series of collaborative book projects with graphic artists. Cohen's academic work is trans-disciplinary and draws on concepts from linguistics and narratology, psycho-analysis and anthropology, cultural history and social phenomenology. He was Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of East London, and a member of the Livingmaps Network which he founded in 2013. Cohen was also a member of Compass, a Gramscian think tank within the Labour Party and was on the editorial board of New Formations. His work has been translated into French, German, Swedish, Italian, French and Japanese.

Reviews

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much interesting stuff, but - as someone who spent most of her career as a professional archivist - was irked both at the tendency to use 'archive/archives' in a very broad sense, and to address archival issues without any particular sense of what professional archivists do or whether they might have been thinking about certain issues. Digitisation, for example, is not a solution to conservation problems (except in the sense that, by providing remote access, it can reduce handling of fragile originals).

[Scott Neigh]

A short, thoughtful, and somewhat meandering book about the politics of memory and legacy and, specifically, archives. The author was part of the New Left in the UK – he went by "Dr. John" in those years and was a central figure in the London Street Commune – and went on to become "a cultural theorist, urban ethnographer, community activist, educationalist and poet." The book begins from some broad consideration of the ways in which today's culture has made all of us compulsive archivists of self via digital technologies, and about the left's to-him largely unsatisfying politics when it comes to history and memory. He seems to both deeply feel the impulse to preserve, to remember, to archive, but also resolutely refuses to let that prevent him from critiquing that impulse and the various ways it manifests in both popular culture and the left – to the extent that the critique feels kind of harsh in places, though never to the point of excess. He then goes on to talk more specifically about archives, highlighting grassroots archives in particular. He develops a typology that helps draw out some important variations in approach, and their implications. He documents a couple of ethnographic encounters with a couple of different grassroots archives in London. And he develops his own take on how the left might more usefully relate to the past, under the banner of the "Living Archive" (or even better, the "Living Anarchive.") Purely as a reader, I enjoyed the somewhat hodgepodgey character of the book and the way it poked into various corners of the issues raised in a way that seemed responsive largely to the interests of the author and the areas where he felt he had something interesting to say. That did make it a bit harder to know how to relate to it as a resource for a couple of things that I'm working on myself, though. I know for sure that the "Living Archive" stuff will be useful to me for some writing in my main book project that I probably won't come to until mid-way through next year, but I'm not sure quite how to relate to some of the broader critiques of the left's politics of memory and, frankly, of the personal impulse to archive which I have always felt and which has only intensified as I grow older. Anyway, a very useful book for me to read. I may end up re-reading it, or at least parts of it, when I come to do the relevant writing next year.