I’ve been thinking about the concept of the dead record lately. That is to say: if a record — by which I mean a collection of information — can be considered to have a lifecycle, what would it mean for it to die? How, first of all, would we tell a record was dead?
Maybe we would start looking at orphaned files, at the untitled, un-discoverable; the sloughed-off literary skin. Wither those records that have been abandonded, mismanaged, uncared-for? Do they become unkempt like a garden? Do they rust like metal? Do they decay like a body?
And what, then, is the point at which a living record passes into death?
I’m not suidical, here, really. I’m thinking of this from a library science and philosophical position. I’ve started re-reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology for some answers. I suppose I’ll have to troll through De Sausseur as well, although I’m also thinking of Borges too.
I’m sure there’s a perfect descriptive term for the concept of the dead record. But I haven’t found it yet.
For example, whither all the blogs I’ve started and abandoned? Perhaps the Internet Archive has catalogued them; perhaps some errant bot has cached those scratchings on the Principality of Sealand (notwithstanding its recent devastating fire). My point is: If they can be constituted, are the records dead?
Or perhaps another way to ask the same question: how do we identify the point at which a continuum of records (a narrative) can no longer be reconstituted? When does the documented corpus rot?
But also–how do we remember?
Dead Records are what you can find but can’t reconstruct. Some records you can recreate; some you cannot. You can recreate a recording, so that’s not a dead record.
You can have records of dead people. There is a band called Dead Records. You could call studio recordings by the Grateful Dead Dead Records. Posthumous records are records by dead people, so they’re a form of dead, too.
Samples are kind-of like dead records, but you can use them as their own tune, so they’re not really dead.
But that’s not what I mean.
I mean records that you can find but cannot make whole again.
For example, if the original recording of a song was lost, it would be a dead record — a record you could know about, but not make real. Or, for example, if the original (trailer) edit of Star Wars, a movie that has been continually tweaked and updated by the Director spanning a number of subsequent re-issues, were lost. We would know all about the original edit. Some movie geeks might have copies on laserdisk. But those would be copies; tombstone data, of sorts.
We would know about an original record, we would be able to identify when the record was created, when it lived, who made it, and all sorts of additional information. But we would not be able to reconstruct it. That’s a dead record; it is a record that is dead and cannot be made alive again.