What is an Archive?: An Apparatus Model for Communications and Media History

Abstract

The author argues for a new methodology for investigating the history of communications and media. Media and communications processes and technologies need to be examined as elements of apparatuses. The author examines the theoretical underpinnings of such an approach by first outlining Michel Foucault's writing on the topic and then investigating the recent use of the term by Giorgio Agamben. Taking an apparatus approach demands more broadly conceiving of the archive to include nonsignifying objects and material concerns. Such an approach is further elaborated through examples on the basis of Raymond Williams' seminal book Television: Technology and Cultural Form and the author's own research on automobility and Citizens Band Radio. The author concludes by offering 5 modes of enquiry to guide an apparatus approach to media and communications history.

A new archivist has been appointed. But has anyone actually appointed him? Is he not rather acting on his own instructions? Certain malevolent people say that he is the new representative of a structural technology or technocracy. Others, mistaking their insults for wit, claim that he is a supporter of Hitler, or at least that he offends the rights of man (they will not forgive him for having proclaimed the “death of man”). Some say that he is a shammer who cannot back himself up with reference to sacred texts, and who seldom quotes the great philosophers. Others, though, claim that something new has appeared in philosophy, and that this work is as beautiful as those it challenges. It celebrates the dawn of a new age. (Deleuze, 1988, p. 1)

We start our investigation into an apparatus model of communications and media history with two figures. On a different left is Michel Foucault, Deleuzes' new archivist. Also on the left is Raymond Williams, one of the founders of British Cultural Studies. Both concerned themselves with the intertwining matters of politics, power, and history. Both also provide models for investigating the history of communications and media. Williams's work may seem more obviously attuned to such an investigation, especially in his seminal book, Television: Technology and cultural form (1974). Foucault, too, offers insight into not only how to approach the archive of communications and media history but also how one might consider communications in relation to other historical forces via the concept of the apparatus. The apparatus, as will be more carefully outlined later in this article, is a strategically organized network of discursive and nondiscursive elements brought together to address problems resulting from specific formations of knowledge. I propose to consider blending some key ideas from Williams and Foucault to inform (a) an exploration into the question, “What is an archive?” and (b) how we could approach communications and media history from such a vantage. I begin with Williams.'

WILLIAM'S MOBILE PRIVATIZATION APPARATUS

Raymond Williams's (1974) version of the coming into being of television and consequently its principle importance differs from other accounts. For one, Williams assumes that the specific arrangement of forces that brought about television as a domestic one-to-many broadcast technology occurred not because of any form of technological determinism, strict political economy, or mere chance, but rather because of a set of motivated strategies that coalesced around political desires to manage the masses and economic initiatives to sell individualized forms of hardware, not initially content. Such organization of television coincided with, according to Williams, a broad array of forces that included the existence of the radio's broadcasting model. Williams gives an account in which a set of strategies are enacted and orchestrated, with the aid of specialized forms of knowledge, to capture the latent force of a population and redirect it for economic and political gain. Further, it works through the creation of a specific form of subjectification, the masses.

More generally and significantly, Williams (1974) locates a powerful trend toward ever-expansive and individualized homes spread out over greater distances, enabled in large part by the automobile and new domestic technologies. This social and spatial arrangement, which replaced public forms of transit and socializing, is what Williams calls mobile privatization. For Williams, television, as such, can only be understood in its British and U.S. manifestations in terms of its role in mobile privatization. It could not exist as it did in another arrangement. Conversely, mobile privatization could not come into being without television or some such technology that would fulfill the key role of maintaining a social connection to the nation (telecommunability), while living increasingly private lives. Although Williams (1980) does not name this arrangement an apparatus, it takes little imagination to recognize it as a ripe example of one as defined in the work of Michel Foucault, and more recently Giorgio Agamben (2009).

What sort of archive exists that would make sense of the mobile privatization apparatus? Understanding media and communications in terms of the apparatus demands that our archives swell in fecund yet challenging ways. More important, in practical terms, I want to suggest that thinking about the archive via the apparatus means thinking outside questions of signification and spectatorship, of the adequacy, effectiveness, and fidelity of meanings and messages. Rather, it is to address communications and media as mechanisms for linking things together, as articulations in networks, as the glue and the infrastructure of apparatuses. A notable example of such an analysis comes from Sarah Sharma's Taxi as Media (2008) in which she uses the taxicab as an example of how our understanding of media needs to include a far greater range of technologies that work to link together—to mediate—various institutions and forces. In this sense, infrastructure are themselves already media. They mediate relations to time and space. As such, the archive that portends to the apparatus is not the archive of film studies or content analysis. For that matter, it is not the archive of epistemes and archeologies. ¹ It is instead a wide-ranging set of discursive and nondiscursive utterances, statements, and grammars, of architectures, diagrams, and backup plans that work to hold together sometimes-fragile apparatuses. I draw upon examples from Raymond Williams's (1974) aforementioned Television and from my own historical research on citizens band radio (CB) and mobility to outline some of these archival practices. Ultimately, I will suggest that the archive should be comprised of those places where and mechanisms by which struggles over power/knowledge took place.

A NEW AGE FOR THE ARCHIVE, FOUCAULT'S APPARATUS

The archive in Foucault's work is nothing so literal as rows of dusty shelves in a particular institution, but rather involves the whole system or apparatus that enables such artifacts to exist (including the actual institutional building itself). In this model, the “archive” is already a construct, a corpus that is the product of a discourse. (Bate, 2007)

Foucault answered the question “What is an author?” by resituating the author from being the originator of discourse to being its effect. The author for Foucault serves a prominent role as a property of discourse, not as an individual subject or person. The author functions to specify a set of relations and expectations that are invoked when someone claims authorship for a piece of writing or signs one's name to a document. Such incidents of authorship occur in a number of overlapping discourses, economies, and institutions. The answer then to “What is an author?” involves understanding the effects of attributing authorship across varied spheres of artistic, legal, moral, scientific, and economic activity. It is to say that calling someone an author or claiming authorship situates one into preexisting arrangements (e.g., copyright) and assumptions (e.g., melancholic genius) while also verifying and legitimating such arrangements. Foucault's approach to the author function clarifies how we imagine what it means to be a creative and autonomous human subject. Such an investigation into discursive production is the method most often associated with Foucault's work up through the late 1960s and early 1970s most notably with the 1971 publication of The archeology of knowledge (1982).

One could follow such a line of thought in regards to the archive. One could look to how the notion of the archive is invoked as a mechanism for providing proof, for legitimating arguments, for verifying the thoroughness of an investigation, in short, to credentialize, authorize, legitimize, and stylize the veracity and authenticity of a historical investigation. In some ways, such an ideal of the archive is rooted in the search for origins, of which Foucault is so critical. ² Certainly, there is much more to be said for critically investigating the various discursive arrangements in which the archive functions as a guarantor for truth claims. One can easily see that the archive in fact owes its existence to the function it plays in such fields as history, religion, archeology, or literary studies. However, that is not precisely the line of enquiry being taken up here. Nevertheless, such an undertaking could prove useful and should never be too far from our answering the question “What is an archive?” Such concerns hinge on whether the archive's status should be understood ontologically or epistemologically. The rest of this article attempts to conceptualize the ontological status of a particular sort of archive. Yet, this archive arises from an epistemological attempt to know the apparatus as a set of power/knowledge relations.

Turning to Agamben's What is an apparatus? (2009), we could sensibly ask, “What is its relation to the archive, if any, and to Foucault's investigation of the author function?” Agamben, when answering “What is an apparatus?” untangles how apparatusworks to tie together a number of concepts in what we might call “Foucault's discourse.” At the same time, he extends the notion of apparatus to encompass all such activities and institutions intended to alter (or, in more Deleuzean terms, capture) human behavior and thought. He even provides two communications or media examples of apparatuses, the cellular telephone and the television, which might fruitfully be examined to relate his concerns to those of media and communications studies.

Foucault described the key elements of the apparatus (“dispositif” in the original French) in an interview from 1977, from which Agamben draws heavily:

What I'm trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogenous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is a network that can be established between these elements… (and) has as its major function the response to an urgency… (it is) precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge. (Foucault, as quoted in Agamben, 2009, p. 2)

Here we see a few key elements of the apparatus. It is strategically organized to address a perceived problem or urgency. It works as a network of interested and associated forms of knowledge that are directed toward creating strategic administrative and technological “solutions”. ³

I will eventually seize on a number of these elements to address the question of the archive. But it must briefly be noted that Foucault's statements regarding the apparatus appear at the period in Foucault's thinking when the notions first of power/knowledge and then governmentality are shaping his understanding of power and by necessity how to conduct historical research. It is also the period when Foucault more explicitly engages questions regarding the material composition of forces. For example, he examined prison, school, and factory architecture as an element in the creation of the panopticon and the workings of disciplinarity. His lectures series Security, territory, population (2004), given in the spring of 1978, examined the spatial organization of cities and hinterland as they related to the movement and mobility of populations, goods, and disease vectors. He suggested that the place to look beyond architecture and the city for an understanding of the workings of power in space were the engineers and technicians of “the three great variables—territory, communication, and speed” (Foucault, 1989, p. 264). These arenas of the “unsaid” give pause to the question “What is an archive?”

So what does Agamben add to this understanding? Agamben proclaims the following:

I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not—language itself. (2009, p. 14)

For Agamben, then, the range of apparatuses is vast and he might draw fire for being so broad as to not provide any useful specificity for analytic application. However, a second necessary element in these compositions is that “Apparatus, then, is first of all a machine that produces subjectifications, and only as such is it also a machine of governance (Agamben, 2009, p. 20).” Taking cigarettes as an example, it is obvious that a complex has long been at work to create the subject position “smoker.” Whether this is a means of capturing one's time, resources, and desires or as a biopolitical attempt to reorient such proclivities and associations to unsmoke or reform, the smoking subject is made and remade by agents of capture. Agamben's qualification that subjectification is central to the apparatus goes a good way in narrowing and clarifying it as a useful concept, but why call cellular telephones an apparatus? We don't speak of the “cellular subject” or “cell phoners.” Do we need a more nuanced means for thinking about the apparatus as it relates to media and communications?

This is where I believe it might prove useful to look to scholarship that has been more generally attuned to communications technology than Agamben's anecdotal suggestions to locate examples of what such a cell citizen or some such might look. Although Agamben is by no means a communications or media scholar, his examples point toward a nonapparatus understanding of technology. He mentions the cell phone and television as if they are singular agents exerting exponential force upon individuals. There is almost a hypodermic needle-model quality to his rhetoric, as if the television set had the power to create the couch potato. It is clearly necessary to look elsewhere for a more compelling and elaborate means for thinking about television and the cell phone in terms of apparatus.

Foucault provides some insight into how communication forms an integral part of an apparatus when answering the question “How is power exercised?” in the essay The subject and power (1982) He maintains the following:

No doubt communicating is always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons. But the production and circulation of elements of meaning can have as their objective or as their consequence certain results in the realm of power; the latter are not simply an aspect of power. Whether or not they pass through systems of communication, power relations have a specific nature. Power relations, relationships of communication, objective capacities should not therefore be confused. This is not to say that there is a question of three separate domains…It is a question of three types of relationships which in fact always overlap one another, support one another reciprocally, and use each other mutually as means to an end. (pp. 217–218)

Brief rumination upon Agamben's examples of how apparatuses work more generally would lead us to see that the archive of the apparatus comprises the sign, signifier, and technologies of inscription and maintenance. It also obviously would need to encompass insight into the power relations enacted through communication and the communication structured by power relations.

We could think of a STOP sign or a book in such terms. They are signifiers and technological elements of vast infrastructures used to guide and direct thought and action. They produce meaning and are the product of labor: creative, affective, manual, and technical. They are technologies with each their own histories and institutional embededness. In the same way that Foucault (1977) read Bentham's diagrams and descriptions for the panopticon and read the panoptic prison itself, we might imagine reading the infrastructure and architecture of media and communication technologies for their power effects, for an understanding of how the movement and mobility of signs, products, and people works to uphold power relations to see how they form and deform subjects. We would need to not only read the content of television, but as Raymond Williams (1974) so ably showed, work to understand how a specific formation and organization of television functions as one element in a larger apparatus that he calls mobile privatization. Further rumination upon Raymond Williams's research on the origins of television and my own on mobility and communication allow me to elaborate something resembling an apparatus form of media analysis.

Communications Apparatuses

To return to Williams, what sort of archive exists that would make sense of the mobile privatization apparatus? To begin, we can quickly push aside the primacy of television content and ideological critique. It must be said that Williams does do extensive textual analysis in other chapters of Television (1974) and obviously in much of his other work, notably, Marxism and literature (1977). My point is not to dismiss textual analysis but to point to different forms of investigation that understand the work of media and communications through a framework that acknowledges their material presence and the attendant force exerted upon lives and landscapes. Our archive here is not attentive to encoding/decoding, semiotics, or other textual interpretive strategy. Rather the strategy of mobile privatization works in vastly different ways. It is literally a strategy of demassing. It does not operate merely through ideological mystification but by unmaking forms of social movement and organization whose shared spatial and temporal, not to mention class, experience was deemed dangerous. Amassed living, mobility, and leisure (that of public housing, public transport, and public space) were replaced by mobile and domestic privacy.

If not television content, then to what did Williams look to for an understanding of this apparatus and what might we add to his initial examination, which was limited to one chapter of his book? The focus of our archive would be oriented upon answering several questions and establishing important connections. It would comprise the plans and theories in use at the time which allow for an understanding of how such an arrangement of forces might come into being. For one, it would entail discussions of the masses and the public then circulating which legitimated the strategies and policies that enabled and supported privately oriented forms of mobility and housing over public. It would include the public debates and studies used to understand the power of the masses as dangerous as well as those tracts that came to describe communications in terms of mass media. ⁴ This would be an archive that maps the linkages that bind together knowledge claims—their production, circulation, and validation—with their political, juridical, technical, and economic application (which is to say “power/knowledge”).

The demands on our archive would necessitate understanding the advancement of certain technological, spatial, and social arrangements in opposition to other possibilities and by what decision-making mechanism their proper implementations were determined. It would need to take account of the processes of subjectification and the accompanying discourses that imagined a new form of subject; the mass man, the dupe, the couch potato, the mobile-privateer commuting to and from the realm of commerce; seeking solace in a private domestic sphere that maintained ties to the nation (and an understanding of the place of the nation in the world) via broadcast television.

We could begin by asking what sorts of knowledge needed to be in place to make such an apparatus possible? What games of truth had been played to legitimate such an arrangement? One may look to the rapidly more powerful realms of public relations and advertising and their dependence upon psychology and social scientific enquiry. One might have to check on advancements, as does Williams, in broadcast, imaging, manufacturing, and electricity to recognize the realm of the physically possible out of which the actual came into being. One could look to the diffusion of expertise into the realms of the popular. How did competing understandings of the benefits and pitfalls of suburbanization get played out across newspapers, magazines, and television shows? ⁵ What kinds of popular knowledge and expertise came into being to address newfound social anxieties and pressures that accompanied the implementation of new forms of living?

In other words, how was mobile privatization made more accommodating and natural seeming? One could look to the development of new kinds of domestic arts and privatized hobbies—the basement or garage woodshop come to mind, as do shade-tree mechanics. Both are means for doing the necessary labor of maintenance on the apparatus (on the private home, home electronics, and the automobile) as well as a way to capture time that is no longer social. One could look at the domestic appliances (e.g., a refrigerator), architectural forms (e.g., cupboards, pantries, basements), and technologies (e.g., canning, preservatives) that make living at a distance possible in day-to-day terms.

Part of this archival experimentation would be both an opening up of the field's focus to recognize the noncentrality/centrality of communications and media. They are never the entire answer—nor thereby their content the whole archive. But they are always part of the answer. Thinking in terms of the apparatus keeps this tension in sharp focus. Further, the focus on the role of communications and media in the construction and maintenance of various apparatuses is not necessarily merely ideological or cultural, if one thinks of the cultural as the realm of meaning making. Rather, taking a well-understood division in the field would entail studying communications history in terms of both transport and culture (Carey, 1988; Packer & Robertson, 2006). It would recognize that the historical importance of communication is manifest in both realms. It works to maintain culture over time (cultural) and to maintain the networks and infrastructures that facilitate mobility across space throughout time (transport).

When I began historical research on citizens band radio several years ago, the first major hurdle was figuring out what it was that I was actually researching. What was my archive? Given that there was no commercial content, the conversations were fleeting and mandated by Federal Communications Commision (FCC) regulation to not last more than 5 min, and CBs' popularity was already 20 years past its period of widest use the methodological issues were obviously troubling. Such methodological obstacles could also be used to explain the limited number of academic studies that had been done at the time of CBs peak of populairty from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s when as many as 20 million CBs were said to be in use. (I was never able to locate more than a half dozen academic articles devoted to CB.) This was in part because the assumed object of study were the utterances and lingo that marked the use of CB. Yet, without extensive recording technologies and the technological ability to eavesdrop on a nearly limitless set of conversations and commands in mostly moving vehicles, which took place across North America (where CB achieved the highest rates of saturation), what could possibly be one's unit of analysis? Twenty years after the fact there was no collection of any of these conversations from which to begin an historical investigation.

Thinking in terms of CB as part of an apparatus of mobile privatization or “disciplined mobility” ⁶ allows for different sets of questions to be asked by which the content of CB conversations, though important in terms of their general uses, is not central. Let me clarify. Rather than look to the specifics of any given conversation, I began with the rules for conversations in general and the roles for CBs imagined use as first outlined by the FCC. This produced an initial element of the archive. This aspect is related to the realm of the determinators. It also meant recognizing that such determinations changed over time and were struggled over by numerous invested parties. In terms of the apparatus, one needs to examine which experts are able to make truth claims as to how the population can conduct itself and enable the conduct of others through the proper use of a given technology.

The archive in such an event entails the official debates over who was granted jurisdiction and how such a determination was made. It also involves understanding how their knowledge claims are legitimated and hence used to organize and legitimate a particular formation of an apparatus. For example, CB was initially seen as a useful business tool for the dissemination of important information, particularly in the form of urgent messages. As such, it was most often used in the management of fleet mobility by businesses or as part of rapid-response strategies. Its spatial range of use was relatively short, but in the case of managing a fleet of taxis or local deliveries, it was eminently useful in monitoring and managing the movement of labor and product.

The FCC is not the be all and end all for such considerations, but they are the policymaking body with jurisdiction over CB in the United States. However, this does not mean treating it merely as the police or policy arm of government. It means to take seriously their ability to make truth claims about a specific realm of activity. When Michael Powell famously compared televisions with toasters, TV became a different technology. Literally. It became part of a different apparatus. It was now governed and expected to be understood—known—through a different rubric. As such, the set of social and material relations in which it was a part were reset, rearticulated. CB went through such a transformation as well, although not because of a proactive change on the part of the FCC but as the result of new cultural uses—aided by technological and economic changes—which could not have been imagined by the FCC.

To be more specific, all of the FCC hearings related to CB functioned as one part of the archive. Further, all of the rules and guidelines created for the policing of CB's use were also an element in the archive. As the governing body with jurisdiction over CB's use, such FCC documentation played a central role in the archive. Within the power/knowledge relations the FCC became the relevant institution that determined how CB should be understood (knowledge) in part as the result of the ongoing collection of data related to its popular use—and it was the governing body that licensed and monitored specific cases of CB's use. The FCC also determined the fine structure for infractions and assessed them. Thus, it set the stage for the proper use and surveillance of CB and organized its use into a rubric of penalties-based governance.

As those who study technology, and communications technology in particular, know, the original intentions for how a technology is to be used rarely play out as hoped. In particular, the state's use of such technologies for policing and military advantage, as well as the specific applications for advancing business interests are often eclipsed by other uses. This was exactly the case with CB. Military forces, policing agencies, and rapid-response civil services such as fire departments and ambulance services initially and most extensively used two-way radio, of which CB is a subset, as it developed for land use. This state appropriation of two-way radio's potentiality was eventually spread out into the realm of business, as with the fleet management already mentioned, and finally into the public via the citizens band. Yet, even there, it was envisioned as a measure to extend its commercial uses and an extension of the state's ability to surveill the road system and promote motorized safety. ⁷ It was never seen as a carrier of culture. The content of CB was to be free from idle chit chat. However, this changed radically beginning in 1973 when truckers began to use CB as their communications tool for organizing political protest and building community.

Although it is not my intention to retell this historical shift in CB use, I do want to suggest a few ways in which thinking about CB as an element in a few different apparatuses makes known how our archival work moves beyond the official discourses of the FCC into other arenas. Conceptualizing CB as a key articulator in two apparatuses, mobile privatization and disciplined mobility, opens up two overlapping archives and sets of concerns.

Thinking about CB in terms of mobile privatization would mean asking how CB alters the key triumvirate in Williams' account of the primary public and private spaces that are traversed in everyday suburban life. That is the home, the automobile, and the workspace. For Williams, the automobile functions as a private space that extends the possibility for an increasingly private domestic life. It bridges, or brings into possibility, the domestic sphere of the home and the public sphere of labor. Television similarly bridges the public and private by bringing the outside world into the home. It links the home to the local community, the nation, and the world. Similarly, the transistor radio brought the outside world into the relative privacy of the automobile, making the car a rolling version of the living room. When CB entered the private sphere of millions of automobiles in the mid-to-late 1970s, this equation came under attack. Suddenly in-car radios were no longer only mass media but rather a two-way form of broadcast. Conversations could be struck up, debates were had, and information was freely and collectively shared. New forms of culture and community were nurtured and the possibility for a noncommercial form of amassed media emerged. In other words, the private sphere of the automobile became a public sphere that could be and was used to initiate political protest and to foster noncommercial forms of (mass) communication.

CB also emerged as a force within the disciplined mobility apparatus. In simplest terms, disciplined mobility can be understood as the orchestration and governance of technologies of autonomous motorized transport (primarily automobiles and motorcycles) according to the seemingly competing logics of freedom and safety into a well-disciplined machine for the efficient and productive movement of peoples and goods. Although disciplined mobility depends heavily on proper forms of training and the panoptic presence of police surveillance, CB was used to provide heroic tales of danger and the means to produce a countersurveillance machine. Although two-way radio on the road had historically been monopolized by state and commerce, the public use of CB allowed for new games of truth to commence and for new relations of power to manifest.

The archive for understanding and mapping CB's alteration of mobile privatization and disciplined mobility involves an array of sites such as B-grade films, CB user guides, DIY electronics manuals, popular songs, and congressional hearings. As noted, the content of CB conversations from the 1970s have long since passed into the realm of the unreceivable, we must look elsewhere to make sense of the struggles over CB's use and the consequent force they exerted upon these apparatuses.

The archive must portend to the cultural manifestations that tell the story of struggle between the CB citizenry and the state as these function as forms of popular truth. A whole host of low-budget films and popular songs told just such stories. They depicted how automobile drivers are situated in a struggle over the validity of motorized safety and what role they played within a vast surveillance apparatus. Should drivers extend the state's ability to monitor motorized behavior by using CB to snitch on errant drivers or should they work together to inform each other of police whereabouts thus blunting the element of surprise necessary for the working of panopticism? Such tales of popular struggle clearly articulated a vision of populism resonant with the perceived potentiality of CB as a force to thwart state surveillance and commercial control of the media.

Our CB archive must also attend to the scientific and technical discourses and material potentialites that depict the array of decisions that account for CBs eventual consistency. What role is played by changes in electronics manufacturing and design as transistors replaced tubes? What new possibilities emerge as prices are driven down by economies of scale and by the exploitation of Japanese labor and the attendant influx of relatively inexpensive electronics into the North American market? How did the coconstitutive infrastructures of highways and gasoline distribution function in tandem through the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)-induced oil crisis? How did the range of CB transmissions make possible or hinder community building and cultural interactions? Such material constraints and consistencies are the backbone of the apparatus. This is not a technological determinism but rather an understanding of the intentionality of actors and the possibilities of the material working together to organize the apparatus.

CB guides sold in the millions. Why? In part because the FCC mandated that a copy of their rules must be present with all CB transmitters and receivers. As such, each CB guide included the rules, thus making them a complimentary element in the legal ownership and use of CB. Beyond the presence of the official discourse, these guides most often opened with a variation on the general CB manifesto that outlined the democratic potentiality of CB to replace mass media and bring the power of communications to the masses. The guides also provided updated glossaries of the ever-changing lingo necessary for successful CB communication. Most generally, these guides provided the tools and ethos, both official and resistant, for becoming a member of what was being called the “CB citizenry.” It provided the rules and modes of conduct appropriate to proper CB use. For example, although the inclusion of the FCC rules was a necessary element, for the most part the manifestos and glossaries provided resistant vocabularies in which the FCC and the police were recognized as the enemy. Yet, proper use was still understood to be that of conversation and not singing for other's entertainment. Discussions were imagined to be about the location of police, not recitations on poetics.

QUESTIONING THE APPARATUS

For many forms of media and communications analysis the potential archive is swelling due to the exponential expansion of digital storage capacity. This is not the growth area that I'm most excited about—though clearly the internet in particular has allowed for a range of materials to be collected and searched in innovative ways. What I'm instead suggesting is to ask new questions regarding why and how communications and media matter. By beginning with an apparatus understanding of media and communications, the archive changes because the focus of our research energies is differently aimed. It doesn't zero in on media content as such but rather tries to map the surrounding terrain where the crucial battles took place that determined how media and communications would be enacted. The backroom strategies, the modes of capture and imprisonment, the molding of soldiers, the play of chance, the mechanized orchestration of technologies' potential, the topological variables, the application of theories new and old, and the ever-present counterforces are a different frame for analysis. So, what is an archive? What are the various realms of discursive and nondiscursive practice to which we look for the elements of our apparatus archive? The archive is what results from how one asks questions and where one looks for answers.

I end with the following five sets of questions or realms of enquiry that correspond with the examples I have already provided, but they do so in a more formulaic fashion:

1. Look to organizations, institutions, or credentialized experts who we might call the determinators. These are groups or individuals (not at all mutually excusive) who have been given, granted, or taken the authority to make truth claims regarding specific phenomena (though often these realms can bleed over into seemingly unrelated areas). They articulate desires and plans to alter institutions and individuals. A first question to ask is “Who has jurisdiction to make truth claims?” The process that determines who is in the true and who can be an adversary in the games of truth are of particular interest. A further consideration is how particular venues of deliberation and institutions—media and otherwise—grant such authority. These often have substantial documents and holdings for investigations into their workings and to determine the mechanisms they use to create truths that can be legitimately acted upon to reform and alter behavior. So the beginnings of such an archive would look to the discourse of those with plans to alter others' behavior—as with say Jeremy Bentham in the case of Foucault's scholarship in Discipline and Punish, the FCC in the case of my research on CB, or in Ronald Greene's recent scholarship on how the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) attempted to use film as a means for reforming immigrant laborers in the 1920s (Greene, 2005).

2. Look to the statements that come to be “free-floating legitimators”. ⁸ These are the statements that are used across numerous discursive sites of contestation to reanimate and legitimate the claims and assumptions that organize numerous apparatuses. For example, the terms safety and freedom worked to accommodate a wide range of goals, alterations, and reorganizations of institutions and people as they relate to the automobility system. One could ask, “What are the free-floating legitimators for an apparatus of disciplined mobility or mobile privatization?” “What are the overarching claims and goals that legitimate the movement to the suburbs or the organization of television as a one-to-many form of broadcasting?” “How has a term like safety been used to justify a whole host of military, governmental, commercial, and even familial initiatives?” To merely suggest they are being implemented for the purpose of safety is to guarantee that they are proper and just.

3. Locate the competing and sometimes resistant forces and knowledge claims. Although the search for resistance has, at times, led scholarship down the slippery slope of inconsequence, it is nonetheless the case that force acts on force, that the creation of knowledge is always an act of violence against competing knowledge claims and those institutions, disciplines, and individuals who are their promoters. It must also be said that the victors in such struggles are not to be universally despised nor are the proponents of subjugated forms of knowledge—who may have passed into obscurity—to be lauded for merely having struggled. With such caveats in place, it is essential that an archive be comprised not merely of the statements of victors or victims, but the full compliment of competing discourses in their combative play of force. It is precisely through an understanding of how such force was exerted, thwarted, and redirected that a finer more nuanced view of power/knowledge comes into focus. It may be just as likely that such analysis leads to a realistic understanding of the solidity of a particular power relation as it is to discover a latent resistance. In either case, if one acknowledges that the apparatus is the result of strategies for the alteration of behaviors, one must then proceed by first understanding how such strategies won out in order to resist them. Yet, strategies are enacted against an adversary. Understand one's adversary.

4. Look to how media and communications work in terms of the material functioning of the apparatus. They are the articulators of apparatuses. They work to bind things together. They are connectors—as in infrastructure. That is, they provide the mechanisms and processes that maintain the necessary movement and flows to keep an apparatus working smoothly. In this sense, CB is a fairly obvious example. It allowed for the organization of fleet mobility, while also creating a mechanism by which important travel information could be shared among those using the road, most notably truckers and the police. We could say that one role of cellular telephones is to do precisely the same thing. It allows for the exchange of information necessary for orchestrating the movements of bodies and things in a highly mobile and fluid social environment. It links people into networks and provides a real-time response mechanism to adapt and alter trajectories in coordination with others. Because of the complex of forces exerted via the cellular phone, it is too simple to call the cellular telephone itself an apparatus in the way Agamben suggests.

5. Look for the processes of subjectification that are coconstitutive of the apparatus. As Agamben suggests, this is the elementary process in the establishment of an apparatus. Subjectification works on life itself, what it means, how it should be lived, and who can manage it (biopolitics). Beyond the obvious realms of public health, medicine, and psychiatry, self-improvement manuals and guides are a good resource. Look to newspaper and periodical articles on training, planning, and organizing daily life and life goals as they relate to an apparatus. Often it is useful to examine training courses and products necessary to implement such life projects. Further, there are often narratives, fictional and otherwise, which provide templates for imagining such new forms of subjectification. The archive for my own historical research has comprised driver's education manuals, guides for successful hitchhiking, and CB users' manuals. Such how-to documents carry not only practical advice but very often articulate a vision of a changed subject and an ethos said to be fused with such practices. Becoming a hitchhiker, according to such guides, is to reorient oneself to all sorts of spiritual and experiential dimensions (knowledge) unknown to the nonhitchhiker. It is also to place oneself into new economies of exchange (sharing of automobile resources) and new obligations to fellow hitchhikers (power). One obvious place to begin such investigation is to look for cases in which a subject is turned into an object. By what process and according to whom does a person becomes a patient, a child become a delinquent, a woman become a hysteric, a driver become a road rager, a viewer become a couch potato, or a citizen become a bomb?

Notes

1. This is to acknowledge that Foucault's oft-noted switch from archeology to geneology increasingly distances itself from a model of textuality and discourse to better explain relations of power.

2. See, for example, where Foucault (1982) claims we must “renounce … [that] there is always a secret origin—so secret and so fundamental that it can never be grasped in itself” (p. 25). Or, more bitingly, “The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin, somewhat in the manner of the pious philosopher who needs a doctor to exorcise the shadow of his soul” (Foucault, 1977, p. 144).

3. This notion can be summed up by the Foucauldian use of the term problematization. Such an approach in communications history and scholarship has to some degree been advanced in articles such as Russill (2008), Bratich (2005), and Packer (2006).

4. For a useful example of this element of such a history, see Bratich (2005).

5. See, for example, Spigel (1992).

6. I used this term to make sense of how the vastly increased freedom of movement enabled by automobility throughout the 20th century came to be organized and implemented (Packer, 2003).

7. For a lengthier history of CB, see Packer (2008, pp. 161–188).

8. Although obviously borrowing from Jacques Derrida (1976) here, there is a clear difference between what I'm implying by the use of this term. Derrida claimed that all signifiers can be freely associated with different signifieds or, more precisely, that the play of signifiers, only ever referring to the general grammar of a given language, have no necessary correspondence to their referents. What I'm suggesting is that particular terms come to take on such significance that they can be used to justify nearly any truth claim across numerous discourses to justify a vast array of initiatives, plans, responses, and resistances.