At the outset of Forwards in The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s intention and purpose are stated as “to grasp such diverse material under the general category of signifying the ‘primal history’ of the nineteenth century” (ix) and “to document as concretely as possible, and thus lend a ‘heightened graphicness’ to, the scene of revolutionary change that was the nineteenth century” (xii). At the first glance, this kind of aspiration appears to be an impossible collective dream. However, the historical configuration of archive shapes itself by the awakening of recording, collecting, analyzing, filing, which, finally, turns out to make itself come true.

Consideration should be given to “wholly unique experience of dialectic” (389), which manifests the archive in the way of continuous reversal, introspection and enlightenment. In this process, the fact that archive reveals itself as an awakening method, rather than comply with the gradual developing history, suffice to put diverse time and space together into the whole system of archive.

“The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!-Therefore: remembering and awaking are most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance. [Kl,3]” In this sense, the dialectical method provides a way researching into the documentary and the art of archive from both sociological and psychological aspects. The inside of the “what has happened” is not only a single universe that conducts the operation of archive or shapes the inherent concept we originally regard it to be, but miscellaneous personal experiences and thoughts that integrate each other throughout different time and space as well.

In On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, the positive and negative elements on the cultural-historical dialectic are investigated as a methodology in archive that encompasses the understanding of history. The “dialectical image”, a central term of The Arcades Project, casts a light on the interpretation of time and space of the silent documentary. “In the dialectical image…it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch-namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation. [N4,1]” (464). This is an interesting part of the “dialectical image” theory that regardless of the far-away living space in different stages of history, the objects that may have been forgotten for a long time suddenly come to live due to the dialectical thinking about the past. Time and space have a reunion and the realization of the collective dream reconstructed itself from thousands of ramifications which encompass the combination of time and space by the dialectical method.

Despite yesterday’s heavy morning snow, I still managed the visit to Massachusetts Archive which is rightly located next to UMass Boston. This is the first time for me to enter an archives building, not an archive room in a library. I find myself enjoying staying there and researching into the documents in the past.

Instead of simply depicting only on the documents and history of any archive, Farge shared what she saw and experienced in an archive, in my point of view, in a quite romantic way in The Allure of the Archives: “Large painted murals, vaguely bucolic and markedly academic, darken the walls of the adjoining ball-ways…” (19). “If, by chance, he emerges from the same train, you must never greet or even smile at him. Any complicity would inevitably entail troublesome compromises of principle” (21). Unlike Steedman’s statement: “…as English-language readers, we are forced to have the fever, and, if we are historian’s, forced to exasperated expostulation that archives are nothing like this at all” (Steedman, 1163), Farge’s views sound like a sort of commitment to the affection of archives that I’m able to identify with.

With the of the archivist’s guidance, I spent most of the time on reading the administration and files on the development vocational projects high education. The main body of the collection “PLANNING AREAS FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION” is the explanation of the enacted legislation, approved by the Governor in 1969, on the issue of planning vocational technical education. It listed numerous clear objectives and detailed plans of how to establish the vocational education in the aspects of academic study, health and care, employment program, etc.

Another document that attracts me is the pyramid graph of “CAREER EDUCATION” for a specific project named career education program, which articulates the continuous curriculum at every level. Career awareness lies in the bottom of this pyramid, while occupational specialization is of the top this graph. This document reveals itself in the way of the arrangement and values that people’s consideration and judgement on vocational education, which is as well enlightening to some extent nowadays. In this sense, this is the reason why we need to go through the documents in the past.

“The archival document is a tear in thefabric of time, an umplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event” (Farge, 6). It is still worthy of considering the value of the combination of the past and present in archive, which not only concerns about the academic research, but the memories of past as well. It also drives me to think about except for the past, how to make this documents more effectively influence the development of education in the future?

To make up the blog post I missed, I spend a while to think about what kind of archive or collection I’d like to present and it turns out that the archives for music fascinate me most.

Rather than just an online music site for the age of the internet technology, the Free Music Archive (FMA) is an interactive music library that involves blog post, latest single reviews, downloads of the archived music, etc. FMA provides legal audio downloads, which is directed by WFMU, a non-commercial community radio station renowned for the freeform and high-quality of its music collection. Thousands of featured mix are available via FMA legally. On this basic level, the music resources on FMA, which exist in a way of reviewing the accessibility of the pieces of music tracks in the past and present online, completely embody the concept of “extension of the period of time” (Mbembe 21).

On top of the FMA home page, visitors can easily choose what they want and browse this site via “by curator” and “by genre”. Curators from throughout the world select and upload the latest music onto their pages. Featured blogs as well unfold the upcoming music festivals, the introduction of artist collectives and the stories behind a certain piece of music which are all connected to the archive. Most of the music resources can be found via genre, through which the music resources on FMA are catalogued into 15 different styles, including blues, jazz, hip hop, country and the like. In each genre tracks, a specific item can be found by the artist, track title, and album. In this sense, the items of FMA is“in a system that facilitates identification and interpretation” (Mbembe 20).

In addition to enjoying the latest music and searching for archived resource, the FMA visitors are allowed to build up music archive of their own by registering their own accounts. As a result, individuals’ participation in the entire process of archive on FMA entails a certain degree of creation: they are able to make comments on what they are interested in; they post blogs to express their ideas, thoughts and stories in relation to music; they even make friends by sharing the great music on FMA. Unlike those traditional archive or online archive networks which are tightly concentrated on professional archiving, FMA looks more like a conflation of archive and social network.

In my understanding, “…the archive affirms the past, present, and future; it preserves the records of the past and it embodies the promise of the present to the future” (Manoff 11) indicates the fact that such archive websites like FMA combine the past and present through music, sometimes even predict or analyze the latent music trend in the future by connecting the people and sharing their different ideas, which sounds rather inspiring and stimulatory to lots of music maniacs and researchers. On this level, the fact that FMA evolves from the diversity and creation of the new has challenged Derrida’s statement: “there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive” (Derrida, 19). However, I’m still considering that whether it is appropriate for an archive to be entertaining. It’s worthy of thinking about should the nature of online archive website cater to public popularity or authority on a relatively limited researchers.