Gesamtdatenwerk: Peter Greenaway, New Media, and the Question of Archetypes

Abstract

Gesamtdatenwerk questions the meaning of “archetype” in the digital age. Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases serves as an example of how archetypes are resituated within the archive and the studio of postmodern culture. Instead of a stabilized and stabilizing narrative that repeats itself consistently through time, an archetype is understood as an improvisational cultural production that we make, unmake, and remake for particular psychosocial reasons and within particular technological domains. Working with the archetypes as a form of idealist philosophy, the article suggests that we must learn to read this tradition with an eye toward differentiating networks of signifiers. When there are no first principles, nor any knowable ultimate realities, archetypes do not return to a primordial past nor point toward a future end, but become ever-changing signifiers that form and re-form in an unprogrammatical mix.