This article concerns the electronic archive, in relation to the academy and to culture. It explores the metaphors by which the archive is con ceived, proposing as an exploratory and imaginative device an installa tion of the archived material from a contemporary newspaper database. The debates over the electronic archive are then viewed through four voices, each with a distinctive ethos, voices which draw on the other voices of Kant, Baudrillard and Derrida, of the Bible and contempor ary social theory.

This article is about knowledge and argument. The purpose is to dramatize certain questions of knowledge: how and why does the better knowledge not become the better argument; what are the voices access ible to the claiming of new knowledge; what are the limits and destinies of contemporary expertise? The article is also an experiment in aca demic and intellectual forms, an experiment which corresponds to the central inquiry: how should knowledge speak now? There are three parts. The first part (...) tells a story about enlightenment and persuasion. The second part is a dialogue between two voices which speak for the argumentative ethos of knowledge - Newtonian is a voice of the centre, and Paracelsan speaks from and for the margins. The third part is a dia logue between Critic and Speculator, a dialogue about the fate of know ledge in postmodernity. Throughout, the text includes a range of quotations, synchronized with its arguments. The continuous source of excerpts is the BSE news, which is taken to represent aspects of know ledge in our time. There is a strong association made between questions of contemporary knowledge and ecological crisis. Major reference points include: Beck; Baudrillard; Blanchot; Jabes. (shrink)

Through dialogue new worlds can be imagined. In this imaginary dialogue between the vision of Daedalus, speaking through J. B. S. Haldane, and the Old Testament visionary, Job, the relationship between nature and science is re-explored, re-examined and re-engaged. Their words bounce back off the media's contemporary imagining of the BSE crisis in Britain, an episode that profoundly questioned this nature-science interrelationship.