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CHAPTER 1
Moot Points
archive: 1. From Greek arkheia, things kept at the public office, derived from arche, beginning, government; 2. A collection of documents such as letters, official papers, photographs or recorded material kept for their historical interest; 3. Backup computer file, kept often in compressed form on tape or disk for long-term storage; a directory of files that Internet users can access using File Transfer Protocol. — Encarta World English Dictionary
Ark: something that affords protection and safety; a chest or cupboard holding the scrolls of the Torah in a synagogue; a low hut used to house livestock; a ship or boat. — Oxford English Dictionary
An archive is where Mr and Mrs Noah and all the animals went to get out of the rain, but it rained and rained for 40 days and nights, so they just stayed put, luckily they had taken lots of story and picture books along with them so they weren't bored. — primary school pupil
It takes time for what has been erased to surface. Traces survive in registers, and nobody knows where these registers are hidden, and who has custody of them, and whether or not their custodians are willing to let you see them. Or perhaps they have forgotten that such registers exist. — Patrick Modiano, Search Warrant
Just as voluntary memory and utter oblivion belong together, so organised fame and remembrance lead ineluctably to nothingness. — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
Modern memory is above all archival. It relies entirely on the materialities of the trace, the immediacy of records, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends in high fidelity and tape recording. No longer living memories, more or less intended remainders, the archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life, itself often a function of its own recording, a secondary memory, a prosthesis-memory. — Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire
The starting point of critical elaboration is the question of what one really is, 'knowing thyself' as a product of historical processes to date which have deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory — therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory. — Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks
The function of the archive, as of art, is to hold unlikely things. ... The primary operations of the archive are no longer the contents of its files but rather their logistical interlinking, just as the Web is not primarily defined by its contents but by its protocols. — Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive
The question of the archive is not a question of the past. ... It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomorrow. ... Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive. — Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
We should not be deceived into thinking that heritage is an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies; rather it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath. — Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History'
The old word 'thing' or 'ding' originally meant a certain type of assembly. The point of reviving this old notion of assembly in a contemporary notion of assemblage, is that we don't assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible, but because we are brought together by divisive matters of concern into some neutral isolated place in order to arrive at some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement. — Bruno Latour, 'From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public'
Moot
Noun: 1) An assembly held for debate in Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval times
2) A mock proceeding set up to examine a hypothetical case as an academic exercise
Verb: To raise or broach a question or topic for discussion
Adjective: 1) Subject to debate, dispute, uncertainty
2) Having little or no practical relevance
Archive Fever: Coming in from the Cold?
The child's confusion of the Ark with the archive in the preceding quote makes us smile, as if it were no more than a charming elision of sounds and meaning, but the association of the two words points to a significant but often overlooked point of connection between them. The archive is a safe harbour for all manner of materials, artefacts, texts, images, documents, which might otherwise perish, whether from neglect or active suppression. It is an affordance of memory which may be a container of profane narratives or holy scripts, bureaucratic protocols or autobiographical memories, but it restores their capacity to survive the storms of history which produced them. The archive is an ark of the covenant we all make with the world in which we struggle to make our mark on posterity. What might appear initially to be a mere container of accidental traces of the past turns out, on closer inspection, to be an object of calculation, even intervention, albeit one that is largely disavowed.
Yet this arch-mnemonic can also be a trap, a siren call to unwary historians, a seductive invitation to immerse themselves in an oceanic feeling of omniscience about the past or, conversely, to drown in sea of nostalgic identification with lives other than their own. The archive can be a talisman for the multifarious desire to 'get to the bottom of things' which may start off with innocent acts of curiosity but all too often ends by being driven by an obsessive ambition to capture and sum up the world. Patrick Modiano draws our attention to an even less attractive face of the archive, its capacity to conceal, to resist disclosure, to obfuscate, even to cover its own tracks so that its existence is either unknown or mere rumour. So it is not only a question of what is lost by being excluded from the archive, but also what remains buried or hidden within it.
A good case in point are the British colonial archives held at Hanslope Park, whose existence was denied for many years because they contain information which gives the lie to the official 'legacy archives' bequeathed by colonial administrations to the newly independent states of the Commonwealth. These provided a highly selective record of events designed to leave behind a positive image of Britain's colonial legacy and eliminate all traces of an often brutal and oppressive regime from the collective memory, a residuum of historical fact which is all too much in evidence at Hanslope Park. The tension between Public Record Acts and the Official Secrets Act remains a constant in the UK story of the archive's troubled relation to the nation-state.
Archives can also serve as a platform for the guardianship of unofficial secrets in civil society. For example, there is the Ark of the Apostles Society, a secret society of a budding intellectual elite at Cambridge between the wars which at one time included many of the Bloomsbury Group. The ark is a wooden box, now housed in Kings College Archive Centre, which contains a diary of the society's proceedings and copies of the papers its members gave. Although the existence of the society was for a long time an open secret, its membership, and hence access to the Ark, remained closed and confined to a coterie of the initiated who were all undergraduate or graduate students of Kings College and St John's.
Yet the self-conscious concealment of knowledge by an intellectual elite is something of a special case. The demand to 'open the archive', whether on the lips of those whose loved ones have been disappeared by State violence, adoptees trying to discover who their birth parents are, or historians trying to gain access to official documents, this demand has largely been addressed to the state and its bureaucracy. The notion of an open archive, which the demand implies, has ramifications for a democratised memory politics which we will explore.
The dual nature of the conventional archive, poised as it is between the inert storing of classified information and its active appropriation, is widely recognised. For Pierre Nora this reiterates the classic Platonic distinction between two different forms of memory, one based oral communication and the other on the written record and prosthetic technology. It has also been argued that the archive occupies a special liminal space between these two positions, in which documents — and the lives or events whose traces they bear — exist in a kind of limbo, neither in the world of the living nor the dead but awaiting their moment of resurrection in the hands of an archivist who will bring them into the light of day.
From this starting point, there are divergent perspectives on the potential of the archive to challenge the dominant forms of knowledge/power in which it has been historically embedded. Foucault, Derrida and Latour all converge on a single idea — that the role of the archive is to provide a public space of deliberation and debate in which traditions can be unsettled, ideologies contested, familiar history defamiliarised. The archive is a way of bringing unlikely things together in order to take their established associations apart and in doing so it stakes out uncommon ground. You may think that this is a moot point, especially if you consider the word's etymology. The Witenagemot was a powerful group of 'wise men', a.k.a. nobles and churchmen, who assembled to counsel the king, but in certain areas where the royal writ did not run, the moot could take on a more popular democratic form, albeit one that has been somewhat over-egged by those on the left who want to see it as an early or 'primitive' form of communist society. The verb certainly suggests that the purpose of such assembly should be to exercise the dialogic imagination and practice the arts of disputation. Even more suggestive for our purposes is the notion of an archive as a site where information may be assembled in order to conduct thought experiments, to test out different explanations against the evidence. But then, of course, there is always the risk that this will degenerate into a purely academic exercise, of little practical relevance.
In what follows I shall be mooting a number of possible approaches to understanding the democratic potential of the archive. My central question is this: does it actually require that the archive occupy an isolated neutral space, as Latour suggests, for this purpose? Or can it also be an intervention which sets up new and critically engaged forms of dialogue, both within and beyond the material itself?
Secondly, does the process of archival reframing not also require an opposite movement to which it is dialectically related — a moment of conservation, or consolidation, a process of re-concentration of what has been disassembled and dispersed? Seen from an anthropological perspective the archival impulse can be regarded as a form of ritual defence against the furies potentially released by the fragmentation of a legacy, a way of pacifying the spirits of the dead, in providing some principle of interpretive closure to protect the living from endless disputes over ancestral virtues or vices they may (or may not) inherit. But how does this tension between the compulsion to repeat the past and the desire to escape it play out in actual strategies of collection and curation and what kind of memory politics do these strategies imply?
The quotation from Adorno draws our attention to the negative dialectic which might exist between the archival drive as a denial of transience, mortality, and death and the apparatus of celebrity which ephemeralises life to the point where the posterity of fame is nullified.
In contrast, Gramsci suggests that an inventory of traces, whether invoking the genealogy of subjects or objects, is a necessary condition for understanding their real — which is to say historical — conditions of existence. In this context, Benjamin's Arcades Project, which consisted of a series of folders — or 'convolutes'— containing diverse material on particular aspects of nineteenth-century Paris, not only gives unique surreal expression to the archival form but can also be considered a Gramscian inventory of traces. The project also laid the foundations for elaborating a theory of the capitalist city as a cultural assemblage, a site of chaotic synchronicity, which his collagist technique was designed to capture.
The impulse to make inventories can move in opposite directions, however. For Gramsci's organic working-class intellectual it involves becoming free enough of ideological conditioning to be able to act back on the world in a self-conscious and reflexive way. For Benjamin's bourgeois collector it means stripping the object of everything worldly (including the labour that produced it) that would prevent it becoming a prop in the psychodrama of the collector's secret passion. So here again we have the two faces of the archive, one turned outwards to the public domain and the manifold sites of its transformation, the other turned inwards to assemble, with obsessive precision, a private model of its detailed workings in a specific sphere of human endeavour. Yet however prescient their methodology, neither Gramsci nor Benjamin could have anticipated a digital culture in which historical time and autobiographical time diverge so radically, giving rise to an 'archive fever' designed to stitch them back together again into a simulated coherence through a wild variety of mashups.
Wolfgang Escher draws a vivid distinction between the traditional archive, in which cultural memory is still anchored to the archive's capacity to store and classify material information (artefacts, documents) within an interpretive or meta-narrative frame, and the virtual or digital archive where algorithms have become a kind of automated mnemonic device, with an infinite capacity for enlargement and updating. For evangelists of the virtual archive, like Ernst, the open-access platform is an instrument for the democratisation of knowledge power; in contrast those, like Arlette Farge, who remain committed to a hands-on model of archival research, the primary encounter with the material is multi-sensorial and cannot be reduced to the mere scanning of images or texts. But can the very materiality of the document, far from being a guarantee of the authentic facticity of what it records, not be deceptive, even a statement of fake news?
My interest in this question goes back to a visit to a museum in East Berlin in 1980. The museum portended to tell the story of the creation of the GDR as a bulwark of socialism in the front line of the cold war. As you entered the large portico you were confronted with a steam locomotive, resplendent in the colours of the GDR. Children were enjoying climbing into the cab and imagining themselves driving it down the tracks. But where did these imaginary tracks lead? If you looked closely at the base of the engine you could read a small plaque announcing that this was one of trains which had hauled bricks to help build the Berlin Wall, constructed entirely with volunteer labour, by workers who were defending socialism against its enemies. A story then of East Berliners enthusiastically volunteering to cut themselves off from their families and friends in the West, and to live in an open prison from which many of them died trying to escape. So here we had an artefact transformed into a protagonist in a narrative which its presence authorises and which is in fact a piece of state propaganda. The very materiality of the exhibit provides its alibi as a mute witness to the fabrication of a historical untruth. Another way to put this is to say that the archival object is falsified by what it is made to verify within the archival frame.
About ten years later I revisited Berlin in very different circumstances. The Wall had fallen and the Museum of Hysterical Materialism, as I nicknamed it, was closed. I had been invited to speak at a conference about racism organised by the reconstituted Socialist Unity Party which had ruled the old GDR and was now trying to reinvent itself as a social democratic party carrying the banner for the 'Ossies' who were finding themselves second-class citizens in the new united Germany. The conference was attended mainly by party delegates, sad-looking middle-aged men wearing grey or brown raincoats who had been part of the old nomenklatura but now found themselves unemployed. One of them, let me call him Max, who took me under his wing and whom I got to know quite well, had been a member of the Stasi. He confessed that the worst thing about what had happened was not that he had become a social pariah and an object of general opprobrium but that he had been forced to recognise that his whole life had been wasted in pursuit of a dream that turned out to be a nightmare. The opening of the Stasi archives had revealed just how deeply embedded the state surveillance system had been and the large numbers of citizens who had collaborated with it, whether out of fear or a genuine sense of patriotic duty. Like many of his fellow militants, Max had been a member of the Kamfgruppen der Arbeiterclasse, the GDR's ideological shock troops, and like them he had volunteered to help build the Wall. To prove his change of heart he offered me a small fragment of brightly graffitied stone which he assured me he had personally chipped out of the Wall. When I got back to my hotel I compared it with another piece of the Wall embedded in a postcard I had bought, which had been issued to celebrate the events of 1989. It was also graffitied but was of a quite different composition. Perhaps it was from a different part of the Wall, but was it possible that one of these stones was a fake? After the fall of the Wall tens of thousands of people went hunting for souvenirs, and a whole export industry grew up around distributing fragments as holy reliquaries of this historic moment across the world. Once the remains of the Wall were protected, some East Berliners, desperate to cash in, turned themselves into do-it-yourself archivists and began to 'manufacture' this little bit of history in their own backyards.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Archive That, Comrade!"
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