There exists a complicated relationship between archives, forms of documentation, and the ways societies remember their pasts. Archive comes from the Greek word ‘Arkheion’ (from ‘arkhe’ – the now of whatever kind of power is being exercised, anywhere, in any place or time) – the superior magistrate’s residence. The magistrate is one who exercises the power of those documents of procedure and precedent, in his right to interpret them, for the operation of a system of law.
The arkhe represents a principle, in the order of commencement as well as in the order of commandment (Derrida). The archive (arkhe, arkheion, archon) can never be a beginning but rather is always the mark of the empty place between the thing and its representation. Archives are not simple historical repositories but a complex of structures, processes and epistemologies situated at a critical point of intersection between scholarship, cultural practice, politics and technologies. As sites for documentary preservation rooted in various national and social contexts, archives help define for individuals, communities and states what are both knowable and known about their pasts. As places of uncovering, archives help create and re-create social memory. An archive is a place where complex processes of ‘remembering’ occur.
Notes to Self (for seasoned):
Guardian (substrate: subjectivity held up) >> RECALL – IMPOSE – STATE: LAW
Command – (by lack) [archive – origin (tear/cut/{epiphany}); + command]
The origin of ideas – Nomoslogical (nomos – auto-nomos) principle [here-there – Freud] — Nature + Other (culture: technique, object, self) – (DOUBLE) MOVEMENT
Archive in mode of – Play: (substitute) – end in itself; play (open-ended) à ethics + politics [denial/ disavowed]
A Freudian Impression: is further exploration of the relationship between memory and writing (or recording), particularly the very first memory that takes place, or is had, just before the thing itself, the origin, comes to be represented.
Recover moments of inception, the fractured and infinitesimal second between thing and trace, which might be the moment of truth. – Derrida [archive and psychoanalysis].
Traces: Perception and understanding of events and experiences always leave behind them by means of the index, or residual mark of their occurrence. The archive is not one and the same as forms of remembrance, or as history. Manifesting itself as these traces, it contains the potential to fragment and destabilize either remembrances as recorded, or history as written, as sufficient means of providing the last word in the account of what has come to pass.
Inscriptions: the law of the archive has been inscribed in definitions of the document and the body. The concept of the archive is synonymous with the trace and the document (the ways it arrests temporality and connotes a particular kind of fixity to events –Kleinman). In each we are able measure not only relations between the past and the present, but between the event and evidence of it occurrence, and between the fabric of everyday life and its representation. The archive gains its authority through establishing a science or regulatory system that codifies the body in terms of equivalence. There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory (Derrida). Inscription in archiving involves both suppression as well as remembering linking individual and collective and also institutional and psychological – the brain. Yet popular memory sets against elite document contrasts that make it not so simple to conform to some sort of elusive authentic past (Frederick Cooper). Memories may contradict or limit the primacy of these documents as an authentic source, yet memory is also multifaceted and in the final analysis deeply personal and mediated across a more recent experience. Also, cultural and social understandings do not easily or necessarily connect with documentation, as with colonial and post-colonial archives, yet ‘race’ can be read into these pasts – ‘constructed’ (Ann Laura Stoler) in confronting the ‘absences’ and ‘silences’ of these archives. Comparative analysis not only reveals commonalities in the ways knowledge is constructed under different political, social and cultural regimes; but also helps clarify what familiarity, tradition and common practice often tend to conceal (Francis X. Blouin & William G. Rosenberg). Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.
The organic and innocent product of processes exterior to archivists and despite their limitations or particular flaw, reflect historical reality. Various presuppositions of research necessarily affect their determination to an epistemological quandary about the very accessibility of the realities of the past, given the layered processes of mediation and an imposed degree of ordering and meaning by which events are recorded, remembered and retrieved. Also, Foucault’s, a priori history that is given and of things said, asserting a certain kind of authenticity; further append to our idea of the archive, in creation of fictional histories (as a fictive construct of the real; the ‘subreal’) based on the fear on uncovering hidden truths as well as challenges normative narratives constructing the ‘cultural memory’. In the retracing of the archival record emerges the construction of a dominant historical record and thereby as well as its effects. Here ‘testimonies’ either devastating (the silent testimonies of those who are literally unable to speak of what they have endured) or the promising of hope, through ethical analysis of datum (Dragan Kujundzic). Yet experience cannot be documented, only transcribed from its visceral impressions into some reproducible linguistic form (Carolyn Steedman). The ‘user’, the social rememberer gives the archives’s ‘stuff’ its meaning. Given the hegemonic historiography as a repository of facts, the archive constructs objects of representation or as a construction of fiction whose tasks was to produce a whole collection of effects of the real; one must pay attention to the questions of who constructs the archive (of those in power) as this points back to the legal and juridical role of the archive as composed of evidential traces of that which has taken place (Spivak). Thus, the archive itself is not simply a reflection or an image of an event but also shapes the event, the phenomena of its origins (Robert Adler).
Given that we are within an age of archival intervention, in which the processes of construction, acquisition, preservation, classification, selection, access and descriptions are increasingly structured by particular cultural values, social biases and political inclinations; restrictions on access to archival materials have always been understood in terms of politics as an undesirable effect of power. Further, the opportunities to explore particular historical issues or to understand the possible dimensions are obviously affected by the kinds of artifacts an archive chooses to acquire. As material objects, along with some kind of documents, ‘trigger’ emotions and memories; that is, culture-bound forms of accessing familiar stories about the past, weather or not grounded in ‘true’ histories of the subject (Gaynor Kavanagh).
The archive is a site of constant creativity, a place where identities may be formed, technologies of rule perfected and pasts convincingly revisited. The archival artist seeks to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. To this end they elaborate on the found image, object, and text, and favor the installation format as they do so. All these archival objects serve as found arks of lost moments in which the here-and-now of the work functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future. Collection of objects create the framing of a historical period as a discursive episteme almost in the sense of Foucault, with ‘interrelated’ elements (placed) together in a field, thereby archival materials become active, even unstable, open to eruptive returns and entropic collapses, stylistic repackagings and critical revisions. It often arranges materials according to a quasi-archival logic, a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, and presents them in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects. Perhaps all archives develop in this way, through mutations of connection and disconnection, a process that this art also serves to disclose. Sometimes archival samplings push the postmodernist complications of originality and authorship to an extreme. The figure of the artist-as-archivist follows that of the artist-as-curator, and some archival artists continue to play on the category of the collection. Yet they are not as concerned with critiques of representational totality and institutional integrity. Archival art is as much preproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces, these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again. These private archives do question public ones; they can be seen as perverse orders that aim to disturb the symbolic order at large. On the other hand, they might also point to a general crisis in this social law or to an important change in its workings whereby the symbolic order no longer operates through apparent totalities.
Images as Archive and as Object of Archive and Access:
Photographs as objects of history emerge from multiple sets of relationships at many levels. Photographs as sets of relationships are, like all relationships, subject to negotiation, exchange, trade and multiple performances and meanings. Photographs are both ‘objects of archival’ as well as an ‘archive in it self’. Further they are archival in both enacting and destroying mnemonic experience. Not only are they objects, produced through sets of social relations that can be collected, exchanged through sets of relationships. Whatever the course and location of images, the photographs’ very existence – what they are – is embedded in a relationship that stays with the photograph forever — that is, the relationship between the subject and chemical trace of their existence. Photographs seeming literally to capture a past event, permanently framing its temporal context, necessarily objectivizes its subject and can read meaning back into the past only through an interpreter; through the contextualized understanding by the user.
Photographs, in their social use, are created intentionally to project a present past into the future and as such they become intermediaries in networks of use (Dant). Continual re-engagement confirms and reaffirms ‘living presence, suggests, ‘long after biological death’ (Gell). Photos can constitute relatedness as a social fact. They can create a form of subjectivity, bringing those distant in time and space into a present’ (MacDonald). This process can also remove photographs from assumed models of periodization. The emphasis is on the relationships that photographs represent through their indexical traces, rather than on individuals in their understandings of human subjectivity and thus, history.
Photos allow people to become known and photographs assume a form of agency in the way they prescribe relations and the telling of history. The act of looking at photographs is itself embedded in social relations. This is so both literally, in the somatic or kinetic relations with photographs as the examples suggested, and metaphorically through the relations that are engendered through the spaces between peoples. But, within this, we have to consider how material forms hold images in certain configurations and bodily relations, giving cultural meaning and concreteness to intentions. Material forms of photographs prescribe responses to them because they demand specific bodily relations. These constitute specific presences and co-presences in spaces, which ‘not only form an inescapable dimension of human interactions but are also regulated by complex communicative conventions’ concerning the way bodies interact with one another in social space’ (Finnegan).
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