locating the archive

catalogue of quotes from four documents towards reaching a theory on the archive …

the infinity of lists #

… when we cannot provide a definition by essence for something and so to be able to talk about it, to make it comprehensible or in some way perceivable, we list it properties … pg 15

the infinity of aesthetics is a sensation that follows from the finite and perfect completeness of the thing we admire, while the other form of representation we are talking about suggests infinity almost physically, because in fact it does not end, nor does it conclude in form. we call this representative mode the list, or catalogue … pg 17

at first sight we might think that form is characteristic of mature cultures, which know the world around them, whose order they have recognised and defined; on the contrary the list would seem to be typical of primitive cultures that still have an imprecise image of the universe and limit themselves to listing as many of its properties as they can name without trying to establish a hierarchical relationship among them. pg 18

the practical list can be exemplified by a shopping list, the lists of guests invited to a party, by a library catalogue, by the inventory of objects in any place (such as an office, an archive, or a museum), by the list of assets in a will, by an invoice for goods requiring payment, by a restaurant menu, by the list of sights to see in a tourist guide, and even by a dictionary that records all the words in the lexicon of a given language. pg 111

in their own way practical lists represent a form, because they confer unity on a set of objects that, no matter how dissimilar, among themselves, comply with a contextual pressure, in other words they are related for their being or for their being expected to be found all in the same place, or to constitute the goal of a certain project. pg 112

Rudolf II as Vertumnus by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

the archive #

created as much as state organisations and institutions as by individuals and groups, the archive, as distinct form of collection or library, constitutes a repository or ordered system of documents and records, both verbal and visual, that is the foundation from which history is written. pg 10

so many years will be spent searching, studying, classifying, before my life is secured, carefully arranged and labelled in a safe place – secure against theft, fire and nuclear war – from whence it will be possible to take it out and assemble it at any point. then being thus assured of never dying, i may finally rest. pg 18

everybody has heaps of accumulated piles of paper under their table and their desk, magazine and telephone notices which stream into our homes each day. our home literally stands under a paper rain: magazines, letters, addresses, receipts, notes, envelopes, invitations, catalogues, programmes, telegrams, wrapping paper, and so forth. these streams, waterfalls of paper, we periodically sort and arrange into groups and for every person these groups are different: a group of valuable papers, a group for memory’s sake, a group for every unforeseen occasion – every person has their own principle. pg 33

in opposition to the archive, which designates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said, we give name testimony to the system of relations between the inside and the outside of langue, between the sayable and unsayable in every language. … the archive’s constitution presupposed the bracketing of the subject, who was reduced to a simple function or an empty position; it was founded on the subject’s disappearance into the anonymous murmur of statements. pg 39

so i don’t really want to say much more about that or any of the other boxes except to say that each of them is put together along the sort of lines – following through on a set of personal associations which initially for me were embedded in the objects. i started with these objects, some of which are objects that i have kept for years, little unimportant things, souvenirs if you like, with a lot of personal resonance. of course i didn’t know what the resonance was. i just knew that i was somehow stuck with these things and I never wanted to throw them out. so i started to look into what the resonance of each thing might be for me, and then each got its place in a box and eventually i added appropriate contextualizing material, a title, an annotation and a date like a real collector would, and that is my collection. pg 48

archives are a set, an organised body of documents. next comes the relationship to an institution. archives are said, in one case, to result from institutional activity; in the other, they are said to be produced by or received by the entity for which the documents in question are the archives. finally, putting documents produced by an institution (or its judicial equivalent) into archives has the goal of conserving or preserving them. pg 66

in structural terms, the archive is both an abstract paradigmatic entity and a concrete institution. pg 73

the archive is hypomnesic. pg 78

at the end of modernity archives are, next to and beyond their functional aspect, an embodiment of cultural heritage. they have to be protected, and made available for public visit and scrutiny – in the same way that old churches and monuments, museums, theatres and libraries are. but unlike those institutions, archives do not carry ethical characteristics; they are in that sense amoral. moral quality is the input of those who access them: people make sense of archives, not the other way around. pg 113

each photo-essay enters the archive as if by night, disturbing the guardians of official history written in the light of empirical truth. they constitute a new kind of archive, an archive of the unconscious, an archive of the avant-garde or an avant-garde archive. pg 135

archives, like collections, are built with property of multiple authors and previous owners. but unlike the collection, an archive designates a territory and not a particular narrative. there is no imperative within the logic of the archive to display or interpret. and therefore the meanings of the things contained are up for grabs; it’s a discursive terrain. there’s a creative potential for things to be brought to the level of speech, as they are not already authored as someone’s (eg a curator’s) narrative or property. interpretations are invited and not already determined, which maybe why there is a creative space that many artists are responding too. pg 150

like photography, the archive gains its authority to represent the past through an apparent neutrality, whereby difference is either erased or regulated. both the archive and photography reproduce the world as witness to itself, a testimony to the real, historical evidence. pg 160

to amass an archive is a leap of faith, not in preservation but in the belief that there will be someone to use it, that the accumulation of these histories will continue to live, … pg 186 [a]

in the archive all viewing is incomplete in the sense of having seen all, but also in the sense that this is a living entity, it rumbles along indefinitely, growing in stops and starts, mutating. you can walk into the vaults, there are files, stacks and shelves of material. the records are static but movement is written all over them. pg 186 [b]

the big archive #

the significance of archives lies not only in the matter in each document but the interrelationship of documents within a group. pg 19

there is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition and without a certain exteriority. no archive without outside. pg 43

but also to collect data that would help elucidate the working of the unconscious by collecting written transcripts of unconscious dreams and other material. pg 94

let us put together a museum of our own day with objects of our own day … we will install in the museum a bathroom with its enamelled bath, its china bidet, its washbasin, and its glittering taps of copper or nickel. we will put in an innovation suitcase and a Roneo filing cabinet with its printed index cards, tabulated, numbered, perforated and indented, which will show that in the twentieth century we have learnt how to classify. pg 101

in the early 1920’s several soviet futurists – whose active campaign to destroy the bourgeois art museum and replace it with a “new museum” is by now well documented – discussed the relationship between archives and museums, using the term “archive” as derogatory shorthand for a revisionist attitude toward the past. pg 105

… with a miscarriage it is not necessary to pay for a midwife; similarly, to pay for reports which have not the slightest connection with the present face of the city is a frivolous waste of public funds. pg 106

today people do not live by the encyclopaedia but by the newspaper, the catalogue of articles, brochures and directories … pg 132

that is lenin … and show me where and when it could be said of an artistic synthetic work: this is the real v.i.lenin. there is none. and there will not be any … because there is a file [papka] with photographs, and this file with photographs does not allow anyone to idealize or manipulate lenin … tell me frankly what should remain of lenin: a bronze sculpture, paintings in oil, engravings, water colors … or files with photographs that show him at work and in his free time, archives of his books, notebooks, stenographic reports, films, phonographic notes. pg 132

… warehousing of nature … pg 145

modernism promotes the idea of an archive that does not collect facts as reveal the conditions for their discovery, an archive whose peripheral objects become visible or audible to the extent that they conform to the archives own protocols. pg 173

locking the archive into what it stores, this mechanism is circular to an extent: in the archive, we encounter things we never expected to find; yet the archive is also the condition under which the unexpected, the sudden, the contingent can be sudden, unexpected and contingent. or differently put, nothing enters the archive that is not in some sense destined to be there from the moment of its inception. pg 174

… i wanted to make a Cageian information room where all information would be available but access to it would be rendered arbitrary, accidental. pg 181

the fact that it is not possible to scan a folder’s contents before choosing a document suggests that, despite the archive’s claims to rationality and order, information is ultimately random. information room implies that the shape of information is a result and consequence of the random ways in which we access it. pg 182

the archaeology of knowledge #

to substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. to define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to a body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. to write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion. pg 53

the never completed, never wholly achieved uncovering of the archive forms the general horizon to which the description of discursive formations, the analysis of positives, the mapping of the enunciative field belong. the right of words … authorises, therefore, the use of the term archaeology to describe all these searches. this term does not imply the search for a beginning; it does not relate analysis to geological excavation. it designates the general theme of a description that questions the already-said at the level of its existence: of the enunciative function that operates within it of the discursive formation, and the general archive system to which it belongs. Archaeology describes discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive. pg 148