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The archive and the human sciences: notes towards a theory of the
archive
Irving Velody
History of the Human Sciences 1998; 11; 1
DOI: 10.1177/095269519801100401
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Vol. 11 No. 4
1-
As the
backdrop to all scholarly research stands the archive. Appeals to ultitruth, adequacy and plausibility in the work of the humanities and social
sciences rest on archival presuppositions. This article aims to explore the
mate
character and nature of the archive; what kinds of claims are involved in the
idea of the archive; how the concept has changed and is likely to change
further in the future; and the incorporation of increasingly diverse types of
material within the archive. I will also consider the politics of the archive as
well as questions of who has rights over the archive and to whom does it
belong.
What then is the archive? The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers
this derivation: Archives (1603); from the French Archives, from the Latin
archiva; and from the Greek archeia meaning: magisterial residence, public
office. The word is defined, then, as a place in which public records are kept.
The Petit Robert gives the following. Archives: from the low Latin archivum;
the Greek arkheion: that which is old. The definition is much as in the Shorter
OED above.
In Archive Fever (but perhaps Mal dArchive might better be titled The
Trouble with Archives) Derrida points up two aspects of archives and both
relate to Greek terms and usages. On the one hand he notes the physical siting
of the archive: as that where the arkhe is, the source or commencement. On
the other hand there is the binding aspect of arkhe: the nomological. Yet in
its singular form as archive, the earliest use as in arkheion derives from house,
the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons. The documents thus
the law and its nature; and demand in their turn a privileged topology
siting. A science of the archive must then include a theory of its institutionalization.
state
or
as
Of
such
as
varied range of genre types: the age of blurred genres (Geertz, 1983). But did
Geertz envisage the following as part of this enrichment?
aspect of Bororo practices help to banalize and at the same exorcize the everyday religious practices of French men and women.
But Selfs narrative and fictional account of the Ur-Bororo reflect precisely
the narrativizational and reportage techniques of much anthropology and
social science today. At the same time the banal and indeed boring character
of Ur-Bororo life and culture successfully establishes the current view that
the mystery of our own social world is not to be resolved by claims about
the other; rather our first task is to throw off the colonialist conception of
Other Peoples, and recognize the exotic nature of our own worlds.
But can the archive encompass Self as well as Malinowski?
ARCHIVAL TRANSGRESSION
In the Winter of 1992, in the
(Ascherson,
1996:
253-4)
How very threatening the legitimation of a particular item for the archive
may be is apparent in a recent discussion of published sociological research.
In a review of Jodi Deans Aliens in America, but one of several volumes discussing alien abduction, Frederick Crews (1998) writes of his hope that belief
in alien abduction, like belief in recovered memories, is on the retreat. The
folly of abduction memory can be halted through public education and counseling. He goes on:
As someone who spent his employed decades in a congenial university
environment, I would like to think that academics will be prime contributors
to
movement
science, what
stake here is again the question of what is a legitimate item for the
archive; what kinds of data can be proffered and what must be offered with
a denying claim attached.
What really upsets Crews is this statement: ...I am not trying to explain
why people believe in UFOs. My interest is in what the attention to aliens
and UFOs in contexts beyond the ufological tell us about contemporary
America (Dean, 1998: 201). Dean here appropriates Bruno Latours conditional distinctions between the rational and the irrational. In effect, Latour
argues that once the scientist steps outside of her context of research her comments on rationality have little bearing on the actuality of events beyond the
laboratory. It is just this putting to one side the matter of the truth claims of
alien abductees that is in question for Crews and others like him. There are
indications for Crews that this state of affairs is profoundly linked to the
current culture wars in American universities. (No doubt the implementation of the Research Assessment Exercise will continue to insulate UK academia from such horrors.) On the question of archives and their uses Crews
is attempting to undermine the legitimacy of Deans procedure and methodology. Presumably he would want to deny her materials the normal standing
in such collections of data. To clarify and emphasize this point it is worth
noting that Crews ends his review with this comment on Deans publishers:
The editors at Cornell University Press - unless they have already been supplanted by space invaders - are apparently wagering such babble will be the
academic lingua franca of the future. No doubt he would take the same view
of any agency that supported and collated such research.
At another level, divisions about the legitimacy of an archive can have
enormous consequences. In the case of the destruction of the Abkhazian
archives the very identity of a culture appears involved (Ascherson, 1996). As
a current example I take the disputes over Noel Malcolms sources in his
account of the history of Kosovo, which echo the current conflict between
Serbs and Albanian speakers in that province (Malcolm, 1998). Rightly so it
might be added, as his book denies the truth claims of Serbian origins in that
land and seems to legitimate the armed opposition of the Kosovo Liberation
Army. Medieval Kosovo is often referred to as the cradle of the Serbs ... but
the reality was rather different (Malcolm,1998: 41 ) Much of Malcolms study
is an examination of a number of such realities and the consequent demolition of several myths, frequently Serbian myths of nationhood and ethnic
dominance. Towards the end of the book Malcolm writes: According to the
mythic history of the Serbs, what happened in 1912 was an act of liberation
which rescued an oppressed people ..., but expresses the hope that Serbs
will reject those fixed patterns of thought which such myths represent (1998:
is
at
355-6;
emphasis added).
as
Wolfgang
notes
quotes the
statement
by
Beyond textual materials there lies a vast province of further objects for the
archive; the remains of past civilizations, arrowheads, tools; and images ...
and, in particular, photographs.
That the photograph plays a major part in all investigations concerning
propriety and truth is one outcome of this 19th-century invention. In a sense
the photograph offers evidence unimpeachable in contrast to the written
word or even the recorded voice. However, the recorded image itself clearly
requires some form of contextualization, or framing. Yet the frame, too, may
generate irresolvable ambiguities. In W. G. Sebalds fictions (or fictions there appears some doubt about the naming of these volumes), ?he Rings of
Saturn and The Emigrants, one bizarre aspect of the volumes is the insertion
of photographs in the text. But the pictures themselves remain untitled. There
is no directive from text to picture of the kind: look at this person - this is
Paul Bereyter whose exile I am retailing; although such a statement is
somehow implied.
Just how difficult this matter of framing can be emerges from testimony in
the first of the O. J. Simpson murder trials. In an attempt to undermine the
evidence of the policeman who established a key link in the murder investigation - the discovery of a glove connecting Simpson, an outstanding black
sportsman, to the murders - defence lawyers pursue the following line of
attack. Officer Fuhrman, who found the glove, had stated that at no time had
he used racist, anti-black language. On this point defence offered as evidence
a set of video recordings made a decade before these events.
Evidence established that Laura McKinny (employed by UCLA) first met
Los Angeles Police Department Officer Mark Furhman in 1985. Interested
in writing a screenplay about women police she was able to interview
Furhman, who had expressed strong views about women police officers, over
a period of ten years. The following are extracts from the trial transcript,
available interestingly on a Website.1 Fuhrman having repeatedly denied
using racial epithets, the transcript states:
The Fuhrman Tapes contain forty examples of the use of the term
nigger to refer to black persons in a racially disparaging context.
Where would this country be if every time a sheriff went out with a
posse to find somebody who just robbed and killed a bunch of people,
he stopped and talked to them first. To make sure they had guns. Tried
to take them - they shot them in the back. We still should be shooting
people in the back....
Further on the transcript offers an example of the falsification of a police
report. Here Fuhrman arrests a suspected narcotics user but cant find any
needle marks. However:
these
can
to
problems.
ARCHIVE AS DATA
empirical support for their investigations, the social scihave their parallel problems. The standard format of much sociology and a good deal of anthropology and psychology has been to establish
standards of data collection and collation that can in some sense stand beside
the work of the natural sciences. In his discussion of the construction of an
In the quest for solid
ences too
anthropological cross-cultural archive, George Marcus notes that the objective here was to create in effect a database for the development of the kind of
positivist conception of the social sciences that we associate with the generation of general statements and law-like formulations.
As Marcus tells us, among the most distinguished attempts in anthropology at the construction of an archive from a scientific orientation was the
Human Relations Area Files (Marcus, 1998). Founded by George Murdoch
in 1937 at Yale University, it seemed the realization of William Graham
Sumners dream, a vision very like a parody of Foucaults description in The
Order of Things of the Enlightenments proposals for the ordering of the
worlds knowledge. Sumner envisioned a room with its four walls lined with
deep shelves, one for each society of the world. All cultural and background
information was to be arranged in systematic order (Marcus, 1998). Indeed
this could be a chapter from Foucault, or perhaps a positivists redescription
of Borges Library of Babel.
A rather similar undertaking can be seen in the ongoing studies of social
mobility conducted at Nuffield College Oxford by, among others, John
Goldthorpe, Anthony Heath and A. H. Halsey. The purpose of these studies
was to explore processes of class formation and class auction.Such issues were
certainly central to the agenda of British sociology in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet, in spite of the highly sophisticated statistical analyses that have been
applied to the data held in this expensively generated archive, the impact of
this work upon current sociological thinking is clearly limited to a small
coterie devoted to what they call conventional class analysis. Indeed, class
itself is a subject confined to a small, and apparently diminishing, corner of
academic bookshops and makes little appearance in current catalogues of
major sociological publishers (Bradley, 1999).
In part this reflects disputed claims on just what should go into the archive,
or at least this particular archive. What kind of data are worthy of being
recorded, sorted, designated and located. For Goldthorpe and his colleagues
the answer is clear: measurable materials. Yet for many sociologists concerned with the effects of class on individuals and their life narratives, the core
of the problem is the exclusion of qualitative materials and narrative forms
from this particular archive collection.
RESOURCE CENTRES AND ARCHIVAL
REFERENCE POINTS.
hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life. (Ted Hughes on
of access to the Sylvia Plath archive in Rose, 1991: 65)
Much of what passes for archival information begins in fact with sources for
I
matters
reaching out to such pockets and collections of basic data, and knowledge of
the remnants of other peoples lives. A much used text of this kind is Foster
and Sheppards British Archives (1995). As its subtitle indicates, it is a guide
to archive resources in the UK. Very similar in intention to British Archives,
but on a far more grandiose scale, is the Archon website. Describing itself as
the principle information gateway for UK archivists and users of manuscript
sources for British history, it is hosted and maintained by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts bearing with it the states imprimatur.3
Carrying out a rather similar function for the social sciences, although far
more modestly, is Qualidata. Set up by the ESRC (Economic &
Social
Research Council) at Essex University in 1994, the aim of Qualidata, the
Qualitative Data Archival Resource Centre, is to locate, assess and arrange
for the deposit in suitable public archive repositories of significant qualitative
research data.
However, just what happens when the investigator reaches, or simply considers using an archive is an interesting question in itself, as the cache may
require some kind of incantation to release its secrets. This password may
not always be forthcoming as in the case of Sylvia Plaths literary remains.
While a number of biographies of Plath have been written over the years, as
Janet Malcolm notes in her survey of such writings, two in particular stand
out: Anne Stephensons account, written with the approval of Plaths
husband and sister-in-law, Ted Hughes and Olwen Hughes, who offered
(apparently) controlled access to certain archives; and the assessment of
Jacqueline Rose, written in the face of much hostility from the Hugheses
(Malcolm, 1995; Stephenson, 1990; Rose, 1991). However, Malcolms book
begins with the account of a less notorious publication in this series, that by
Linda Wagner-Martin. Discussing her exchanges with Olwen Hughes over
her manuscript, in part to obtain permission to quote at length from Plaths
works, Wagner-Martin eventually concluded that objections to details in her
work would continue, and I had to end my attempt to obtain permission to
quote at length if ever I was to publish this book. However, much the
greater part of Malcolms book deals with the conflicting visions of Sylvia
Plath in the two biographies by Stephenson and Rose. While in her Authors
Note to Bitter Fame Stephenson writes that Ms Hughess contribution to
this text makes it almost a dual work, in strong contrast Jacqueline Rose
reports that the Hugheses attempted to revoke the permissions for quotation of four poems in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Malcolm 1995: 174).
Although perhaps trivial in itself, it is certainly significant for this article that
the section of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath that was found most objectionable and was, to quote Malcolm again, to stick in the Hugheses craw was
a chapter called &dquo;The Archive&dquo;. Cunningly enough, The Archive itself
opens with a quotation from a Ted Hughes poem from a larger collection,
Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. In the poem, Crows Nerve
Fails, the central, eponymous character of the book finds his every feather
the very reminders and remainders of a trail of murder; in a striking phrase
Crow himself becomes an embodied archive of accusations. In a telling
comment Rose says: it is impossible to read Plath independently of the
frame, the surrounding discourses, through which her writing is presented
(Rose, 1991: 69). For Rose, this section The Archive is a reading of the
editing of Plaths work; a reading which is of necessity speculative. Part of
the reason for such speculations must lie in the conditions of archival constraint and regulation; as Rose, having made a visit to the Smith College Rare
Book Room, observes of the availability of Plaths journals, The originals
are unavailable, sections of them under seal until 2013 (Rose, 1991: 248).
However, successful archival breaching where it does occur, often leads to
an impressive textual display. To return to Noel Malcolms Kosovo, among
his acknowledgements is a list of archival resources; although perfectly standard nevertheless they have a ring of the esoteric and obscure (I have heavily
edited the sequence so as not to exhaust the reader):
permission to study and cite manuscript materials in their collections, I am grateful to the Controller of Her Majestys Stationery Office
in respect of the Public Record Office, and also the following: the
For
...
(Malcolm,
1998:
viii-ix)
The
The very notion of the museum has given rise to a science which at first sight
is reminiscent of one of Derridas cognitive fantasies, grammatology, archiviology ...4: namely museology. The museologists have contributed much to
our understanding of the procedures of obscuration and display in galleries
which are well matched in academic institutions at large with their own
complex and frequently inaccessible collections and databanks. In contrast,
10
the work of an artist like Boltanski, who actively parades his archive and
archivistic materials, carries out the very contrary activity: this work openly
boasting of its duplicity and ambiguities tells the onlooker quite precisely the
contingency and serendipity which make up these works.
In a series of publications Donald Preziosi (1989, 1996, 1998) has discussed
the problematics of the art gallery in particular. The crucial supporting
activity linked to this institution is art history, a discipline intimately related
to the gallery and the museum. It has been in many ways the most orthodox and conventional of the human sciences; while in contrast the attempts
by, say, sociology, to decode art have been marked by crass causal explanations and an extraordinary insensitivity to the products themselves.
However, Preziosi shows us that the kind of work he and his colleagues are
involved in is very much at the heart the broad range of current human
science issues; his researches indicate the distance between himself and traditional art-historical work, and at the same time hint at the possibilities other
disciplines (like sociology) could take on and employ to fruitfully extend
their range. Preziosi argues that art history enframes an ars memorativa - a
system of protocols for elucidating knowledge and a prescriptive grammar
for the composition of historical narratives: ... the modern discipline acts as
an anamorphic archive keyed by a panoptic gaze.5 That is, behind its apparently systematically organized array of objects, artefacts and data, lie a
panoply of contingent and ad hoc machines for bringing the performance of
the art museum into play.
The consequences of this point can be seen through the following example.
It has been argued that for Giorgione, perhaps the most famous of Renaissance painters, there is no single work that can be confidently attributed to
him. The complexities of art historical analysis have particular resonance for
the archive as:
of
the catalogue is the quintessential archive for art history ... whether
this is the catalogue of all the artists works or the catalogue of a
museum collection etc.... The crucial characteristic is that each item in
the catalogue (archive) is understood to relate to a particular (unique)
art object and to contain all the verbalisable basic data relevant to that
object. (Nowadays it often also includes a visual simulacrum in computerised or photographic form.) And that data usually at a minimum
consists of: the Artist: i.e. the necessity of attribution - since the Artist
is the key word by which you access the archival entry. The other data
are: time, date, medium and provenance.6
...
11
comments as
on
to
12
the second level the clear possibility of formal, mathematical operationalization. The archive then should be considered as one of a growing cluster of
anti-concepts. By this I mean thematic domains, like voice and frame, which
can fruitfully generate the envisioning and revisioning of the world that the
human sciences engage with. By their very nature questions of epistemology
and ontology are not the concerns of those (like myself) who operate with
such modalities. The significance of the archive then is not bound up with its
quiddities. The adequacy, propriety, truthfulness of the materials, entities and
objects that constitute an archive cannot be judged by their appearance in the
archive as such. Only those who work within and around the archive can
undertake such claims. As the work of the installation artist, Christian
Boltanski, displays: the archive and his archivization of photographs, newscuttings and so on may well raise questions of both genocide and the loss of
community (Hobbs, 1998). But on matters concerning the significance of
those materials used, the documents, the clothing, the time cards: these both
resist and offer questions about their reality and appropriation. The substantiation and defeasibility of these claims are only partially related to the existence of the archive itself.
As has become apparent, the problem of the archive is bound up - not so
much with the methods of its accumulation - but rather its legitimacy. And
matters of legitimacy relate to events within the larger order of the world:
that is, beyond the academic community.
The partial release of the files of the GDR Staatssicherheitsdienst - the Stasi
has had devastating consequences for individual lives, and raised difficult
questions. A case in point is that of the East German writer Christa Wolf,
whose novel A Model Childhood is an impressive account of a girl growing
up under the Third Reich and her complicity with National Socialism. The
revelation that she had also co-operated with the Stasi caused a storm of
debate in Germany and beyond, on her motives. In reply to an interview
question that she was intellectually afraid Wolf responds:
-
The difficult
reported and
is
just what
was
being
more
13
because
lips
(writes Nora)
mimoire, in which
UK
NOTES
1 See: Defense Amended Offer of Proof Re: Fuhrman
Tapes,
under Websites
below.
2
Findings of the mobility studies are presented in Halsey et al. (1980), Goldthorpe
(1987), Eriksen and Goldthorpe (1992). Critical discussion of the exclusion of
women
et
al. (1988)
Crompton and
Mann
The
oeuvre
perhaps
14
(1984). Barhams work reveals with great sensitivity that the apparent
silence of such patients, that is the silence that follows on from inability of the
observer to understand the inmates words, can be infused with meanings. But this
involves a considerable move away from the treatment of these subjects as mere
respondents to exterior stimulants. More particularly it calls for the use of narrative
techniques deriving from a variety of disciplines but including politics, sociology
and literary theory.
8 I have included two Website references on how to do citations in this medium from
a longer list provided by Beth Davis-Brown - to whom many thanks. (See Internet
7 See Barham
15
writing
this
how
carry
to
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ernst, W. (1999) Archival Action: The Politicisation of German Archives from Read
Only Memory into Agencies of Politics in the Weimar Republic and under the
Regime, History of the Human Sciences 12(2).
Foster, J. and J. Sheppard (1995) British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the
United Kingdom, 3rd edn. London: Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences.
National Socialist
London: Tavistock.
Woman:
Sylvia
Hughes. London:
Papermac.
Malcolm, N. (1998) Kosovo: A Short History. London: Macmillan.
16
University Press.
Rose, J. (1991) The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago.
Rugg, L. H. (1997) Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sebald, W. G. (1997) The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press.
Sebald, W. G. (1998) The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill
Press.
Tapes
[http://www.php.indiana.edu/-dmiguse/OJ/fuhrman.html].
[http://www.stedwards.edu/cfpages/stoll/internet.htm].
Bibliographic references to electronic documents
[http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/iso/tc46sc9/standard/690-2e.htm].
Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts Website
[http://www.hmc.gov.uk/archon/noframes.htm].
ISO 690-2,