Archiving the Potentialities of Events

Abstract

CONSTRUCTING AN ARCHIVE exclusively for events that can happen--regardless of whether or not they ever will or actually ever did happen--is also to challenge limits of what an archive can do. Since 1999, Lebanese artist Walid Raad has done just that. His project Atlas Group Archive still documents, researches and produces a contemporary history of Lebanese civil that ravaged Lebanon between 1975 and 1991. In their exhibitions, Atlas Group Archive claims, like any other archive, that objects on display constitute factual evidence of past events. Ibis in no sense untrue, but as I will suggest in more detail, most striking experience when attending their exhibitions realization that documents represent not actual past events but potential ones. I will argue that archive's artefacts and explanatory texts produce historical paradoxes in such a way that these are capable of documenting historical potentialities of events. As Raad himself explained in an interview: The documents in this imaginary archive do not so much document 'what happened: but what can be imagined, what can be said, taken for granted, what can appear as rational or not, as thinkable and sayable about civil wars (Raad 2001). In short, Atlas Group organizes an archive for potentialities that only appeared historically after wars. in this article, I will describe and analyze what structural features are required of such an archive. Atlas Group Archive collects and displays physical things. Yet its collection amounts to an archive of potentialities. This in itself remarkable, since distinction between things and potentialities fundamental. Their separation ontological, which means that way things are completely different from way potentialities are. It was Aristotle who introduced this fundamental difference into philosophy. (1) He argued that if a potentiality were said to be, in same way that a thing is, one would confuse being of a thing with being of that which enables a thing to be way it is. Aristotle also said that, unlike a thing, a potentiality can exist without manifesting itself as an actual being: one can be able to do a thing without ever doing it, showing it or even knowing about it. There have been several different attempts to define difference between potential beings and actual beings. For purpose of speaking about Atlas Group Archive, I would like to avoid majority of definitions, which in one way or another hinge upon materialization or realization of a potentiality. Instead, I would prefer to take as my departure point how actual beings and potentialities change. A potentiality does not change same way as an actual being changes. Therefore, I would say that ontogenetically two belong to two different modes of existence. In essay collection Potentialities, Giorgio Agamben traces a philosophical history of potentiality from Aristotle until today. He ends by showing how Derrida and Daleuze differ precisely on point of how to separate potentialities from actual beings. Agamben concludes his remarks on Derrida by saying that in his conceptualization of trace:' its pure potential to signify (and not to signify) is no longer meaning's self-reference, a sign's signification of itself; instead, it materialization of a potentiality, materialization of its own possibility (Agamben 218). Trace in Derrida does not mean that potentialities materialize into actual beings, but that they materialize so as to make their own actualization possible. Quite differently in essay on Deleuze, Agamben finds that the potentiality that constitutes life in original sense (self-nourishment) coincides with very desire to preserve one's own Being that, in Spinoza and Deleuze, defines potentiality of life as absolute immanence (Agamben 237). Self-nourishment--as a desire to preserve--does not mean to reduce change to a minimum, but to encourage natural growth . …