In the Absence of the Archive (Paris, October 17, 1961)

Abstract

If quantItIes of scholarshIp are any measure—indeed, if the number of volumes and essays devoted to the archive, as both object and concept, can be understood as so many thermometers capable of taking the disciplinary temperature in any number of domains—then we are certainly in a position to diagnose an epidemic of archive fever. More than a place where documents are filed for safekeeping and consultation, the archive has taken on a critical valence that allows it to be conceptualized and theorized, then redeployed as a heuristic tool. The scholarship in question speaks to the multiple ways in which this old noun is made new again, be it by bringing fresh interpretations to documents with a long history (Ann Stoler’s work on imperial Dutch archives in Along the Archival Grain); through the pioneering consultation of official records long hidden from public view (South African scholars’ excavations of apartheid in Reconfiguring the Archive or Mark von Hagen’s engagement with post-Soviet archives in “Archival Gold Rush”); or in discussions of digital technologies and the delights and dangers they pose (Sean Cubitt’s Digital Aesthetics). Beyond these encounters with the archive in its more or less denotative meaning—that is, as documents or a place where documents are kept—scholars have also proposed that archives are all around us; Mike Featherstone, for example, reminds us that the city was an archive for Benjamin, and that Christian Boltanski’s installations constitute “visual archives.”1 Regardless of the form the archival material takes, the work of the “archival turn” has necessarily been concerned with entities that are accessible, that can be viewed, read, consulted, or otherwise physically apprehended by the researcher. Yet numerous state-controlled archives in France, Germany, South Africa, and the former Soviet Union (to name only a few) are subject to administrative injunctions that prohibit consultation of documents deemed “sensitive.” While the reasons and logistics of these various types of archival sequestration vary from country to country, the denial of access underscores the imbricated nature of knowledge, power, and politics. As Foucault and, later, Derrida would point out: “There is no political power without control of the archive [. . .] Effective democratization can always be measured by [. . .] the