The Politics of the Archive (1)
Romancing the archive: the personal rapidly becomes the political
We come to the archive like lovers, with hope and high expectations. We wish it never to have closing hours. We wish it to be infinite so that we never lose our sense of wonder. At the same time, we wish it to be finite so that we might find the morsel of evidence we seek, the definitive document to bolster some thesis we formed too early: the meaning of this particular history is____ and my visit to the archive will offer up proof that___.
But our wishes go mostly ungranted. The archive does have closing hours. It may feel infinite, especially when closing time arrives and we have not completed our searches. But we know otherwise. The archive – despite being too vast and complex to yield its secrets easily - is also frustratingly finite. Unfinished. If during one’s lifetime, every piece of its evidence could be viewed, we would still know damn well there remains the possibility of new evidence out there beyond the archive. As yet undiscovered, unregulated, uncollected.
We’ll publish our paper, having made our case. But someone will come along later and either destroy or improve it. Either way, there is no last word. We write our endings in the disturbing knowledge that there is no end. This applies not only to the possible emergence of new evidence concerning our particular topic, but to history itself. Each one of our working hours is turning itself into the past behind us, piling up even as we write our conclusions. It is behind us, yes, a growing mound, but we are also in it, ever-unfolding history, the “Great Story” of “Everything” that can never end (Carolyn Steedman, Dust):
“… historians want ends, quite as much as anybody else. They, though, are the only narrators who cannot have what they want… At the centre of the written history lies this recognition of temporariness and impermanence. And all historians, even the most purblind empiricists, recognise this in their acts of writing: they are telling the only story that has no end.” (Steedman, Dust)
The finite/infinite and endings/end contradictions are further worsened by problems of narrative and interpretation: how to read and recount historical evidence. Bias. Selection. Gaps. Silences. The social positioning of the historian. The changing political culture in which the archive is administered and within which we read our sources and produce our essays/books. The meaning and status of Truth with a capital T. Time and place. Power.
Truth, power, and the archive
“During the twenties, so a story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar Republic on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. “What, in your opinion,” Clemenceau was asked, “will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?” He replied “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.”
Hannah Arendt recounts this story in her 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics” an examination of the relations between truth, lies, fact, opinion, and power, one that has gained new relevance in the era some now describe as ‘post-truth’. And although she does not contend that historians or archivists alone have the power to alter received truths about the past, she does imagine the possibility of such alteration occurring:
“It is true, considerably more than the whims of historians would be needed to eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium; it would require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world. But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable, and it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power interests, national or social, had the last say in these matters.”
These days, we haven’t far to look. There are numerous examples of the strained relations between facts, fictions, and power. Historians, I contend, are relatively well-equipped for this, even as it worries us as much as anyone else. This is partly because we bear regular witness to the vagaries and unreliability of evidence; we have also documented and analyzed the capacity of historical actors to lie to themselves and others. We struggle with our own ‘truths’. Then, it is partly because knowledge of the past tends to make the present less shocking. But mostly, it is because you cannot study history and remain unaware of the workings of power.
So, in truth, the status of truth has always been worrying. If Derrida’s theory of the archive privileged a psychoanalytical reading, it also attended to matters of political power by reminding us of the Greek origins of the term. As the residence of the archon (magistrate), the archeion was where all official documents were filed. In the beginning, therefore, the archive was located at the seat of the law, at the legal source and legitimation of political power:
“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” (Derrida, Archive Fever)
Our mal d’archive, then, is not only a feverish search for origins, but it is implicated in the legitimation and maintenance, or contestation, of power. Only the most naïve of historians, even before the postmodern turn, would have staked her reputation on the absolute truth of all archives and the written histories derived from them.
Arendt’s story is a stark reminder that historical truth is politically urgent and precarious. What we can say in one time/place, we cannot assume will remain ‘sayable’ in another. The same precariousness applies to archives. Perhaps few working historians saw this more clearly than Foucault who theorized the archive as a discursive practice, as the “law of what can be said”:
“[By archive] I do not mean the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor do I mean the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation… The archive is first the law of what can be said… It does not have the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of all libraries, outside time and place… [rather] it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification.” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge)
Arendt’s essay on truth and politics can now be read as an anticipation of the ways in which the practice of History would be destabilized by postmodern theory. A Holocaust refugee, Arendt adhered to the critical importance of truth, to the ‘fate’ of truth, as she put it. Yet the archive, historical witnesses, our research practices, how we present our findings, the nature of historical writing, narratives, and truths – all of these would soon come under greater pressure. By 2003, Robert Darnton would sum up the historian’s predicament as follows:
“Hard facts have gone soft: there is no denying it, no matter where you took a stand during the last few decades while the waves of relativism swept over the intellectual landscape. Historians may still favour metaphors, such as digging in the archives, but who believes in quarrying out nuggets of reality? Words such as ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ make us uncomfortable and stir the urge to make us run for protective covering.” (Darnton, “How Historians Play God”, European Review, 2003)
Next up: The historian’s anxiety at the archive gate