Crafting History

Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy

Albena Yaneva

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501751844
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Métodos y materiales arquitectónicos

What constitutes an archive in architecture? What forms does it take? What epistemology does it perform? What kind of craft is archiving? Crafting History provides answers and offers insights on the ontological granularity of the archive and its relationship with architecture as a complex enterprise that starts and ends much beyond the act of building or the life of a creator.

In this book we learn how objects are processed and catalogued, how a classification scheme is produced, how models and drawings are preserved, and how born-digital material battles time and technology obsolescence. We follow the work of conservators, librarians, cataloguers, digital archivists, museum technicians, curators, and architects, and we capture archiving in its mundane and practical course.

Based on ethnographic observation at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and interviews with a range of practitioners, including Álvaro Siza and Peter Eisenman, Albena Yaneva traces archiving through the daily work and care of all its participants, scrutinizing their variable ontology, scale, and politics. Yaneva addresses the strategies practicing architects employ to envisage an archive-based future and tells a story about how architectural collections are crafted so as to form the epistemological basis of architectural history.

1

ARCHIVE FEVERS

The archive often evokes a musty place full of drawers, dim lights, filing cabinets, and shelves overloaded with old documents. Either it is understood as a place enclosing records, a container of objects and other materials of historical interest, an institution; or it is just the collection of such materials from which History emerges, like that scent from old books, the “archive-as-source,” the origins of History. In both these forms, is the archive an inert repository of artifacts of historical importance or sentimental value? Or is it possibly something more than just mute objects and documents—an active and regulatory discursive system, a semantic machine that produces historical meaning, the sure visions of our past? The dual nature of archives as storehouses of dusty objects and as active machines that transform structures and meaning has been the object of many studies by historians, anthropologists, and art and culture studies scholars during the past three decades.

As Michel Foucault provocatively observed in the middle of the twentieth century, the archive is neither the sum of all the texts that a culture preserves nor is it those institutions that allow for that record’s preservation. The archive is rather the “system of statements” that shapes the specific regulations of what can and cannot be said.¹ Thus, it is also “the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events, that is, as a discursive system.”² More than a repository of documents, a series of images, a batch of correspondence, the archive, for Foucault, is what delimits normality, the average, and the field of the possible. While art critics, cultural historians, anthropologists, and historians have wrestled with this formulation to capture what renders archives as powerful documents of exclusion and as monuments to particular configurations of power, architectural scholars have rarely paid attention to the formation of archives, and even less, to the practices of archiving.

The study of archives as practice is motivated by a number of developments in the social sciences and the arts, dating back to the 1990s, a time when the “end of History” was officially announced.³ First, “archive fever” (the drive to remember and store related to the fear of death, destruction, and forgetfulness) spread in the arts, with Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur as key protagonists in rethinking the role of archiving as a tool of memory; yet, it somehow arrived late in the field of architectural scholarship.⁴ Second, the emergence of the trend of “archival ethnography” (a technique of adapting ethnography to account for the lived experience from the past) witnessed the advent of the “archival turn” (the increasing use of archival sources and the need to conceptualize them) in anthropology and led to the rethinking of the role of archives, their formation, and their modes of existence. These two shifts signal, for us, the direction for the development of an anthropology of archiving in architecture. They provide hints for how to think about the nature of architectural archives, which contain both written accounts and textual products of architectural practices and visuals, models, videos, and films. Third, archival studies, performed mainly by archival scientists and rarely by architectural scholars, also took an “empirical turn” (the tendency to conduct empirical research to inform archival practice) in the mid-1990s coinciding with the “archive fever” in the arts and the “archival turn” in anthropology; this turn has opened up new, and previously unexplored, venues for understanding architectural archiving.

The Archive “Fever”

When philosophers and historians question themes of remembering, recollecting, and narrating the past, they look to the archive as a means of thinking through the problematic relationship between what has passed and what is to come. The archive is the site of epistemological questions that are tied to historical research, and how we write about our pasts; inevitably, archiving is caught within problems related to memory and testimony. While history and memory have been construed as two different ways of dealing with the past—history is written, documented, and “stands for” the past; memory is imbued with private and affective recollections—others have combined the two, treating history as a special case of social and cultural memory.⁵ The fundamental objective of the good historian, according to Paul Ricoeur, is not just to consult archives, but to “enlarge the sphere of archives”; the conscientious historian should “open up the archive by retrieving the traces which the dominant ideological forces attempted to suppress.”⁶ Questioning the epistemological status of the documents that compose an archive, he distinguishes between monuments, documents, and traces. Insofar as the content of archives is thought to be more like documents than monuments, the critical approach advocated by Ricoeur aims at revealing “the monument hiding behind the document.”⁷ For Ricoeur, as well as Derrida and Benjamin, the archive is a way to resuscitate the “Angel of History.” The archive holds not mere neutral traces of the past in the form of dead documents, witnessing for the mechanical reproduction of “progress,” but possible monuments for enlarging “collective memory” and enlivening the past, of recollecting it differently; monument is what transforms the past and the possible future and thus is an “ethical” and “critical” device for the historian to act on what has passed and on what is to come. The archive is a tool for the critical historian to use to “narrate” the past differently in order to alter the future.

This awareness of the archive—its role, what constitutes it, and what it constitutes—is part of the increasing reflexivity of “history in practice”⁸; historical research often revolves around concepts and ideas, which were not known at the time of the construction of archives, whereby the archive becomes the catalysis for such concepts and ideas.⁹ Ironically, the archive is thus also grasped and plagued with an anxiety related to uncertainty and the unknown. For Michel Foucault, the formation of archives and the practice of archiving prevent the amorphous amassing of things, thus controlling, even mastering, one might say, the fear of a frenzied accumulation, by establishing an “order of things.”¹⁰ Pointing to another fear, the fear of death, Jacques Derrida argues that facing destruction, and consequently forgetfulness, is what prompts, permits, and conditions archivization. The archive holds the possibility of memorization, repetition, and reproduction. The archive always works against itself, as the need to archive is connected to the fear of loss. Yet to archive something, it must be fixed in time (like a butterfly pinned in a glass case), and thus, paradoxically, to archive is also to kill what you fear to lose. Drawing on the analysis of Freud’s own archive, Derrida coined the term “archive fever” or mal d’archive to outline that the archive is founded on an instant of death, a moment of passing into the past.¹¹ In other words, the death drive threatens every archival desire and leads to the destruction of traces and of the archives themselves. The archive, for Derrida, is aporetic: a desire to remember that is founded on the drive to destruction.

If Foucault sees the archive as unequivocally related to discourse production and allowing for a multiplicity of statements to emerge, Derrida in contrast, plays with the double meaning of “archive.” The Greek origin of the term, arkheion, refers to a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded, but it is also associated with arkhe, which is the commencement of history and the command of a people, an authority. Reflecting on the semantics of the term, Derrida regards the archive as having an important “archontic power,” as it is what “gathers the functions of unification, of identification, of classification.”¹² But Derrida emphasizes that this “archontic power” can be thought only in conjunction with another aspect of the archive, the “power of consignation.” Consignation, as an act of entrusting, assigning residence, handing over for care, is also an act of consigning, consenting, and agreeing through the gathering together of all signs. For Derrida, “There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority.”¹³ Thus, consignation brings us back to the double meaning of the archive as what the dust settles on—storage, deposit, house, on the one hand—and, on the other hand, as that active circuit that scatters the dust—a mechanism of discursive formation or sign generation. The archive is, therefore, what gathers together things in a place, in a depository, in a building, and what simultaneously generates signs, discourse, and an authorized sequence of events.

The archive has been largely discussed and conceptualized through a semantic framework, that is, as language. Building on Foucault’s theorization of the archive, Giorgio Agamben’s work also locates the archive within language, in terms of the history of what is possible to say and as a collection of what has already been said, but also in terms of “testimony,” or the impotentiality of speaking (the impossible passage of voice to speech and the difficulty in attaining the experience of language).¹⁴ For him, the archive is “the mass of the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of its enunciation; it is the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act of speech.”¹⁵ The archive is also “the unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything said by virtue of being enunciated.”¹⁶ Maintaining a discursive understanding of archives as what “designates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said,” the conditions of the possibility of speaking, that is, language as such, Agamben differentiates the archive from testimony; testimony is what points to “the system of relations between the inside and the outside of langue” and “between a possibility and an impossibility of speech.”¹⁷ In addition, the constitution of the archive presupposes the bracketing of the subject, who is reduced to a simple function or an empty position; thus, archive is founded on the disappearance of the subject into the anonymous murmur of statements, whereas testimony refers to the reemergence of the subject who is subjected to the impossibility of speech, and yet speaks. In other words, the archive, and here Agamben agrees with Foucault, constitutes the “historical a priori” (the fact that the conditions of possibility for thought are both necessary for us and also historically contingent) delimiting what is possible in speech; yet Agamben also departs from Foucault through the idea of testimony, which is what the speaking subject who witnesses that which is impossible in speech does.

By conceptualizing and problematizing the archive in different ways, the work of these philosophers has inspired art scholars, artists, and critics to rethink the role of archiving in the arts in the past three decades and precipitated the birth of what is known as the “archival arts.” From the inception of digital photography as a medium that acts simultaneously as documentary evidence and archival record, the expansion of the use of archives in the arts has led to an “archive fever”; many art scholars have appropriated the term to describe the ways in which artists have seized, interpreted, reconfigured and interrogated archival structures and materials.¹⁸ In fact, the abundance of literature addressing photography and film as the preeminent forms of archival material and the capacity of the camera to act as an archiving machine is an index for the extent of the spread of this “fever.” The capacity for accurate description, the ability to establish distinct relations of time and event, image and statement, have come to define the terms of archival production in the arts as being proper to the language of those mechanical media.

In reflecting on what constitutes a photographic archive as a documentary source or as an artistic one, shortly before the art world caught “archive fever,” Allan Sekula posited an understanding of archives as a territory of images shaped by different patterns of ownership, commercialization, and commodification (e.g., images for sale, copyrights, licenses);¹⁹ the general condition of archives involves the subordination of “use” to the logic of “exchange.”²⁰ Affirming that the semantic availability of pictures in archives exhibits the same abstract logic as that which characterizes goods in the marketplace, he advocates that an archive has to be read from below, “from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced or made invisible by the machineries of profit and progress.”²¹ Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history,²² Sekula argues that we can no longer consider the contents or the forms of archives, or the many receptions and interpretations of the archive of human achievements, to be inno...