The notion of an archive achieving “master” status within a nation-state not only implies public consensus around an assemblage of ruling ideologies but also the enactment of physical violence against other human beings. As seductive as the power of a master archive is to the modern state, even to the point of it contracting what Jacques Derrida calls “archive fever,”1 the materiality of this power reveals contours of triumph for some and despair for others. For Derrida, “there is no political power without control of the archive”; yet framed differently, I would add that there is no control of the archive without political power resorting to physical acts of violence against other humans.2 Of course, Derrida was not undiscerning of the correlation between state archives and violence. He not only conflates the archive with state power, he also understands the archive as prone to violence (or, as he describes, “archival violence”) because of its institutive and conservative functions.3 Another way to conceptualize the violence of the archive is through what Derrida calls “archivization,” which points to how “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structures of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.”4 As Derrida explains, “archivization produces as much as it records the event.”5 What archivization produces is inherently violent largely because it involves what Derrida calls “the death, aggression, and destruction drive” or “archive fever (mal d’ archive).”6 Here the power of the archive constitutes specific abuses like repressions, censoring, reductions, forgetfulness, erasure, secrets, or what Derrida terms the “the in-finite,” which is “an archiving destruction.”7 In this way, archivization “produces the very thing it reduces,” which for state power can legitimate acts of radical evil against other humans. By understanding the archive as the violence on power, Derrida “opens the ethico-political dimension of the problem.”8
The Politics of the Master Archive
For the ruling power, the archive’s allure lies in how it is able to compel a social body about what is true and real while at the same time rendering unseen its silencing mechanisms and productions of otherness. As Thomas Osborn rightly states, “it would be a mistake ever to think that there could be an archive without a politics of the archive.”9 Here again, I would frame “politics” not merely as an ideological force but more importantly as an activity that produces power. In Western society, master archives are themselves premised on particular conceptions of what is and is not considered archival worthy.10 As Elisabeth Kaplan rightly explains, “the archival record doesn’t just happen: it is created by individuals and organizations, and used … to support their values and mission.”11 Here the master archive has an underside in which truth-making is indeed a subjective process that works to reproduce the ruling power rather than stultify it. Such a claim has in view the everyday operations of archives (archivization) like appraising, collecting, and preserving facts. On the surface, this day-to-day technical labor operates with intentional purpose toward a designated common good; yet when seen from the vantage point of who is excluded, it is clear that this labor seeks to privilege certain forms of knowledge over others. Thus, the question to be considered is how the privileging of knowledge within a master archive facilitates the subjection of those representing the excluded knowledge. The dismissal of other experiences and realities from the master archive comes about by what Albert Memmi refers to as a series of negations: “they are not fully human, they are not civilized enough to have systems, they are not literate, their languages and modes of thought are inadequate.”12 In this sense, the archive’s exclusion of particular forms of knowledge is less about preservation of facts than about a common set of values, norms, and beliefs that deem some humans as unworthy of any dignified existence.
At the state level, a master archive has the most to gain from such negations in part because its domain of influence extends over, at the least, a geographical territory and hence a social body. In this way, the people privileged in the national archive reflect the same people privileged in the broader sociopolitical and economic realities of that nation. Moreover, the negated human Other in a nation’s master archive often represents the marginalized human Other in its economy, politics, and social order. Though I admit that social implications are infinitely in flux, the negation of the human Other is traceable within the professionalization complex of academia, which in part pertains to the credentialing of scholars, the rise and fall of disciplinary discourses, publishing markets, and epistemic currencies—to name a few. Yet even with this complex of negation, libraries, museums, and archives are the incubating institutions in the archival violence of human silencing. The origin of such a dynamic is rooted in elite power, for it is here that these institutions are declared stewards of all knowledge. Supporting this claim are their colossal spaces, expansive bookshelves, modes of surveillance, systems of organization, and admissions procedures. In what appears natural to their stewardship of knowledge, it is elite power that ultimately stands to benefit from these everyday practices.
The Indexes of Subjectivity for the Archive
The strains of archival theory that inform this book primarily begin with the revelatory work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and afterward pivot to postcolonial studies and theory.13 This trajectory of archival theory acts on the unveiling claims that Derrida and Foucault provide regarding the subjectivity of the archive and the power it wields in Western society. For Derrida, the archive’s subjectivity lies in its techniques of archivization and, for Foucault, this subjectivity comes to the fore when the archive is viewed as “the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.”14 Distinctive here is how the archive is problematized, so that we understand it not as a benign repository of documents but rather as a form of technology, process, system, and mode of operation for reproducing state power.15 As Foucault indicates, the archive marks “the first law of what can be said” and hence determines how what is said is “grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities.”16 In tracing the actions of elite forms of power (e.g. nation-state and empire), the archive emerges as a profitable tool, largely because its central function is to define the what, when, where, and who of truth. Yet, as Derrida and Foucault have revealed, this function is not performed objectively but rather is conditioned by a social context in which the biases of designated social bodies prevail as facts. Indeed, this initial awareness of the archive’s subjectivity has given rise to a number of critical studies that historicize the archive’s multiple subjectivities.17 As Nicholas Dirks writes, “the archive is simultaneously the outcome of historical process and the very condition for the production of historical knowledge. The time has come to historicize the archive.”18 In her introduction to the acclaimed book Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Antoinette Burton also makes a similar charge with these words:
Among the disciplines that have yet to seize the moment in fulfilling Dirks’s call to historicize the archive is biblical studies. Indeed, Derrida’s words come to mind here: “a Biblical scholar, as they say, claim[s] to speak in all objectivity while basing himself on ancient or new archives.”20 This reminder of the biblical scholar’s incessant reliance on ancient and new archives obliges me to rephrase Dirks’s call; the time has come to hi...Our insistence on the necessity of talking about the backstage of archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated—stems equally from our sense that even the most sophisticated work on archives has not gone far enough in addressing head-on the lingering presumptions about, and attachments to, the claims to objectivity with which archives have historically been synonymous, at least since the extended moment of positivistic science on the German model in the nineteenth century.19