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 âarchive-as-source,â 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 documentsâan 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 recordâs preservation. The archive is rather the âsystem of statementsâ that shapes the specific regulations of what can and cannot be said.1 Thus, it is also âthe system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events, that is, as a discursive system.â2 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 âend of Historyâ was officially announced.3 First, âarchive feverâ (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 âarchival ethnographyâ (a technique of adapting ethnography to account for the lived experience from the past) witnessed the advent of the âarchival turnâ (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 âempirical turnâ (the tendency to conduct empirical research to inform archival practice) in the mid-1990s coinciding with the âarchive feverâ in the arts and the âarchival turnâ in anthropology; this turn has opened up new, and previously unexplored, venues for understanding architectural archiving.
The Archive âFeverâ
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 pastâhistory is written, documented, and âstands forâ the past; memory is imbued with private and affective recollectionsâothers 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 âenlarge the sphere of archivesâ; the conscientious historian should âopen up the archive by retrieving the traces which the dominant ideological forces attempted to suppress.â6 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 âthe monument hiding behind the document.â7 For Ricoeur, as well as Derrida and Benjamin, the archive is a way to resuscitate the âAngel of History.â The archive holds not mere neutral traces of the past in the form of dead documents, witnessing for the mechanical reproduction of âprogress,â but possible monuments for enlarging âcollective memoryâ and enlivening the past, of recollecting it differently; monument is what transforms the past and the possible future and thus is an âethicalâ and âcriticalâ 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 ânarrateâ the past differently in order to alter the future.
This awareness of the archiveâits role, what constitutes it, and what it constitutesâis part of the increasing reflexivity of âhistory in practiceâ8; 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 âorder of things.â10 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 Freudâs own archive, Derrida coined the term âarchive feverâ or mal dâarchive 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 âarchive.â 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 âarchontic power,â as it is what âgathers the functions of unification, of identification, of classification.â12 But Derrida emphasizes that this âarchontic powerâ can be thought only in conjunction with another aspect of the archive, the âpower of consignation.â 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, âThere is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority.â13 Thus, consignation brings us back to the double meaning of the archive as what the dust settles onâstorage, deposit, house, on the one handâand, on the other hand, as that active circuit that scatters the dustâa 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 Foucaultâs theorization of the archive, Giorgio Agambenâs 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 âtestimony,â 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 âthe 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.â15 The archive is also âthe unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything said by virtue of being enunciated.â16 Maintaining a discursive understanding of archives as what âdesignates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said,â the conditions of the possibility of speaking, that is, language as such, Agamben differentiates the archive from testimony; testimony is what points to âthe system of relations between the inside and the outside of langueâ and âbetween a possibility and an impossibility of speech.â17 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 âhistorical a prioriâ (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 âarchival arts.â 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 âarchive feverâ; 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 âfever.â 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 âarchive fever,â 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 âuseâ to the logic of âexchange.â20 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, âfrom a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced or made invisible by the machineries of profit and progress.â21 Drawing on Walter Benjaminâs 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...