Notes on Derrida and Foucault on the archive - TP

On Derrida's Archive Fever

Initial distinctions

Derrida starts his remarks on the archive by introducing a series of conceptual distinctions, based from the etymology of the word archive. These initial distinctions provide a background to other themes treated under 'Exergue' section of his article.

In the first instance, the archive is at once both a commencement and a commandment.

• Commencement: where things commence, an origin – whether physical, historical. This is the archive's ontological principle.

• Commandment: there where authority and social order are exercised. Keywords: authority, to command, to institute, the place where this commandment occurs. The nomological principle.

This last principle is further explored in its two-fold sense. Thus we have:

• the act of commandment: the nomological proper; jurisdiction; to institute the law.
• the 'place' where this act happens : topological sense: the house of the archons, where documents are kept; the residence or of the archive.

" It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place." (p10)

Derrida stresses the importance of such an institutional topology: personal documents may become part of the archive and undergo a change from the private to the public, just by virtue of being 'placed' in a privileged 'house.'

The archive has at once an institutive and conservative function: (see p12, 2nd paragraph)

• Institutive: to command: to lay down the law and give the order: to posit. This can be revolutionary (as opposed to conservative): to make the law, reinvent, to create, etc.
• Conservative function: to keep, to preserve (in a location, as hypomnetic device, an external aid to our memory), to save.

Archive as an hypomnesic extension to memory

"[The death drive] works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own "proper" traces." (p13-14)

Very briefly and as in passing, Derrida makes a very important remark on the archive that determines many of his comments: "The archive is hypomnesic." (p14) That is, the archive is not direct memory or recollection (mneme and anamnesis), but rather it is a device outside memory, like a prothesis, that supplements and aids memory. This reminds me of McLuhan characterisation of media (in general) as extensions to our body and mind. Thus the archive is an artificial (media) extension of memory. Derrida seem to imply to me that the archive takes place at the moment that our spontaneous memory breaks down. I can forget something because now it's in the archive and it is retrievable. Perhaps for this reason repetition is important to the archive.

A paradox

Iteration and repetition make the archive possible. But as Derrida notes, repetition is closely related to the death drive, to the drive for the destruction of the archive. (though he does not clarify this relation) Thus, he notes in passing a paradox which conditions his remarks on the archive. The archive necessitates a place, a topos, which would assure the possibility of memory, of repetition and reimpression. But repetition is at the same time indissociable from the death drive: "Right on what permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than what exposes to destruction … introducing forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument."

Makes me think of artistic practices of repetition and iteration, copy and appropriation, of historical works. This kind of repetition can be used as a strategy to undermine traditional ideas of the archive… (Sherrie Levine comes to mind, etc)

The death drive's vocation is to "incite amnesia … to ruin the archive as accumulation and capitalisation of memory…" (p15)

Archival technology influences what is kept and also what is generated

The idea of the archive as an external hypomnesic device prompts Derrida to ask: what is the impact of technological change on archivization? Questions: -How does the technical mechanism of archiving affect a certain field (such as the institution and discourse of psychoanalysis in general)?

"The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its coming into existence and in its relationship to the future." (p17)

Contemporary technology directly affects not only the manner in which we preserve in the archive, but also determines the structure of content.

The printer conditions the printed.

This again reminds me of McLuhan arguing that the medium, the structure of the media, determines its content, and thus have a profound impact on society.

On Foucault's The Archeology of Knowledge

Introduction: the new history

In the Introduction to The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault sketches a historiography that does not rely on the idea of continuity in history.

Instead of of focusing on vast unities like periods or centuries, the new history turns its attention to "the phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity." (4)

"The problem is not longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations.

The new historiography here described is concerned with the question of discontinuity. Whereas the old history saw discontinuity as a bothersome problem, to be smoothed out into a coherent narrative, a unified totality, the new history sees discontinuity as something to seek, something that is now one of the basic element of of historical analysis.

Discontinuity seems to be the basis for the possibility of historical analysis.

On the old history: "Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are two sides of the same system of thought" (p13)

The old history is intimately tied with a manner of thinking that seeks (and at times takes for granted) the integrity of the subject, the continuity of identity (both personal and social). Foucault's new history performs a sort of decentering: the sovereignty of the subject is seen as a19th century (modern) myth.

Keywords:

• New history: discontinuity, difference, notions of threshold, rupture, transformation, the description of series and limits (p15)
• Old history: continuity; totalizations; immobility of structures, closed systems, a necessary synchrony (that is, an ahistorical system to apply to historical phenomena)

The historical a priori and the archive

The archive " does not have the weight of tradition; and it does not have to constitute a library of all libraries, out side time and space (so it's not a transcendental archive); ... 'between tradition and oblivion it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification." (p147)

The archive in this sense preserves and at the same time modifies (institutes. Derrida says something along these lines: the archive involves remembering as much as forgetting.

An archive (or the archive as Foucault describes it) is made of differences. Rather than of continuity and unity.

The analysis of the archive "establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discurses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. (p147)