Counter-Archival Dissemination

Summary

The concept of archive often evokes an image of control, survey and organisation. For example, in The Order of Things, Foucault describes the archive as a system introducing order, meaning, boundaries, coherence and reason into that which is disparate, confused, contingent and without contours. Thus his ‘critique of power’ observes that the archive is not just a passive collection of records from the past, but is an active and controlling system of enunciation that gives ever-changing form to the ‘great confused murmur’ that emanates from the ‘Discursive Formation’ (Foucault 1989: 44). In other words, the archive has a set of meanings – a ‘form’ – that changes with the mental frame that is brought to it.

In Derrida's Archive Fever, another distinct connection is made between archival reason and the rhetoric of power. According to Derrida, this connection is genealogically underscored by the fact that the word ‘archive’ is derived from the Greek Arkheion, the residence of the superior magistrates. It is in this location, where the rulers reside, that the documents are stored:

The archive more often than not preserves the history of the victors, while presenting it as historical reality or scientific truth. The archive is a realist machine, a body of power and knowledge, and it sustains itself by repetition. More precisely, the authority of traditional archives controls and regulates the reproduction of their items (Steyerl 2008).

Obviously, this implies that there are criteria for how to reproduce those objects ‘faithfully’, according to specific, hermeneutic protocols. ‘Technologies of inscription and the undoing of certain protocols of reading, writing, and thinking that they occasion must be thought together, so that, in addition to the affirmative, gathering, preserving dimension of the archive, there is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence’ (Derrida 1996: 7).

With such features of archival reason, both Foucault and Derrida seem to refer to Nietzschean thought. From a philosophy of power, the archive could be understood as a product of the will to represent, the desire to survey and for transparency that is emerging in modernity as a rigid scopic regime where multiformity and diversity have been reduced to levels of equivalence.