Concerning the Archives

Extract

“But You Might Discover Secrets that we don’t know we have,” he said with unmistakable irony. He knew that my project, concerning museums of a century ago, would most likely not uncover any deep dark secrets, much less any that would fall within the realm of any legal statute of limitations. And yet he also knew that there are few statutes of limits when it comes to the patrimony of cultural property, a patrimony which, as Turkish museum administrator, is his to protect in the name of the state and in the name of its citizens—and even to protect from those citizens, of which I am one. Yet in the supposition that I would most likely not uncover any secrets, and in full consciousness of the irony of his statement, he would still not allow me, an ‘outsider,’ free access to documents, in this case uncatalogued and as yet unseen, and which nonetheless I had designated as mine through their proximity to my project. The limits of my access were as arbitrary, by some standards, as the limits of my project: as many documents from century-old registers as I could list on two sides of a blank page. “Can I write extra small?” I asked, and we laughed in complicity, even though this time it was I who was fully conscious of the irony that the limits on these documents were not good news for my project, yet that his assertion of control provided one of the most important insights around my research: the nature of possession and the economy of a ‘free’ flow of information.