Mariah Maras

Professor Robert Wilkie

English 413
March 27, 2014

Archives, History, and Memory: Expected Representations of Compiled Writings

I have compiled what I believe to be my strongest and most representative writings of my undergraduate
career. I stepped into this project with this intention and have finished, or at least have a presently polished
artifact to represent my intention thus far. I anticipate that my work is also representative of my capabilities and
flexibility in what my abilities are concerning future work to be done.
In this introduction I will step back and evaluate why I have made the decisions about what writings I
have decided to include. Using Jacques Derridas and Karl Marxs ideas, along with my own, I will also
consider how archives, history and memory interwork when considering how expectations about collections of
writing and writing itself are formed and played out. In particular, I will use Derridas idea of consignation from
Archive Fever. I will elaborate on this and tie Marxs idea about people making history, not just as they please,
but through a kind of anticipation or revolutionizing spirit of the future through nostalgia of something such as
an ideal composition by forgetting, in some ways, their origins.
In Archive Fever Derrida writes, Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a
synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration (Derrida 3). This idea lines
up with my intention of providing my strongest writings into a polished composition. He continues by saying,
In an archive, there should not be any dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate
(secernere), or partition in an absolute manner (Derrida 3). Along with my intention to provide representations
of my flexibility as a writer, I am not dissociating by providing different genres of writings (technical,
academic, published, etc.), but am providing a more clear representation of myself as a writer in a complete
manner. In combining the idea of me representing my strongest writings in my portfolio with the idea that I am
providing my strongest writings from various genres, I will also not be with holding any secret which could
cause some kind of dissociation not only across my portfolio, but for the reader or viewer when they look
through it as a whole, as the principle of consignation, Derrida says, is of gathering together (Derrida 3).
By providing my best works across various genres, I am also providing what Derrida would call traces
of what is not included. Though I wish for my writings to be seen as general enough so as not to deliberately
exclude what is also possible in a genre of writing that I provide a piece for. I have especially tried to make this
idea prominent in my poetry section of my portfolio. I have provided a haiku, a narrative poem, an experimental
poem, and a prose poem with its main focus on end rhyme. These poems differ in form and content enough so
that there is not any one overarching concept that can cause that section to lack any sufficient elucidation in
this certain circumscribed domain (Derrida 34).
Following up with this concept, Derrida discusses the idea of archiving and how it shelters itself from
the memory, which comes down to saying also that it forgets it (Derrida 2). By this, I think that he means by
creating something such as an archive of writings, the writings are sheltered of their own accord, such as being
grouped or compiled into one website, and the very memory of each individual writing on its own as it was in
its own original location with its own circumstances and own criteria, is now forgotten. For instance, the
academic writing I used for the section on academic writing in my portfolio was gathered from two different
philosophy courses, 19
th
Century German Continental Philosophy and my capstone Philosophy course, and two
different English courses, American Literature II and Introduction to Rhetoric and Writing. Stepping back now,
I can see that each of the writings from each of these courses were directed under varying circumstances,
subjects, and criteria, yet somehow fell into the same genre and have not only forgotten the memory of their
origins, but created a new memory of where they now belong. This ties into what Marx claims about memory as
well, but I will discuss that later on in this paper.
Later on in Archive Fever, Derrida discusses Freuds idea of the destruction drive remarking:
it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme [retention] or
anamnesis [reminiscence], but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that
which can never be reduced to mneme or to anamnesis, that is, the archive, consignation, the
documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema [remembering], mnemotechinical supplement or
representative, auxiliary or memorandum. (Derrida 11)
From what I have explained about the gathering together of various writings from various courses into one
genre, Derrida has pinpointed this very idea of inciting forgetfulness or eradication, when creating something
such as an archive, of that which can never be reduced to something that can be remembered completely or
serve as a piece to be retained or representative on its own. He goes on to say that he claims this because an
archive, a gathering together of various writings, in my case from various genres and courses I have taken, will
never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience (Derrida 11).
A last note on Derrida before moving on to Marx is that when creating an archive, it is not only a place
for the past, but for future production; and the products are also influenced by where they are produced and
where they are archived. In my case, my writing portfolio not only provides a place for what I have done in the
past, whether I had gathered together these writings in the location that I did this website or not I still would
have known that I did them, and so would my professors, but it provides a relationship of that past, on this
website, to what I am capable of in the future as well. Derrida states, the technical structure of the archiving
archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its
relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event (Derrida 17).
Marx touches on the idea of the relationship of the past to ones future in portions of his essay The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He uses the word nostalgia and spirit to describe these feelings.
Marx writes concerning the social revolution of the nineteenth century, but I think his idea of anticipation of
future progress by not drawing necessarily from the past is an idea that coincides with my intention of providing
a composition of my capabilities as a writer. He states that the social revolution cannot draw its poetry from
the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself, before it has stripped off all superstition in regard
to the past (Marx 91). He further states, In order to arrive at its content, the revolution of the nineteenth
century must let the dead bury their dead (Marx 91). These statements coincide with Derridas idea that by
archiving content we are in a sense forgetting the past that set the circumstances up for the content that is
archived to come about. We must in a sense forget, or let the dead bury their dead.
His statements also align with his description earlier on his writing about the spirit of revolutionizing.
There he states, The awakening of the dead in those revolutions therefore served the purposes of glorifying the
new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given tasks in imagination, not of taking flight from
their solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost walk again (Marx
90). These circumstances he describes are because he believes that men do not make history just as they please,
but they do make their own history. In connection to the statement at the beginning of this paragraph, the
writings I have chosen are, in a sense, the awakening of the dead, of courses I have taken and completed in
order to move on, in order to glorify the new papers and struggles I had to face while writing them or
completing the next course. I learned and accomplished, I didnt parody the previous artifact and from that
came my strongest writings, the writings I chose to include.
The circumstances however, were not necessarily as I chose. I was required to take certain classes,
required to do certain assignments and papers, and through that my circumstances were found. Marx states this
idea precisely, saying, Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not
make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and
transmitted from the past (Marx 89). I can also say then, that the circumstances I found myself in were
involved with professors who learned from other professors to get to where they are today, and in that sense
those circumstances and information I learned were transmitted from the past.
Overall, the portfolio I have constructed is a reflection of the history, tradition, the archive, the memory
and forgetting, of what I have completed as an undergraduate student. My technical construction of my portfolio
not only archives my writings, but provides a framework for adding new writings, in a way, creating the
potential for tradition or recurring forms, and granted, various forms. In including those various forms as well, I
have provided a place of integration for my artifacts where a sense of harmony can exist while at the same time
represent my flexibility as a writer.

Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Religion and Postmodernism.
Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.
Marx, Karl. From The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Collective Memory Reader. Eds. Jeffrey
K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 89-91.
Print.