The Archive and The Human Sciences Notes Towards A Theory of The Archive

History of the Human Sciences
http://hhs.sagepub.com
The archive and the human sciences: notes towards a theory of the
archive
Irving Velody
History of the Human Sciences 1998; 11; 1
DOI: 10.1177/095269519801100401
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HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES

© 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi)
[0952-6951(199811)11:4;1-16; 006962]
Vol. 11 No. 4
1-
The archive and the human

sciences: notes towards a
theory of the archive
IRVING VELODY
As the
backdrop to all scholarly research stands the archive. Appeals to ultitruth, adequacy and plausibility in the work of the humanities and social
sciences rest on archival presuppositions. This article aims to explore the
mate
character and nature of the archive; what kinds of claims are involved in the
idea of the archive; how the concept has changed and is likely to change
further in the future; and the incorporation of increasingly diverse types of
material within the archive. I will also consider the politics of the archive as
well as questions of who has rights over the archive and to whom does it
belong.
What then is the archive? The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers
this derivation: Archives (1603); from the French Archives, from the Latin
archiva; and from the Greek archeia meaning: magisterial residence, public
office. The word is defined, then, as a place in which public records are kept.
The Petit Robert gives the following. Archives: from the low Latin archivum;
the Greek arkheion: that which is old. The definition is much as in the Shorter
OED above.
In Archive Fever (but perhaps Mal dArchive might better be titled The
Trouble with Archives) Derrida points up two aspects of archives and both
relate to Greek terms and usages. On the one hand he notes the physical siting
of the archive: as that where the arkhe is, the source or commencement. On
the other hand there is the binding aspect of arkhe: the nomological. Yet in
its singular form as archive, the earliest use as in arkheion derives from house,
the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons. The documents thus
the law and its nature; and demand in their turn a privileged topology
siting. A science of the archive must then include a theory of its institutionalization.
state
or
SETTING THE ARCHIVAL SCENE
There were memorable struggles involving sociology in the intellectual

history of the Third French Republic. Positivist sociology was an excellent anti-clerical tool in influencing the masses. Once it became scientifically established that in their ritual dances the Bororo Indians
identify with a parrot, the future popular educator was protected
against the magic of the religious Mass. (Curtius: 1990: 113)

To consider the work that went into this conception of the Bororo in functionalist terms, thus throwing light on, indeed explaining, if not explaining
away, French Catholicism, is also to envisage the materials, the field notes
that researchers
form these conclusions. The archive of the

scientist
is
thus
anthropologist
something rather different to the archive of
the anthropologist as author as Clifford Geertz points out in Works and Lives
(1989). But if that other archive, say that holding the diaries and notebooks
of Malinowski, is brought to light, a degree of uncertainty might be asserted
of the primary source for our accounts.
must use to
as
Of
satisfying, organicist accounts of peoples like the Bororo,

reported by Curtius, have long since passed away. But their passing has
been accompanied by an enrichment of the evidence for making sense of the
world. Elsewhere Geertz has pointed to the growing possibility, or rather
probability, that the work of social scientists could begin to take over a most
course
such
as
varied range of genre types: the age of blurred genres (Geertz, 1983). But did
Geertz envisage the following as part of this enrichment?
[Ur-Bororo: here before the Bororo]

Unlike other isolated tribal groupings the Ur-Bororo do not refer to
themselves as typical or essential human beings. The Ur-Bororo
actually refer to themselves as The People Who You Wouldnt Like to
be Cornered by at a Party ... the Ur-Bororo regard most of what they
do as a waste of time. In fact the expression that roughly corresponds
to now in Ur-Bororo is waste of time. (Self, 1994: 82)
The changes in our conception of science and the social sciences can be read
from the two excerpts reflecting on our understanding of anthropology and
its implications for interpreting our own societies.
For Curtius, the scientific character of anthropology assists in establishing
a Realpolitik of the human sciences in the Third Republic. The functional
aspect of Bororo practices help to banalize and at the same exorcize the everyday religious practices of French men and women.
But Selfs narrative and fictional account of the Ur-Bororo reflect precisely
the narrativizational and reportage techniques of much anthropology and
social science today. At the same time the banal and indeed boring character
of Ur-Bororo life and culture successfully establishes the current view that
the mystery of our own social world is not to be resolved by claims about
the other; rather our first task is to throw off the colonialist conception of
Other Peoples, and recognize the exotic nature of our own worlds.
But can the archive encompass Self as well as Malinowski?
ARCHIVAL TRANSGRESSION
In the Winter of 1992, in the
war between Abkhazia and Georgia four

from the Georgian National Guard drew up outside the Abkhazian State Archives and threw in incendiary grenades. It was later
reported that the history of the entire region had been reduced to ashes.
men
(Ascherson,
1996:
253-4)
How very threatening the legitimation of a particular item for the archive
may be is apparent in a recent discussion of published sociological research.
In a review of Jodi Deans Aliens in America, but one of several volumes discussing alien abduction, Frederick Crews (1998) writes of his hope that belief
in alien abduction, like belief in recovered memories, is on the retreat. The
folly of abduction memory can be halted through public education and counseling. He goes on:
As someone who spent his employed decades in a congenial university
environment, I would like to think that academics will be prime contributors
to
this effort. (1998: 18)
However, he continues, Deans book reminds
academy cannot be counted

problem is Deans indifference
the UFO
us that the contemporary

bastion against irrationalism. The
- indifference that is to all claims proffered by
on as
movement
studied refusal to acknowledge any criteria of

judgement except sheer subversiveness towards an imaginary establishment - is precisely the scandal here.... As a sociologist of cults, Dean
might be expected to show us how the abduction zealots debase the language of scientific prudence. (1998: 18)
But indifference itself -
But this she singularly fails to do (in Crews judgement).

As in disputes between natural scientists and sociologists of
science, what
stake here is again the question of what is a legitimate item for the
archive; what kinds of data can be proffered and what must be offered with
a denying claim attached.
What really upsets Crews is this statement: ...I am not trying to explain
why people believe in UFOs. My interest is in what the attention to aliens
and UFOs in contexts beyond the ufological tell us about contemporary
America (Dean, 1998: 201). Dean here appropriates Bruno Latours conditional distinctions between the rational and the irrational. In effect, Latour
argues that once the scientist steps outside of her context of research her comments on rationality have little bearing on the actuality of events beyond the
laboratory. It is just this putting to one side the matter of the truth claims of
alien abductees that is in question for Crews and others like him. There are
indications for Crews that this state of affairs is profoundly linked to the
current culture wars in American universities. (No doubt the implementation of the Research Assessment Exercise will continue to insulate UK academia from such horrors.) On the question of archives and their uses Crews
is attempting to undermine the legitimacy of Deans procedure and methodology. Presumably he would want to deny her materials the normal standing
in such collections of data. To clarify and emphasize this point it is worth
noting that Crews ends his review with this comment on Deans publishers:
The editors at Cornell University Press - unless they have already been supplanted by space invaders - are apparently wagering such babble will be the
academic lingua franca of the future. No doubt he would take the same view
of any agency that supported and collated such research.
At another level, divisions about the legitimacy of an archive can have
enormous consequences. In the case of the destruction of the Abkhazian
archives the very identity of a culture appears involved (Ascherson, 1996). As
a current example I take the disputes over Noel Malcolms sources in his
account of the history of Kosovo, which echo the current conflict between
Serbs and Albanian speakers in that province (Malcolm, 1998). Rightly so it
might be added, as his book denies the truth claims of Serbian origins in that
land and seems to legitimate the armed opposition of the Kosovo Liberation
Army. Medieval Kosovo is often referred to as the cradle of the Serbs ... but
the reality was rather different (Malcolm,1998: 41 ) Much of Malcolms study
is an examination of a number of such realities and the consequent demolition of several myths, frequently Serbian myths of nationhood and ethnic
dominance. Towards the end of the book Malcolm writes: According to the
mythic history of the Serbs, what happened in 1912 was an act of liberation
which rescued an oppressed people ..., but expresses the hope that Serbs
will reject those fixed patterns of thought which such myths represent (1998:
is
at
355-6;
emphasis added).
Thus the archive becomes a crucial weapon in ethnic struggle,
as
Wolfgang
in his discussion of the
politicization of German archives: he

the head of the Bavarian archival administration,
Knopfler, at the 1936 Congress of German Archivists: There is no practice
of racial politics without the mobilisation of source documents informing us
on the origin and development of a race and people.... There is no racial
politics without archives, without archivists (Ernst, 1999).
Ernst
notes
quotes the
statement
by
THE AMBIGUITY OF THE ARCHIVE
Beyond textual materials there lies a vast province of further objects for the
archive; the remains of past civilizations, arrowheads, tools; and images ...
and, in particular, photographs.
That the photograph plays a major part in all investigations concerning
propriety and truth is one outcome of this 19th-century invention. In a sense
the photograph offers evidence unimpeachable in contrast to the written
word or even the recorded voice. However, the recorded image itself clearly
requires some form of contextualization, or framing. Yet the frame, too, may
generate irresolvable ambiguities. In W. G. Sebalds fictions (or fictions there appears some doubt about the naming of these volumes), ?he Rings of
Saturn and The Emigrants, one bizarre aspect of the volumes is the insertion
of photographs in the text. But the pictures themselves remain untitled. There
is no directive from text to picture of the kind: look at this person - this is
Paul Bereyter whose exile I am retailing; although such a statement is
somehow implied.
Just how difficult this matter of framing can be emerges from testimony in
the first of the O. J. Simpson murder trials. In an attempt to undermine the
evidence of the policeman who established a key link in the murder investigation - the discovery of a glove connecting Simpson, an outstanding black
sportsman, to the murders - defence lawyers pursue the following line of
attack. Officer Fuhrman, who found the glove, had stated that at no time had
he used racist, anti-black language. On this point defence offered as evidence
a set of video recordings made a decade before these events.
Evidence established that Laura McKinny (employed by UCLA) first met
Los Angeles Police Department Officer Mark Furhman in 1985. Interested
in writing a screenplay about women police she was able to interview
Furhman, who had expressed strong views about women police officers, over
a period of ten years. The following are extracts from the trial transcript,
available interestingly on a Website.1 Fuhrman having repeatedly denied
using racial epithets, the transcript states:
The Fuhrman Tapes contain forty examples of the use of the term
nigger to refer to black persons in a racially disparaging context.
McKinny Transcript no. 1, p. 44

7 & 8 (discussing where he grew up in the state of Washington).
People there dont want niggers in their town. People there dont want
Mexicans in their town. They dont want anybody but good people in
their town.... We have no Niggers where I grew up.
The Fuhrman Tapes contain eighteen examples of detective Fuhrman
admitting police misconduct ... [including] illegal use of deadly force
planting evidence, framing innocent persons....
4 (... describing the use of deadly force in arrests).
...
Where would this country be if every time a sheriff went out with a
posse to find somebody who just robbed and killed a bunch of people,
he stopped and talked to them first. To make sure they had guns. Tried
to take them - they shot them in the back. We still should be shooting
people in the back....
Further on the transcript offers an example of the falsification of a police
report. Here Fuhrman arrests a suspected narcotics user but cant find any
needle marks. However:

3 (... describing the arrest of a narcotics user).
You cant just find the mark cause hes down. [But] his eyes dont lie.
Thats not falsifying a report. Thats putting a criminal in jail. Thats
being a policeman.
The claims that these videotapes revealed the truth about Furhmans racism,
violence and capacity to tamper with evidence were denied by the prosecution ; rather, his responses to these interviews were represented as no more
than braggadocio, given the frame of the videotapes. In this trial Simpson was
found not guilty of murder; a second trial was less charitable.
How
these
can
this evidence be assessed? There is of course no final solution
to
problems.
ARCHIVE AS DATA
empirical support for their investigations, the social scihave their parallel problems. The standard format of much sociology and a good deal of anthropology and psychology has been to establish
standards of data collection and collation that can in some sense stand beside
the work of the natural sciences. In his discussion of the construction of an
In the quest for solid
ences too
anthropological cross-cultural archive, George Marcus notes that the objective here was to create in effect a database for the development of the kind of
positivist conception of the social sciences that we associate with the generation of general statements and law-like formulations.
As Marcus tells us, among the most distinguished attempts in anthropology at the construction of an archive from a scientific orientation was the
Human Relations Area Files (Marcus, 1998). Founded by George Murdoch
in 1937 at Yale University, it seemed the realization of William Graham
Sumners dream, a vision very like a parody of Foucaults description in The
Order of Things of the Enlightenments proposals for the ordering of the
worlds knowledge. Sumner envisioned a room with its four walls lined with
deep shelves, one for each society of the world. All cultural and background
information was to be arranged in systematic order (Marcus, 1998). Indeed
this could be a chapter from Foucault, or perhaps a positivists redescription
of Borges Library of Babel.
A rather similar undertaking can be seen in the ongoing studies of social
mobility conducted at Nuffield College Oxford by, among others, John
Goldthorpe, Anthony Heath and A. H. Halsey. The purpose of these studies
was to explore processes of class formation and class auction.Such issues were
certainly central to the agenda of British sociology in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet, in spite of the highly sophisticated statistical analyses that have been
applied to the data held in this expensively generated archive, the impact of
this work upon current sociological thinking is clearly limited to a small
coterie devoted to what they call conventional class analysis. Indeed, class
itself is a subject confined to a small, and apparently diminishing, corner of
academic bookshops and makes little appearance in current catalogues of
major sociological publishers (Bradley, 1999).
In part this reflects disputed claims on just what should go into the archive,
or at least this particular archive. What kind of data are worthy of being
recorded, sorted, designated and located. For Goldthorpe and his colleagues
the answer is clear: measurable materials. Yet for many sociologists concerned with the effects of class on individuals and their life narratives, the core
of the problem is the exclusion of qualitative materials and narrative forms
from this particular archive collection.
RESOURCE CENTRES AND ARCHIVAL
REFERENCE POINTS.
hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life. (Ted Hughes on
of access to the Sylvia Plath archive in Rose, 1991: 65)
Much of what passes for archival information begins in fact with sources for
I
matters
reaching out to such pockets and collections of basic data, and knowledge of
the remnants of other peoples lives. A much used text of this kind is Foster
and Sheppards British Archives (1995). As its subtitle indicates, it is a guide
to archive resources in the UK. Very similar in intention to British Archives,
but on a far more grandiose scale, is the Archon website. Describing itself as
the principle information gateway for UK archivists and users of manuscript
sources for British history, it is hosted and maintained by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts bearing with it the states imprimatur.3
Carrying out a rather similar function for the social sciences, although far
more modestly, is Qualidata. Set up by the ESRC (Economic &
Social
Research Council) at Essex University in 1994, the aim of Qualidata, the
Qualitative Data Archival Resource Centre, is to locate, assess and arrange
for the deposit in suitable public archive repositories of significant qualitative
research data.
However, just what happens when the investigator reaches, or simply considers using an archive is an interesting question in itself, as the cache may
require some kind of incantation to release its secrets. This password may
not always be forthcoming as in the case of Sylvia Plaths literary remains.
While a number of biographies of Plath have been written over the years, as
Janet Malcolm notes in her survey of such writings, two in particular stand
out: Anne Stephensons account, written with the approval of Plaths
husband and sister-in-law, Ted Hughes and Olwen Hughes, who offered
(apparently) controlled access to certain archives; and the assessment of
Jacqueline Rose, written in the face of much hostility from the Hugheses
(Malcolm, 1995; Stephenson, 1990; Rose, 1991). However, Malcolms book
begins with the account of a less notorious publication in this series, that by
Linda Wagner-Martin. Discussing her exchanges with Olwen Hughes over
her manuscript, in part to obtain permission to quote at length from Plaths
works, Wagner-Martin eventually concluded that objections to details in her
work would continue, and I had to end my attempt to obtain permission to
quote at length if ever I was to publish this book. However, much the
greater part of Malcolms book deals with the conflicting visions of Sylvia
Plath in the two biographies by Stephenson and Rose. While in her Authors
Note to Bitter Fame Stephenson writes that Ms Hughess contribution to
this text makes it almost a dual work, in strong contrast Jacqueline Rose
reports that the Hugheses attempted to revoke the permissions for quotation of four poems in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Malcolm 1995: 174).
Although perhaps trivial in itself, it is certainly significant for this article that
the section of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath that was found most objectionable and was, to quote Malcolm again, to stick in the Hugheses craw was
a chapter called &dquo;The Archive&dquo;. Cunningly enough, The Archive itself
opens with a quotation from a Ted Hughes poem from a larger collection,
Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. In the poem, Crows Nerve
Fails, the central, eponymous character of the book finds his every feather
the very reminders and remainders of a trail of murder; in a striking phrase
Crow himself becomes an embodied archive of accusations. In a telling
comment Rose says: it is impossible to read Plath independently of the
frame, the surrounding discourses, through which her writing is presented
(Rose, 1991: 69). For Rose, this section The Archive is a reading of the
editing of Plaths work; a reading which is of necessity speculative. Part of
the reason for such speculations must lie in the conditions of archival constraint and regulation; as Rose, having made a visit to the Smith College Rare
Book Room, observes of the availability of Plaths journals, The originals
are unavailable, sections of them under seal until 2013 (Rose, 1991: 248).
However, successful archival breaching where it does occur, often leads to
an impressive textual display. To return to Noel Malcolms Kosovo, among
his acknowledgements is a list of archival resources; although perfectly standard nevertheless they have a ring of the esoteric and obscure (I have heavily
edited the sequence so as not to exhaust the reader):
permission to study and cite manuscript materials in their collections, I am grateful to the Controller of Her Majestys Stationery Office
in respect of the Public Record Office, and also the following: the
For
...
Archive du Ministere des Affairs Etrangeres, Paris; the Archivio della

Sacra Congregazione della Propaganda Fide, Rome; the Archivio
Segreto Vaticano, Vatican City ... the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv,
Vienna ... and the Somerset Record Office, Taunton. In addition I am
grateful to the following libraries and institutions: the Biblioteca
Casanatense, Rome ... the Biblioteke Komb6tare, Tirana ... the
Nationalna i Sveucilisna Knjizica, Zagreb ... the Staats- und Universithtsbibliotek, Hamburg; and the Taylor Institution, Oxford.
(Malcolm,
1998:
viii-ix)
The
offering of this list is an aspect of the writers claims to legitimacy and

authenticity. Whether the list should be regarded as part of the text or an item
of its framing, or to use Genettes term, the paratext is unclear (Genette,
1997).
THE MUSEUM AS ARCHIVE
The very notion of the museum has given rise to a science which at first sight
is reminiscent of one of Derridas cognitive fantasies, grammatology, archiviology ...4: namely museology. The museologists have contributed much to
our understanding of the procedures of obscuration and display in galleries
which are well matched in academic institutions at large with their own
complex and frequently inaccessible collections and databanks. In contrast,
10
the work of an artist like Boltanski, who actively parades his archive and
archivistic materials, carries out the very contrary activity: this work openly
boasting of its duplicity and ambiguities tells the onlooker quite precisely the
contingency and serendipity which make up these works.
In a series of publications Donald Preziosi (1989, 1996, 1998) has discussed
the problematics of the art gallery in particular. The crucial supporting
activity linked to this institution is art history, a discipline intimately related
to the gallery and the museum. It has been in many ways the most orthodox and conventional of the human sciences; while in contrast the attempts
by, say, sociology, to decode art have been marked by crass causal explanations and an extraordinary insensitivity to the products themselves.
However, Preziosi shows us that the kind of work he and his colleagues are
involved in is very much at the heart the broad range of current human
science issues; his researches indicate the distance between himself and traditional art-historical work, and at the same time hint at the possibilities other
disciplines (like sociology) could take on and employ to fruitfully extend
their range. Preziosi argues that art history enframes an ars memorativa - a
system of protocols for elucidating knowledge and a prescriptive grammar
for the composition of historical narratives: ... the modern discipline acts as
an anamorphic archive keyed by a panoptic gaze.5 That is, behind its apparently systematically organized array of objects, artefacts and data, lie a
panoply of contingent and ad hoc machines for bringing the performance of
the art museum into play.
The consequences of this point can be seen through the following example.
It has been argued that for Giorgione, perhaps the most famous of Renaissance painters, there is no single work that can be confidently attributed to
him. The complexities of art historical analysis have particular resonance for
the archive as:
of
the catalogue is the quintessential archive for art history ... whether
this is the catalogue of all the artists works or the catalogue of a
museum collection etc.... The crucial characteristic is that each item in
the catalogue (archive) is understood to relate to a particular (unique)
art object and to contain all the verbalisable basic data relevant to that
object. (Nowadays it often also includes a visual simulacrum in computerised or photographic form.) And that data usually at a minimum
consists of: the Artist: i.e. the necessity of attribution - since the Artist
is the key word by which you access the archival entry. The other data
are: time, date, medium and provenance.6
...
to match up the basic tools of the two archives - the archive

of artefacts with the archive of textual evidence and traces are, as in the case
of Giorgione, frequently ambiguous, not to say the work of dreamers.
Yet the attempts
11
TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE ARCHIVE
Although the archive has been perceived, by historians in particular, as a well

defined data-holding facility, somewhat like a penitentiary, in a more or less
clearly signified space, a theory of the archive has to take account of the kinds
of conceptual mobility we have seen displayed. To take up Noras speculation
that modern memory is essentially archival is to accept the implications that
the archive now has for researchers in the human sciences at large. And while
my focus in this article has been very much
the social sciences, I would

the
regard following
generality of the human
applicable
science disciplines ... if we can continue to call them such.
For undoubtedly it is the case that in the relations between historical
research and cognate forms of related investigation, significant changes in
style and method are occurring. If it is true that the claims in the social sciences about methodology and the character of scientific undertaking have
moved away from the earlier and clear conceptions of modernist presuppositions then the clarity of the constitutive archive for these disciplines has also
begun to blur.
Unlike earlier social science accounts of science, the current empirical
investigations into the working methods of natural scientists are themselves
firmly based on the observation of these practices. The outcome of such work
necessarily undermines claims that the work of the social sciences can sensibly be based wholly on such natural science forms of analysis; that is, the
textbook model account of deductive argument resting on quantitatively
assimilable data. Just as the range of legitimate working materials for historians has seen an expansion from written documents to oral testimony to
tape and video recordings and the memories of subaltern groups; so sociology
- or its operational community - has increasingly taken up and absorbed
these sources and thus inevitably expanded, indeed massively expanded, its
legitimate archive. But in doing so it has weakened the solidity of the kind of
quanta (like suicide rates) it had at one time rested its hopes on.
Questions about the reality of this archive understandably arise. In other
words, are the recorded meditations of hospitalized schizophrenic patients to
be ranked alongside the obiter dicta of spokespersons for the Royal College
of Surgeons? Or (to return to the earlier example) are the findings of
researchers like Latour, Shapin and Lynch in the sociology of science, to be
collated with the statements of Nobel prize winners like Stephen Weinberg
in astrophysics and Max Perutz in biophysics ?7
To answer these and similar questions effectively requires a rethinking of
the kind of conceptual work that has been the hallmark of the social sciences.
I mean concepts such as class, norm, role, social structure, which have
demanded at the first instance sharply defined conceptual boundaries; and at
the
comments as
on
to
12
the second level the clear possibility of formal, mathematical operationalization. The archive then should be considered as one of a growing cluster of
anti-concepts. By this I mean thematic domains, like voice and frame, which
can fruitfully generate the envisioning and revisioning of the world that the
human sciences engage with. By their very nature questions of epistemology
and ontology are not the concerns of those (like myself) who operate with
such modalities. The significance of the archive then is not bound up with its
quiddities. The adequacy, propriety, truthfulness of the materials, entities and
objects that constitute an archive cannot be judged by their appearance in the
archive as such. Only those who work within and around the archive can
undertake such claims. As the work of the installation artist, Christian
Boltanski, displays: the archive and his archivization of photographs, newscuttings and so on may well raise questions of both genocide and the loss of
community (Hobbs, 1998). But on matters concerning the significance of
those materials used, the documents, the clothing, the time cards: these both
resist and offer questions about their reality and appropriation. The substantiation and defeasibility of these claims are only partially related to the existence of the archive itself.
As has become apparent, the problem of the archive is bound up - not so
much with the methods of its accumulation - but rather its legitimacy. And
matters of legitimacy relate to events within the larger order of the world:
that is, beyond the academic community.
The partial release of the files of the GDR Staatssicherheitsdienst - the Stasi
has had devastating consequences for individual lives, and raised difficult
questions. A case in point is that of the East German writer Christa Wolf,
whose novel A Model Childhood is an impressive account of a girl growing
up under the Third Reich and her complicity with National Socialism. The
revelation that she had also co-operated with the Stasi caused a storm of
debate in Germany and beyond, on her motives. In reply to an interview
question that she was intellectually afraid Wolf responds:
-
That is one of the obscene consequences of the description of these files

in the press, that people adopt the Stasi characterisation and the Stasis
language and apply them to me. It is unbelievable. (Rugg, 1997: 192)
The difficult
reported and
question about this particular archive

specially the how of the telling.
is
just what
was
being
more
THE FUTURE ARCHIVE

a future? Where will it be? Recently, Pierre Nora has
introduced a multi-volumed history of France, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, with these observations. Memory is constantly on our
Does the archive have
13
because
it no longer exists. But there are sites, lieux de

residual sense of continuity remains. These sites have
supervened over those milieux de memoire, those settings in which memory
was once a real part of everyday existence. Consequently modern memory is
now above all archival.
Nora notes the ever expanding collection of files and the numerous teams
busily pursuing and recording the narratives of the French throughout the
country. How will these vast databanks be accommodated? Further, what
forms of legitimation of knowledge will develop in order to express the
Website as an archival source? Just when academic institutions and publishers have found agreement in the presentation of current journal and book
resources, the World Wide Web has created new opportunities and new ambiguities.8 Perhaps the prime directive is now: to be is to record.
Insofar as the past is the future it will always be with us. Or is that a slogan
from 1984?
lips
(writes Nora)
mimoire, in which
University of Bristol, Bristol,
UK
NOTES
1 See: Defense Amended Offer of Proof Re: Fuhrman
Tapes,
under Websites
below.
2
Findings of the mobility studies are presented in Halsey et al. (1980), Goldthorpe
(1987), Eriksen and Goldthorpe (1992). Critical discussion of the exclusion of
women
from the studies features in Marshall
et
al. (1988)
Crompton and
Mann
(1986), and Marshall (1997).

3 For details of the Archon Website
4
see: Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts Website, under Websites below.

Let us imagine in effect a project of general archiviology, a word that does not exist
but that could designate a general and interdisciplinary science of the archive
(Derrida, 1996: 34).

By anamorphic Preziosi intends
to name an organizational device whereby

relations among units in a database are made visible through prefabricated positions
vis-à-vis the archive. In this particular case - art history - a very powerful viewing
point that of the period or period-style (Preziosi, 1989: 76).
6 These observations come from Elizabeth Prettejohn to whom I owe a profound
intellectual debt. I would like to present her commentary, from work in progress,
here in full:
of the Venetian Renaissance painter Giorgione (1476/8-1510) is

the greatest mystery of the art-historical archive (even his name is
uncertain: Giorgio Barbarelli or Giorgio del Castelfranco, nicknamed
Giorgione or Big George). Giorgiones importance to Venetian painting is
well attested in (nearly) contemporary sources such as Castigliones The
The
oeuvre
perhaps
14
Courtier and Vasaris Lives of the Artists

; yet even Vasari was unable certainly
identify a single work by the artist. The work that most scholars now accept
as the most authentic example, the Tempesta of the Accademia in Venice, was
not attributed to Giorgione at all in the pioneering nineteenth-century texts
on connoisseurship. Another painting of the highest possible status, the Fête
Champêtre of the Louvre (much admired by observers such as Théophile
Gautier and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) has been assigned to Titian and
Giorgione in alternation for generations; indeed it is almost the case that each
Louvre catalogue switches the attribution: if the last generation considered the
painting to be a Giorgione, then the next will call it a Titian. The current attribution is to Titian, and perhaps it is a sign of the insecurities of our age that
a large proportion of the more dubious attributions to Giorgione are now
reassigned to the young Titian. But to paraphrase - we know that Giorgione
was a painter (from Castiglione and Vasari, among other sources) - he must
therefore have painted some paintings.
Yet no contemporary art historian will admit what is certainly the only
fact to emerge from this complex history: there is no single work that we can
confidently attribute to the historical person mentioned by Castiglione as a
consummate courtier. The same problem applies to Praxiteles, among the
most famous names of ancient sculpture. We speak confidently of a Praxitelean style characterised by grace and suavity, and we refer to sculptures in
... yet there is no sculpture currently
major collections such as the Hermes
in existence that can be identified with any confidence as the work of Praxiteles hand.
Both cases are made fascinating the non-correspondence of the artefactual
and textual archives, the twin resources of the art historian. In both cases we
have textual traces of a supreme artistic genius - the consummate Venetian
courtier of the Venetian High Renaissance, lover of noble women and adept
on the lute - the great master of grace in Greek sculpture. In both cases we
also have a number of artefacts - paintings that can be identified as Venetian
works of c.1500 by either stylistic or scientific analysis, sculptures unearthed
at relevant archaeological sites. The art-historian tries assiduously to match
the two archives. But the results are ambiguous - if not fantastic. The
Tempesta may, or may not be, the picture of a soldier and a storm recorded in
an early Venetian inventory; the Hermes may or may not be the work
Pausanias saw at Olympia .... (Personal communication, 22 August 1998, Dr
Elizabeth Prettejohn, Department of Art History, Plymouth University)
to
(1984). Barhams work reveals with great sensitivity that the apparent
silence of such patients, that is the silence that follows on from inability of the
observer to understand the inmates words, can be infused with meanings. But this
involves a considerable move away from the treatment of these subjects as mere
respondents to exterior stimulants. More particularly it calls for the use of narrative
techniques deriving from a variety of disciplines but including politics, sociology
and literary theory.
8 I have included two Website references on how to do citations in this medium from
a longer list provided by Beth Davis-Brown - to whom many thanks. (See Internet
7 See Barham
15
Citation Guide and ISO
writing
this
how
carry
to
690-2, under Websites below.) Nevertheless, at time of
journals publishers have themselves not issued a policy statement on

out this procedure.
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Ascherson, N. (1996) Black Sea. London: Vintage.

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Sage.
Crews, F. (1998) The Mindsnatchers, New York Review of Books 25 June: 14, 16-19.
Crompton, R. and M. Mann (1986) Gender and Stratification. Cambridge: Polity.
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Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute. London:
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Dean, J. (1998) Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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ISO 690-2,

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