Wolfgang Ernst Stirrings in The Archives Order From Disorder

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Stirrings in the Archives

AMSTERDAM
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AMSTERDAM
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Stirrings in the Archives
Order from Disorder
Wolfgang Ernst
Translated by Adam Siegel
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Ernst, Wolfgang, 1959–

[Rumoren der Archiv. English]
Stirrings in the archives : order from disorder / Wolfgang Ernst ; translated by Adam Siegel. pages
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-5395-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-5396-4 (ebook) 1.
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Contents
1 The Inflation of the Archive 1

2 Before the Archive 3
3 Writing the Archive Transitively? 5
4 “A New Archivist”: Foucault 7
5 The Archive as “Submedial Space” 11
6 The Gaps Are the Archive 13
7 Exercices de silence (Silence in the Archive) 17
8 Prosopopoetic Phantasms (Scenes from the Archives) 21
9 DRACULArchiv 25
10 Inverted Time: The Space of the Archive 29
11 Textuality of History? Archives and Literature 33
12 Faking the Archives 39
13 Archibiograffiti 45
14 The Mother of Archives: Rome 49
15 In History’s Arsenal: The Archival Catechon 53
16 From Louis XIV to Big Brother: Monitoring 57
17 Historical Bodies 61
18 Collection and Dispersal: The Posthumous 67
19 Dedicated to the Archive? Jacques Derrida and (the) Paul de
Man’s Case 71
20 “We from the Archive” 77

21 Book-enwald 81
22 The Mechanization of the Archive 83
23 Entropy: A Rubbish Theory of the Archive 87
24 In the End: Digital Anarchi(v)es 91
Index 99
About the Author and Translator 101
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ONE
The Inflation of the Archive
Archives are no longer associated solely with the image of the philologi-
cal and dust-shrouded. This particular image is fading from view and
is—so long as it has not yet congealed into sediment (the case with the
Stasi files in Germany)—being dispersed by fresh breezes of attention.
Never has the concept of the archive as research space or object of cultu-
ral theory been so salient as today. There was, in the past, a tendency to
promote the idea of the archive as either a kind of technological-cultural
metaphorical universal or as a conceptual coin of the realm whose mean-
ing was worn down through overuse. Archival studies have also been
marked by the tendency to dismiss the philosophical discourse that relies
on the term archive: such “a transformation of the archive into the purely
metaphorical has not always been helpful.” 1 The wisdom of the philoso-
pher and the imagination of the poet diverge considerably from the in-
sights of the jurist or the historian when it comes to blindness of meta-
phors of memory toward power’s enmeshment in the archive. Contrary
to popular belief, the archive is not the main component of cultural mem-
ory: to regard the archive thus is to misread it. Which the archivist
contrasts with memory—not only do archives emerge from policy, but
even more that a politics of archives exists: in this way the judicial au-
thorities throughout Germany before 1806 and the Kingdom of Prussia
could shroud their archives, as potentially political repositories, in mys-
tery. 2 Contemporary archival theory emphasizes, quite deliberately, the
connection between court-oriented registrars and the contents of histori-
cal archives where the files serve an administrative rather than an
historiographical purpose: this constitutes a misuse (in its most neutral
sense)—a misreading of the archive. The Geheime Staatsarchiv in Berlin-
Dahlem was to a certain extent recodified as a sort of historical archive by
the Allies in 1947, and rightly so: if the connection between documents
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2 Chapter 1
and power is absent, an archival barrier is erected, and the historian’s

work is retroacting.
Here is where the difference between German-Prussian archival science
and the metaphorical conceptualization of the archive in Parisian philo-
sophical circles is amply contoured. The present text attempts to reconcile
these two evaluations via an invocation of French figures such as Michel
Foucault, Michel de Certeau, François Furet, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Der-
rida, and Arlette Farge, on the one hand, and, on the other, via an exam-
ination thereof from the perspective of media archaeology, a school in
which the cybernetics of memory brings a more actual and institutionally
and medially more tangible archive to light (the current move toward the
virtual notwithstanding). Is what we have an inventory of memory rather
than a history? If a conceptualization of history that can encompass the
two is conceivable or worth conceiving, the relationship between the past
and the present can be thought of in quite different ways. Pierre Nora’s
monumental, multivolume Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–), a pinnacle of the
nouvelle histoire in France, represents a convergence of both history and
alternate memory—that is, a statement on the end of the hegemony of
history. The historiography of state and nation can no longer represent
collective memory. The inventory-shaping mémoire collectif has come to
replace the collective singular, thereby repluralizing not only history it-
self but also the ways in which history is understood and grasped. Rather
than a national historiography, the nation itself is the archive: the disap-
pearance of a national consciousness elicits a corresponding inventory of
lieux de mémoire in which this consciousness was once embodied: festi-
vals, emblems, monuments, and memorial rites, along with archives, dic-
tionaries, and museums. Absent the nation that once produced a totaliz-
ing union of individual agents of memory, and which in so doing came to
represent nothing more than a heuristic fiction, nothing can remain, save
the archi(ve)—tech/textual network—the configurations and techniques
for memorization of a past that can no longer coagulate into an emphatic
history.
NOTES
1. Botho Brachmann, “‘Tua res agitur!’ Aussensichten auf Archive und archivaris-
ches Selbstverständnis,” in Archiv und Geschichte. Festschrift für Friedrich P. Kahlenberg,
ed. Klaus Oldenhage, Hermann Schreyet, and Wolfram Werner (Düsseldorf: Droste
Verlag, 2000), 18.
2. Wolfgang Hans Stein, “Archive als Object von Kulturimperialismen:
Französische Archive in Deutschland—deutsche Archive in Frankreich,” Archiv und
Gedächtnis. Studien zur interkulturellen Überlieferung, ed. Michel Espagne, Katharina
Middell, and Matthias Middell (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000), 89.
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TWO
Before the Archive
No re/citation without the archive: the present chapter feeds off a textual
corpus drawn from an array of writings devoted to this topic. For archae-
ology, if it concerns itself with the accumulation of files as the sedimenta-
tion of memory, is also archiv-ology. The national archive, when seen
through the eyes of an archaeologist, represents one consequence of the
accumulations of past eras; collectively, such layers of history create a
stratified architecture. 1 Here is where the cold gaze of the archaeology of
knowledge lands as it seeks out the temptation to resist while reacknowl-
edging history in fugitive and discarded bits of data; it finds them, more-
over, behind the renunciation of imaginary preludes, more positivist per-
haps than modern physics and with more substantial consequences for
the anthropological conception of cultural memory. As is well known,
Foucault’s philosophical response was to scoff at treating the individual
as a point of departure and an object of a search for truth. The deperson-
alized view tends to renounce a rhetorical tendency toward figures of
thought that give life to the lifeless, as one archival theorist cloaked the
metaphor in 1830: “Just as Cuvier was a genius at telling which genus a

given fossil belonged to, the historian must be able to take the evidence of
a single individual and be able to depict the social conditions of the world
around it.” 2 But should they really? The scientist’s memory assimilates
stored information taken across distinct episodes, extends such informa-
tion via disparate sources, and reconstructs it in an image presumably
faithful to the original. We can “remember” a given dinosaur from a few
pieces of preserved bone, which has everything to do with our memory
of a past that was never actually present. The power of the archaeological
imagination is not memory but model. When gaps occur due to a
dropped signal, our imagination completes them in a sensible stream or
in forms: the noise of auditory archival data via sonic images. John Dean,
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4 Chapter 2
Richard Nixon’s adviser during the Watergate scandal, recalled during

his testimony an apparently word-for-word conversation with the former

president. When the transcripts of the White House tapes were released,
it turned out that Dean’s memory had rewritten the scene. Thus Oliver
Stone’s 1995 film, Nixon, a memorial to the tapes, opens with an epigraph
from William Burroughs: “Nothing here now but the recordings.” The
audio archive divulges only garbled speech between signal and noise at
key points, such as the planned invasion of Cuba; at such key points only
“unintelligible noise” is perceptible. 3
NOTES
1. Krzystof Pomian, “Les Archives. Du Trésor des chartes au Caran,” in Lieux de

mémoire, Bd. III (Les France), ed. Pierre Nota (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 202.
2. Friedrich Ludwig Baron von Medem, “Über die Stellung und Bedeutung der
Archive im Staate,” Jahrbücher der Geschichte und Staatskunst, ed. Karl Heinrich Ludwig
Pölitz, Bd. II (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichssche Buchhandlung, 1830), 31.
3. Helmut Esau, “The ‘Smoking Gun’ Tape: Analysis of the Information Structure
in the Nixon Tapes,” Text: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, vol. 2,
no. 4 (New York and Amsterdam, 1982), 309.
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THREE
Writing the Archive Transitively?
Archival operations not only are predicated on allowing immense data-

bases to speak, they also give a textual voice to the silence of a forgotten
reality and transform parts of the world that intrude upon it into material
for a world yet to be fabricated. 1 Future revolutions will not be detained
by works of mourning that take the form of a conversation in which the
living speak to and assume the language of the dead—an end to the
eloquence of the eulogist. 2 While this does not extend as far as simply
writing the archive, it does effectuate a redistribution of space, so as to dis-
place data by reconfiguration into a cybernetically different condition. So
that a place might be given over to techniques such as the transformation
of data into the history, it was necessary for the archive be built. The
essayist’s form of archival description can itself transform this difference
into an option for writing the archive in its own medium—that is, as both
thicket of footnotes and narrativization of the card catalog. This essay,
despite its modular form, does not create an archive but instead seeks out
the violence of the archive through thought figures in order to crack open
figurative writing without lapsing into a poetology of the archive—one

failing of the New Historicism, which has unleashed fantasies of social
energy while misconstruing the power of the archive. The work at hand
is intended to show a way out of the archive, away from the notion that
the era of the archive is coming to an end, and in so doing can heighten
our sensitivity to challenging the origins of the archive and its forms—the
arché of the archive. “L’archive naît du désordre,” writes Arlette Farge. 3
Archives deal with disappearances; they attempt to exorcise our fear of
loss by amassing memory. Our view of the genesis and immanent es-
sence of the familiar archives becomes all the sharper at the very moment
of their disappearance as classic scientific and cultural storage at the
hands of electronic-storage media, which virtually subsume the long-
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6 Chapter 3
standing difference between the archive, the library, and the museum
under the rubric of information. Here is where the internal borders of

such realizations of the archive are laid out: as we have learned from
Michel Foucault, one period can describe not only the archive of its own
era but also earlier schools of thought—a function of the observer’s dif-
ference, according to Niklas Luhmann. As stated at the outset of this
positioning of the archive, in the end we are left in the end with the
insight that we are making a permanent shift, inching away from an
older European culture that privileges storage, toward a media culture.
All historiography is by definition retroacting; the science of history is
most concerned with historical accounts that can be performatively rec-
ognized as postal transmission and hence attest that the transmission of
the past (be it tradition or knack for doing so) is invariably an effect of
media and the mechanisms of delay. Following the retreat from an idea-
listic philosophy of history, all that is left are one-sided mnemonic de-
vices, which orbit, along with many other satellites, the term history, no
matter whether or not our thinking inclines once more toward its objec-
tification. So discourse analysis seeks to dismantle so-called historical
realities as archival formations and systems of connections, even as al-
lowance must be made for technical media in a present day, barely imag-
inable to Foucault, defined by digital worlds. No longer do archives offer
up historical a prioris in the Foucauldian sense in order to create the
appearance of a nondiscursive reality. 4 At this time the real of reality is
registered elsewhere: the concept of a generalized post office called the
Internet is replacing the archive and the library.
NOTES
1. Michel de Certeau, “L’espace de l’archive ou la perversion du temps,” Traverses.

Revue du Centre de Création Industrielle, no. 36 (January 1986): 5. This is a variation on
L’Écriture de l’histoire, 3rd ed. (Paris: Campus Verlag, 1975, 1984), 84–88. The German,
partially edited, translation is Das Schreiben der Geschichte, trans. Sylvia M. Schomburs-
Scherff, afterword Roger Chartier (Frankfurt and New York, 1991), 93–98.
2. Karl Marx, Der achzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte; paraphrasiert von Jacques
Derrida, Marx’ Gespenster. Der verschuldete Staat, die Trauerarbeit und die neue Internation-
ale, trans. Susanne Luedemann (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), 182f.
3. Arlette Farge, Le goût de l’archive (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 36.
4. Friedrich A. Kittler, Manfred Schneider, and Samuel Weber, eds., Diskursanaly-
sen I: Medien, editorial (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987).
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FOUR
“A New Archivist”: Foucault
At first glance it seems paradoxical that Michel Foucault developed his

concept of the archive by relying on the resources of the library—primari-
ly at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Bibliothèque de Saulchoir in
Paris. Similar to the nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke,
Foucault had an archetypal historian’s experience: when it is no longer
sufficient solely to sort through the library of scholarship, one then must
sift through an entire complex of archives that embraces decrees, police
regulations, and legal cases, where structural pattern recognition can
supplement a hermeneutic reading. All the archives of a centralized
French state in Paris lay within walking distance for Foucault. But just
what lies in archives—information about social reality? “The documents
have nothing to say about this,” says cultural historian Johan Huizinga,
author of the classic Waning of the Middle Ages, in a posthumous note
making a derisive allusion to Ranke; the errors of a history written solely
on the basis of documents lies in this precise misconception. For his part,
Huizinga shows a preference for narrative sources—namely, those where
history emerges not as a consequence of the archive’s formation but as

fully formed. This is why his depiction ends with contemporary history,
where he observes an increasing formlessness: “A history that can no
longer be compressed into tragedy . . . has lost its form,” as it falls outside
the poetic possibilities of a meta-history, thus becoming “undepictable and
unmemorable.” 1
Archivists, look out: not everything that is called an archive is actually
an archive. Foucault defines the archive neither as the sum of all the
transmitted documents nor the institution of their transmission but rather
as a system that governs not only the emergence of such statements but
also their current functioning. What governs today’s functions is called
cybernetics. Thinking of its arché (simultaneously both command and
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8 Chapter 4
origin) medially affords, in a quite specific sense, the link to Foucault’s

archaeology of knowledge, which as a form seeks to convey discursive

experience “as though recorded in an archive.” 2 The analysis of discur-
sive experiences in the element of the archive means not only their inti-
mate reading as documents in their original, hidden sense but rather as
monuments: “what might be called something like archaeology according to
the rules of the game of etymology.” 3 Thus we might think of the archive
as both the act of filing and the registry files, backed by the institution’s
arché, both mechanical and juridical. 4
Gilles Deleuze has called the Foucault of The Archaeology of Knowledge
“un nouvel archiviste.” Foucault founded a new archival studies, one
concerning itself with statements. Unlike earlier generations of archivists,
Foucault aimed at formal analyses that resemble sequences of letters.
While the typewriter keyboard itself is not a statement, the same se-
quence of letters laid out in a typing manual is a statement of the alpha-
betical order to be applied to a given local typewriter-keyboard layout. 5
Foucault’s concept of the archive refers to the laws that govern what can
be said, the system that governs the appearance of the statement as a
distinct event. Even the concept of the archive as the general system of the
formation and transformation of statements oscillates between the concrete
archive and its nondiscursive memory as feedback between its adminis-
tration and the library, with its discursively collected collective memory:
“Between language, which defines a system for constructing potential sen-
tences and corpus, which passively receives the spoken word, the archive
defines a particular field, that of praxis.” 6 The archive, in the Foucauldian
sense, constitutes not so much a library formed from libraries that are
ungrounded in time or space but rather a particularly incisive (i.e., differ-
entiating) state of latency (which, for the time being, we may call a pro-
gram).
While initially it seems attractive to regard Foucault’s formulation as
the liberation of this concept from the narrow confines of archival stud-
ies, a closer look reveals its lack of objectivity. Foucault seldom acknowl-
edges the positivity of the archive. Even when his case studies—on mad-
ness, the clinic, the prison—rely on actual repositories of files, transcripts,
and notes, his definition of the archive is notable for its omission of
archives as they actually exist, preferring a transcendental dispositif,
which a priori rules in favor of the conditional possibilities of certain
forms of speech. At this point media archaeology offers something that,
while not exclusive, is nevertheless definitive: the introduction of “the
media,” left open by Foucault, as variable. The misunderstanding lies in
the fact that, for Foucault, the archive is text, and the library, praxis.
Foucault writes, letter by letter, of “dis-persal,” without identifying its
infrastructure. However, media archaeology looks from within the archi-
val space to more closely examine the operative agencies at work, all that
appears to us as surface or interface, or in the words of Immanuel Kant,
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“A New Archivist”: Foucault 9
the infrastructural and medial parerga of discourse, its matrix. This is how
media archaeology undermines the preoccupation with the archive as

manifest and looks for that medial law, which itself establishes the order
of things in their production, something like the photographic apparatus
for the production of multiple images. Such are the kinds of technical
media that Foucault tends to pass over in silence.
NOTES
1. Card in the Huizinga Archive, no. 52-II (cover, alg. noties), cited by Christoph
Strupp, Johan Huizinga. Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte (Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 116.
2. Michel Foucault, in conversation with students in Los Angeles; published as
“Dialogue on Power,” Chez Foucault, ed. Simeon Wade (Los Angeles, 1978), 4–22. See
also Michel Foucault, Dits et Ècrits III, no. 221 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
3. Michel Foucault, “Sur l’archéologie des sciences. Réponse au Cercle
d’épistemologie,” Cahiers pour l’analyse Nr. 9: Généalogie des sciences (Summer 1968):
9–40. Foucault, Dits et Ècrits I, no. 59 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Cited here is Walter
Seitter’s translation (unpublished typescript, archives of Merve Verlag, Berlin). In a
footnote, Foucault attributes this model of reading the archive as a series of disconti-
nuities and moments to philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem.
4. Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive. Une Impression freudienne (Paris, 1995), 11; Dem
Archiv verschieben, German trans. Hans-Dieter Gondek and Hans Naumann (Berlin,
1997).
5. Gilles Deleuze, “Ein neuer Archivar,” in Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Der Fa-
den ist gerissen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1977), 59–85. This is in reference to Michel Fou-
cault, Archaeologie des Wissens (Paris, 1969); German trans. Ulrich Koeppen (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), 125.
6. Foucault, Archaeologie des Wissens (1973 ed.), 188.
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FIVE
The Archive as “Submedial Space”
Does the power of memory lie in its repressive functions, in its mecha-
nisms of censorship, exclusion, barrier, or suppression? This is where its
strengths lie, producing positive effects in the area of desire; rather than
hinder knowledge, they allow it to emerge. 1 If we extend this to the
world of memory, we may give this power a name more concrete than
Foucault himself might have liked: the apparatus of the generalized
archive and its institutional positivity. Even Freud did not visualize the
archive as lacking a material substrate; this is where Derrida’s theory of
the archive decisively parts with Foucault, whose descriptions of the
archive remain something of a virtual phenomenon, for he never de-
scribes the archive in terms of its materiality—a rather anomalous blind
spot. 2
To a certain extent, Boris Groys shares Foucault’s concept of the
archive: specifically, the law of totality, meaning that which can be said,
rather than the internal difference between the present and the reposito-
ry. “What the archive actually offers is an assumption so that something
like history might even take place at all” 3—which shifts the concept of
the archive from the latent to the manifest. Rather than proceed from the
givenness of the real archive, Groys is building a model of the archive
that poetically oscillates between reality and fiction. He transposes the
repository with the discourse it effectuates, while highlighting the
archive as a machine for the production of memories, one that fabricates
history out of the material of unassimilated reality. It is not the machine
but rather the program that drives the machine that is called narrative.
Narration is the medium of history. Herein lies the entire difference be-
tween the database and the algorithm. The mediality of the archive is
based on the concreteness of its technical materiality—the apparatus of
data storage (paper, film, computers) that for the most part remain con-
11
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12 Chapter 5
stitutively concealed as concrete carriers of the signal of their cultural

decoding: the archival carrier detached from the viewer’s gaze (Groys).
At the same time, it is an irreducible element both in play and at work in
the archive as lieu de mémoire: the control signs belong not to the content
of the archive but rather to an administration that is radically grounded
in the present and so constitute an archive in Foucault’s terms—as dispo-
sitif, which Groys succinctly terms submedial carrier-space. This space is in
some ways already the object of a paranoid suspicion of manipulation,
conspiracy, and intrigue. But first one must see the paranoid gaze
(Jacques Lacan). Media also constitute themselves as intersections, where
the performance of the so-called subject, to which belongs the narrative
stabilization as self-assertion through history(ie)s, transitions to the appa-
ratus, “whereby the apparatus always overplays the subject that it serves
or is served by.” 4 This allows for a genuine media archaeology that does
not write about the media as history beyond all other historiography
(intransitively) but rather writes the archive of media as the law of the
sayable and the seeable—transitively. A model for this artistic notational
system of historical events can be found in Hanne Darboven’s 1978 Bis-
marckzeit. For her, writing and text serve as a pure chronological visual-
ization of telling time. In the end, the archive appears to be less some sort
of neutral accumulation of information, on constant standby, than a me-
dial outcome of temporal events, so that the information, the content,
might be consciously suppressed: “All script, no description” (Darbov-
en). She uses mathematical procedures to bring data to a form that effaces
the source of the original context of facts (Kai-Anne Hemken).
NOTES
1. Michel Foucault, Mikrophysik der Macht. Über Strafjustiz, Psychiatrie und Medizin
(Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1976).
2. Jan Engelmann, “Aktenzeichen ‘Foucault,’” in Michel Foucault, Botschaften der
Macht. Der Foucault-Reader. Diskurs und Medien, ed. and afterword Jan Engelmann,
intro. Friedrich Kittler (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999), 220.
3. Boris Groys, Unter Verdacht. Eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Munich: Hanser
Verlag, 2000), 9.
4. Bernhard J. Dotzler, “‘Galilei’s Teleskop’. Zur Wahrnehmung der Geschichte
der Wahrnehmung,” ed. Dotzler/Ernst Müller, Wahrnehmung und Geschichte. Markie-
rungen zur aesthesis materialis (Berlin, 1995), 25.
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SIX
The Gaps Are the Archive
Can a study that simply takes a classification structure as given, that

obeys laws promulgated by official archives, that has been unable to
define its own discursive universe, even be called research? Not even the
national archives of the (highly) centralized state can always be the mag-
net that draws in all manner of disparate particles. Gaps in the archive
repudiate its image of historical amplitude. An archival indeterminacy of
history leaves unclear the relationship between the criminal trial, on the
one hand, and lettres de cachet, on the other, between the writ and the
reaction: “Nothing in the archives makes a provision for the specification
of one course or the other.” 1 The researcher in the archive is helpless. The
archi[ve]tecture is fragile: on the one hand, Farge and Foucault may deci-
pher royal petitions of the eighteenth century as a unique conflict scenar-
io; on the other, in any dossier such narratives are but a subset of what is
structurally archived in the archive: less narrative than the logistics of
administration set in motion via such dossiers, such as the processuality
of investigation, incarceration, revocation of charges, or appeals for clem-
ency. In the act of oral transcription of predominantly illiterate petition-

ers by the stenographer in the stenographer’s office, what takes place is
an enumeration of complaints—an index rather than a narration. As a
consequence this genre belongs not in the space of the library but in the
juridical archive. It is made plain in the historian’s opening statement
that “la vie fragile” is essentially that of a fractured tradition, which has
emerged from the depths of time and forgetting. Rather than collections
of primary sources, chronicles, memoirs, or novels, it is “a book that was
born from the archives.” Informed less by judicial (juridical), administra-
tive, or literary discourse than court or police files, the scraps and frag-
ments are “gathered in this vast sanctuary of words once spoken and
now dead,” the archive. Ensnared by the narrative character of the files,
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14 Chapter 6
Farge reads the archive as a literally generative space made of tiny scraps
of life that appear nowhere save as occasional sentences in the court

transcripts where they have been transcribed. 2 In fact, between the world
of the past and the reading of the present, the archive appears not so
much as “author” but as restructuring and prefiguration; the knowledge
of reality is a function of its classification, one that hangs like a net be-
tween the world and its perception, making each one linguistically com-
prehensible. It is less the case that we translate reality into a kind of
classification than that the classificatory form itself gives us information
about the archival structure of reality. 3 The archive, therefore, is not so
much what is left behind so much as it is the already extant screen for an
indexed reality.
Are the gaps in the archives—the lettres de cachet, the pre-1720 and
post-1760 files of the Bastille—significant or not? It is difficult to explain
their almost complete disappearance from the Bastille after 1760, al-
though Farge attempts this, asserting that petitions and files from the
period are likely archived elsewhere or have been dispersed or de-
stroyed, or perhaps never may have existed at all. There is almost always
a written trace to be found, a purloined letter, à la Edgar Allan Poe, just as
lettres de cachet that consist solely of correspondence force their way into
the historical unconscious. But nonexistence allows the historian not to
think. Is a gap in the archives evidence of an original silence of something
forced to be silent? Thousands and thousands of postcards were written
on that Sunday in July when the first moon landing took place, in which
the event passed unmentioned, because everyone assumed that it was no
longer news to anyone else: “a silentium from which the historian no
longer can make an argumentium,” 4 a complete lack of presence in the
organized discourse. “Forgetting” this is the crime that distinguishes the
absent from the absent-minded. Here we find both passive absence and
an absenting that is an act of violence. “At the end of this disappearance,
with the fury of the century at one’s heels, the archive appears as the final
refuge, a site for preservation after the excess of destruction.” 5 But at the
same time the memory of the archive is being transmitted into electronic
media that can transform data into nothing with a simple program com-
mand.
In light of the gaps and silences of the archive, the question is raised as
to how representative archival holdings can be and how they can be
defined as an information resource. The documents of 1728 and 1758
analyzed by Farge and Foucault are relatively plentiful and in their basic
outlines agree overwhelmingly with each other. Thus their theoretical
value as source of information is redundant; the assumption that they
constitute a representative corpus seems justified, even when a statistical
evaluation is impossible. Although he has vanished from the accumulat-
ed files, it would be impossible to imagine the past without the individu-
al, for whom both the historical and the narrative imagination, hungry
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The Gaps Are the Archive 15
for anthropomorphic figuration, clamor, apart from a world not so much

grasped as coolly calculated.
NOTES
1. Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, Familiäre Konflikte: Die “lettres de cachet.” Aus
den Archiven der Bastille im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. and commentary Arlette Farge, trans.
from French Chris E. Paschold and Albert Gier ([Paris, 1982] Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1989), 49.
2. Farge and Foucault, Familiäre Konflikte (1989 ed.), 7. Farge refers expressly to
Michel Foucault’s accompanying text to his planned Anthologie La vie de hommes
infâmes, Les Cahiers du chemin, no. 29 (January 1977): 12–29. The German edition is Das
Leben der infamen Menschen, ed., trans., and afterword Walter Seitter (Berlin: Merve
Verlag, 2001).
3. Luiz Costa Lima, “Soziales Wissen und Mimesis: der ‘Wirklichkeitsgehalt’ liter-
arischer Texte als Grundproblem der Literaturgeschichte,” in Der Diskurs der Literatur-
und Sprachhstorie. Wissenschaftsgeschichte als Innovationsvorgabe, ed. Bernard Cerquiglini
and Hans Ulrich Gumbrechte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 516.
4. Arnold Esch, “Überlieferungs-Chance und Überlieferungs-Zufall als methodis-
ches Problem des Historikers,” Historische Zeitung 240 (1985): 595.
5. Ulrich Rauff, “Club der untoten Dichter. Am Ort des Wahren und des Falschen:
Fiktionen im Archiv,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 8, 1997, 43.
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SEVEN
Exercices de silence (Silence in the
Archive)
Archives may be regarded as hallucinogenic substances 1: even Arlette

Farge had a sensation of resonance in the Paris Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal,
which is to say in Paris’s historic police archives. Might this be where the
role of vocal intonation, so crucial to oral literature, is invoked 2—the
archive as grammophone? Here Farge believes she has discovered that
documents, like stringed musical instruments, which can be set into vi-
bration as they are read, somehow store a tonal quality, a speech rhythm,
that no archive can silence. Wilhelm Jensen described where such archi-
val hallucinations might lead in his novella Gradiva: the German archae-
ologist Hanold believes that he sees walking and animated, beneath the
midday sun amid the ruins of Pompeii, the figure of a young girl, which
had moved him deeply when he saw it on a Greek bas-relief in the mu-
seum in Naples. Sigmund Freud drew conclusions for psychoanalysis:
antiquity represents the repression of childhood (in this case the archae-
ologist’s young love). Archives and archaeology are linked—and not
only in Freud. 3 How then are historiographical choreographies produced

from the dismembered bodies in the archive? A primal scene that only
functions if we assume an unconscious (Annette Bitsch). Archives are
places of temptation, if their textual corridors make one forget their si-
lence, and evoke fantasies of recovered memory, which withstand the
distant gaze only with difficulty. What then, if archival hallucinations do
not materialize? Sitting in the archive, I do not hear the murmur of the
dead—only silence. We translate this silence out of the acoustic into the
spatial dimension, and it becomes eloquent and implies an absence, as it is
essential for history. Patient reading allows the eye to drift across the
silence of manuscripts and pause whenever it finds any possible resis-
tance. Obstacles at the level of the artifact are the resistance to the real
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18 Chapter 7
inside the archive; in contrast, for digital space, it holds that in virtual
worlds (apart from technical breakdowns at the level of the operational or

software system), the very possibility of defect and decay is missing, all
that happens to material textual artifacts over time—and therefore, exact-
ly what imbues them aesthetically with a “historical” dimension (Alois
Riegl’s “Alterswert,” or “age value”). In the archive, Arlette Farge has
struggled with the physical defects of the documents: they are often illeg-
ible, or a missing word may make their meaning unclear. Pages folded
into one another so that texts appear blurred or truncated—hence the
gaps. History’s absence, as Michel de Certeau has described it again and
again, is reflected in the archive, which despite its floods of paper is not a
hoard of wealth but an unforgettable lack, which never stops updating
itself: this state of going missing is what the use of the archives trans-
forms into research questions. Historien: in French the name of the profes-
sion reads as an encapsulation of an antimony. Since the French Revolu-
tion, memory storage has been accumulated not as treasure but as protec-
tion against the impending loss of things. And since then such a fear has
been constitutive for the conception of cultural-memory storage, against
which the current world of the Internet reacts phantasmally, with a re-
quest to fill the gaps. In fact, it is important to develop the latencies of the
archive—that is, what makes itself noticeable in the present of the archive
as absence, very much in the sense of the photographic negative. But the
bond between the photographic gaze of the medium, the evidence-seek-
ing gaze of the detective, and the historical-archival gaze, which Carlo
Ginzburg so convincingly demonstrated, leads less toward the archaeo-
logical foundations of such a history than toward the abyss, as made
explicit in Antonioni’s film Blow Up: the attempt at using photographic
enlargement to document evidence of a crime randomly caught on film,
which in the end is lost within the grainy silver-nitrate surface of the
photograph itself—quite different form the blowup scene in Ridley Scott’s
film Blade Runner, where the foundations of the seeming pictures from
childhood at which the replicant looks are not photographic chemicals
but electronic pixels. The archive is formed only out of atoms: letters—
calculable but discrete. And just as the archive depicts relationships logis-
tically instead of hermeneutically, requiring literary-historiographical re-
formation, there is, at the microarchival level of textual characters in the
interstices, the intervals between letters on paper, no continuity, just a
blank, white surface. This is exactly what applies even more radically in
the digital space, which resolves all analogue surfaces into discrete
points: between them lies nothing. And thus media analyses stand on the
side of the archival gaze, for they operate under the condition that as-
sumption that every statement forms a border against a vast emptiness, a
vast field of the unsaid: the anarchive.
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Excercices de silence (Silence in the Archive) 19
NOTES
1. Per the title of Michel Melot’s essay in Traverses 36 (Themenheft L’Archive)

(January 1986): 14–21.
2. Farge and Foucault, Familiäre Konflikte (1989 ed.), 77.
3. Sigmund Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva, mit dem Text der
Erzählung von Wilhelm Jensen (Frankfurt: Fischer-Taschenburg-Verlag, 1973).
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EIGHT
Prosopopoetic Phantasms (Scenes
from the Archives)
Archives are places of silence. We approach the archive as we would an

Etruscan tomb in Tuscany, in Italy, which consists of nothing more than a
scattering of artifacts, so long as there is no adequate literary reference as
to its semantic decryption. 1 This is where history goes missing in archae-
ological situations. (Mis)identification: how it is possible to not so much
forever encounter the past as the presence of history but instead to not
only bear its silence, its absence, but also to name them. In contrast we
find well-nigh Jesuitical vows of silence; and this requires the re/an-nun-
ciation of that narrative, which is history. Is silence the only authentic
speech? In this sense, there is also the question of Michel Foucault’s his-
toric investigation into the relationship between madness and civiliza-
tion: is not the history of silence itself subject to linguistic organization
and thus already on the side of reason, which—ordering, classifying, and
thus archiving—forever defines the boundaries of nonrational speech? 2
How can silence communicate without speaking?
The current void in the Etruscan tomb furnishes cloistered cells with
such exercises, history’s vacuum. How can we prevent our preconceived
historical imagination from running away with us when we enter these
spaces? It is only then that we can begin to hear the otherwise silent
Etruscans if their culture is linked to observation through other peoples,
such as the Greeks, who practiced historiography. 3 Of course, when we
enter an Etruscan tomb, we are faced with an absence of Etruscans—an
absence that is not a mere variant of presence, although Western percep-
tion forever attempts apotropaically to avoid this confrontation. D. H.
Lawrence noted a “queer stillness and a curious peaceful repose” in such
Etruscan places, especially during his descent into the rock tombs: “There
is nothing left. It is like a house that has been swept bare: the inmates
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22 Chapter 8
have left: now it waits for the next corner.” 4 The truth of this admission,
however, is a cybernetic: In order to protect the air-conditioned Etruscan

tomb in Cerveteri and its impressive murals from climatic infiltration, the
entrance is watched by a computer monitor. Alphanumeric data process-
ing has long employed nondiscursive forms for dealing with the archives
of the past.
It makes a difference whether something gets written about the archive
on a scholar’s desk or whether it is literally thematized from the archive
itself. A memory of taking notes in the early 1990s in the archives of the
Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome and the possibility of descending
below the reading-room level by means of a simple elevator ride: a place
where the registrar reigns and in which the contingencies of history as
collections of loose-leaf paper, unbound, are in evidence. The compact-
shelving system for efficient storage in the archival (inter)space—uni-
form boxes for historians’ estates, like urns in a columbarium, print traces
like ashes. Reading, researching, writing in the archive, in its desolation,
dessication, in its clinical abstinence—these are exercises in terms of a
weaning from the hallucinations of the historian, constantly imagining
life behind texts from the past as already tending toward the narrative.
Archaeologists of knowledge put up with lacunae, absences, and silence
as opposed to those historians who immediately transform the archive
into history’s cocktail party; just as the vacuum stimulates—in the spirit
of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 Laocoön theses—the imagination,
the need to know, to fill the gaps. “The excavators of ancient cities have
until now promoted only desolation, and never the past,” 5 disiecta mem-
bra, the unassailable, vast ruins. Archaeology and history in conflict: be-
yond historical identities and continuities, and flamboyant narratives,
there is only the reality of the archive from which historiographers breed
their phantasms—covering the textual surface, in light of the last flicker-
ing candle of a history’s transcendental signifier. But there is no archaeo-
logical point zero for insight into the past; there is nowhere. There can be
no spiritual exercise in the emptiness of Etruscan tombs and no contem-
plation of the archive. An encounter with the past means an inevitable

implication within representations and thus being caught up in language.
Origins, beginnings, orders, leaders, archives: every arché is always con-
ceived as logos, as speech. How not to speak: perhaps in another lan-
guage? Instead of history, the alternative is called information science.
NOTES
1. The historian Moses I. Finley, “Archaeology and History,” in Historical Studies

Today, ed. F. Gilbert and S. R. Graubard (New York, 1972), 288.
2. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito und die Geschichte des Wahnsinns” [1963], German
translation in Derrida’s Die Schrift und die Differenz (Frankfurt, 1976); see also Michel
de Certeau, Kunst des Handelns (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1988), 209f.
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Prosopopoetic Phantasms (Scenes from the Archives) 23
3. D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places [1932], foreword Massimo Pallottino (London:

Olive Press, 1986), 52f.

4. Ibid., 39.
5. Botho Strauss, Fragmente der Undeutlichkeit (1989), cited in Justus Covet and
Barbara Patzek, eds., Archäologie und historische Erinnerung. Nach 100 Jahren Heinrich
Schliemann, Justus Covet and Barbara Patzek (eds.) (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1992), 9.
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NINE
DRACULArchiv
In the context of the archive, the keyword Dracula seems to be a matter of

course, as it relates to a syndrome widespread among historians: to see
life where there is only silence, in search of a path between language and
silence, between the living and the dead. We (de)term(ine) this routing de
la mort à la vie. Up all night, at his or her desk, writing in ink that dries
like blood, the historian-author drains their subject. Dracula’s fangs cor-
respond to the voiceless grave of letters that is the archive. For the post-
Revolutionary, Romantic historian Jules Michelet in Paris, the ancien ré-
gime’s most terrible crime lay in how it doomed its subjects to an exis-
tence that was neither life nor death but a kind of hybrid. The archives
are the place where past lives are disinterred, and the space for the past
frequented by historians is le vide, wallpapered and carpeted solely by
texts. Étrange dialogue: because one can neither speak with dead nor warm
the textual corpus gone cold. While Michelet haunted the archives of the
French Parlament so as to write his history of the French Revolution, he
heard an obstinate murmur within the documents and described imagi-
nation as the drug of history: “Out of the lonely galleries of archives

through which I roamed for twenty years, out of the silence of the abyss, I
could nevertheless hear a murmur.” 1 Even the historian/archaeologist
Foucault looked for answers to the infinite stirrings of the archive as the
form of existence for accumulated discourse. 2 To give a voice to the dead
is grammophony. The grooves of the record are traces, scars left by the
vampire fangs of every system of organizational memory—“les sons, leur
traces, leurs manières de mémoire,” as Michele de Certeau puts in his
concluding remarks to L’histoire de l’absent. 3 But a store of letters becomes
history when historical discourse provides it with an electrical charge.
The place where signifiers and texts rest like bones and skeletons, wait-
ing, literally, to be read back together, is the archival collection. The archi-
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26 Chapter 9
val container is a coffin, and the nocturnal moment of its examination

corresponds to the phantasmal period during which the vampiric gaze is

fixed upon the faded script of notarized documents. The line from the
literal, scriptural authority of the administration and its vampire’s fangs
toward the grave proceeds logi(sti)cally. And does so not so much meta-
phorically as metonymically: “Scraps of paper and parchment like bits of
skin . . . light, fragile, and incorporeal, as they threaten to crumble, to
moulder, to turn into ash at your touch, but are no less alive for that.” 4
What happens when Dracula himself becomes part of the archive?
The archive, which is both assertion and praxis as authorized by Dracula:
“There were counts.” 5 Here (dug) graves justify not only the study of
their beginnings but also the reading of their registries; thus the vampire
novel becomes the textbook of bureaucratization. This is why in African
literature, state officials are often portrayed as literal bloodsuckers: the
colonial administration is Dracula’s realm, the enforcement of administra-
tive notation.
Dracula archaeology, for Bram Stoker, meant an attempt to reassem-
ble an archive from public knowledge: in contrast with other vampire
novels, he strove for an aura of authenticity, spending his days in the
British Library, reading up on Transylvania’s history, geography, cus-
toms, and traditions. There is an overallotment of histori(graphi)cal imagi-
nation here, as to which the doyen of nineteenth-century German
historiography, Leopold von Ranke, proclaimed, one should strive to
erase one’s self entirely from the writing of history so that nothing should
speak except facts and the force of the past. 6 Rather than the writer, what
operates here is purely (text) screen. To be more precise: history is a
medium that lets ghosts speak. Even the New Historicism was launched
by a desire to speak with the dead, as Stephen Greenblatt has acknowl-
edged. 7 Ranke wanted “merely to show what actually happened,” 8 the
ideal of positivism. It is the archive, that void, that consumes the histo-
rian while writing: it drains him of his physical substance; he gives his
blood when he writes his history, in which he dedicates himself to the
archive—lost in the irreducible gap between the symbolic and the real
and thus the impossible. Hence the historian can only save him- or her-
self when yielding to an illusory coherence of the imaginary, to live in its
narrative garments. The alternative would be a reckoning with only par-
tial outcomes, one that could never be tallied up, that would be
un(re)countable.
NOTES
1. Jules Michelet’s foreword to Histoire de France (1869) found in Oeuvres Complètes

IV, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 24.
2. Michel Foucault in conversation with Raimond Bellour, “Sur les façons d’écrire
l’histoire,” Les lettres françaises, no. 1187, June 15, 1967; German translation by Friedrich
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DRACULArchiv 27
Giese: “Über verschiedene Arten, Geschichte zu schreiben,” in Adelbert Reif (Hg.),

Antworten der Strukturalisten (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1973), 169.

3. Paris, 1973.
4. Claude Simon, Die Strasse in Flandern (Paris, 1960) (Berlin, 1960), 54f.
5. Friedrich Kittler, Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften (Leipzig: Reclam Ver-
lag, 1991), 21.
6. Leopold von Ranke, Englische Geschichte, Bd. II (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot
Verlag, 1860), 3.
7. Stephen Greenblatt, “Einführung,” Verhandlungen mit Shakespeare (Berlin: Klaus
Wagenbach Verlag, 1990).
8. Leopold von Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494
bis 1514 (Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 33/34) (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot Verlag, 1874), VII
(Einleitung zur 1. Ausgabe 1824).
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TEN
Inverted Time: The Space of the Archive
Comparable to the early industrial factories, national and municipal

archives have formed a segment of a system that has always been focused
on production. The archive is an economic place for symbol circulation,
where a given present derived from numerous channels (“tradition,”
“the past”) comes to light, to create a product called memory. Such a place,
which primarily serves genealogical interests, can now be the tool or
medium for a production called historiography—a metamorphosis of the
archive that increasingly makes forgotten what once was represented.
The archive becomes a factor that reverses time, transforming it into for-
mative space: a memory machine that plays a leading role on our opera-
tional stage. 1 Thus the archive is not so much an agent of historical time
but rather a medium for a detemporalized present of storage. Not so
much a passive site for accommodating such data, which can be treated
as conditional (i.e., in the form of data), it constitutes knowledge. The
cybernetically motivated concept of memory as information storage be-
comes technical here—not as a representation of past reality but as its
construction. It is not that recollections are recalled from this memory but
that they are made here first. De Certeau has a radical conception of the
archive qua memory agency as machine, virtually linked to the new me-
dium of the computer. Thinking about the archive cybernetically doesn’t
necessarily explain it as a universal metaphor for every form of storage,
which currently grows at an inflationary rate: here the term archiving has
nothing to do with archiving in its classic sense but rather merely denotes
data storage. 2 Thus in a game of strategy it becomes a factor in the defin-
ing power of the present; henceforth de Certeau’s concept of “theater of
operations” can be explained as an allusion to Clausewitz’s concept of
“theater of war.” Twentieth-century archives are no longer conceivable
without war machines and memory machines. At the close of the Second
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30 Chapter 10
World War the regulations archive served as the central steering mecha-
nism for the development and application of technical regulations by the

special representative for regulatory techniques to the Reichsminister for
Armaments and War Production. 3 At the beginning of the new millen-
nium there is less interest in the eschatological than in the detemporal.
The archive becomes a condition; the title page of the archives issue of
Traverses depicts the archive as a bunker. Since the death of Michel de
Certeau, this bunker has been shrunk to the size of a microchip, whose
circuits recall the structure of the Internet itself: less archive than cache,
less site for preservation and legitimation of rights than for production
and (hopefully) free software. Foucault was interested in cybernetics in
another space, 4 but the space of the archive has been defined by de Cer-
teau, emphasizing the archive as cultural technique (“Il faut y une opéra-
tion technique”). Thus archival memory is no longer purely the space of
letters but of the alphanumeric (just as the printing press has made pages
numerically identical, so has memory storage made them precisely ad-
dressable). Through the mediation of the digit, which assumes a central
place in the art of deciphering, there are homologies that obtain between
erudition and mathematics, from which de Certeau has diagnosed the
emergence of the computer. For the longest time, modern archives were
architectonic “macrochips,” designed to be permanent and enduring,
monuments of documentation—monumentum aere perennis, as Horace
called them. Microelectronic archives are not built on hard ground but on
sand: memory in silicon, grains of digital sand in a granary of bits and
bytes. Learning how new forms of knowledge and archival navigation
play out in this archival space is nothing more than a translation of the
ancient Greek art of navigation: steering a ship—its cybernetics—accord-
ing to latitude and longitude. Mass and count are the coordinates of the
Noah’s Ark archive: mathematics and geometry. L’arche (Lat. arca) also
means box in French (coffre, armoire)—the charge, the archive, both hori-
zontal (as Noah’s Ark) and vertical (as functional archival architecture).
The Parisian journal Traverses unearthed a historical engraving as an
illustration for their special issue “L’archive” (January 1986), Jean Lepel-
letier’s L’arche de Noë (Rouen: Jean B. Besonge, 1700), for in the beginning,
en arché, after the flood the rescue boat on the waters was a crate some-
thing like the magic stele in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—in the
heavens above, outlined by clouds, a discursive fog representing God
may be read as the software effect of the archive's hardware, as represent-
ed by the ark itself. Excavated archaeographically, the ark is depicted as a
tomb, a coffin (between textual corpus and corpse). Noah’s ark was the
first archival museum, the first exemplary collection of the representative
objects of the world, equally metonymical and metaphorical. The naviga-
tional thinking of the first archival transfer: in order to navigate the high
seas to transport goods or information, ships were themselves data-pro-
cessing systems. Cargo or data: Noah collected fauna in twos for his ark
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Inverted Time: The Space of the Archive 31
and made them into a compact encyclopedia of the world. For ships
“transfer and store, they are a means for transmission and collection . . .,
metaphorically, naturally, for metaphora, translatio, or ‘transfer’ all mean
full speed ahead and nothing more than the ship.” 5 The media archives
of the present, which no longer only primarily store but also transmit,
remind us of this function.
NOTES
1. Michel de Certeau, “L’espace de l’archive ou la perversion du temps,” Traverses.

Revue du Centre de Création Industrielle, no. 36 (January 1986): 6.
2. Gerhard A. Auer, “Bildarchivierung auf optischen Speichermedien,” Der Archi-
var 48, no. 1 (1995): 71.
3. “VDI-Regler-Archiv,” VDI-Zeitschrift 88 (1944): 407.
4. Michel Foucault, “Andere Räume,” in Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspek-
tiven einer anderen Ästhetik, Karlheinz Barck, Peter Gente, Heidi Paris, and Stefan Rich-
ter, eds. (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1990), 34–36.
5. Bojan Budisavljevic, “Die Überfahrt, ein Dichtertod: Hart Crane,” Aufbrechen
Amerika. Der Katalog (Stadt Bochum) (Kornwestheim: Druckhaus Münster, 1992, 235).
Cf. Michel de Certeau, Kunst des Handelns (Berlin, 1988).
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ELEVEN
Textuality of History? Archives and
Literature
The New Historicism in literary criticism is generally interpreted as a func-

tion of the archive. Stephen Greenblatt writes his cultural analyses of
early modern responses to the new world in a decidedly modular fash-
ion, largely by means of the avowedly fragmented quality of anecdotes,
those indexes to the strangeness of chance; he forms relationships be-
tween their subjective forms of perception, in order to approach, at least
archaeologically, the ever-withdrawing historical object. 1 However, what
distinguishes the archive from other memory media is the nonarbitrary
character of its very order. The excursive, and consequently archivally
eclectic, methods of the new historicism resemble the form recommended
by the novelist Laurence Sterne: he tried not to proceed by the straightest,
most-direct route but instead kept an eye out for digression, contrasting
different accounts, gathering anecdotes, reading inscriptions, weaving
together stories, surveying traditions. And “[t]o sum up all; there are
archives at every stage to be look’d into, and rolls, records, documents,
and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to
stay the reading of.” 2 This is the crossroads where new historicists unmask
themselves not as careful readers in the archive but as flâneurs, if they,
after hasty investigation, are satisfied by a search for suitable objects of
demonstration to support their theories, like the peregrinations of a hat. 3
The mode through which the New Historicism links rather heterogene-
ous texts is not just the mute logistics of the archive but the assumption of
a cultural resonance that obtains between monuments, which is then man-
ufactured as a “conversation of statements”—a certain musical tone, a
dialogism as transmutation of voice and texts, which has only been per-
formatively imaginable during the Middle Ages, and then only between
texts. 4 The “new” historicism of the 1980s and 1990s was not primarily an
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archival movement: its triumphs lay not in the discovery of new docu-
ments but in the interpretation and reconfiguration of already extant ma-

terial—material that the “old” historicism had already discovered. Only
when it resists the attempt to narrate does the deciphering of an archival
record escape its premature historicizing: the decipherment of discrete
archival materials, records not yet processed, is to be preferred over this
tendency toward representations demarcated by discipline or culture.
With archival bits such as these, we are not talking about digital space,
the typographical, visual, or auditory signs that can actually be broken
down into their elemental units and thus be made attributable, exchange-
able, or transferable. 5 Such an archive is the literal effect of the (mathe-
matical) real. However, Hayden White critiques the privileging of the
archive, calling into question the inevitable linguistic-rhetorical media-
tion between the world and consciousness—a provocation for historians
who inter themselves in the archive in search of an evidentially solid
foundation. 6 For poetic figures operate not only at the level of historio-
graphical representation but in the figuration of the archive itself. The
agency of the archive is a pragmatic form of reality insofar as it is imme-
diate: thus in this sense we may speak of a poetics of the archive. An
incisive review of Arlette Farge’s pamphlet is expressly placed beneath
the heading: literature. 7 Is there a poetics of the archive, or does the
archive provide not just a representation of a discrete, nondiscursive al-
ternative to literary forms of data textualization? Speaking frankly,
“When one has overcome one’s surprise and astonishment, the monoto-
ny of the series, its innumerable and trivial individual instances, is what
dominates.” 8 This is where Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge—that
is, a nonnarrative-historical conception of the archive—comes into play.
LaCapra warns against an uncritical, mystifying archivism in which the
archive becomes fetish, a substitute for the evermore-lost reality of the
past. Read as fetish, the archive stands within the process of its own
historiographical textualization for the illusory experientiality the past
things instead of being regarded as mere mundane custodian of their
traces. 9 Accordingly, the relationship of the archaeology of knowledge to

the archive is allegorical, in contrast to the symbolic restitution of the past
as history: here allegory represents the desire for an object that can nei-
ther be grasped nor completely lost. If historicism in Frederic Jameson’s
conception refers above all to our relational links to the past, and hence
the possibility of perceiving at all its monuments, artifacts, and traces, we
are directed toward the level of archive rather than narrative. The analy-
sis of the materiality of culture and its techniques takes the place of his-
torical understanding. It is not so important to discover new things as it is
to create new relationships between things, as the video artist Nam June
Paik once declared. 10
The power of memory technologies lies in the failure of literature as
narrative. That which remains silent must be archived. Beyond the histor-
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Textuality of History? Archives and Literature 35
ic speech, the dispositif of the archaeology of knowledge that Greenblatt

has termed negotiation, becomes accessible: standardization, currency,

only possible through symbolic information exchange (even if it means
the remainder, the trace, the supplement, le don in Derrida’s sense, is what
falls from view). 11 At this point, the archive comes into play, as agency,
all the more effectively at work in literature for being silent. In the literary
work the archival body has always been cowritten, if it agrees that every
work is already necessarily an archive, constituting a space-time organ-
ization: insofar as it is not so paradoxical that works (whether textual or
artistic) first must find a fixed point in space and time in the archive or
the museum in order to facilitate their own repetition and transmission. 12
“For space here is time,” according to Gurnemanz in Richard Wagner’s
Parsifal; de Certeau also argues for a morphological analysis of spatially
stored temporal processes. The classical ars memoriae proceeds from the
site; it is far more space- than time-bound. The archive is a Bakthinian
chronotope, and it captivates us with the simultaneity of its documents
that have come down to us from many different eras. It is the work of the
author that transforms this synchronicity into the form of temporalized
history. Historiography means the transformation of the spatiality of the
archive as a consequence of its temporalization (narration). The order of
the archive follows a logistics (the register), which stands more on the
side of the infrastructure of power (administration) than on that of the
anthropological imperative to temporalize experience: in activities and
objects the trace of the human is less easy to find than the logic of the
system.
But Greenblatt’s poetics of culture, in contrast to Foucault’s discourse
analysis, in no way conceals an “historical a priori” but writes the history
of divergent cultures under poetological signs from the perspective of
American multiculturalism. As idiosyncratic agent, the archive stands in
the background of the New Historicism that can decipher (con)texts with
precision but that is less precise when explaining recording and storage
techniques as agents of the praxis of representation and, correspondingly,
as power operators.
The New Historicism proceeds with an insight into a chiasmus: the
historicity of texts and the textuality of history (Louis Montrose). Thus,
no beginnings, no arché. The circularity of Greenblatt’s negotiations is as-
cribed to the historiographical act itself (close to Marx’s theses on ex-
change value), and even more so if the accent here falls less on identity
than on the difference between historical dynamics and textuality. At this
point, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Arlette Farge show up for
an inharmonious rendezvous with the New Historicism, for the archaeol-
ogy of knowledge cannot just relocate “that enigmatic point where the
individual and the social are transformed into one another.” 13 When
Louis Montrose underscores history’s textuality, he refers here to the
subsequent unavailability of an authentic past as the fulfillment of a
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lived, and thus material, existence in the medium of the texts it has left
behind. The ghost of a platonic logocentrism still haunts these words, a

belief in a realm of lived orality, from which all writing, in contrast, is
derivative. The rhetoric of chiastic formulations appears plausible so long
as they help configure its emphasis on the dynamic, unstable, and recip-
rocal relationship between the literary and the social. 14 But in fact this
text(ual) figure privileges its literary dimension and in so doing simply
locks down whatever flickers within the historical real, which the New
Historicism seeks to trace. Although claim is laid to an entire range of
discursive forms, whether literary or not, this is precisely the point where
nondiscursive stabilizers and mediators may also be identified as nonar-
bitrary agents of the real: archive and law. The aesthetics of the New
Historicism adjoin Walter Benjamin’s plea for a history of the anonymous
masses, the victims, the voiceless, the quotidian. But the material basis for
this symbolic restitution is irretrievably gone. 15 The textual relationship
between literature and society as a condition of the New Historicism
returns, on the other hand, both analogically and concretely, to the new
archaeology, once more at the level of material culture, as a transfer of
methods of readings heretofore limited more to the realm of letters than
to that of the artifact. The text-formative properties of cultural artifacts
are laid bare as the reciprocal mechanisms of archaeological text produc-
tion. 16 This assimilation of archaeologically coded forms with the meta-
language of forms of knowledge in the library economy 17 entraps us
within textual metaphors, in which “context” along with the cladding of
objects through texts, signifies as its situatedness among other objects,
which assign meaning throughout to the mute individual instance. But
memory storage cannot function as history’s foundation: it is much more
its abyss. Whether in the museum, the library, or the archive, the past is
always in retreat, lost in an endless flight. Wandering archaeologists and
historians peregrinate, forever opening new doors with their various me-
thodological keys, gathering up the skeletal remains of past societies,
browsing the shelves of death, seeking truth through excavation and re-
search reports. 18 But in the end the echo heard from the cryptic labyrinth
of the excavation site or the archive is not the voice of the archaeologist or
the archivist. In contrast, the new archaeology has sought to develop a
method that links its object, the materiality of culture, with the impulses
of poststructural literature in order to escape the aporia of historiographi-
cal representation.
NOTES
1. See Andreas Mahler (rev.), “Fluch und Wunder: Greenblatts Geschichte(n),”

Jahrbuch 1993 der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft und der Deutschen Shakespeare-Ge-
sellschaft West, ed. Werner Habicht and Günther Kolotz (Bochum: Kamp Verlag, 1993),
270–77.
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Textuality of History? Archives and Literature 37
2. Laurence Sterne, Das Leben und die Ansichten Tristram Shandys, Trans. into the
German Rudolf Kassner (Bremen: Schünemann, 1958), 37f.

3. John Lee, “The Man Who Mistook His Hat: Stephen Greenblatt and the Anec-
dote,” Criticism, 45 (October 1995).
4. See also Christa Karpenstein-Essbach, “Derivationen der Diskursanalyse: New
Historicism und mediale Mythenanalyse,” Weimarer Beiträge 47 (2001): 13.
5. See Bernhard Siegert’s pictorial essay “Zwischen den Säulen des Herkules. Das
Archivo general de Indias in Sevilla,” Trajekte (Zentrum für Literaturforschung Berlin)
no. 2 (April 2001): 10.
6. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins,
1978), 125f. The German edition is Auch Klio dichtet oder die Fiktion des Faktischen.
Studien zur Tropologie des historischen Diskurses (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991).
7. Martin Stingelin, “Kleine Poetik des Archivs,” Basler Magazin no. 19 (May 12,
1990): 11.
8. Farge (1993), 15.
9. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1985), 92, footnote
17.
10. Nam June Paik, Art & Satellite (Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD,
1984).
11. Stephen Greenblatt, “Capitalist Culture and the Circulatory System,” The Aims
of Representation: Subject, Text, History, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia,
1987), 257–73.
12. Jean-François Lyotard, “Konservierung und Farbe,” in Das Inhumane. Plauderei-
en über die Zeit (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1989), 348.
13. Michel Foucault, Archaeologie des Wissens, trans. Ulrich Koeppen (Frankfurt,
1973), 199.
14. Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (Lon-
don and New York: Routledge, 1990), 8f.
15. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars
(Cambridge: Harvard, 1991), 170.
16. Christopher Tilley Material Culture and Text: The Art of Ambiguity (London: Rout-
ledge, 1991) reviewed by Bryan Hood in Norwegian Archaeological Review 25, no. 1
(1992): 69.
17. Jean-Claude Gardin, Une archéologie théoretique (Paris: Hachette, 1979), 84.
18. Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley, eds., Re-constructing Archaeology: Theory
and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1987), 7.
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TWELVE
Faking the Archives
Arlette Farge offers an unexpectedly literal conception of the digital in

the archive when she establishes “contact” with the archive as beginning
at the moment when the reader takes hold of the material. This moment
may sometimes be sensually charged—here the textuality of the archive
as reclaimed by the New Historicism comes into its own: “These scraps of
material between the fingers, a sweet and unusual consolation for hands
accustomed to the ubiquitous cold of the archive.” 1 But does the opportu-
nity to touch reality actually lie here? Similarly, Marianne Birthler, as of
this writing the West German commissioner overseeing the records of the
former East German Stasi, devoted, during her first week in office, a half
a day in the archives to the files, “because I really wanted to get my
hands on them—I needed to grasp them by grasping them.” 2 Many re-
searchers prefer to encounter the original manuscript in the more easily
readable form of the critical edition, but this moment forever recalls only
the contingency of the archive, the random origin of ordering. What else
can Greenblatt’s desire to speak with the dead mean, other than a meto-
nymic displacement of this tactile desire to descend to the level of logo-

centrism? The archive of texts is a Wunderkammer, the object of obsession
for wonderful estates. Contact with the archival makes concrete what Johan
Huizinga rather vaguely described as historical sensations, as a sensual
experience of history not in the sense of reexperiencing it but rather in
becoming aware of it—that is, the only possible authentic experience of
the past. Experience is itself a historically and ideologically loaded term,
which was used in England in congregations of Protestant nonconform-
ists to designate direct contact with supernatural power without the dog-
matic interventions of priestly authority. Farge’s sensation of the taste of
the archive is very much in line with how sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century antiquarians spoke of relics of the past as fragments that could be
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40 Chapter 12
tasted. Here the archive of the past, its physical body of memory, is
literally and metaphorically (think of Catholic transubstantiation) incor-

porated into the present. And yet a text(ile) fragment in the archive is no
more the likeness of the past as the Shroud of Turin is a photographic
portrait of Christ.
As Farge describes it, the archive of the eighteenth century did not
mimetically mirror the city of Paris (which is to say, the logic of the state
at the time) but emerged instead as a work in progress. For the reality of
the past is fixed only within the context of the signs and attributions of
the archive, at the moment we find their traces. This involves both inven-
tio as rhetorical technique and as finding: but this invention also refers to
what Natalie Zemon Davis has called archival fictions. Even Foucault
confessed he had never written anything other than fiction, that even
within the innermost truth the dissimulations of the political were always
in play. 3 History as discourse sets in motion figures that tend toward
narrative writing, which is to say fiction. On the other hand it produces
statements with a claim to truth, which can only be verified through its
operations. 4 Do not invent, not even in the slightest, not even a figment of
the imagination—so Leopold von Ranke once warned his readers. This
meant abstaining from all manner of dramatization. However, every
historiography is a dramatic production (as Hayden White and Paul
Veyne tirelessly point out). Ranke’s “mere show” defines an ascetics of
historiography and thus the tension within a discourse of the antiquar-
ian-archival versus the rhetorical-imaginative, which has been revoked
(or permanently deferred) in a narration dominated by science and
marked by the apparatus of citations, the liquefaction of the archival
constellation. Archive-oriented historians such as Ranke, on the one
hand, and novelists such as Sir Walter Scott and Gustave Flaubert, on the
other, have fought, within their respective media (historiography, fiction)
to overwrite the irreducible difference between discrete data and a meta-
physical insight into the whole. Flaubert the novelist, after all, advised to
show and not tell: this semiotic imperative links both modes of writing
(hi)stories. And Ranke, for his part, while effacing historical fiction, ac-
knowledged a trace of a debt to it in his historiographical impulse—
Scott’s historical novels, which he read “with fervent participation” while
at the same time dismissing them. Ranke convinced himself, based on
sources, and against his own better judgment, that the Charles the Bold
and Louis XI depicted in Scott’s works, such as Quentin Durward, never
could have existed. This comparison convinced him that the historically
attested was more beautiful and more interesting than romantic fiction: “I
turned away from all this and seized upon the thought that I should
avoid everything invented or fabricated, and adhere strictly to the
facts.” 5 In place of the literary historical narrative, the aesthetics of the
archive step forward—the mandate of what was actually said, which
even Foucault indulged in as “joyful positivism.” The order of tradition
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Faking the Archives 41
here is identical with that of state power. Dissimulatio artis, concealing the
rhetoric of the real, is their trade secret, and the higher order, the cosmos
of the state, relieves the historiography of some poetologically grounded
foundational order. The beauty of narrative calls to mind the triadic semi-
otics of Charles S. Pierce, to an interpretant in the ordering of sign and
signifier, where the authority for such an order is located beyond authori-
al rhetoric.
Friedrich Nietzsche was also to become a function of archi(val)-fiction
and hence an object of interest for Foucault. The Will to Power Interpreted
was Nietzsche’s legacy in the eighties—but should the title have been
revised further: The Will to Power Edited? 6 Making Nietzsche contempo-
rary means treating Nietzsche as both subject and object, divided by a
rupture of a scientific kind—the moment of his abrupt mental breakdown
in early 1889, when his sister Elisabeth presented herself as the authori-
tarian guardian of his work and his memory. The notebooks she edited
posthumously were castigated by critics not so much as falsifications but
as deformations, as the fictions of the archives do not occur so much in
individual documents as they do in their (re)assembly. The Nietzsche
archive, institutionalized by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, was trans-
formed by the administrators of his estate into a site for the subsequent
production of an unwritten book called The Will to Power—reason enough
for Foucault to publish a work with the title The Will to Knowledge as an
allusion to this archival fiction. Foucault himself in turn forbade posthu-
mous publications of his own unpublished work. The world is waiting
for an edition of Les Aveux de la chair, the fourth volume of his History of
Sexuality, which he wrote just after finishing The Will to Knowledge, but
which had only undergone a rudimentary revision at the time of his
death. Might this final largely revised manuscript of Foucault’s yet be
published? His biographer Didier Eribon, to a certain extent the editor of
Foucault’s life (in the narrative rather than the critical sense), refers to the
1967 foreword by Gilles Deleuze and Michael Foucault to Nietzsche’s
Oeuvres complètes, where both philosophers argue in favor of posthumous
publication of all his writings, of unfettered access to all his manuscripts

and notes: for no one could critically evaluate in advance the form that
such a great book might have assumed. Such a form is best imagined by
the reader, who must, at any rate, rely on whatever means are at hand. 7 Is
French poetry in regular contact with the archive? In fact, every random
note ever dashed off by Nietzsche is being edited within the framework
of a research project. “How can a work be defined out of the millions of
traces left behind after someone’s death?” 8 The volumes of scholarly ap-
paratus accompanying Nietzsche’s posthumous writings for the years
1885 to 1889 that appear in the Kritisches Gesamtausgabe are not repro-
duced as different readings, as a distortion of preliminaries, variants, or
dedications, but as Nietzsche’s notes according to their spatial ordering
in the manuscripts, flanked by a genealogical itemization of the material
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42 Chapter 12
along with a chronological sequence from volume to volume. 9 This is to

say it is a radical archivology: memory as archival space, to be perceived

and asserted in its presence. The discrete resolution of the material in a
meticulous documentation of the process of writing is the most effective
deconstruction of the myth of the posthumous work as an actual cell
within a compilation called The Will to Power—a process that itself once
more disentangles the erstwhile textual operations of the Weimar Nietzs-
che Archive, because the power of memory lies less in its past than in its
undeceivable storage. Foucault never gave up on the real, for he took
seriously the illusion of the referent itself—those things rescued from the
archive whose manipulability establishes its own rules and boundaries.
File numbers do not cheat. 10
The archive oscillates between a cemetery of facts and a “garden of
fictions” (Ulrich Raulff). Does the fictionality of textual storage not also
apply to (state) archives that store registers and statistics rather than
literature? So the contingency of the medium would have it: the same
newspaper edition that Raulff points to as an archival fiction covered the
transfer of the so-called Jewish files of the French police to the Centre de
documentation juive contemporaine in Paris, ordered by French president
Jacques Chirac. The article dealt with the 1991 discovery, in the archives
of the Ministry for Veterans Affairs, of files containing personal data
relating to the persecution and deportation of Jews in and around Paris
between 1942 and 1944—administrative traces bounding a monstrous
void, long-hushed-up evidence of French collaboration with the German
occupier. Memory in the conflict between (state) power and those af-
fected by it—formally, the documents remain part of the state archives,
which with their transfer now constitute an enclave inside the Centre de
documentation juive contemporaine. The foundation of the present is there-
fore itself an archive, “which requires,” according to Chirac, “that we
look our history in the face.” 11 But isn’t this how a corpus made of
papers, themselves dealing with corpses, is prosopoietically transformed
into an historical body—the “body of the condemned,” as Foucault calls
it in the first chapter of Discipline and Punish? How tight the connection,
thematized in the same book, between archives, personal papers, and
memory capital, can be seen in the renewed reminders of French gold
confiscated by the Germans: after the war restitution of gold was only
made to individuals who could produce a German submission and re-
ceipt document. The quest for survivors or heirs was only launched in
early 1952, after the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine demanded
the lifting of bank secrecy so as to locate the accounts and safe-deposit
boxes of deported Jews. Memory is determined not by the narrative text
but by that of figures and codes.
The garden of fictions brings forth strange flowers, which are called
literature. Can there be narrative outside the archive, asks Roberto
González Echevarría in his analysis of Latin American literature, or is the
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Faking the Archives 43
(legal) form of the archive that initially generates specific literary gen-
res? 12 The Archivo General de Indias in Seville preserves the statements of

those willing to emigrate to the New World, who underwent an interro-
gation procedure like that later undergone by the subjects of the Catholic
Inquisition: within these inquisitors’ notes the archaeology of knowledge
deciphers the cells of what expands, as a literary form, into autobiogra-
phy. The European subject is thus literally born of the procedures of the
archive (Bernhard Siegert)—a process that today repeats itself under the
sign of a very different sort of archive, toward a virtual world rather than
a new one: the birth of fictitious user identities within the Internet. Fou-
cault gives the concept of the archival fiction a peculiar twist by coincid-
ing literary invention and archival inventory, virtual worlds as worlds of
fictions and machines, so that an anonymous murmur speaks from be-
hind the mask of the author. The subject of the author is only partially
constitutive of what it writes; it is itself a repressive implication within
texts, a phenomenon of interference against the noise of idioms. Books
are not an authorial invention, they are the interface of a present epoch
and its epistemic configurations against a given body of texts, which in
their totality nevertheless articulate a subject, albeit only in the form of an
anonymous “they.” 13
NOTES
from French Chris E. Paschold and Albert Gier ([Paris, 1982] Frankfurt, 1989), 16.
2. “Die Akten sind ein Schatz.” Marianne Birthler, interviewed by Mirko Heine-
mann and Claudia Wahjudi in Berlin, zitty (October 2001): 26.
3. Michel Foucault, “Die Machtverhältnisse durchziehen das Körperinnere.
Gespräch mit Lucette Finas,” in Dispositive der Macht. Über Sexualität, Wissen und Wah-
rheit (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1978), 117.
4. Michel de Certeau, Das Schreiben der Geschichte, trans. Sylvia M. Schomburs-
Scherff, afterword Roger Chartier (Frankfurt and New York, 1991), 73.
5. Ranke’s November 1885 dictum, cited in Wahan Nalbandian, Leopold von Rankes
Bildungsjahre und Geschichtsauffassung, Diss. (Leipzig, 1901), 13.

6. Ludger Lütkehaus, “Die Geburt des Philosophen, zur Edition von Nietzsches
frühen Schriften in 5 Bänden (München 1994),” Die Zeit, March 18, 1994, 29.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Introduction générale” to Oeuvres philoso-
phiques complètes de F. Nietzsche (Collin and Montinari edition), V, Le Gai Savoir, Frag-
ments posthumes (1881–1882) (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). I have, cited from the German
translation in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1993), 470.
8. Michel Foucault, “Was ist ein Autor?, hier unter Bezug auf Nietzsches Nach-
lass,” in Botschaften der Macht. Der Foucault-Reader. Diskurs und Medien, ed. and after-
word Jan Engelmann, intro. Friedrich Kittler (Stuttgart, 1999), 33.
9. Jan Ross, “Angstbeisserei eines Propheten,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June
15, 1994.
10. Pierre Michon, in Michon and Arlette Farge, “Entretien,” Villa Gillet, notebook 3
(November 1995), 153.
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11. “V.M.,” “Wir müssen unserer Geschichte ins Gesicht sehen,” Frankfurter Allge-
meine Zeitung, December 8, 1997, 5.

12. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Nar-
rative (Durham and London: Duke, 1998), 186.
13. Michel Foucault (in conversation with Raimond Bellour), Archaeologie des Wis-
sens, trans. Ulrich Koeppen (Frankfurt, 1973), 165 and 170ff.
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THIRTEEN
Archibiograffiti
Michael de Certeau’s allegations against him notwithstanding, Foucault

spends too much time examining power’s mechanisms of oppression and
not enough on the subversiveness of everyday praxis (in a cultural stud-
ies sense); we recall Foucault’s editorial project The Lives of Infamous Peo-
ple and its accompanying essay, where life and power intersect. One site
for this intersection is the archive, that memory of life in the dispositif of
an apparatus for the power of memory: Foucault did not chance upon the
idea of an anthology when he chanced upon a registry of early eight-
eenth-century arrest records in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. It
thus became his intention to give a face to coagulated instances of exis-
tence through narrative historiography. Exhumation des archives—to strike
biographical sparks from the archive means forever concealing the tech-
nological structure of its indexing, which in turn conceals itself behind
anthropologically conciliatory stories: perhaps this is the media archaeol-
ogy of life itself. Thus Foucault places to one side every literary refraction
(including memoir)—that is, all the already distanced and reflected in-
sights into lives that have pressed their way into transcripts of police
interrogations as “the dramaturgy of the actual,” because they have an
operative interest in what they record—de/refining the archive, or, to put it
another way: what can also be said will be recorded in writing, collected,
and inserted within the dossiers of the archive. In this regard, the archive
is not a passive storage unit; it generates—in league with power—new
forms of literature or knowledge. Let us not forget: autobiographical liter-
ature is an effect of a particular dispositif of power that in the West struc-
tures both economies and strategies of truth. The site of the archive is
where this dispositif comes into its own.
Peripheral laughter over contingent existences was sufficient reason
for Foucault to plan an anthology of infamous individuals that would not
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46 Chapter 13
be a scientific-historical monograph but a collection of sketches, the

historiograffiti of lives that have survived only in a few lines or pages:

biographical accidents and adventures, gathered up in handfuls of words
encountered by chance in books and documents. What is it that delivers
the transmission of the archive as a grave for signifiers: “Message or
noise?” 1 A past reality is fixed within the context of signs and attributes,
whose “grammar” is history (per Farge)—which is to say, at the level of a
symbolic order, which, in contrast, only rarely does a trace of the real
break through, whether as noise or disturbance. It is at these very mo-
ments that the archive becomes informative.
Can there be an increase to such infamy? Alain Corbin has undertaken
an attempt to resurrect a “nameless” cobbler named Louis-François Pina-
got from the random hits of the archive. While he can describe the sub-
ject’s living conditions and likely existence, he cannot provide him with a
personality. Can a historian create a portrait of an unknown and his time
out of practically nothing, operationally proceeding step by step inside
the archive, “until at last, like a jigsaw puzzle, the whole picture of a man
appears before his eyes”? 2 Of course, archival breakthroughs can be a
matter of chance, which Corbin allowed for when he chose to write his
cobbler’s biography, generating new, nonredundant information. But the
supposed superiority of Corbin’s application of the principle of chance to
his cobbler can be deceptive: he himself acknowledges an explicit inter-
vention in his choice. How representative can the files of the archival
inquisition be? Corbin criticizes as unrepresentative the process used by
Carlo Ginzburg to select Menocchio the miller from a village in Friuli as
the object of an historical study, 3 because Menocchio—unlike Pinagot—
was already visible within the institutions of both church and state and as
a conflict study already constituted an exception in terms of systems-
theoretical observational differences. But does this insight into an as-yet-
unfathomed layer of forms of folk beliefs and obscure peasant mytholo-
gies (per Ginzburg) facilitate a subject that is both focus of power and
registered according to the rules of the archive? Is the archive’s silence
regarding certain questions we have addressed the product of a forced

concealment, or is it an indicator of a genuine absence? Pinagot could
neither read nor write. Can something unrecorded even be history? “It
could be that what is meant here is: can we find anything in the sources
indicating that Pinagot understood the word ‘fellow’?” 4 But the attempt
to give a form to the obstinate murmur in the coagulated discourse of the
archive (the “nameless swarms”) does persist. In any case, these are
archives, not (hi)stories—which is why Corbin offers up preliminary
fragments from the journal of his initial archival recherche. Choosing an
anonymous subject from the local archive of said subject’s home is an
attempt to vault, against one’s better judgment, the chasm that separates
the present from archival memory. But in this way the object is trans-
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ferred from the geometries of chance into the probable, carried back
home into a hermeneutically familiar space.

So what are the scalar parameters of what constitutes an (un)ordinary
life? In an 1871 lecture on moral statistics, G. F. Knapp discussed statisti-
cal qualities for measuring things that were otherwise intangible. Bour-
geois society is thus statistically modeled. Nevertheless, statistics show
the individual that “he isn’t even worth a unit measured to the seventh
decimal place,” but statistics also offer the consolation that the big picture
is only altered by changes brought about by individuals. 5 Control no
longer means surveillance and punishment but can be found in the dis-
cursive effects of measurement itself: statistics, as the unseen force of
symbolic infrastructure, are reincorporated into the concept of state
knowledge (scientia). Quetelet’s 1870 Anthropometrie posits the homme
moyen as the statistical mean; he tried to calculate in terms of vectors’
criminal tendencies with the statistician’s scientific-archaeologically gelid
gaze, for which Francis Galton found, in his late nineteenth-century com-
posite photographs, a visual equivalent of data as visual pixelation. This
approach was originally drawn from the assumptions of the physiog-
nomical tradition, which held that a portrait of a person’s mental charac-
ter is not only visible but measurable—which is why he described his
composites as the visual equivalents of statistical tables. 6 The archival
form of writing out tabular statistics understands that economies are no
longer texts and thus serves, in terms of descriptive, quantitative social
science, as a provocation by the thick description (Clifford Geertz) of cultu-
ral studies. Tabular statistics share a common intersection with political
arithmetic: the characteristic lexicon of figures and equations, “without war-
ranting the phrase ‘dazzling’” (John). The documentation of the body of
the nation in its discrete numerical monuments may be contrasted with
its narrative version. Freed from semantic control, documentation can be
electrified, and the statistical engineer can take the place of the archivist. 7
NOTES
1. Under the title “Message ou bruit?” Michel Foucault gave a 1966 lecture to an
audience of physicians in Paris on prediscursive body signals in terms of information
theory, in German, in Foucault, Botschaften der Macht. Der Foucault-Reader. Diskurs und
Medien, ed. and afterword Jan Engelmann, intro. Friedrich Kittler (Stuttgart, 1999),
140–44. See also Foucault, Dits et Écrits I, no. 44 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
2. Book advertisement, www.amazon.de, for Alain Corbin’s Auf der Spuren eines
Unbekannten. Ein Historiker rekonstruiert ein ganz gewöhnliches Leben, trans. Bodo
Schulze (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1999).
3. Carlo Ginzburg, Der Käse und die Würmer. Die Welt eines Müllers um 1600 (Berlin:
Klaus Wagenbach Verlag, 1990 and 1993).
4. Thomas Müller on Corbin, “Alain Corbin: Auf den Spuren eines Unbekannten,”
1999, Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Freie Universität Berlin, http://hsozkult.
geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensio/buecher/2000/reaktion/fomo0200.htm, March 28,
2000.
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48 Chapter 13
5. V. John, “Name und Wesen der Statistik,” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Statistik
19 (Bern, 1883), 111.

6. Ante te Heesen, “Das Archiv. Die Inventarisierung des Menschen,” Der Neue
Mensch. Obsessionen des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Nicola Lepp, Martin Roth, and Klaus
Vogel, Katalog zur Ausstellung im Deutschen Hygiene-Museum Dresden (April 22 to
August 8, 1999) (Ostfilden-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1999), 125.
7. Herman Hollerith, cited in Christoph Asendorf, Ströme und Strahlen. Das lang-
same Verschwinden der Materie um 1900 (Giessen: Anabas Verlag, 1989), chapter 1, 28.
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FOURTEEN
The Mother of Archives: Rome
The archives of the Bastille fortress that have been Arlette Farge’s focus
are now both housed and accessible at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in
Paris, and once more it is a fortress that speaks to us. Archives are bas-
tions of memory, and in Rome this is true for the Vatican archives as well.
For a very long time the Roman Curia was bound together with the
catechontic nature of the archive: it is before the ageless walls of the
Vatican where the transmission of a democratically transformed epoch
comes to a halt. The Roman Curia looks back over millennia and antici-
pates the following: for the Curia there is no need for impatience—it can
always wait, there’s no need to rush, because it knows that one of its
strengths is time, and so temporeggiare, ‘playing for time’ forms one of the
main tenets of its politics.” 1 This well-nigh posthistorical crystallization
ended with the opening of the Vatican archives in 1881 and 1882, which,
for the science of history, literally made history. The opening of an archive
scans according to the rhythms of historiography. The historiography of
recent years can be traced back to an analysis of conflict relations that
have built up the science of history into an archive. 2 At the moment,

however, whenever an archive becomes “an incomparable treasure trove
of historical tradition,” 3 it has usually already lost its function as an ac-
tionable memory respective to the labor storage of power; and the histo-
rian, as analyst of power, arrives too late. The perception of present-day
reality is made up of similarly contingent channels of access to databases,
along with an analogical construction called the past. The difference lies in
authority, which guarantees that images and data are assigned to their
assumed referents. But this authority is absent when it comes to the past,
as it is substituted, analogous to state power, by an institutionalized sci-
ence of history—patriarchival, in Jacques Derrida’s term, and in line with
Michel de Certeau’s interpretation of the allegorical frontispiece to
49
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50 Chapter 14
Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains (1724), a publication of the Jesuit priest

François Lafitau.
Here we see an asymptotically symbolic clash between writing (Clio)
and time (Chronos) in the space of the archive, the ethnological collec-
tion, the archaeological museum, and the database. History can make the
silent relics of the past speak when they are compared with the analogous
phenomena of the present: Lafitau the cultural historian uses this exam-
ination technique to bridge the gaps of tradition and thus bring authorita-
tive order to the wreckage of these same traditions. 4 Scholars of Peiresc,
Kircher, and Leibniz have sought out innumerable “rarities” through the
medium of the museum collection in order to forcibly join and totalize
the emanations of such a history. Obsessed with the dream of a compre-
hensive taxonomic order of knowledge, and with the desire to create
universal tools commensurate with this passion, they necessarily had to
find a language that would provide an opportunity to compare and re-
vise every heterogeneous, laboratory-analyzed element. For the scholar,
the library is something they themself make (and not something that
simply happens to them): in the field of writing it seems that a continuity
between text collection and text production (per de Certeau) prevails.
The archive is the difference of authority, its postponement. Those
Geschäfte (“affairs”) (Johann Gustav Droysen) that are archivally extent in
an aggregate condition that is a tangible archaeology of knowledge—
those monuments to power that have coagulated into writing—are trans-
formed into history in the act of their documentation. Foucault points to
this in the introduction to his Archaeology of Knowledge: history in its tradi-
tional form undertook to “memorize” the past monuments by transform-
ing them into documents and allow their traces to speak, even if they were
generally not linguistic in nature—that is, to transform data, those small-
est tangible monuments, into information. In that such data often seem to
“secretly” refer to “something else” when they actually say something,
they make conceivable the allegorical belief in hidden scripted meaning,
the cryptographic truth of history. The relationship between the memory
institution (the archive) and historiography takes shape in the contested

ground of this belief. In contrast, Foucault issues a call for archival data
as understood by the Parisian Annales school of history to be serially
processed—that is, standardized—so as to make for a more accessible
archaeological-scientific, administrative description beyond that of narra-
tive. So too did the establishment of the Prussian Historical Station in
Rome in 1888 maintain that archival studies and editions of the day were
to be “the goal of their standardization” (Stengel). But will historians ever
be in a position to not immediately read archival materials as documents
of a bygone era but as a link in a chain that leads to the archive and
whose evidence documents pieces of writing in the archives as proof?
Paul Fridolin Kehr, director of the Prussian Historical Institute in Rome
at the time, saw in the genealogical reconstruction of the archive itself
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The Mother of Archives: Rome 51
extent at the time the key to understanding its unique logistics. As early
as 1823, George Heinrich Pertz, one of the cofounders of the standard

edition of sources on medieval German history, formulated it precisely:
“[f]or the papacy, the best defense is to have their system exposed.” And
this is as true for archaeology as it is for archivology: “Isn’t it enough that
there’s still something buried somewhere? Isn’t that current enough?
Rather more than if it weren’t.” 5 Even before its opening the Vatican
archive was a piece of the past not yet past, but history only comes into it
when the science of history takes hold of it.
NOTES
1. Deutsches Historisches Institut Rom, Archiv, Nachlass Philip Hiltebrandt, fasc.

Nr. 7: Lebenserinnerungen, 2. Fassung (Maschinenskript), Bl. 98.
2. Arlette Farge, Das brüchigen Leben. Verführung und Aufruhr im Paris des 18. Jah-
rhunderts, trans. Wolfgang Kaiser (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach Verlag, 1989), 7.
3. Edmund E. Stengel, Präsident des Reichsinstituts für ältere deutsche Geschichts-
kunde, Berlin: “Das Deutsche Historische Institut in Rom 1888–1928,” Forschungen u.
Fortschritte Bd. 14, no. 34, December 1, 1938, 401f.
4. Michel de Certeau, “Writing versus Time,” Rethinking History, ed. M. R. Logan
and J. F. Logan Yale French Studies 59 (1980). Cf. the German edition, ed. Helmut Reim,
(Leipzig: Acta humaniora, 1987), which is a reprint of Jean-François Lafitau, Die Sitten
der amerikanischen Wilden im Vergleich zu den Sitten der Frühzeit (1752/1753).
5. Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Peter Leyh
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog, 1977), here “Historik. Die Vorlesungen
von 1857,” 67.
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FIFTEEN
In History’s Arsenal: The Archival
Catechon
Power means what remembers, rather than who, as we have learned from
Foucault. The power of the archive lies in its postal structure: but what if
transmission occurs immediately? With the Internet—that is, the immedi-
ate actualization of memory storage—such a deferral is reduced, as a
condition of that emphatic philosophy of history, to nothing. Compared
to the real time (temps réel) of data processing and storage, the archive
brings into play the concept of sustainability, the reintroduction of a
blockade known as the archival embargo as resource protection, as infor-
mation blockage or news blackout—the catechontic power of the archive
that corresponds with the psychoanalytic concept of repression itself. So-
nia Combe has described praxis of European archival culture as literally
retaining (rétention), as a “loi du silence.” 1 This is unlike the United
States, where—in the interconnection of archive and chancery—records
and their reactivation lie alongside one another. Against the backdrop of
the 1966 Freedom of Information Act in the United States, European
archival conservatism was sharply delineated, which remained as it had

been, significantly based on a lack of transparency regarding administra-
tive records and decades-long embargoes for archives (with the exception
of the Scandinavian countries and the post-1989 legacy of an erstwhile
state known as East Germany). The Freedom of Information Act guaran-
tees the right to inspect the contents of even current archives—that is,
even administrative documents that may still be in force. Declassification
means the release of records for public inspection, their anarchival return
to the discursive. In the American model, administrative transparency
remains the rule rather than the exception, as the struggle over the Water-
gate tapes during Richard Nixon’s presidency made clear. In Europe, by
way of contrast, the state record(s) belong to the king and thus to secrecy,
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54 Chapter 15
the ruling praxis since the age of absolutism. The arcanum of this state
technology tends toward the direction of the archive; with an 1803 de-
cree, the term Geheimes Staats-Archiv was officially introduced in Prussia,
while an addition “geheim” (secret) was struck for the chancery and the
cabinet. On July 17, 1978, the French parliament made the first breach in
this arcanum with its “loi sur la liberté d’accès aux documents administra-
tifs,” which remains in a state of conflict with applicable archival regula-
tions that are still in effect—a genuine differend, to use Jean-François Lyo-
tard’s term. Only when there is a political short circuit does the arcanum
open itself to privileged eyes, as during the spring of 1998, when the
French government abolished the archival embargo on files from October
17, 1961, when an unknown number of Algerian demonstrators were
killed on orders of Maurice Papon, prefect of the Paris police.
The best description of the archive can be found when it is used to test
a specific research problem, precisely in the same way as computer pro-
gramming can only be learned by solving problems. Arlette Farge has
described the archive as a concrete foundation, a product of the gaze of
the Polizey. Censorship is the surest guarantee of archiving (and the in-
quisitorial collection of personal data is the dispositif of literary genres like
fiction and biography). Were it not for the numerous censors’ files con-
taining descriptions of each movie set, in accordance with the logic of
police tradition, our knowledge of early film—given the loss of much of
the film stock—would be deplorably small. Had East Germany not
archived, under the auspices of keeping an eye on its enemies, the nightly
news broadcasts of ARD in West Germany, Western broadcasts not re-
tained for reasons of cost would have been irretrievably lost. What was
hastily destroyed by East Germany in 1989 and 1990 in order to conceal
anything incriminating was nevertheless preserved in documents
archived in West Germany. Paranoia is the energy of the archive and
drives all its systems. In a discourse society, the archive is more medial
than social site, at which information is collected, organized, and pro-
cessed according to a type of social knowledge. For its part, it is subject to
a set of rules that cover secrets and knowledge: records containing unvar-
nished information on actual conditions were to be read only under
supervision in the Central Committee headquarters, duly confirmed
through signature. And thus the reading of records, like the deletion of
records, leaves behind trace records. 2
The archive is always present, which also means that life itself is qua-
si-archivally administered. As Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault leafed
through registries in the Bastille archives, they discovered the paradox
within: on the one hand, they were provided nearly photographic “snap-
shots from the lives of people,” while at the same time they gleaned “the
impression of continuous movement, of constant circulation”—a halluci-
nation, in the sense of the New Historicism, a mix of analogous fantasies
from real life and discrete memory machines. Is the archive the crystal-
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In History’s Arsenal: The Archival Catechon 55
lization of socially molecular movements? The information obtained here

indicates the extent to which people were motile, volatile—and yet com-
prehensible only within the fixed coordinates of the archive, like the glo-
bal positioning system of history. In her commentary, Farge describes the
murmur of the social as a “specter for the authorities,” 3 as both the state
and the police look for order from noise in the name of the archive (or its
foreshadowing). Which is how the people come to be depicted as some-
thing like a Markov chain, in terms of a mathematical probability theory
of history as well as the butterfly effect in chaos theory. Farge implicitly
describes the state of affairs in East Germany in the autumn of 1989:
whenever an incident took place, no one could tell what its impact might
be an hour later. Nevertheless, there was more order and reason to this
than might be read at first glance. However, the system wanted nothing
more than to return to the old order a world that had suddenly fallen to
pieces, whereby the archive, from which the historical distills insights
gleaned from reading, shares a primordial bond with the order of the
social itself, whose memory it stores, breaks, fragments, or reflects. What
coagulates into a record is the trace of an action, such an ordering emerg-
ing from social visions. In the beginning, the research focuses on the
anatomy of the archive, the document as fragment, “as living interface in
the urban fabric” (Farge)—an archival corpus of social corporations. In the
medium of the archive, due to its cross-sectional perspective, moments
from the lives of the people drawn from Parisian life are reified, and yet
these figures are a shadowy prosopopoietic hallucination, a rhetorical
confusion of statistical tables and animation, as is familiar to us from
ancestor worship in antiquity, from waxwork cabinets, and from forensic
medicine.
NOTES
1. Sonia Combe, Archives interdites. Les peurs françaises face à l’histoir contemperaine
(Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1994), chapter 3.
2. See Peter Christian Ludz, Mechanismen der Herrschaftssicherung (Munich and

Vienna: C. Hanser Verlag, 1980), 28ff.
3. Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, Familiäre Konflikte: Die “lettres de cachet”. Aus
from French Chris E. Paschold and Albert Gier ([Paris,1982] Frankfurt, 1989), 15f. See
also Arlette Farge, Le goût de l’archive (Paris, 1989), 302.
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SIXTEEN
From Louis XIV to Big Brother:
Monitoring
Since domestic tranquility was an important factor in the maintenance of

public order under the ancien régime in France, it was necessary that the
king be imbued with the highest authority. It was the monarch’s respon-
sibility to coordinate the public and the private with one another, as an
equation balancing private repression and public order. 1 The relativistic
interconnections (of power) between the public and private in early
eighteenth-century Paris were processed within the medium of lettres de
cachet, whose pure possibility constituted an ongoing provocation, drag-
ging into daylight, or candlelight, every manner of minor dispute and
committing it to writing. The petition imbues the person who writes it
with a feeling of pride in being regarded as the most important personal-
ity in the state (which at the time meant by the state itself). Here the king
occupies, physically, a site taken over in Orwell’s 1984 by the camera—a
blank space that, after the guillotining of Louis XVI during the French
Revolution, became a technical blind spot of optical insight, initially
photographically (Bertillon), then cinematically, and finally electro-opti-

cally. “There was no place where you could be more certain that the
telescreens were watched continuously.” 2 In the meantime, the medium
creates a coin with the portrait, which is to say the panoptic eye, of the
king, and his equally real and virtual omnipresence. 3 The fact that royal
authority pays attention to domestic drama is perceived not as threaten-
ing but desirable—analogous to the passionate self-dramatization by in-
dividuals in front of the anonymous television cameras in the fishbowl of
the real-life soap opera Big Brother, of that experimental interpenetration
of both the public and the private, which treats public space itself as a
phantom that can be defined by phantasmal media. As early as Dan
Graham’s 1974 video installation Picture Window Piece, the monitor not
57
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only enhances the window’s cultural and technological boundaries but

also undermines the difference between private and public space through
a continuous feedback loop. Here the panoptic surveillance, whose gene-
sis was sketched out by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, can no
longer be understood as threat but rather as opportunity for self-exhibi-
tion, self-concern, beneath the gaze of the anonymous camera—a social-
media experimental arrangement of the subject. While the classical dis-
tinction between “public” and “private” has proven to be an ideological
fiction, the real-time archive has taken on the distinguishing role. Property
laws provide for camera surveillance in places such as shopping malls,
not only the recording itself but also the storage of such footage.
In 1977, Foucault himself became intimately acquainted with the dif-
ference between a democratic and a totalitarian regime: in the latter, the
archive governs the present itself. This was the year when Foucault visit-
ed Berlin for the first time, and at the East–West border crossing he was
interrogated for hours. In West Germany he was also held on suspicion of
terrorist activities for giving a talk on Ulrike Meinhof—two variants of
state control and surveillance, which he later analyzed in an interview.
Here he established why the Western system had more of a future than
that of the Eastern Bloc: because power, under capitalism, enforces dis-
course’s production rather than its repression. 4 In fact, the difference
Foucault observed between the two systems can be described in terms of
cybernetics and open versus closed circuits. And, indeed, scientific social-
ism—and here is where its sixties-era flirtation with cybernetics (Walter
Ulbricht, Georg Klaus) is centered—relies on the notion that social pro-
cesses and social transformations can be steered, almost algorithmically.
But this availability fails because the necessary feedback is missing. Feed-
back generally refers to the influence that an event exerts on a subsequent
process when reacting to self-generated, especially the rule mechanisms
of information and communications theory. In the case of East Germany,
this determination can be made through recourse to the systems-theoreti-
cal notion of autopoiesis, that the basic conditions for really existing so-
cialist societies are missing: they have been illuminated by perfected tech-
niques of observation over even the most remote corners and have opera-
tionalized the knowledge so generated, albeit though not as a deliberate
system of self-transformation. No references to Foucault’s 1977 travel
experiences were ever deposited in the former East German Stasi
archives. This has its own logic:
had foucault crossed the border at marienborn, we probably would
have found nothing: not enough staff, paper, or desire on the part of
the police, or the files were long since discarded. had foucault taken the
interzone autobahn, we might only through sheer luck find a report
like this: “french newspaper found at rest stop xy, no further signs of
hostile operations.” and what if the gauck commission had found a
trace of the 1977 interrogation? is it not impossible that something
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might be discovered in a terse logbook entry for surveillance team

dept. III, the relevant district administration of the ministry for state
security. perhaps foucault has been registered as a ciphered entry in the
file of some suspicious individual. of course, given there are people
who administered, edited, used or did not use the files, or waved
through, waved along, or simply said “have a safe journey,” etc., all of
this might have been completely different. 5
Is the apparent inability of state socialism to monitor itself despite its
sophisticated system of informers explicable due to its institutionalized
arbitrariness and idiosyncrasies in information collection, interpretation,
and use? For machine-driven discrete processes for data collection, stor-
age, computation, and transmission (the technical definition of media)
constantly encounter the analogue disruption of humans. This is the only
information that actually has informational value: its receivers are not the
only ones who are informed of its availability. This second-order knowl-
edge, this “administration according to records” with organizationally
ordered minor powers of insight that are made known, ensures that the
content of first-order information is not selectively ignored, misinter-
preted out of paranoia, or strategically “forgotten.” 6 The two German
systems reflected one another in their archival aesthetics: in 1989 and
1990, capitalist memory culture, which is characterized by reverberating
circuits, replaced that of socialism, which is shaped by memory-involving
records. Klaus Krippendorff defined the memory model that developed
during the capitalist era as dealing with the systems operations of society
within the premise of inputs of all relevant information, which are
echoed, taken up, and input once more. Memory accomplishes nothing
more than the maintenance of circulating information. This contrasts
with (simplex or duplex) book-driven memory, based on records, as was
meant to justify Leninist state socialism and hybrid collections of records
as volumes in the temporary memory storage of the former East German
secret police. Memory-involving records require fairly durable media in
which relevant retained information may be not only stored but also
disposed of: that is, the classic archive. But memory based on records
ineluctably leads to an attempt to monopolize memory and a counterat-

tempt to construct a countermemory: every archive may also be read
against the grain. 7 This distinction also methodologically applies to the
difference between cultures of memory and the science of history, in
what Aleida Assmann has called the line between “memory function”
and “memory storage.” 8 Memory storage is not liberated from a specific
carrier but is a dedicated archive of specified techniques. In terms of the
institutional difference between administration and archive, it separates
the radical past from the present and future. The archive as memory
storage “is interested in everything, everything is equally important”—in
this wise as arbitrary and postmodern as the pre-1989 culture of remem-
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brance in West Germany. In contrast, the emphatic culture of remem-

brance in East Germany made memory an imperative.
NOTES
from French Chris E. Paschold and Albert Gier ([Paris, 1982] Frankfurt, 1989), 275.
2. George Orwell, 1984 [1948] (Frankfurt and Berlin: Ullstein, 1996), 99.
3. See also Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi (Paris, 1983).
4. See Agnes Handverk’s documentary video, Michel Foucault in Berlin (Germany,
1992 and 1993).
5. E-mail from Axel Doßmann to the author, March 16, 2001.
6. Claus Offe, Der Tunnel am Ende des Lichts: Erkundungen der politischen Transforma-
tion im neuen Osten (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1994), 12.
7. Dirk Baecker, Poker im Osten (Berlin, 1998), esp. “Die Frage nach dem
Gedächtnis,” 114–26. This is supported in Ulrich Raulff’s review of Arlette Farge, “Der
ferne Lärm der Strasse,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 236, October 11, 1989, N3.
8. Aleida Assmann, “Gedächtnis, Erinnerung,” Handbuch der Geschichtsdidaktik, ed.
Klaus Bergmann et al. (Seelze-Velber: Kallmeyer, 1997), 36.
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SEVENTEEN
Historical Bodies
Dominick LaCapra characterizes the aporia of the dialogue with the

archive as a heuristically useful fiction to face the archive’s absolute oth-
er. 1 Natalie Zemon Davis also proceeds with texts from the archive: with
lettres de remissions, the petitions for mercy addressed to the king. Here
correspondence functions as a message in the medial circuit, like the
circulation of blood in the body politic. Drawing on this textual corpus,
Davis suggests that this demonstrates the fiction in the archives. 2 In the
rhetoric of the French Renaissance, as in Daniel d’Auge, feindre in the
context of courtroom speech, means “to create” rather than “to deceive.”
In order to get to the actual core of facts, Zemon Davis brings fiction itself
into play as a cultural poetics of social reality, in contrast to the notion that
such sources must be liberated from their fictive elements: this is precise-
ly the point on which E. H. Kantorowicz insisted when he took seriously
the symbolic level of power as representation in The King’s Two Bodies. 3
Michel Foucault—under misapprehensions—read the legal fiction of the
king’s two bodies based on corporal punishment for convicted criminals, 4
and Zemon Davis adds that even royal pardons belonged to the political
anatomy of the ancien regime. In this regard, however, the body politic may
also be referred to as a body of text, whose medium is the chancery and
whose memory is the archive. For a single moment the archive’s “right to
veto sources” (Reinhart Koselleck) is once more embroiled in the dis-
course of history. Under the title “History’s Two Bodies,” Zemon Davis
has translated Kantorowicz’s political-archaeological analysis of the
king’s offices into a task for the historian, which is in turn embodied
within the historical office—if a corpus is understood to mean not only
juridical collections (like the Corpus iuris civilis) but the general mass of
texts to be found in a given field. In 1587, a French court historian not
only debated the political body of the king but also synthesized a mass of
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chronicles and annals into a universal history, “as in one body of harmo-
ny.” 5 Transubstantiation turns the social into a body of memory. “So

back to the archives,” goes Zemon Davis’s motto. The archive is not a
space beyond narrativity but its hoard: in this instance, it stores an entire
range of narrative techniques and motifs from various French provinces,
dating back to the juristic texts of the sixteenth century and the Renais-
sance novel. A cultural analysis of the pardons examined is responsible
for determining their discourse-generative rules, whereas a media analy-
sis of the same group of texts examines the law of their specific archival
formation. Discourse rules constitute nothing more than an allegory of
the nondiscursive praxis of their erstwhile systems of documentation.
Marriage licenses, wills, and other contracts are our only access to a con-
ception of the acts and feelings of people unable to sign their own names,
let alone write their lives. Notarizations and petitions—that is, what re-
quires the hand of the clerk—are the only channels that connect us with
this life. Thus, the register moves toward the level of the object under
examination, the archival document itself. These archival mechanisms
reveal themselves only when their narrative content is disregarded as
defined within the bounds of the statement-worthiness of such sources.
Authorities and officials from private-sector corporations can build
archives as well. How does the body of history stand in relationship to
the archival body? Archivist training in the Netherlands circa 1900 was
based on an organological model—using the prosopopoetic metaphor of
the organic whole as cladding for memory control. Is it possible to trans-
late a conception derived from natural organisms into an archival regis-
try? Have registries been made from life? “Seen this light, the pony-tailed
registrar has already been formed.” 6 As for archival holdings, it is insuffi-
cient to merely assume the logistics of administration, to preserve regis-
tries at all costs, maintaining possibly monstrous random accretions in-
definitely rather than generating “archival bodies.” Here the archivist’s
activities are unexpectedly creative: according to Brennecke, her value
lies in “using artistic empathy to listen closely to the collection attuned to
the secrets laws of its being and becoming,” thus allowing it to express
itself. The semanticization of an institutional organization through the
hermeneutics of the organism is a characteristic of this archival aesthetics
and thus, to use Wilhelm Dilthey’s term, the anthropomorphizing of an
apparatus via a life-philosophy. In that the principle of provenance—that
is, the archival adaptation of the order of origin for records—becomes the
decisive tenet for the organization of the archive as well, the genealogy of
archival organization takes on a new significance for our understanding
of the history of its foundation and administration and ceases to be an
odd subsection of cultural history writ large. The provenance principle
found its first official expression in a circular by the French Minister of
Interior on the organization of departmental and municipal archives,
stating that from April 24, 1841, “respect for their funds”—that is, a due
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measure of respect would be offered to those archival bodies that had

grown over time. This solution was motivated by practical necessities,

the need to master the masses of archival collections that had lain in the
departmental archives since the Revolution, viz., the membra disiecta of
the ancien regime: a strategy for the structuring of redundancies. The
morphology of the archive thus generated the research principle itself for
historical sources: particularly with sources that have been dispersed, the
provenance principle offers the researcher the only way to find them
again. Prior to any synthetic historiography comes the genealogy of its
foundational parataxis in the dispositif of the archive: here Prussian archi-
val aesthetics come into conflict with Foucault’s plea for a serial sorting
and grouping of individual pieces of writing. The progress from chronol-
ogistics to history is an effect of the necessity to reduce complexities used
by document-generating societies for the purpose of differentiation. Only
there, where serial construction is utilized, as subject classification is
practically impossible (dispatches, transcripts), does modern archival
studies maintain this. Brennecke takes a stab at an implicit critique of the
mechanistic structure of French archives, which forms the aesthetic back-
ground for Foucault’s concept of the archive: if archival holdings are
understood to be their contents, with no regard for their origin, what is
formed is a collection, a form of order, which Brennecke would only have
applied to instances of individual pieces where context of origin has gone
missing. In the archives, German historicism means to superordinate the
origin of the thing. In contrast, Paris offers the proposal to decouple the
archive from the discourse of history. The alternative to the narrative
mastery of amounts of data from “the past” means serializing. Writing
history serially ultimately means leaving the field of narrative and thus
no longer talking about history but rather writing the archive, transitively.
In actuality, German archival aesthetics as a historical aesthetics in regard
to provenance has long been distinct from a certain French privileging of
thematic and, in terms of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, serializ-
ing relevance (cadre de classement). In contrast, the German archivist advo-
cates for a veritable historicist’s “logic of the archive” as “the preserva-

tion and production of contexts in which archival holdings are created
from the side of production.” 7 This archaeo-logic of the archive is the
ideal reconstruction of records production and thus for its part also his-
torical-constructivist. The German Archiv, as a term for a memory institu-
tion, corresponds to the French plural archives: herein a misleading inter-
pretation of the term archive (singular) has already been applied to Fou-
cault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, which actually refers to a different
knowledge, a presentistic knowledge. In France, any sort of records pres-
ervation can be referred to indiscriminately as “archives”—not just his-
torical archives but even the working memory of the administrative
present itself, the registries of administrative and court authorities. Only
through substitution of adjectives can current records be defined as
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archives vivantes or archives courantes. 8 Archives in their German sense are

thus archives archivées.

The archives of the German Historical Institute in Rome store the
papers of its former associate Philip Hiltebrandt. His memoirs describe
the conditions at the institute under its director Paul Fridolin Kehr (who
later became general dictator of the Prussian archives from 1915 to 1929
and president of the source edition for German history, the Monumenta
Germaniae Historica). Kehr once explained to Hiltebrandt that there are
three systems: the punctilio of the Prussian, the utter freedom of the
French, and, as for the Austrians, who mix up the other two, slovenliness.
Kehr took daily note of the (per definitionem) late-arriving historians to the
Vatican archives: Prussian science did not distinguish between institu-
tional or discursive precision. Prussian archives store this praxis not only
as historical knowledge but as statements on the cybernetics of memory:
this, if anywhere, is the hoard where Prussia lives on. The popular histo-
rian Alf Lüdtke recalls his encounters with Prussia as an archive while he
was working with and working through the thick volumes of records
from the Prussian ministries, and the supreme and governmental presi-
dencies of the late nineteenth century: “It is not entirely incidental that in
the reading room the command voice of the (Prussian?) barracks is
trained upon the adepts of the discipline.” 9 In actuality, the archive dis-
closes nothing without discipline in what is excerpted and strict temporal
divisions. Archives are the function of a strategy of (textual) scarcity, the
economy of which was well known in Prussia: its morphological archae-
ology of knowledge reflects its political regime at the time. The order of
knowledge installed by the archive is in this way not merely passive
storage for written communications but raises questions, generates ca-
nonical bodies of evidence, and distorts interpretation. As a technology,
the archive defines not only the moment when the recording is preserved
but also its form, the resultant archived event. Archival orders generate
different modes of history: for instance, two documents dealing with
land purchases are found in a municipal archive that the historian un-
trained in archival studies might treat as a single unit, because from their
contents they seem to identical, whereas the archivist recognizes that
both belong to totally different contexts. While the scientific ordering of
the archive seeks to preserve the interconnectedness of the archive’s indi-
vidual parts, along with the meta-textuality of their media memory, the
individual researcher, fixated upon content, attempts to proceed from
individual documents and order them according to his own subjective
evaluative and thematic points of view. This is exactly how prescientific
historiography proceeded, out of delight in stringing together curious
facts of all kinds, regardless of their historical significance or interrelated-
ness. 10 Here the form of history is closely tied to its memory storage.
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NOTES
1. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1985), 73.
2. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in
Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford, 1987).
3. Princeton, 1957.
4. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975); in German
as Uberwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefängnisnisses (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Ver-
lag,1977), 41.
5. Natalie Zemon Davis, “History’s Two Bodies,” American Historical Review 93
(February 1988): 2.
6. Adolf Brennecke, Archivkunde. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte des
Europäischen Archivwesens, bearbeitet nach Vorlesungsnachschriften u. Nachlasspapieren u.
ergänzt v. Wolfgang Leesch (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang Verlag, 1953), 85ff.
7. Wolfgang Hans Stein, “Thesen zur Logik der Archive,” Espagne (2000): 62.
8. Johannes Papritz, Archivwissenschaft, 2. durchges. Ausgabe (Marburg: Archivs-
chule, 1983), Bd. 2, Teil II, 2: Organisationsformen des Schriftgutes in Kanzlei und Registra-
tur, Part II, 459.
9. Introduction to the partial translation of the chapter “Un matin à la Bibliothèque
de l’Arsenal” by Arlette Farge, Le goût de l’archive (Paris, 1989), 16–20; WerkstattGes-
chichte 5 (1993): 13.
10. Wolfgang Leesch, “Methodik, Gliederung und Bedeutung der Archivwissens-
chaft,” Archivar und Historiker. Studien zur Archiv- und Geschichtswissenschaft. Zum 65.
Geburtstag von Heinrich Otto Meisner, Stättlichen Archivverwaltung im Staatssekretari-
at für Innere Angelegenheiten (Berlin: Stättlichen Archivverwaltung im Staatssekre-
tariat für Innere Angelegenheiten, 1956), 16.
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EIGHTEEN
Collection and Dispersal: The
Posthumous
German science refers to archival bodies (Archivkörpern) when talking

about stored texts in the aggregate. And of course the body of the author
is replaced by a textual corpus to become part of the archive—not after
the fact, but during the process of writing. The showplace of literary
history is the body of work as textual corpus, which may be at least
partially dismembered, at times according to the intentions of the author
themself. Individual texts do not fit together hermetically but differ from
one another. 1 The author himself becomes a corpse and thus part of the
aggregate condition of body of work/corpus—which is to say, having
entered the archive, the author’s right as an authority to appeal against
interpretation of their writings has been revoked. The author’s name be-
comes increasingly associated as an entry in an inventory for displaying
different sorts of a texts—a fate that has befallen the name of Foucault
himself. This refers to the French publishing house and literary archive
IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’E’dition Contemporaine), which incorpo-
rates Foucault’s papers, formerly held in the knowledge archaeologist’s

preferred research site, the Bibliothèque de Saulchoir in Paris, very much in
the spirit of the theory of two bodies of memory: “A man has a single grave.
But a poet has a second: the archive.” 2 Is this directed toward the biogra-
pher? The archive feeds not only interest in the text but also (the media
archaeologist might add) interest in the texture of the archival apparatus
itself. Drawers in the apartment of the deceased create a contrast with the
anarchive of lost time, a disorder that knows what it is doing at play. Here
is where effects are collected even before death: baby teeth, pencil
sketches from elementary school—to clean this up is to disturb the har-
mony and specific memory of an undisturbed disorder. 3 When the post-
humous papers of the French historian Marc Bloch unexpectedly came to
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light in Moscow—neither the heirs nor researchers knew anything of

their existence—a countermodel was made manifest (that is, a calculated

order). Bloch seems to have revised his research findings with the help of
a full-grown and complex system of notations and classifications “almost
protocybernetic . . . a kind of rudimentary processing computer.” 4
Against the blueprint of this structural ordering, gaps within the exten-
sive Bloch collection in the Archives Nationales in Paris became visible
for the first time. Thus there are archives whose memory is the archival
order itself. Gaps in the archives never become visible as long as they
play no role in the research apparatus: this is precisely how the archive
can constitute the blind spot in historical observation. However, the
papers of the deceased are not an archive but a collection, collective read-
ing (legein). July 1996, in the reading room of the Leo Baeck Institute in
New York, a hoard of papers by German Jewish immigrants, looking for
Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1895–1963): all that remains of him is an archival
body—cartons of Kantorowicz’s papers, signatorily confirmed as collec-
tions. Whatever is held in the stacks—that is, the latent memory of his
name—must be looked up alphanumerically, or it does not exist. Call
slips decide whether Kantorowicz is to be read. The silence of the archive
is an archaeological silence that the historian can transform back into
discourse only with difficulty: “Because one can spend an eternity, as
George said, not speaking with the absent.” 5 Kantorowicz himself re-
called in his inaugural lecture in Frankfurt during the 1933–1934 winter
semester the passages dealing with the underworld as found in Homer’s
Odyssey, in book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, and in Dante’s Divine Comedy: “For
only under very special circumstances would shades reluctantly provide
answers to questions.” 6 What the researcher encounters in the archives of
the Leo Baeck Institute is a fragmentary biographical landscape, the tex-
ture of a literary corpus marked with the initials “E. K.” The dispositif of
history as archive allows for a number of configurations, not the confu-
sion of rhetorical figura and persona as “masks.” In this instance the masks
are texts: a transcendental referent named Kantorowicz is forever only an
absence, only comprehensible as a textual-corporal presence—storage

without content. In his November 1962 will, preserved in the Leo Baeck
Institute, he states, “I direct my executor to collect all of my letters and
correspondence and burn them.” It was Kantorowicz’s habit to publish in
as many different places and publications as possible. Disseminated, like
his corpus, his scientific works as dispersed writings are the traces of his
body: Kantorowicz had his ashes scattered in the Caribbean. It is the
researcher rather than the past that is formatted at the moment of reading
in the archive: “At the instant in which I have a document from the past
lying in front of me so I can read it, and the people in this document take
shape, they are reunified with their experiences and become the
present.” 7 Is this past itself already history-forming, or is it the reader
who turns it into history? The media artist Kathryn Bird thought she had
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Collection and Dispersal: The Posthumous 69
caught “glimpses of stories” in a chance posthumous discovery of the

correspondence of Harry Gaywood-Baker 8; the screenwriter in Wim

Wenders’s film States of Things types in his computer, “Stories only exist
in stories”—a reference to the autopoietic character of narrative form.
It is not reality but the history-forming organization of reality that
produces history. 9 In contrast, there is the discrete archaeological gaze,
which cannot fill the gaps in the data with empathetic imagination—a
material variant, which transforms the past out of the empty spaces it
leaves behind, turning absence and void at the edge of negation, back
into the fullness of the fiction of past lives: the archaeological technique
used by the excavators of Pompeii, who were able to transform, with
gypsum, cavities created by corpses and preserved by lava back into
figures.
The memory of the living is in competition with the knowledge of the
archive (as an instance of the cross-checking impulse in all historiogra-
phy), perhaps the confusion of text and mask for a person who could
play a role perfectly, as has been taken to be the case of Kantorowicz,
whose mannered locution and ironic self-presentation might be played
by the protagonist of a play. The cliché of Kantorowicz’s two bodies gets
jostled by a defective body from the German past in the national-conser-
vative circle around Stefan George (Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, 1927) and
in a sound body in postwar America (The King’s Two Bodies, 1957). 10
However, a definitive assessment of the relation between Kantorowicz’s
two figurations is not possible, analogous to the controversy over Mow-
bray that Kantorowicz himself analyzed in his study of Shakespeare’s
Richard II. Every reconstruction of the past is something like a stage play,
only with protagonists who are not made of flesh and blood but are pure
(death) masks. 11 This implies that the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia:
“the fiction of apostrophizing an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity,
whereby the possibility of a response is eliminated and the entity thus is
granted the power of speech.” 12 The hallucination of an absent voice
requires not only the alphabetic transcription of sounds but also a mouth
and even a face, as is made manifest in the etymology for the rhetorical
trope: prosopon poien—that is, “to give a mask or a face to a thing.” This
mask forever defines the abyss, for its mouth describes nothing other
than the bounds if the real in the voice.
NOTES
1. Dominick LaCapra, “Geistesgeschichte und Interpretation,” in Geschichte denken,

ed. LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 69f.
2. Georg Eyring, “Eine Kathedrale des Lesens,” Die Zeit, January 8, 1998.
3. Reiner Grünter, “Schubladenfunde,” Merkur. Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken
no. 432, issue 2 (1985): 174.
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70 Chapter 18
4. Ulrich Raulff, “Nicht vermisst. Ein Archiv kehrt zurück,” in Frankfurter Allge-
meine Zeitung, February 9, 1994.

5. Gerhart B. Ladner, Erinnerungen, ed. Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl (Vienna:
Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994), 36.
6. Siehe Wolfgang Ernst, “Das ‘Geheime Deutschland’ als Dementi des ‘Dritten
Reichs’: Ernst Kantorowicz 1933,” in Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1895–1963). Soziales Milieu
und wissenschaftliche Relevanz, ed. Jerzy Strzelczyk (Poznań: Instytut Historii UAM,
1996), 155–64.
7. Eugen Fischer-Baling, director of the Reichsbibliothek, 1928–1945, cited as an
epigraph in Gerhard Hahn, Die Reichstagsbibliothek zu Berlin - ein Spiegel deutscher Ges-
chichte (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1997), 5.
8. In her essay “No Come Home: Divining the Native Logic of Our Source
Archives to Design the Creative Logic of Our Digital Project,” for the panel “Recov-
ered Memories: Compression/Loss/Excess,” at the colloquium Excavating the Archive:
New Technologies of Memory, Parsons School of Design, June 3, 2000, New York.
9. Lorenz Engel, “Erzählung,” in Ausfahrt nach Babylon. Essais und Vorträge zur
Kritik der Medienkultur (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften,
2000), 111.
10. Cf. Hans Belting, “Images in History and Images of History,” in Ernst Kantorow-
icz, ed. Robert L. Benson and Johannes Fried (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997),
94–103.
11. Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seven-
teenth Century (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale, 1978), chapter 4, 119f.
12. Paul de Man, “Autobiographie als Maskenspiel,” in Ideologie des Ästhetischen, ed.
Christoph Menke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993), 140.
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NINETEEN
Dedicated to the Archive? Jacques
Derrida and (the) Paul de Man’s Case
Memories whose addresses are unreadable remain speechless. Less than

ever does the concept of the archive encompass the entirety of what
might be archivized—“what remains unvanquished remains associated
with the anarchive.” 1 This corresponds to the question of what form can
evoke the past at all. At the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
it has become concrete—a stone surface into which the names of
American casualties have been engraved; visitors can scan on-site paper
indexes for individual names. What is the relationship between the
archive, prosopopoeia, and resurrection? Hardly had Jacques Derrida,
philosopher of differance, completed the mémoires of his friend and rival,
who had died in late 1983, 2 when the archives revealed long-vanished
early anti-Semitic writings—posthumous scraps as an accident of the
archive, an unexpected event, and hence (as Niklas Luhmann would put
it) information. Did this intrusion of the archive into the textual
(dream)space of deconstruction lead, after a period of intellectual drift
and misdirection, to a new wave of archival research—back to the basics

of real reality? The proviso for this discovery was the death of Paul de
Man as impulse toward biography. At first, there was a correspondence
between the archive and the latency of Paul de Man’s silence, but in
November 1986, while Ortwin de Graef was spending time in the Archief
en Museum voor het Vlaamse Cultuurleven in Antwerp, looking through
materials involving de Man’s uncle Hendrik and his family, it was the
metonymical, alphabetical logic of archival memory activation qua names
that made the name Paul de Man indistinguishable from Paul de Man, and
thus attribution was made an act of resurrection. De Graef uncovered a
series of articles in the Flemish newspaper Het Vlaamsche Land, signed by
“Paul de Man,” dating from 1942. A little later, another set of articles
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72 Chapter 19
from the Belgian francophone newspaper Le Soir were located. 3 Paul de

Man was in his early twenties in December 1940, when he began writing
for the culture sections of both Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land—news-
papers that more or less clandestinely collaborated with Belgium’s Ger-
man occupiers. An article from March 4, 1941, one of the 170 articles de
Man published in Le Soir closes with the phrase, “that one solution to the
Jewish question, the creation of a Jewish colony outside of Europe, would
have no adverse consequences whatsoever with the Western way of life
in the Western world.” Reread today, this would make for a perfect scan-
dal. Reeling, stunned, Derrida sent a revision back into the field. 4 The
critique of every historical metaphysics since Nietzsche, as advanced by
de Man, was found to have disguised his own implication within a his-
torical corruption. Was this the rationale for his insistence upon an ar-
chaeological distancing from the past, his distrust of historical continu-
ity? All the same, texts are indifferent to the life or death of their author.
One can no longer talk to de Man about his early writings in the language
in which he wrote in Le Soir from 1940 to 1942. We can only speak about
him—that is, de Man. What can be said about him that does not implicate
us within his name? His writings are his tombstone, and herein the char-
acters themselves stand for his persona, and they are presented to us like
ashes without a tomb, as inscriptions beyond the cemetery (Derrida). De
Man himself referred to “archaeological questions” that force us to redi-
rect the present, away from an identification with a more or less unmedi-
ated past that lies behind us, toward that process that leads it back to us:
such an attitude is consistent with the uses of history. 5 But de Man kept
his youthful anti-Semitic writings concealed for decades. Can silence be
proof? Jewish memory is haunted by the memory of the phantom of
repressed murder, the case of Moses, which Sigmund Freud turned into a
study of trauma, latency, and repression. If Moses actually had been
murdered by his own people, as an apocryphal legend has it, would the
repression of this not have left behind written traces in their collective
memory? 6 The archive of the discourse network becomes the unforeseen
guaranty, the testament to the actuality of the event, and hence genera-
tive, preceding any sort of passive storage. But what can be proved from
an absence in the archive? According to Freud, Moses’s murder high-
lighted archival symptoms in Jewish memory. Spending time in a para-
archival zone with an unmistakable trace, full of “grass written asunder”
(Paul Celan, Engführung), we waver here between an actual historical
figure that has no historical memory and an inherited historical figure
that has no actual and precisely detectable history. 7 In fact, memory oscil-
lates between the accessible archive and the inaccessible “crypt”—that
space that does not permit the installation of the lost object of the critique
of its research environment. Instead, it is incorporated into the psyche of
the grieving collective where it takes on a life of its own, which is reor-
dered by the historical unconsciousness of the crypt keeper. The latter
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receives mnemonic signals from a region of which he is unaware: “the

crypt speaks, it emits broadcasts which through the repetition of a trauma,

take endless pleasure in leading astray their analyst or reader” 8—thus
subarchival space. Christian Boltanski was able to realize such a place of
memory in the cellars of the Paris conservatory, Les archives du conserva-
toire de musique, whose operations are not guided by accessibility or en-
counters but operate instead out of a rigorous absence, made visible only
to selected witnesses, an exercise du silence of a particular kind, in which
all sound is muted by dust-covered space. “In the photographs and in the
files, all laid out, anywhere where the subject is music, but all that
emerges is silence”—a definitive rest, reminiscent of John Cage’s Silence. 9
Here the space of the archive is made a rendering of the absent, a hollow-
ing-out of the sound, an edge of the voice, a vacuous storage variable. On
this site, there is no archivist but a self-archivizing. 10 Can silence mean
both evidence of a crime and at the same time the only possible (hol-
lowed-out) form—another, which injures through language and not in
it? 11 The project that both Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida represent
was a linguistic admission of the failure of language to assign meaning.
As the reputation of language as a stable signifier sinks, that of silence
rises (Susan Sontag). All that matters is the ambiguity of whether some-
thing is brought to silence or is born in silence. 12 Can silence set traps?
The archive has broken silence. De Man suspected this when he posited
the figurality of the power of historical imagination as a space beyond its
literaricity. His words on the nonexchangeability of true mourning seems
to anticipate the posthumous discussions of his case: “The utmost of
which it is capable is to permit nonunderstanding, and no-anthropomor-
phic . . . and hence enumerate the prosaic, or, it might be better to say,
historic forms of linguistic violence.” 13 Which would bring us to the
archive. Which of course only disclose data depending on the price of
their renewed narration—as history and hence as defiguration. The regis-
tries of the archive for their part are configured as both matrix and mime-
sis of the power of memory. Archives are not, nor will they remain, the
foundation of reason but the abyss of argumentation. Historians such as

Hayden White, who remember that their medium is not history but liter-
ature, know this: it is precisely the reason that the textual sciences on the
one hand have been cursed to interpret without purpose or foundation
but on the other have been blessed with this insight. 14 Institutions, which
store knowledge and affect their future readership, themselves determine
the meaning of the texts—as sense, strictu sensu. When historians wish to
find the determinative answer, to break the silence, they look within the
archive. For this is where the break between history as fact and as text
occurs—a diversification that Paul de Man denied himself: “The basis of
historical knowledge is not empirical facts, but pieces of writing, particu-
larly when these texts cloak themselves in the masquerade of wars or
revolutions.” 15 If historical research were possible as an archaeology that
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would burrow through textual layers onto firm ground, the archive
might be stylized as the guarantor of the actuality of history. But archi-

vology as literal archaeology is a misreading. Archi(val) texts are base-
less: their arché is revealed only through patterns, in the figuration of
their registrative texture. Derrida is very familiar with the paradox of
archiving: its blank spaces and vanished details on the one hand, its
outstanding security functions on the other. 16 So why shouldn’t we cling
to the antiquated concept of what really happened, the authentic event,
asks the historian Vidal-Naquet; and even Paul Ricoeur insists on the
cutting edge of that actual occurrence. While we “cite” Paul de Man
before the court of a historic factual judgment, we hear nothing more
than a double silence: the silence of the dead and their silencing. Jean-
Paul Sartre has proposed a hermeneutics of silence, wherein he searches
within the work for all that the author has not said. It is these very
moments that give each work its heft, its own face. “We say too little,
when we claim they are unspoken: they are almost unspeakable.” 17 Paul
de Man himself did help French Resistance fighters, did help distribute in
Belgium a newspaper banned in France, one called Exercice du silence—
the praxis (not just the sound) of silence. The newspaper’s title suggests a
technological transmission medium rather than an archive: “My ear
pressed close to the telephone, I’m still not certain whether I heard cor-
rectly. Lambrichs said it again: ‘Exercice du silence.’” 18 This is where mat-
ters arrive at Derrida’s metaphor of “the sounds of the sea” in the tele-
phone shell: the sounds of electroacoustic waves, the telecommunications
of signal-to-noise ratio of every tradition between information and entro-
py. And of course such a physically present fact affirms the transcription
of a tape-recorded discussion. Thus de Man is not only a case from the
archives for literature studies and ideological critique but for media ar-
chaeology as well. At this point, Derrida cites himself: the transcription of
an earlier panel discussion, hence drawn from the media archives. For
ears accustomed to deconstruction, the concept of “taking place” sounds
strange 19: Derrida made a spontaneous back-translation of this idiom
from “avoir lieu”—that is, he mnemotechnically assigned a place to what

took place: the site of the archive. The tape-recorded excerpt of this dis-
cussion seems to have gone missing in the interval, which recalls a later
query of Derrida’s: what can be archived, and what cannot? Today the
problem of the archive is more salient than ever, given the techniques of
recording. 20
NOTES
1. Derrida 1991, 400 and 419.

2. Jacques Derrida, “In Memoriam (Paul de Man),” in Yale French Studies 69 (1985).
The German translation is published as Mémoires für Paul de Man, trans. from French
by Hans-Dieter Gondek (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1988).
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3. Ortwin de Graef, “Aspects of the Context of Paul de Man’s Earliest Publications,

followed by Notes on Paul de Man’s Flemish Writings,” in Wartime Journalism,

1939–1943, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln, NE, and
London: Nebraska, 1988), 115.
4. Jacques Derrida, Wie Meeresrauschen auf dem Grunde einer Muschel . . . Paul de
Mans Krieg - Mémoires II, trans. from French by Elisabeth Weber (Vienna: Passagen
Verlag, 1988).
5. Paul de Man, “Shelleys Entstellung,” in, Ideologie des Ästhetischen, trans. Chris-
toph Menke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993), 147.
6. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable
(New Haven, CT: Yale, 1991). See page 102 of the French translation (Paris, 1993).
7. According to Gerhard Kaiser in his review of Jan Assmann’s Moses der Ägypter,
“Entzifferung einer Gedächtnisspur, München 1998,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
no. 255, November 2, 2000, 58.
8. Thomas W. Kniesche, “Tot, Scheintot, Untot? Amerikanische Dekonstruktion
der dritten Art – an ausgewählten Beispielen beobachtet,” in Weimarer Beiträge 39,
issue 3 (1993): 86f, in reference to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Kryptonomie. Das
Verbarium des Wolfsmanns, trans. Werner Hamacher (Frankfurt, Berlin, and Wien: Ull-
stein Verlag, 1979).
9. Werner Spies in his Laudatio of Boltanski, award ceremony for the Goslar Kai-
serring, reprinted in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 244, October 20, 2001, II.
10. Paolo Bianchi, “Rituale im Archiv,” in Basler Magazin, no. 36, September 19,
1998, in reference to Christian Marclay’s installation Empty Cases (1998); and exhibition
catalog Archiv X. Ermittlungen der Gegenwartskunst (Spring 1998) ed. Elisabeth Madlen-
er and Elke Krasny (Linz: Centrum für Gegenwartskunst Oberösterreich, 1998).
11. Jean-François Lyotard, “Einleitung,” in Le différend, dt. Der Widerstreit (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1985).
12. Veselko Tenzera, “Das Ansehen des Schweigens. Auf wessen Seite die Schwei-
genden schweigen,” in Tihomil Mastrovic, ed., Der kroatische Essay der achtziger Jahre,
Croatian Literature Series, vol. 9 (Zagreb: Mladost, 1991), 20–23.
13. Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphismus und Trope in der Lyrik,” in Allegorien des
Lesens (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 202.
14. Jochen Hörisch, “Erledigungen. Anmerkungen zur deutschen Aufarbeitung des
‘Falles Paul de Man,’” in fragmente 32 and 33 (June 1990): 282.
15. Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in In Search of Literary
Theory, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Ithaca: Cornell, 1972), 267.
16. Jacques Derrida, “Pour l’amour de Lacan,” in Collège International de Philosophie,
ed. Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1991); dt.: Vergessen wir
nicht – die Psychoanalyse! (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 15–58.
17. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations II (Paris, 1948), 95.
18. Schlusssatz von Derrida: 1998b (116) – sein (Telefon-)Gespräch mit dem belgis-
chen Schriftsteller Georges Lambrichs.

19. “If we are to know what actually happened,” per Peggy Kamuf’s English trans-
lation: “Jacques Derrida, Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s
War,” in Critical Inquiry 14 (Spring 1988): 635.
20. Author’s discussion of Jacques Derrida at the “Habermas/Heidegger/Paul de
Man” seminar held at the Graduiertenkolleg Kommunikationsformen als Lebensformen,
Department 3 at the Universität and Gesamthochschule Siegen, July 5–7, 1988.
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TWENTY
“We from the Archive”
Even the opening sentence of Derrida’s essay on the archive insists upon
beginning not at the beginning, and not with the archive, but instead
with the etymology of this familiar word. On the other hand, what does it
mean to actually begin with the archive? Günter Grass’s Wende novel A
Wide Field leads off with an anonymous “We from the archive.” Does the
archive speak? By means of the artifice of pretending that the narrator
“shadows” the archive, 1 Grass seeks to achieve the unmediated reality of
the disinterested observer. Every observation requires its own difference,
which is to say its own blind spot, with whose help it might observe. 2 In
order to become history, it is necessary to contrast the disinterested ob-
server with the past, “to its historians and consequently—lest we risk
making a very weak oxymoron—the future observer whom the narrator
creates solely for the purposes of temporal constraint.” 3 However, Grass
also establishes his archival setting in order to facilitate a temporal dis-
tance through it. But this is only an illusion of temporal distance, for
archives are so radically present. Can a beginning be found? Narrating the
events of 1989 as history is an attempt to escape their tautological repre-

sentation. No one knows this better than the novelist (whether Fontane or
Grass): “with the very first word, fiction separates itself from reality, in
order to formulate a world according to its own laws” 4—the space of the
archive itself, its fiction.
“We from the archive called him Fonty,” Grass’s novel opens. A clas-
sic transmission: the narrative subject of the Theodor Fontane Archive in
Potsdam (the ostensible plot) casts an eye on an object named Theo Wutt-
ke, who, because of his personal data (born in Neuruppin in 1919), has
come to identify as Theodor Fontane’s reincarnation. Not entirely atypi-
cally for the work of the archive, “we from the archive” appear here as
surveillance over a user who is spied upon and ambushed by the archive.
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In contrast to the hospitable praxis of the current Fontane Archive in

Potsdam, a panoptic paranoia associated with the East German Stasi is

transferred into the memory of the system—a metonymic shift that takes
advantage of the status of the term archive in the public eye, one that has
always been associated with secrets and (state) power. Do the archives of
the former East Germany still harbor secrets, given that so many free-
floating, no-longer-archivally-bound guardians of the archival realm are
still around? Grass imputes his Stasi-like description of the perspective of
the archive with a panoptic gaze that the actual Fontane Archive never
possessed. This “we from the archive” forms an allegorical shift of autho-
rial authority: “the author who cleverly conceals himself, holding all the
threads, without ever having to intervene directly as author.” 5 Instead of
the surveillance of memory storage (state/archive, the paradigms of so-
cialist states), it is the television camera crew that steps forth, transmis-
sion-oriented monitoring—a similarly anonymous perspective.
However, Fonty himself ironically serves to deliver files to the offices
of the Berliner Treuhand, at the same site that once housed the East
German House of Ministries. It is a medial function that Grass observes
here, for his eye also takes in an antique means of transportation, the
Paternoster elevator, which coagulates into an allegory for the posthistor-
ical condition: file recycling. Here the emphasis shifts from an emphatic
final archive to a dynamic transitional archive, from memory storage for
permanence (ROM) to permanent transmission (RAM). Hardly are the
fortified Stasi headquarters on Nomannenstrasse stormed and sealed off
when various pockets are filled to ensure the dossiers are saved. During
their circuitous Paternoster elevator trips, Grass’s Hoftaller speaks of
“temporary storage” whenever Fonty opens one folder or another for
him. Later on, the housed files would seem to have vanished—the famil-
iar records disposal that takes place when a chancellor is replaced. “What
seemed to have been rescued the day before had to be reallocated the
next” (Grass). Here the concept of Wende runs into a material[AU], along
with a concept of upheaval. However, those civic movements that gave
one last shock to the brittle state system had little knowledge of its
records and found and continue to find what they were not looking for—
and vice versa. After all, citations are only breakages (Walter Benjamin),
or, in other words, as formulated in Claude Shannon’s 1948 theory, infor-
mation originates where things are not only familiar but redundant.
The title of Grass’s novel is taken from an ending, the last sentence of
Theodor Fontane’s novel Effie Briest. Here the biblical book of Ezekiel
shines through, in a selection addressed to the people of Israel: “ein we-
ites Feld, das lag voller Totengebeine” (“in the midst of the valley which
was full of bones”); and the Lord said to the prophet, “Son of man, can
these bones lives?” Here, too, the subject is the reunification of two
realms. However, the valley of dry bones is nothing more than the space
of dead letters (specifically, consonantal writing) or the grave of the sig-
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“We from the Archive” 79
nifier. In this sense, this vocalic-alphabetic reawakening is the sort of

citation technology that Grass practices excessively. The vision of the

prophet Ezekiel is a medial function of an alphabetic fantasy: he sees the
bones coming together, bone to bone, and skin covering them. Without
the phantasmagorical readers such as Fonty, even the Fontane Archive
would remain utterly silent: Just dead paper, “Only footnotes, and desert
wastes. Wherever one reaches there is only void, or secondary noises at
best.” 6 God promised the prophets he would open all the graves. Which
brings us to translation, which also plays a role in Grass’s novel, as the
reinterment of King Frederick II of Prussia. But the excavation of the
remains of the executed protagonists of the 1956 uprising, which took
place on March 29, 1989, at Budapest’s central cemetery in the
Rákoskereszeter district, was a political act. Identification of the remains
was made by representatives from the Justice Ministry (doctors), an ar-
chaeologist, and an anthropologist, and they were ceremoniously re-
interred before crowds of observers on June 16, 1989, the thirty-first anni-
versary of the executions: an act of excavation and reburial as symbolic
rehabilitation whose signifiers (bones) correspond to those used by the
historians who register them (letters). This is where the disorder of the
real (scatterings of bones) meets the symbolic order of the typewriter, the
bureaucracy, the logic of the archive. 7
NOTES
1. Claus-Ulrich Bielefeld, Günter Grass, and Dieter Stolz, “Der Autor und sein
verdeckter Ermittler. Ein Gespräch,” in Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 34 (1996): 139,
311.
2. Niklas Luhmann, “Sthenographie,” in Bielefelder Universitätszeitung 17, no. 48
(1987): 36.
3. Gérard Genette, Die Erzählung, trans. from French by Andreas Knop, ed. and
foreword by Jürgen Vogt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994), 246.
4. Norbert Miller, Der empfindsame Erzähler. Untersuchungen zu Romananfängen des
18. Jh. (Munich: C. Hanser Verlag, 1968), 9f.
5. Dieter Stolz, “Nomen est omen. ‘Ein weites Feld’ von Günter Grass,” in Zeits-
chrift für Germanistik 7, no. 2 (1997: 331.

6. Günter Grass, Ein weites, Feld (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 1995), 780f.
7. András B. Hegedüs, “Frühlingsmorgen auf Parzelle 301,” in Österreichische Zeits-
chrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 1 (1990): 117–21.
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TWENTY-ONE
Book-enwald
When the historian Harry Stein chose to do his work in the Buchenwald
Memorial instead of Weimar, he wanted above all to read into the docu-
ments. But the first guidance he received was, “There’s nothing here to
research.” After some time he altered his reading method to focus on
reading the material traces of things that had been left carelessly lying
about on the periphery of the concentration camp grounds: spoons, tin
cans, combs, etc., “until I had transformed my study into what you might
call a garbage dump.” 1 In light of a stone memento that remains installed
on the southern boundary of the camp, this line from Paul Celan’s
Engführung (1959) is still relevant: “No more reading—look!” In 1995, a
large number of relics documenting everyday life in the camp was part of
a new exhibition at the museum, brought home into the symbolic order
of historic presentation. Thus historical documents or affective reliquar-
ies from discrete monuments (realia) become entries in an inventory. But
is the 2,555th button we find still worth being collected? Concentration
camps long ago anticipated classic storage media as fatal praxis: the body
cavities of internees were searched for hidden valuables. Reality in the

archive is found between the hole and the plug: the piles of corpses
themselves bear even more witness than the depots the liberators came
upon when they marched in. Before becoming documents in the contem-
porary museum, they were the mo(nu)ments of the real: temporary
camps. At present, it is the archaeologists who have seized their remains.
The incursion of realia into the symbolic order of memory reminds of the
limits of the narrativizing of a traumatic past: this is their point where it
ends with alphabetized lists and tallies of inventories finds. The mode of
rubbish archaeology means (re)counting from A to Z. 2
In 1983 construction workers in the forest just outside the camp-
grounds discovered skulls and human bones: an anarchival reminder of
81
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82 Chapter 21
one-time Soviet Special Camp II (1945–1950). But this vexing finding was
quickly covered up again, and only Sabine Stein, the Buchenwald archi-
vist, knew of its rumored existence. Finally, in late January 1990, a Wei-
mar reporter along with surviving witnesses arranged a disinterment
there in the forest. Such archaeological noise comes accompanied by the
rattle of the microfilm reader, the advancing and rewinding of micro-
filmed photographs, documents from the Buchenwald Memorial, which
make work in the archive a sensual experience. Until the entry for the
person being sought appears on the screen—arrested on a certain day,
name, date of birth, prison number, date of transport, and figures that
only initiates understand. A skeleton appears behind the narrative biog-
raphy: the lists, more alphanumeric than literary, like the survey data of
inquisition and censor, which historians such as Emmanuel Ladurie, Car-
lo Ginzburg, and Alain Corbin exploit, recasting them as (hi)story. Most
of the fifty-six thousand victims of the camp have no grave, except for the
symbolic weight of lists of names and dates of death. At times readers
break into tears while at the monitor; moments such as these do not
figure in theories of the archive. Instead of collective memory, instead of
nebulous discourse, a cybernetic-administrative feedback of memory, au-
thority control: discrete counting rather than re-counting. Here memory
opens the space of a narrative only on the condition that it previously
reckoned with census periods. The archaeology of knowledge, and not
history, reckons with data. Sabine Stein is familiar with the phenomenol-
ogy of this specific rhythm of the age of archive, in which the historical
imagination is left to the mercy of a memory machine: dry, tight, prosaic.
But only rarely do historians with any regard for the eyes and ears of the
reader permit such an audiovisual media archaeology. Instead of such
words on the page, narrative harmonies, on the side of history.
NOTES
1. Cited in the radio feature Arbeitsort Buchenwald. Vom Alltag in einer Gedenkstätte
(Axel Dossmann), MDR, broadcast April 2001.

2. Ronald Hirte, “Offene Befunde - Ausgrabungen in Buchenwald,” Zeitgeschich-
tliche Archäologie und Erinneru ngskultur (Braunschweig: Hinz & Kunst Verlag, 2000).
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TWENTY-TWO
The Mechanization of the Archive
The mechanization of the archive, which has already been applied, in

principle, to every order of archival logic, like that of the computer in
formal mathematics, makes true what G. W. F. Hegel described as the
difference between psycho-organic memory and external memory. At the
dawn of the era of machine-driven industrial production, Hegel argued
against “the dead principle of movement” for equipment. But in his own
reading he utilized memory technology, building a rubric of citations
he’d read on slips of paper and filing the slips alphabetically in little
boxes with an identifying marker glued on. By means of this simple
device, the material evidence of the secret work processes guiding his
apologetics of pure spirit, which has come down to us mostly intact,
Hegel was able to utilize such excerpts instantaneously. 1 Recall for Hegel
is not a wealth but rather an abyss—that is, not so much the mind’s
engendering function than, on the contrary, a devouring and engulfing
one in which the mind gathers together masses of spatially and temporal-
ly distinct sensory data during its nocturnal operations, the depths of a
opaque storage. This activation, which facilitates daytime deposits, Hegel

contrasts with memory, which he sharply distinguishes from recall. A
mechanical accessory can of course motivate recall: productive memory,
for which Hegel’s equivalent term was mnemosyne, is entirely concerned
with punctuation and nomenclature. 2 Such hypomnèmata correspond to
the automated batch-storage punch cards in Charles Babbage’s proposed
Analytical Engine, which in programming language is “its own library,” at
any given moment able to reproduce in its card sets the calculations for
which it was originally set up to do. 3 But what changes such sorting
machines into metaphors of memory or the operations of memory itself?
Automatized distortions provide the formalized archive with a dis-
tanced, knowledge-archaeological vision and along the way broaden it
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by imposing an external order. 4 Thus the disciplinary subject of the old

principle of pertinence becomes visible once more—to the detriment of

the historical conception of the archive. Its mechanization also helps form
series rather than telling stories. Regarding present-day data processing,
de Certeau speaks of the transformation of the archival as the beginning
of a new (hi)story, no less groundbreaking than the learned “machinery”
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. François Furet has shown
some of the consequences emanating from the formation of new archives
stored on punch cards: they no longer store signifiers in relation to their
referential reality but only as functions of a series. Here there are no
longer objects of research, save for what can be formally modeled: symp-
toms of a far broader epistemology. “The historian of tomorrow will be a
programmer or nothing.” 5 Automatized devices disrupt modes of inter-
pretation that have dominated historical research since the Romantic era
and later sought to rediscover their given and hidden sense. The analysis
of data from the archive can be traced back to a faith in abstractions that
characterizes the era of Klassik—abstractions, of course, that nowadays
represent a formally literal ensemble of relationships. Their praxis con-
sists of the construal of consciously arranged models, in order to substi-
tute for the study of concrete phenomena by means of such models with
one that forms the object through definition. The scientific value of such
an object of investigation reveals itself only in relation to that field of
questions that it is permitted to answer, the bounds of which determine
its power to state claims. Aleatory models such as these possess not only
the dominant concept of the archival series but suffuse the aesthetic field
itself, which has clear correspondences to the world of serial composi-
tion. 6 Access to memory is literally transformed by its own techniques,
when it encounters data filters at the site of the shelf list, catalog, or
inventory. Data storage and what Ranulph Glanville referred to as neces-
sary accessories, such as the address header, are kept separate and hence
serve no less than as a common part of memory storage, for this differ-
ence is licensed by human memory (as it is systems-theoretically formu-
lated), in order to be operable. But von Neumann’s computer architecture

prohibits data processing from occurring at the same site where program
processing is harbored—a coincidence of memory storage and its instruc-
tions. Thus the inventoried collection is no longer the long-term database
of a given past; nor is memory any longer assumed to be a stable condi-
tion of a future historiography but something to be maintained on an as-
needed basis. The Internet itself constitutes the appropriate model, with
its many, many pages of frequently asked questions, or FAQs, for every
subject. Thus an encyclopedia lacking both explicators and authorities
emerges. 7 What is delineated within is the dynamic archive.
Akten in Evidenz halten, “keeping records on file,” in Austrian adminis-
trative parlance, is a term referring to not-yet-processed materials. Thus
archival collections are not a question of, or for, the past but are a logis-
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The Mechanization of the Archive 85
tics, the coordination of which lies askew from the observer’s difference
between present and past—a cybernetic function of latency and making

current (actualization). The absolutist state, in this sense, had an utterly
unemphatic conception of the archive: in its efforts to organize its admin-
istration, it was necessary to gather together the disiecta membra of files in
an archival organization but not to make the research itself accessible, of
course. It was merely intended to ensure for reasons of policy and admin-
istration that necessary juridical titles and documents were accessible—as
temporary or working storage, as flat memory. In this light the historio-
graphical or cultural-historical reading of archives is a subsequent mis-
reading of a legal dispositif, and even when Farge discusses this she is
primarily referring to the juridical archive. If we understand the system
to be less a concrete storage agency than an abstract one, which rules the
appearance as well as the more current functioning of the utterance—that
is, arché as cybernetic command—we find ourselves approaching the pre-
modern concept of the archive: its legal-political production, revision,
and application of any kind of relevant files(s) in the chancery or admin-
istrative office (in the archeion), where they can be mastered and hence
ruled upon/over and managed. Only in the transition to modernity has
the archive been transformed from the attorney’s arsenal to the histo-
rian’s workshop. 8 But what would this storage be without its hierarchies,
without its orientation in favor of the Oeuvre—a kind of total reserve? In a
technical or institutional sense, storage (removal) is merely a subset of the
system in its entirety. Is the power of the aggregate state of the archive a
difference between history and power in actu? The synchronized time of
the archive spatializes that which is called history as deflection. No ad-
ministration, insofar as it does not itself become an archive and thus a
particular administrative subspecies, aims at history as a field of knowl-
edge, but rather it aims at a permanent potential presence not only of its
ongoing and preexisting processes but also its supply of preserved res
gestae as “operated things”—that is, its files. A potential actuality is an
aggregate state, in which archival data remain poised—a situation of
radical latency. Through the re(d)action and activation of memory (be-

tween the file and the archive), an unpassed, and, thus, be it as legal
monument or otherwise, a constant past, is reconfigured into a new state.
The present is consequently less an ontological quality than the cybernet-
ic condition of an actuality, or an actualization of an archival latent state.
Niklas Luhmann describes reality as a “terminal value,” and for him,
accordingly, the past of a given reality is an archival aggregate state.
Memory is therefore the term for what cannot be observed, as the com-
plex real state of one system merging into the next, so that selected past
inputs can be relied upon as indicators. Thus, the institution of the
archive is an “observer’s device that is interpreted along the unobserved
and transferred to the emergent level of intersystem contact.” 9 The
archive crystallizes processes that suspend history’s thought patterns, the
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aesthetics of a temporally dynamic order. Historiography seeks to recon-

vert this relationship back into narrative structure, into theoretical arbi-
trariness of the beginning and of its own history. Here is the entire differ-
ence within the knowledge organization between narrative and database.
Historians return to narrative so as not to (for human eyes at least) become
unreadable. Even the nineteenth-century heads of the Prussian state
archives necessarily failed as historians—out of respect for their objects.
A narrative, literary or historical, constitutes, according to Roland
Barthes, the organization of a discourse as a move toward an archival
constellation, which makes a claim for a different order of time than the
time of the narrated object, “a complex, parametric, nonlinear time.” 10
However, once archival systems are in turn historically operationally
closed, their aggregate becomes self-referential—that is, they refer only to
their own operations. Only closed archives are actually archives qua
mechanisms of input and output (which recalls not only Carl Schmitt’s
friend/foe distinction but also the binary logic of ones and zeros).
NOTE
1. Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben (Berlin: Duncker und
Humblot, 1844), 12f.
2. Hermann Schmitz, “Begriff der Erinnerung,” in Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte Bd. 9
(Bonn, 1964), 40, in reference to Hegel’s Enzyklopädie, para. 458.
3. Charles Babbage, Passagen aus einem Philosophenleben [1864] (Berlin: Kadmos
Verlag, 1997), 83.
4. Karlheinz Blaschke, “Verwendungsmöglichkeiten von Lochkarten in Archivwe-
sen,” in Archivmitteilingen 11, no. 5 (1961): 155f.
5. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le territoire de l’histoire (Paris, 1973), 14; see also
François Furet, “L’histoire quantitative et la construction du fait historique,” Faire de
l’histoire, ed. Jacques Le Godd and Pierre Nora, Bd. 1 (Paris, 1974), 47f; German transa-
tion found in Marc Bloch, Schrift und Materie der Geschichte, ed. Claudio Honegger
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976), 86–107.
6. Siehe André Régnier, “Mathématiser les sciences de l’Homme?” in Anthropologie
et calcul, ed. P. Richard und R. Jaulin, coll. 10/18 (1971): 13–37; see also Michel Foucault,
vorgestellt von Maurice Blanchot, trans. Barbara Wahlster (Tübingen: Edition Diskord,
1987), 26.
7. Norbert Bolz, “Wirklichkeit ohne Gewähr,” Der Spiegel 26 (2000): 130f, 131.
8. Dazu Walter Seittler, “Die Gegenwart anderer Wissen,” in Michel Foucault and
Dazu Walter Seittler, Das Spektrum der Genealogie (Bodenheim: Philo Verlag, 1996),
94–112.
9. Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme. Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987), 159.
10. Dirk Baecker, “Anfang und Ende in der Geschichtsschreibung,” Techno-Patholo-
gien, ed. Bernhard Dotzler (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992), 68.
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TWENTY-THREE
Entropy: A Rubbish Theory of the
Archive
Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault have referred in their writings to do-
mestic disputes, the official entries into dossiers kept for police investiga-
tions housed in the Bastille, that were broken up and scattered during the
Revolution only to be reassembled later. This would correspond to the
law that Michael Thompson describes in his “rubbish theory,” which
holds that cultural artifacts must first undergo a phrase of disarray (or
even trash) before they can be rediscovered as historical objects—wheth-
er in the museum or the archive. 1 Even Sigmund Freud treats memory in
the same way, as distinct from the file: that which is registered and stored
must first be forgotten before “it” can be remembered. The garbage men
of the information society stand alongside the artists and the figures as
data archaeologists. Nature is basically chaotic, demarcated by fluid tran-
sitions, while culture is ordered and divided into parts. Vilém Flusser
also describes culture in these terms but moves beyond Thompson with a
certain gusto when he describes it as a process, which nature negentropi-
cally informs and valorizes, thereby transforming it through

(re)generation into product. A portion of this product is in turn used up,
disinformed, devalorized, and returned to nature. 2
The British artist Ian Hamilton Finlay quotes a phrase of Saint-Just on
the shock to the old political system by the French Revolution: the
present order is the disorder of the future. His instruction to read these
letters: Cut around outlines. Arrange words in order. 3 For the adminis-
tration of the British Empire was also organized along archival principles
as all-encompassing knowledge: it took a lurch as nineteenth-century
physics discovered that the tendency of all matter, according to the inex-
orable law of nature, is to move from an organized to a disorganized
state. 4 “If ever any such thing as the real actually exists, it would appear
87
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88 Chapter 23
in this disorder as a reflex of multiple, dynamic behaviors” (Farge). The

archive is what maintains data as information: unsystematic, structurally

disorganized material cannot be the means for the storage and transmis-
sion of information. Wherever elements are not ordered in line with one
another, and hence the occurrence of any one of them is equally likely—
which is to say, where taxonomic structure is absent, and only an amor-
phous entropic mass is present—information becomes impossible. Entro-
py is very much the other side of the archive, as desire represents the
other side of the law. Archives stand on the side of order in the struggle
against entropy and thus form a cybernetic regime, the very opposite of
the tendency of history toward the dynamic. The concept of time of what
we call history is oriented, according to this principle, toward an irrever-
sible loss of order, which is transferred from a state of higher probability
to one of lower probability. This concept of time may be cybernetically
contrasted with another one, based on the idea that information process-
ing taking place in the world indicates, under certain conditions, an in-
crease in order. 5 Archival desire is a powerful attempt to symbolically
provide an encyclopedia structure—that is, order—to a particular
“world” inclined toward disorder, which is to say, to control it. In
contrast, there is an archival delirium, which constantly produces disin-
formation, like the Tower of Babel producing linguistic war from linguis-
tic unity. Archives are an attempt at fixing regulated processes to a con-
tinuing order of memory storage, principally catechontic, maintaining
the tendency toward disorder as in all cultures. In this alternative per-
spective, the classificatory rhetoric of the archive encounters the statisti-
cal calculus of its letters. In 1948, when Claude Shannon in his mathemat-
ical theory of communication defined information as freedom of a choice
out of a given, and therefore quasi-archivally fixed repertoire of signs, he
meant by this the degree of surprise that the message elicits from the
receiver. If all imaginable messages are equally likely, it is impossible to
predict them: white noise on every channel. The difference in the tenden-
cy of the physical, which is ever less organized over time, is thus the
archival state, the archive as retention institution. At the very moment

when masses of data are coupled with measurement, the archive comes
into play as a system where such measurements can be made, presenting
itself as a kind of memory faculty, insofar as the y-axis for the state can be
recognized, what kind of value the x-axis had an earlier point in time. 6
Maximum entropy, death by fire or ice, is addressed by General Stumm,
in the hundredth chapter of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qual-
ities, as a terrifying vision of an all-encompassing civilizational order, a
total library. 7
Nostalgia for an archival order is a phantasm but one that is the sole
survivor of what Marshall McLuhan defined as the Gutenberg Galaxy,
the age of the printing press. Its alternative is a media culture that under-
stands how to circumvent the virtual anarchive of multimedia data in
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Entropy: A Rubbish Theory of the Archive 89
this way, lying beyond the desires of the conservator, who continually
seeks to reduce them to classification order. Positively formulated, data

trash is the immediate grounds for the anarchaeological excavation of
knowledge. Thus it is useful to think of the archive entropically, to toler-
ate a high degree of disorder in the service of maximal potential informa-
tion. In an 1884 lecture, “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,”
John Ruskin foresaw that the static concept of classification order would
come to be replaced by a process-driven theory of the archive in motion a
kind of dynamic equilibrium (“order by fluctuation”)—far less the nega-
tion of order and far more an alternative form. From a distance, disorder
can also be regarded as a potential ordering principle. Every archive—
even when it stands for nothing but order—always incorporates a latent
anarchival constellation: the labyrinth, such as figured in Jorge Luis
Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel,” based on an actual such con-
stellation in Buenos Aires. 8
NOTES
1. Michael Thompson, Die Theorie des Abfalls: über die Schaffung und Vernichtung von
Werten [Rubbish Theory, 1979] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 1981).
2. Vilém Flusser, Dinge und Undinge (Munich: C. Hanser Verlag, 1993), 22.
3. Siehe Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, A Visual Primer (Edinburgh: Reaktion
Books, 1985).
4. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive. Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (Lon-
don and New York: Verso, 1993). See chapter 3, “Archive and Entropy,” 75. See also
Daniel Charles, Musik und Vergessen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1984), 122.
5. Gotthard Günther, Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen. Eine Metaphysik der Kybernetik
(Baden-Baden and Krefeld, 2. Aufl., 1963 [1959]), 157.
6. L. Slizard, “Über die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen Sys-
tem bei Eingriffen intelligenter Wesen,” Zeitschrift für Physik (1929): 842.
7. Siehe Albert Kümmel, “Möglichkeitsdenken - Navigation im fraktalen Raum,”
Weimarer Beiträge 4 (1995): 526–46.
8. See Wolfgang Schäffner’s photo series, Trajekte, Zentrum für Literaturforschung
Berlin, no. 1 (September 2000): 13–15.
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TWENTY-FOUR
In the End: Digital Anarchi(v)es
Each archive bears within it an aura of the arcane. Information regarding

actual holdings is only made accessible via the acquisition of material
and the medium of the inventory. In accordance with the term inventio,
the inventory recalls how closely fiction lies next to the archive: dis/
covery. While catalog rooms in libraries are frequented places, the inven-
tory room of the National Archives in Paris brings to mind a grave. This
is where the world stops, where it is turned to stone: only for those
versed in the code are the indexes more than just Sybilline oracles. 1
However, for those who know how to decipher the codes, the invento-
ry space is an aquarium, in which the reader “swims like a fish”—by
which Farge implicitly touches upon the immersive spaces of the digital
archive. An inventorial acquisitions program must—as in program-
ming—take into account the structure of what is sought; thus registration
becomes a kind of invention, a process of discovery. Which newly
archi(ve)-techtonic options are opened by virtual navigation via the Inter-
net archive, monitoring the archive, outside of photorealist images from
catalogs?
In contrast to the order of state archives, most private archives are
formed according to the idiosyncrasies of their owners (as their other
corporeal form). Along with this libidinous or economic impulse, they
figure just as much as an external memory of the aesthetics of knowledge
in their era. Does this permit the heretofore dead capital of hidden
archives and libraries to liquefy and once more flow into the discursive?
Beyond traditional storage formats this would mean that interactive—
that is, usable—archives would be generated anew. A model for this is
suggested by Aby Warburg’s Hamburger Bibliothek, whose department-
store structure was the result of purely economy-driven considerations. It
was created not so much in line with the idea of the reading room but
91
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92 Chapter 24
according to use specifications. 2 The morphology of the archive does not

initially appear in the digital space as matrix but is actually a cyberspatial

term referring to the two bodies of memory, the physical and the virtual.
The difficulty of really thinking about this field as an archive of the virtu-
al remains—that is, what exists only as possibility, not as actual record(s).
Media-memory archaeology analyzes the (cultural) technical law of
what can be said, in the sense of what can be stored and transmitted: this
accentuation has currently shifted from cultural storage to transmission
in perpetuity. The octopus of electronically transmittable storage is the
meaning of the Internet and the promise of digital archaeology: in an era
when all information may be stored, its paradoxically anarchival signa-
ture is on display: “Cyberspace has your memory.” 3 Cyberspace is not
only space but much more a topological configuration.
Accordingly, the metaphorical application of the art of memory in the
Renaissance (ars memoriae) is misused with regard to Internet qua memo-
ry. Traditionally, only what was stored could be localized; within the
Internet, however, there is no longer so much a lieux de memoire as there
are only addresses. Here the structure of communication is fused togeth-
er with its contents/holdings. The “gigantic machine” that de Certeau
once wrote about now bears the name “World Wide Web,” for which the
archive is mere metaphor, belying the fact that it is not so much that its
products are archived than that a transformed “disposability” of cultural
knowledge obtains. Not getting lost in the data forest of this dis/order is
the imperative of a familiar pedagogy, which is also dedicated to the
ordering of the archive. But learning to get lost in a labyrinth is the option
of a future cultural technology, beyond the archive, and in the form of a
journey whose destination one must first get to know—destinerrance, as in
Derrida. In order to be able to think about the storage procedures for
multimedial space, it is the task of media archaeology to historicize the
concept of the archive itself, for it remains oriented toward a vanishing
point of alphabet-based texts and paper formats. European culture re-
mains fixated on the codex and on print—that is, on the library and the
archive. In contrast, rival media cultures are far more likely to think in
terms of transmission because of long-term or even historicoreligious
memory directed toward the eternal. While in the past, archives of insti-
tutional and juridical databases were sealed away, the online database,
compared to the public access of the present (which is offline, so to speak),
is subjected not so much to termination but to continuous evaluation. 4
Media culture is concerned with demonumentalized memory, similar to
that of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, while compiling his adages, regarded
movable type not as an option but as a curse, because it allowed him to
constantly add new words and phrases to successive editions of his anno-
tated collection of sayings, Adagiorum collectanea, right up until his death
in 1536. He could have used a computer, 5 but on the other hand, the
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In the End: Digital Anarchi(v)es 93
Internet takes this one step further, as it does not recognize a final edition
but permanent revision.

The media-art group Knowbotic Research is currently designing an
online version of the Bochum lecturers of media anthropologist Vilém
Flusser, now housed in the Kölner Kunsthochschule für Medien. An on-
line archival program is appropriately scaled, so long as it doesn’t suc-
cumb to the temptation to arbitrariness. The proposed solution is simple:
researchers and other database users should create decentralized levels
that might act as local branches of the archive and invite a steady flow of
new deposits via horizontal networking—that is, a social model of the
archive. 6 This method is grounded in the archival ingestion of collections
to focus on nodes, and form grids, beyond individual documents, files, or
texts. Therefore an exemplary archival pool is necessitated, one demar-
cated by means of specific attractors. Its concrete uses thus generate fur-
ther archival divisions (archiving on demand): the archive is then con-
structed as object-oriented and cumulative, with digital agents (knowbots)
and filters. This may prove a departure: from the read-only paradigm of
the classic archive toward a generative reading of the archive. A collec-
tion is thus no longer inventoried against the source and context of its
database but rather becomes radically user-oriented—toward a dynamic
archive. Whoever would rather not have a “dead archive” must convert
place into working structure, in which dwell not only concrete medial
bodies (book, file, image) but also their precursors, the actual fund of
design on demand. Dynamically generated information is the signature
of the Internet, whereas the users of the classic archive until now have
mainly accessed static information. Similar to the input of start and end
points in a travel plan, net routing is not so much revealed on the basis of
the storage of fixed data combinations than it is expressed mathematical-
ly—that is, algorithmically optimized. Online archives operate far more
along culturally unfamiliar ground than through seamless connections
between various databases, whereas the strength of the classic archive
lies not so much in abundance but in choice and selection of data as a
condition for constituting meaning, in its scarcity. However, the marking

up of hypertext links is one more archival act of contextualization; the
will to knowledge-as-power is enhanced by sorting, distributing, assign-
ing. The buzzing of digitally detected objects may be arranged through
self-organizing sorting algorithms—orderings that are temporally fragile.
In line with the algorithms of the Kohonen self-organizing map, which was
created at the Helsinki Medialab in the context of research in neural
networks, a full range of genuinely medial sorting options are on offer:
formal properties provide criteria as well as order to associative mean-
ings (cultural or personal) so as to determine the relative position among
data in a collection. Which is precisely what Vannevar Bush dreamed of
in 1945 with his conception of a memory extender: memory based not on
classification but association, in line with human cognition. 7 However,
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94 Chapter 24
digital data structures no longer reflect collective memory in its anthro-

pological sense but instead the archive of their processing programs. The
difference between hidden archives and collections for public display
(libraries, museums, monitors) has never been more implacable. What
remains, under such digital conditions, is the authoritative power to de-
fine the archive: the invisible components of present-day information
distribution and digital storage systems and methods. Precisely where
data seem to be organized along natural or sensible lines, they are actual-
ly directed by cultural-technical operations, in its strictest sense. Thus
new archives reveal, media-archaeologically speaking, the programs be-
hind an apparent order: data structures whose transparency is the key to
current memory praxis, since at this level cultural and aesthetic patterns
are quite literally coded. 8 Behind every narratively or iconically adorned
collection stands a naked technological structure, an archival skeleton,
strategically and consciously removed from discursive access to the inter-
face (the Windows aesthetic). Apparently, the system, lacking irreversible
hierarchies, is, beyond its visible surfaces, as rigidly wedded to technical
protocols for transmission and storage as the traditional archive.
Within the Internet, the pictorial turn makes broadband transmission
of audio and video in quasi-real time (streaming) possible through algo-
rithms of data compression. Significantly, downloads of images generated
by webcams are not called archives (for this term belongs to the realm of
paper-based memory) but galleries—the realm of the visual. In light of
this denial of archivistic classification, David Gelernter has envisioned
data streams called lifestreams as a way out of the desktop metaphor of
the surface of the contemporary computer screen, which, with its file-
shaped icons (“folders”), displays both an anachronistic archaicism and
an archivism—this originates within an older European era of chancery
and office rather than from an aesthetic understanding of digital storage
according to its own terms or internal logic. Archival techniques are
therefore also a prehistory of the computer, which has inherited its stacks,
files, and indexes from Old World administrative practices. 9 Emphatic disc
memory, according to Gelernter’s scenario, is to be replaced in the future

by intermediate, as-it-happens storage: his lifestream system simply treats
the PC as temporary data storage, not as a permanent file cabinet. 10 Past,
present, and future are nothing but segments, functional demarcations of
differences in a dynamic data stream. What separates the Internet from
the classic archive is that its mnemotechnical dynamic is contrasted with
print-based cultural memory—a function of the “electricity fairy”
(Jacques Lacan). At any rate, as was done prior, it is also true that the
Internet orders knowledge. The establishment of a separate Internet II by
the Clinton administration, restricted to scientific and military communi-
cation, was justified by the threatening disorder of data jams in the net-
work: the rest of the Internet has degenerated into a giant department
store of raw information. The greater part of this mass is in a constant
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state of transition and is “chaotically sorted” 11—an allusion to current

forms of postindustrial warehousing. In the network the archivist’s pho-

bia of disorder has come true. Here we are confronted more with an
analogy to organizational memory than with an archive in its strictest
sense, where discrete data from a variety of sources are subjected to
systems simultaneously, technically, and societally distributed 12—an
infrastructural version of the collective construction of memory, as soci-
ologically defined by Maurice Halbwachs. Here lies the difference in the
strict procedural progression of the archive, for all these memories must
be seamlessly linked. The actual records float past, transitional objects
between different units of memory, where they increasingly shed their
original context. This is how visible documents must become functional
monuments, to be capable of transmission and coupling. Since informa-
tion is retained, and if transmitter and receiver do share the same mutual
context, information must not only be authenticated by the archival
stamp at the moment it enters the (ingestion) channel but must also be
decontextualized. Who accesses memory must reckon with this context-
lessness—an old historian’s folk wisdom. How can a memory preserve its
aggregate state and simultaneously be embedded in a dynamic process?
Beyond the traditional notion of the archive as a container or black box, a
dynamic framework of complex composite systems for preserving indi-
viduals and organizations is emerging, in an ongoing game of de- and re-
contextualization. So memory processes spring from memory objects.
Does memory no longer exist in an emphatic sense in such a space? From
a constructivist perspective organizational memory operates analogously
with neural processes: multiple processes operate synchronously and are
simultaneously embedded in other operations. Cognitive science has, in
the meantime, not only described the power of forgetting as possibly a
more significant performance than memory but has gone further and
removed memory as container to replace it with a single cognitive and
memory system. 13 If, given the supremacy of selection over storage, ad-
dressing before sorting should be assumed to be inconceivable without
memory, we should regard archival terminology (or even the archive

itself) as a literally metaphorical function of processes of transmission.
But the end of online cultural memory, moving toward a permanent
transference, is perhaps the future of the archive, albeit in a completely
different and abstract sense, insofar as it depicts the archive’s posthistori-
cal condition—not so much in its continuities and linearities but in its
discrete states, to wit: thinking archivally. The universally feared Y2K
bug, like all catastrophes, offered a opportunity that continues to be valid
as a theoretical model. The computer calendar reset from 2000 to 1900
implied a time frame, a jump (time warp) backward in time, time with
which our cinematographic apparatus already discretely reckons. Here
we approach the cinematographic temporal aesthetic of the cut, and this
means the discontinuous calculation of reality with the eye of the film
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96 Chapter 24
editor. On a technical-media-archaeological level, film (as recording and

projection equipment) has cut up life into discrete steps and jumps, or
into states mechanically coupled to the clock mechanism: reproduction
and projection of animated and photographed scenes as a series of snap-
shots. In contrast with the archive, technical storage is able to lead view-
ers to believe in the reanimation of its data. This is how film’s earliest
audiences saw the new medium, one that not only brought the dead back
to life but also was able to let time flow backward, like tapes of that most
fugitive of media, the voice. The memory of our senses is then fed back
into this technical reactualization like the later replay of magnetic tape.
The result is a number of data-storage options, the stuff of the classic
paper archive’s (bad) dreams. Here knowledge exists only in archival-
archaeological arrangements but may be presented analogously as narra-
tive subordination to past lives. Hence the value in treating archives that
exist among us like this: as discrete sources, without prejudicing the recog-
nition that their imagined referents—and thus life itself—once proceeded
steadily. The latter’s symbolic emanations are indeed created in a contin-
uous, dynamic time but are only preserved in arbitrary states and condi-
tions 14; likewise, a quantization process digitally converts a signal cur-
rent into a finite sequence of discrete elements: into a quasi-archival rep-
resentation. The receiver system then determines the context and creates
information out of its data: this is the foundation not only of our histori-
cal memory but of all information about the present. The cultural-techno-
logically significant aspect is present so that the concept of the archive no
longer refers to the philosophical-historical emphatic memory of the past,
rather a given concrete repertoire of signs, knowledge, and concepts: the
conditions for a relative certainty as a form of existence for a present that
is experienced as ceaseless consequence of perturbations. In the begin-
ning, en arché, was the birth of the archive from disorder; at the end, its
rebirth as a component of an information theory that cultivates disorder
itself: “[t]he day finally breaks over a world of circumstances, differance,
chance, and improbability.” 15
NOTES
1. Arlette Farge, Das brüchigen Leben. Verführung und Aufruhr im Paris des 18. Jah-
rhunderts, trans. Wolfgang Kaiser (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach Verlag, 1989), 139f.
2. Tilmann von Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. Archi-
tektur, Einrichtung und Organisation (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz Verlag, 1992), 82.
3. Christoph Drösser, “Ein verhängnisvolles Erbe,” Die Zeit, June 23, 1995, 66.
4. Mark U. Edwards Jr., Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: California, 1994), 163.
5. Jonathan Sawday, “Towards the Renaissance Computer,” The Renaissance Com-
puter: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Sawday and Neil Rhodes
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 41.
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6. Eric Kluitenberg, Report (December 13, 2000) to mailing-list syndicate@aec.at on

DEAF_00, Digital Dive Workshop Online Archives (DEAF Festival, Amsterdam), No-
vember 15–17, 2000.
7. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1945).
8. Handout from media artist George Legrady at the conference Archive des Lebens,
November 2000, at the Evangelische Akademie (Rothenburg o. d. Tauber) about his
installation A Pocket Full of Memories, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Summer 2001.
9. See Cornelia Vismann, Akten. Medientechnik und Recht (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag,
2000).
10. David Gelernter, Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology (New York:
Basic Books, 1997), 106.
11. “Editorial: The Internet; Bringing Order from Chaos,” Scientific American 276,
no. 3 (March 1997): 49.
12. Mark S. Ackerman and Christine A. Halverson, “Reexamining Organizational
Memory,” Communications of the ACM 43, 1 (January 2000): 63.
13. Dirk Baecker, “Was wollen die Roboter?” Freude ohne Ende. Kapitalismus und
Depression II, ed. Carl Hegemann (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2000), 140.
14. H. H. Pattee, “Discrete and Continuous Processes in Computers and Brains,”
Physics and Mathematics of the Nervous System, ed. M. Conrad et al. (Berlin, Heidelberg,
and New York: Springer Verlag, 1974), 129.
15. Michel Serres, Anfänge (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1991), 11f.
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Index
Aeneid, The (Virgil), 67 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 62

Antonioni, Michelangelo, 17; Blow Up , Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 67
17 Dracula, 25–26
Archives Nationales (Paris), 67, 91 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 50
Archivo General de Indias, 42
Erasmus of Rotterdam, 92; Adagiorum
Babbage, Charles, 83; Analytical Engine, collectanea, 92
83 Eribon, Didier, 41
“Babel, The Library of” 88 Exercice du silence (French Resistance), 71
Barthes, Roland, 85
Bastille, 14, 49, 54, 87 Farge, Arlette, 2, 5, 13–14, 17, 33, 35, 39,
Benjamin, Walter, 35, 78 40, 45, 49, 54, 84, 87, 91
Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, 17, 49 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 87
Bibliothèque de Saulchoir, 7, 67 Flaubert, Gustave, 40
Bibliothèque Nationale, 7 Flusser, Vilém, 87, 93
Bitsch, Annette, 17 Fontane, Theodor, 77, 78; Effie Briest, 78
Bloch, Marc, 67 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 40
Borges, Jorge Luis, 88 Foucault, Michel, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13,
Buchenwald, 81 14, 21, 25, 29, 33, 35, 40, 41, 42, 45,
Burroughs, William S., 3 50, 53, 54, 57, 58, 61, 62, 67, 87;
Bush, Vannevar, 93 Archaeology of Knowledge, 8, 33, 50,
62; Discipline and Punish, 39, 42; The
Cage, John, 71; Silence, 71 Lives of Infamous People, 45; The Will
Celan, Paul, 71; Engführung, 71 to Knowledge, 41; The Will to Power
Centre de documentation juive Interpreted, 41
contemporaine, 42 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 53
Cerveteri (Tuscany), 21 Freund, Sigmund, 11, 71, 87
Combe, Sonia, 53 Furet, François, 2, 83

Corbin, Alain, 46, 81
Curia (Rome), 49 Galton, Francis, 47
Geertz, Clifford, 47
Darboven, Hanne, 11 Geheime Staatsarchiv in Berlin-
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 40, 61 Dahlem, 1
De Certeau, Michel, 2, 5, 17, 25, 33, 34, Geheimes Staats-Archiv (Prussia), 53
35, 45, 49, 50, 83, 92 Gelernter, David, 94
De Man, Paul, 71 George, Stefan, 69; “Kaiser Friedrich
Dean, John, 3 der Zweite,” 69
Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 8, 41 German Historical Institute (Rome), 64
Derrida, Jacques, 2, 11, 34, 49, 71, 77, 92 Ginzburg, Carlo, 17, 46, 81
Deutsches Historisches Institut, 22
99
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100 Index
Grass, Günter, 77–78; Too Far Afield Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 64

(Ein weites Feld), 77–78 Musil, Robert, 87; The Man without
Greenblatt, Stephen, 26, 33–35, 39 Qualities, 87
Groys, Boris, 11
Nagy, Imre, 78
Halbwachs, Maurice, 94 New Historicism, 5, 26, 33, 35, 39, 54
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 83 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41
Hemken, Kai-Anne, 11 Nixon, Richard, 3, 53
Het Vlaamsche Land (Belgium), 71 Nora, Pierre, 2; Les Lieux de mémoire, 2
Hiltebrandt, Philip, 64
Huizinga, Johan, 7; The Waning of the The Odyssey (Homer), 67
Middle Ages, 7, 39
Pierce, Charles S., 40
Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Poe, Edgar Allan, 14
Contemporaine (IMEC), 67
Quetelet, Adolphe, 47; Anthropometrie,
Jensen, Wilhelm, 17; Gradiva, 17 47
Kant, Immanuel, 8 Raulff, Ulrich, 42

Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 61, 67, 69; The Ricoeur, Paul, 71
King's Two Bodies, 61, 69 Riegl, Alois, 17; Alterswert, 17
Kehr, Paul Fridolin, 50, 64 Ruskin, John, 88; “The Storm-Cloud of
Knowbotic Research, 93 the Nineteenth Century,” 88
Kohonen self organizing map, 93
Kölner Kunsthochschule für Medien, Schmitt, Carl, 85
93 Scott, Ridley, 17; Blade Runner, 17
Kubrick, Stanley, 30; 2001: A Space Scott, Sir Walter, 40; Quentin Durward,
Odyssey, 30 40
Shannon, Claude, 78, 87
Lacan, Jacques, 11, 94 Siegert, Bernhard, 42
Ladurie, Emmanuel, 81 Stein, Harry, 81
Lafitau, Joseph François, 49–50; Moeurs Stein, Sabine, 81
des sauvages Ameriquains, 49–50 Stone, Oliver, 3
Lawrence, D. H., 21
Le Soir (Belgium), 71 Thompson, Michael, 87
Leo Baeck Institute, 67 Traverses, 29

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 22 Tuscany, 21
lettres de cachet, 13–14
Loi sur la liberté d'accès aux Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 71
documents administratifs (France), Vietnam War Memorial, 71
53 Von Ranke, Leopold, 7, 26, 40
Lüdtke, Alf, 64
Luhmann, Niklas, 5, 71, 85 Warburg, Aby, 91; Hamburger
Lyotard, Jean-François, 53 Bibliothek, 91
Wenders, Wim, 67; States of Things, 67
Michelet, Jules, 25 White, Hayden, 33, 40, 71
AMSTERDAM
Account: uamster
About the Author and Translator
Wolfgang Ernst (born 1959) is a German cultural and media historian.

Educated at the universities of Köln, London, and Bochum, he is profes-
sor of media theory and media studies at Humboldt Universität. His
works include Das Rumoren der Archive. Ordnung aus Unordnung (2002),
Im Namen von Geschichte. Sammeln – Speichern – (Er-)Zählen (2003), Das
Gesetz des Gedächtnisses. Medien und Archive am Ende (des 20. Jahrhunderts)
(2007), and Gleichursprünglichkeit. Zeitwesen und Zeitgegebenheit technischer
Medien and Chronopoetik. Zeitweisen und Zeitgaben technischer Medien (both
2012).
Adam Siegel is languages and literatures bibliographer at the University

of California, Davis. Educated at the Defense Language Institute, Univer-
sity of Minnesota, and University of California, Berkeley, his translations
from German and Russian include works by Hubert Fichte, Thomas
Bernhard, and Viktor Shklovsky. For his translation and archival re-
search, he is recipient of a number of awards, including a University of
California research grant.
101
AMSTERDAM
Account: uamster

Wolfgang Ernst Stirrings in The Archives Order From Disorder

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Copyright © 2015. Rowman &amp; Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.

Stirrings in the Archives

Stirrings in the Archives

Order from Disorder

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Copyright © 2015 by Adam Siegel

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ernst, Wolfgang, 1959–

Printed in the United States of America

1 The Inflation of the Archive 1

20 “We from the Archive” 77

and power is absent, an archival barrier is erected, and the historian’s

metaphor in 1830: “Just as Cuvier was a genius at telling which genus a

Richard Nixon’s adviser during the Watergate scandal, recalled during

his testimony an apparently word-for-word conversation with the former

1. Krzystof Pomian, “Les Archives. Du Trésor des chartes au Caran,” in Lieux de

Archival operations not only are predicated on allowing immense data-

figurative writing without lapsing into a poetology of the archive—one

under the rubric of information. Here is where the internal borders of

1. Michel de Certeau, “L’espace de l’archive ou la perversion du temps,” Traverses.

At first glance it seems paradoxical that Michel Foucault developed his

history emerges not as a consequence of the archive’s formation but as

origin) medially affords, in a quite specific sense, the link to Foucault’s

archaeology of knowledge, which as a form seeks to convey discursive

media archaeology undermines the preoccupation with the archive as

stitutively concealed as concrete carriers of the signal of their cultural

Can a study that simply takes a classification structure as given, that

ency. In the act of oral transcription of predominantly illiterate petition-

of life that appear nowhere save as occasional sentences in the court

for anthropomorphic figuration, clamor, apart from a world not so much

grasped as coolly calculated.

Archives may be regarded as hallucinogenic substances 1: even Arlette

only in Freud. 3 How then are historiographical choreographies produced

worlds (apart from technical breakdowns at the level of the operational or

1. Per the title of Michel Melot’s essay in Traverses 36 (Themenheft L’Archive)

Archives are places of silence. We approach the archive as we would an

however, is a cybernetic: In order to protect the air-conditioned Etruscan

plation of the archive. An encounter with the past means an inevitable

1. The historian Moses I. Finley, “Archaeology and History,” in Historical Studies

3. D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places [1932], foreword Massimo Pallottino (London:

Olive Press, 1986), 52f.

In the context of the archive, the keyword Dracula seems to be a matter of

nation as the drug of history: “Out of the lonely galleries of archives

val container is a coffin, and the nocturnal moment of its examination

corresponds to the phantasmal period during which the vampiric gaze is

1. Jules Michelet’s foreword to Histoire de France (1869) found in Oeuvres Complètes

Giese: “Über verschiedene Arten, Geschichte zu schreiben,” in Adelbert Reif (Hg.),

Antworten der Strukturalisten (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1973), 169.

Comparable to the early industrial factories, national and municipal

nism for the development and application of technical regulations by the

1. Michel de Certeau, “L’espace de l’archive ou la perversion du temps,” Traverses.

The New Historicism in literary criticism is generally interpreted as a func-

ments but in the interpretation and reconfiguration of already extant ma-

traces. 9 Accordingly, the relationship of the archaeology of knowledge to

ic speech, the dispositif of the archaeology of knowledge that Greenblatt

has termed negotiation, becomes accessible: standardization, currency,

behind. The ghost of a platonic logocentrism still haunts these words, a

1. See Andreas Mahler (rev.), “Fluch und Wunder: Greenblatts Geschichte(n),”

German Rudolf Kassner (Bremen: Schünemann, 1958), 37f.

Arlette Farge offers an unexpectedly literal conception of the digital in

Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.