the archive and the human sciences notes towards a theory of the archive

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The archive and the humansciences: notes towards a

theory of the archiveIRVING VELODY

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No. 4 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi)[0952-6951(199811)11:4;1-16; 006962]

As the backdrop to all scholarly research stands the archive. Appeals to ulti-mate truth, adequacy and plausibility in the work of the humanities and socialsciences rest on archival presuppositions. This article aims to explore thecharacter and nature of the archive; what kinds of claims are involved in theidea of the archive; how the concept has changed and is likely to changefurther in the future; and the incorporation of increasingly diverse types ofmaterial within the archive. I will also consider the politics of the archive aswell as questions of who has rights over the archive and to whom does itbelong.What then is the archive? The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers

this derivation: Archives (1603); from the French Archives, from the Latinarchiva; and from the Greek archeia meaning: magisterial residence, publicoffice. The word is defined, then, as a place in which public records are kept.The Petit Robert gives the following. Archives: from the low Latin archivum;the Greek arkheion: that which is old. The definition is much as in the ShorterOED above.

In Archive Fever (but perhaps Mal dArchive might better be titled TheTrouble with Archives) Derrida points up two aspects of archives and bothrelate to Greek terms and usages. On the one hand he notes the physical sitingof the archive: as that where the arkhe is, the source or commencement. Onthe other hand there is the binding aspect of arkhe: the nomological. Yet inits singular form as archive, the earliest use as in arkheion derives from house,the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons. The documents thus



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state the law and its nature; and demand in their turn a privileged topologyor siting. A science of the archive must then include a theory of its insti-tutionalization.

SETTING THE ARCHIVAL SCENE

There were memorable struggles involving sociology in the intellectualhistory of the Third French Republic. Positivist sociology was an excel-lent anti-clerical tool in influencing the masses. Once it became scien-tifically established that in their ritual dances the Bororo Indiansidentify with a parrot, the future popular educator was protectedagainst the magic of the religious Mass. (Curtius: 1990: 113)

To consider the work that went into this conception of the Bororo in func-tionalist terms, thus throwing light on, indeed explaining, if not explainingaway, French Catholicism, is also to envisage the materials, the field notesthat researchers must use to form these conclusions. The archive of the

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

as reported by Curtius, have long since passed away. But their passing hasbeen accompanied by an enrichment of the evidence for making sense of theworld. Elsewhere Geertz has pointed to the growing possibility, or ratherprobability, that the work of social scientists could begin to take over a mostvaried range of genre types: the age of blurred genres (Geertz, 1983). But didGeertz envisage the following as part of this enrichment?

[Ur-Bororo: here before the Bororo]Unlike other isolated tribal groupings the Ur-Bororo do not refer tothemselves as typical or essential human beings. The Ur-Bororoactually refer to themselves as The People Who You Wouldnt Like tobe Cornered by at a Party ... the Ur-Bororo regard most of what theydo as a waste of time. In fact the expression that roughly correspondsto now in Ur-Bororo is waste of time. (Self, 1994: 82)

The changes in our conception of science and the social sciences can be readfrom the two excerpts reflecting on our understanding of anthropology andits implications for interpreting our own societies.For Curtius, the scientific character of anthropology assists in establishing

a Realpolitik of the human sciences in the Third Republic. The functional



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aspect of Bororo practices help to banalize and at the same exorcize the every-day religious practices of French men and women.

But Selfs narrative and fictional account of the Ur-Bororo reflect preciselythe narrativizational and reportage techniques of much anthropology andsocial science today. At the same time the banal and indeed boring characterof Ur-Bororo life and culture successfully establishes the current view thatthe mystery of our own social world is not to be resolved by claims aboutthe other; rather our first task is to throw off the colonialist conception ofOther Peoples, and recognize the exotic nature of our own worlds.But can the archive encompass Self as well as Malinowski?

ARCHIVAL TRANSGRESSION

In the Winter of 1992, in the war between Abkhazia and Georgia fourmen from the Georgian National Guard drew up outside the Abkhaz-ian State Archives and threw in incendiary grenades. It was laterreported that the history of the entire region had been reduced to ashes.(Ascherson, 1996: 253-4)

How very threatening the legitimation of a particular item for the archivemay be is apparent in a recent discussion of published sociological research.In a review of Jodi Deans Aliens in America, but one of several volumes dis-cussing alien abduction, Frederick Crews (1998) writes of his hope that beliefin alien abduction, like belief in recovered memories, is on the retreat. Thefolly of abduction memory can be halted through public education and coun-seling. He goes on:

As someone who spent his employed decades in a congenial universityenvironment, I would like to think that academics will be prime con-tributors to this effort. (1998: 18)

However, he continues, Deans book reminds us that the contemporaryacademy cannot be counted on as a bastion against irrationalism. Theproblem is Deans indifference - indifference that is to all claims proffered bythe UFO movement

But indifference itself - a studied refusal to acknowledge any criteria ofjudgement except sheer subversiveness towards an imaginary establish-ment - is precisely the scandal here.... As a sociologist of cults, Deanmight be expected to show us how the abduction zealots debase the lan-guage of scientific prudence. (1998: 18)

But this she singularly fails to do (in Crews judgement).As in disputes between natural scientists and sociologists of science, what



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is at stake here is again the question of what is a legitimate item for thearchive; what kinds of data can be proffered and what must be offered witha denying claim attached.What really upsets Crews is this statement: ... I am not trying to explain

why people believe in UFOs. My interest is in what the attention to aliensand UFOs in contexts beyond the ufological tell us about contemporaryAmerica (Dean, 1998: 201). Dean here appropriates Bruno Latours con-ditional distinctions between the rational and the irrational. In effect, Latourargues that once the scientist steps outside of her context of research her com-ments on rationality have little bearing on the actuality of events beyond thelaboratory. It is just this putting to one side the matter of the truth claims ofalien abductees that is in question for Crews and others like him. There areindications for Crews that this state of affairs is profoundly linked to thecurrent culture wars in American universities. (No doubt the implemen-tation of the Research Assessment Exercise will continue to insulate UK aca-demia from such horrors.) On the question of archives and their uses Crewsis attempting to undermine the legitimacy of Deans procedure and method-ology. Presumably he would want to deny her materials the normal standingin such collections of data. To clarify and emphasize this point it is worthnoting that Crews ends his review with this comment on Deans publishers:The editors at Cornell University Press - unless they have already been sup-planted by space invaders - are apparently wagering such babble will be theacademic lingua franca of the future. No doubt he would take the same viewof any agency that supported and collated such research.At another level, divisions about the legitimacy of an archive can have

enormous consequences. In the case of the destruction of the Abkhazianarchives the very identity of a culture appears involved (Ascherson, 1996). Asa current example I take the disputes over Noel Malcolms sources in hisaccount of the history of Kosovo, which echo the current conflict betweenSerbs and Albanian speakers in that province (Malcolm, 1998). Rightly so itmight be added, as his book denies the truth claims of Serbian origins in thatland and seems to legitimate the armed opposition of the Kosovo LiberationArmy. Medieval Kosovo is often referred to as the cradle of the Serbs ... butthe reality was rather different (Malcolm,1998: 41 ) Much of Malcolms studyis an examination of a number of such realities and the consequent demoli-tion of several myths, frequently Serbian myths of nationhood and ethnicdominance. Towards the end of the book Malcolm writes: According to themythic history of the Serbs, what happened in 1912 was an act of liberationwhich rescued an oppressed people ..., but expresses the hope that Serbswill reject those fixed patterns of thought which such myths represent (1998:355-6; emphasis added).Thus the archive becomes a crucial weapon in ethnic struggle, as Wolfgang



5

Ernst notes in his discussion of the politicization of German archives: hequotes the statement by the head of the Bavarian archival administration,Knopfler, at the 1936 Congress of German Archivists: There is no practiceof racial politics without the mobilisation of source documents informing uson the origin and development of a race and people.... There is no racialpolitics without archives, without archivists (Ernst, 1999).

THE AMBIGUITY OF THE ARCHIVE

Beyond textual materials there lies a vast province of further objects for thearchive; the remains of past civilizations, arrowheads, tools; and images ...and, in particular, photographs.That the photograph plays a major part in all investigations concerning

propriety and truth is one outcome of this 19th-century invention. In a sensethe photograph offers evidence unimpeachable in contrast to the writtenword or even the recorded voice. However, the recorded image itself clearlyrequires some form of contextualization, or framing. Yet the frame, too, maygenerate irresolvable ambiguities. In W. G. Sebalds fictions (or fictions -there appears some doubt about the naming of these volumes), ?he Rings ofSaturn and The Emigrants, one bizarre aspect of the volumes is the insertionof photographs in the text. But the pictures themselves remain untitled. Thereis no directive from text to picture of the kind: look at this person - this isPaul Bereyter whose exile I am retailing; although such a statement issomehow implied.

Just how difficult this matter of framing can be emerges from testimony inthe first of the O. J. Simpson murder trials. In an attempt to undermine theevidence of the policeman who established a key link in the murder investi-gation - the discovery of a glove connecting Simpson, an outstanding blacksportsman, to the murders - defence lawyers pursue the following line ofattack. Officer Fuhrman, who found the glove, had stated that at no time hadhe used racist, anti-black language. On this point defence offered as evidencea set of video recordings made a decade before these events.

Evidence established that Laura McKinny (employed by UCLA) first metLos Angeles Police Department Officer Mark Furhman in 1985. Interestedin writing a screenplay about women police she was able to interviewFurhman, who had expressed strong views about women police officers, overa period of ten years. The following are extracts from the trial transcript,available interestingly on a Website.1 Fuhrman having repeatedly deniedusing racial epithets, the transcript states:

The Fuhrman Tapes contain forty examples of the use of the termnigger to refer to black persons in a racially disparaging context.



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McKinny Transcript no. 1, p. 447 & 8 (discussing where he grew up in the state of Washington).

People there dont want niggers in their town. People there dont wantMexicans in their town. They dont want anybody but good people intheir town.... We have no Niggers where I grew up.The Fuhrman Tapes contain eighteen examples of detective Fuhrmanadmitting police misconduct ... [including] illegal use of deadly force... planting evidence, framing innocent persons....

McKinny Transcript no. 1, p. 254 (... describing the use of deadly force in arrests).Where would this country be if every time a sheriff went out with a

posse to find somebody who just robbed and killed a bunch of people,he stopped and talked to them first. To make sure they had guns. Triedto take them - they shot them in the back. We still should be shootingpeople in the back....

Further on the transcript offers an example of the falsification of a policereport. Here Fuhrman arrests a suspected narcotics user but cant find anyneedle marks. However:

McKinny Transcript no. 1, p. 223 (... describing the arrest of a narcotics user).You cant just find the mark cause hes down. [But] his eyes dont lie.Thats not falsifying a report. Thats putting a criminal in jail. Thatsbeing a policeman.

The claims that these videotapes revealed the truth about Furhmans racism,violence and capacity to tamper with evidence were denied by the prosecu-tion ; rather, his responses to these interviews were represented as no morethan braggadocio, given the frame of the videotapes. In this trial Simpson wasfound not guilty of murder; a second trial was less charitable.How can this evidence be assessed? There is of course no final solution to

these problems.

ARCHIVE AS DATA

In the quest for solid empirical support for their investigations, the social sci-ences too have their parallel problems. The standard format of much soci-ology and a good deal of anthropology and psychology has been to establishstandards of data collection and collation that can in some sense stand besidethe work of the natural sciences. In his discussion of the construction of an



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anthropological cross-cultural archive, George Marcus notes that the objec-tive here was to create in effect a database for the development of the kind ofpositivist conception of the social sciences that we associate with the gener-ation of general statements and law-like formulations.As Marcus tells us, among the most distinguished attempts in anthro-

pology at the construction of an archive from a scientific orientation was theHuman Relations Area Files (Marcus, 1998). Founded by George Murdochin 1937 at Yale University, it seemed the realization of William GrahamSumners dream, a vision very like a parody of Foucaults description in TheOrder of Things of the Enlightenments proposals for the ordering of theworlds knowledge. Sumner envisioned a room with its four walls lined withdeep shelves, one for each society of the world. All cultural and backgroundinformation was to be arranged in systematic order (Marcus, 1998). Indeedthis could be a chapter from Foucault, or perhaps a positivists redescriptionof Borges Library of Babel.A rather similar undertaking can be seen in the ongoing studies of social

mobility conducted at Nuffield College Oxford by, among others, JohnGoldthorpe, Anthony Heath and A. H. Halsey. The purpose of these studieswas to explore processes of class formation and class auction. Such issues werecertainly central to the agenda of British sociology in the 1970s and 1980s.Yet, in spite of the highly sophisticated statistical analyses that have beenapplied to the data held in this expensively generated archive, the impact ofthis work upon current sociological thinking is clearly limited to a smallcoterie devoted to what they call conventional class analysis. Indeed, classitself is a subject confined to a small, and apparently diminishing, corner ofacademic bookshops and makes little appearance in current catalogues ofmajor sociological publishers (Bradley, 1999).

In part this reflects disputed claims on just what should go into the archive,or at least this particular archive. What kind of data are worthy of beingrecorded, sorted, designated and located. For Goldthorpe and his colleaguesthe answer is clear: measurable materials. Yet for many sociologists con-cerned with the effects of class on individuals and their life narratives, the coreof the problem is the exclusion of qualitative materials and narrative formsfrom this particular archive collection.

RESOURCE CENTRES AND ARCHIVALREFERENCE POINTS.

I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life. (Ted Hughes onmatters of access to the Sylvia Plath archive in Rose, 1991: 65)

Much of what passes for archival information begins in fact with sources for



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reaching out to such pockets and collections of basic data, and knowledge ofthe remnants of other peoples lives. A much used text of this kind is Fosterand Sheppards British Archives (1995). As its subtitle indicates, it is a guideto archive resources in the UK. Very similar in intention to British Archives,but on a far more grandiose scale, is the Archon website. Describing itself asthe principle information gateway for UK archivists and users of manuscriptsources for British history, it is hosted and maintained by the Royal Com-mission on Historical Manuscripts bearing with it the states imprimatur.3Carrying out a rather similar function for the social sciences, although farmore modestly, is Qualidata. Set up by the ESRC (Economic & SocialResearch Council) at Essex University in 1994, the aim of Qualidata, theQualitative Data Archival Resource Centre, is to locate, assess and arrangefor the deposit in suitable public archive repositories of significant qualitativeresearch data.However, just what happens when the investigator reaches, or simply con-

siders using an archive is an interesting question in itself, as the cache mayrequire some kind of incantation to release its secrets. This password maynot always be forthcoming as in the case of Sylvia Plaths literary remains.While a number of biographies of Plath have been written over the years, asJanet Malcolm notes in her survey of such writings, two in particular standout: Anne Stephensons account, written with the approval of Plathshusband and sister-in-law, Ted Hughes and Olwen Hughes, who offered(apparently) controlled access to certain archives; and the assessment ofJacqueline Rose, written in the face of much hostility from the Hugheses(Malcolm, 1995; Stephenson, 1990; Rose, 1991). However, Malcolms bookbegins with the account of a less notorious publication in this series, that byLinda Wagner-Martin. Discussing her exchanges with Olwen Hughes overher manuscript, in part to obtain permission to quote at length from Plathsworks, Wagner-Martin eventually concluded that objections to details in herwork would continue, and I had to end my attempt to obtain permission toquote at length if ever I was to publish this book. However, much thegreater part of Malcolms book deals with the conflicting visions of SylviaPlath in the two biographies by Stephenson and Rose. While in her AuthorsNote to Bitter Fame Stephenson writes that Ms Hughess contribution tothis text makes it almost a dual work, in strong contrast Jacqueline Rosereports that the Hugheses attempted to revoke the permissions for quota-tion of four poems in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Malcolm 1995: 174).Although perhaps trivial in itself, it is certainly significant for this article thatthe section of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath that was found most objection-able and was, to quote Malcolm again, to stick in the Hugheses craw wasa chapter called &dquo;The Archive&dquo;. Cunningly enough, The Archive itselfopens with a quotation from a Ted Hughes poem from a larger collection,Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. In the poem, Crows Nerve



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Fails, the central, eponymous character of the book finds his every featherthe very reminders and remainders of a trail of murder; in a striking phraseCrow himself becomes an embodied archive of accusations. In a tellingcomment Rose says: it is impossible to read Plath independently of theframe, the surrounding discourses, through which her writing is presented(Rose, 1991: 69). For Rose, this section The Archive is a reading of theediting of Plaths work; a reading which is of necessity speculative. Part ofthe reason for such speculations must lie in the conditions of archival con-straint and regulation; as Rose, having made a visit to the Smith College RareBook Room, observes of the availability of Plaths journals, The originalsare unavailable, sections of them under seal until 2013 (Rose, 1991: 248).However, successful archival breaching where it does occur, often leads to

an impressive textual display. To return to Noel Malcolms Kosovo, amonghis acknowledgements is a list of archival resources; although perfectly stan-dard nevertheless they have a ring of the esoteric and obscure (I have heavilyedited the sequence so as not to exhaust the reader):

For permission to study and cite manuscript materials in their collec-tions, I am grateful to the Controller of Her Majestys Stationery Office... in respect of the Public Record Office, and also the following: theArchive du Ministere des Affairs Etrangeres, Paris; the Archivio dellaSacra Congregazione della Propaganda Fide, Rome; the ArchivioSegreto Vaticano, Vatican City ... the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv,Vienna ... and the Somerset Record Office, Taunton. In addition I amgrateful to the following libraries and institutions: the BibliotecaCasanatense, Rome ... the Biblioteke Komb6tare, Tirana ... theNationalna i Sveucilisna Knjizica, Zagreb ... the Staats- und Univer-sithtsbibliotek, Hamburg; and the Taylor Institution, Oxford.(Malcolm, 1998: viii-ix)

The offering of this list is an aspect of the writers claims to legitimacy andauthenticity. Whether the list should be regarded as part of the text or an itemof its framing, or to use Genettes term, the paratext is unclear (Genette,1997).

THE MUSEUM AS ARCHIVE

The very notion of the museum has given rise to a science which at first sightis reminiscent of one of Derridas cognitive fantasies, grammatology, archiv-iology ...4: namely museology. The museologists have contributed much toour understanding of the procedures of obscuration and display in gallerieswhich are well matched in academic institutions at large with their owncomplex and frequently inaccessible collections and databanks. In contrast,



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the work of an artist like Boltanski, who actively parades his archive andarchivistic materials, carries out the very contrary activity: this work openlyboasting of its duplicity and ambiguities tells the onlooker quite precisely thecontingency and serendipity which make up these works.

In a series of publications Donald Preziosi (1989, 1996, 1998) has discussedthe problematics of the art gallery in particular. The crucial supportingactivity linked to this institution is art history, a discipline intimately relatedto the gallery and the museum. It has been in many ways the most ortho-dox and conventional of the human sciences; while in contrast the attemptsby, say, sociology, to decode art have been marked by crass causal expla-nations and an extraordinary insensitivity to the products themselves.However, Preziosi shows us that the kind of work he and his colleagues areinvolved in is very much at the heart of the broad range of current humanscience issues; his researches indicate the distance between himself and tra-ditional art-historical work, and at the same time hint at the possibilities otherdisciplines (like sociology) could take on and employ to fruitfully extendtheir range. Preziosi argues that art history enframes an ars memorativa - asystem of protocols for elucidating knowledge and a prescriptive grammarfor the composition of historical narratives: ... the modern discipline acts asan anamorphic archive keyed by a panoptic gaze.5 That is, behind its appar-ently systematically organized array of objects, artefacts and data, lie apanoply of contingent and ad hoc machines for bringing the performance ofthe art museum into play.The consequences of this point can be seen through the following example.

It has been argued that for Giorgione, perhaps the most famous of Renais-sance painters, there is no single work that can be confidently attributed tohim. The complexities of art historical analysis have particular resonance forthe archive as:

... the catalogue is the quintessential archive for art history ... whetherthis is the catalogue of all the artists works or the catalogue of amuseum collection etc.... The crucial characteristic is that each item inthe catalogue (archive) is understood to relate to a particular (unique)art object and to contain all the verbalisable basic data relevant to thatobject. (Nowadays it often also includes a visual simulacrum in com-puterised or photographic form.) And that data usually at a minimumconsists of: the Artist: i.e. the necessity of attribution - since the Artistis the key word by which you access the archival entry. The other dataare: time, date, medium and provenance.6

Yet the attempts to match up the basic tools of the two archives - the archiveof artefacts with the archive of textual evidence and traces are, as in the caseof Giorgione, frequently ambiguous, not to say the work of dreamers.



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TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE ARCHIVE

Although the archive has been perceived, by historians in particular, as a welldefined data-holding facility, somewhat like a penitentiary, in a more or lessclearly signified space, a theory of the archive has to take account of the kindsof conceptual mobility we have seen displayed. To take up Noras speculationthat modern memory is essentially archival is to accept the implications thatthe archive now has for researchers in the human sciences at large. And whilemy focus in this article has been very much on the social sciences, I wouldregard the following comments as applicable to the generality of the humanscience disciplines ... if we can continue to call them such.For undoubtedly it is the case that in the relations between historical

research and cognate forms of related investigation, significant changes instyle and method are occurring. If it is true that the claims in the social sci-ences about methodology and the character of scientific undertaking havemoved away from the earlier and clear conceptions of modernist presuppo-sitions then the clarity of the constitutive archive for these disciplines has alsobegun to blur.

Unlike earlier social science accounts of science, the current empiricalinvestigations into the working methods of natural scientists are themselvesfirmly based on the observation of these practices. The outcome of such worknecessarily undermines claims that the work of the social sciences can sen-sibly be based wholly on such natural science forms of analysis; that is, thetextbook model account of deductive argument resting on quantitativelyassimilable data. Just as the range of legitimate working materials for his-torians has seen an expansion from written documents to oral testimony totape and video recordings and the memories of subaltern groups; so sociology- or its operational community - has increasingly taken up and absorbedthese sources and thus inevitably expanded, indeed massively expanded, itslegitimate archive. But in doing so it has weakened the solidity of the kind ofquanta (like suicide rates) it had at one time rested its hopes on.

Questions about the reality of this archive understandably arise. In otherwords, are the recorded meditations of hospitalized schizophrenic patients tobe ranked alongside the obiter dicta of spokespersons for the Royal Collegeof Surgeons? Or (to return to the earlier example) are the findings ofresearchers like Latour, Shapin and Lynch in the sociology of science, to becollated with the statements of Nobel prize winners like Stephen Weinbergin astrophysics and Max Perutz in biophysics ?7To answer these and similar questions effectively requires a rethinking of

the kind of conceptual work that has been the hallmark of the social sciences.I mean concepts such as class, norm, role, social structure, which havedemanded at the first instance sharply defined conceptual boundaries; and at



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the second level the clear possibility of formal, mathematical operationaliza-tion. The archive then should be considered as one of a growing cluster ofanti-concepts. By this I mean thematic domains, like voice and frame, whichcan fruitfully generate the envisioning and revisioning of the world that thehuman sciences engage with. By their very nature questions of epistemologyand ontology are not the concerns of those (like myself) who operate withsuch modalities. The significance of the archive then is not bound up with itsquiddities. The adequacy, propriety, truthfulness of the materials, entities andobjects that constitute an archive cannot be judged by their appearance in thearchive as such. Only those who work within and around the archive canundertake such claims. As the work of the installation artist, ChristianBoltanski, displays: the archive and his archivization of photographs, news-cuttings and so on may well raise questions of both genocide and the loss ofcommunity (Hobbs, 1998). But on matters concerning the significance ofthose materials used, the documents, the clothing, the time cards: these bothresist and offer questions about their reality and appropriation. The substan-tiation and defeasibility of these claims are only partially related to the exist-ence of the archive itself.As has become apparent, the problem of the archive is bound up - not so

much with the methods of its accumulation - but rather its legitimacy. Andmatters of legitimacy relate to events within the larger order of the world:that is, beyond the academic community.The partial release of the files of the GDR Staatssicherheitsdienst - the Stasi

- has had devastating consequences for individual lives, and raised difficultquestions. A case in point is that of the East German writer Christa Wolf,whose novel A Model Childhood is an impressive account of a girl growingup under the Third Reich and her complicity with National Socialism. Therevelation that she had also co-operated with the Stasi caused a storm ofdebate in Germany and beyond, on her motives. In reply to an interviewquestion that she was intellectually afraid Wolf responds:

That is one of the obscene consequences of the description of these filesin the press, that people adopt the Stasi characterisation and the Stasislanguage and apply them to me. It is unbelievable. (Rugg, 1997: 192)

The difficult question about this particular archive is just what was beingreported and more specially the how of the telling.

THE FUTURE ARCHIVE

Does the archive have a future? Where will it be? Recently, Pierre Nora hasintroduced a multi-volumed history of France, Realms of Memory: Rethink-ing the French Past, with these observations. Memory is constantly on our



13

lips because (writes Nora) it no longer exists. But there are sites, lieux demimoire, in which a residual sense of continuity remains. These sites havesupervened over those milieux de memoire, those settings in which memorywas once a real part of everyday existence. Consequently modern memory isnow above all archival.Nora notes the ever expanding collection of files and the numerous teams

busily pursuing and recording the narratives of the French throughout thecountry. How will these vast databanks be accommodated? Further, whatforms of legitimation of knowledge will develop in order to express theWebsite as an archival source? Just when academic institutions and publish-ers have found agreement in the presentation of current journal and bookresources, the World Wide Web has created new opportunities and new ambi-guities.8 Perhaps the prime directive is now: to be is to record.

Insofar as the past is the future it will always be with us. Or is that a sloganfrom 1984?

University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

NOTES

1 See: Defense Amended Offer of Proof Re: Fuhrman Tapes, under Websitesbelow.

2 Findings of the mobility studies are presented in Halsey et al. (1980), Goldthorpe(1987), Eriksen and Goldthorpe (1992). Critical discussion of the exclusion ofwomen from the studies features in Marshall et al. (1988) Crompton and Mann(1986), and Marshall (1997).

3 For details of the Archon Website see: Royal Commission on Historical Manu-scripts Website, under Websites below.

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

5 By anamorphic Preziosi intends to name an organizational device wherebyrelations among units in a database are made visible through prefabricated positionsvis--vis the archive. In this particular case - art history - a very powerful viewingpoint that of the period or period-style (Preziosi, 1989: 76).

6 These observations come from Elizabeth Prettejohn to whom I owe a profoundintellectual debt. I would like to present her commentary, from work in progress,here in full:

The oeuvre of the Venetian Renaissance painter Giorgione (1476/8-1510) isperhaps the greatest mystery of the art-historical archive (even his name isuncertain: Giorgio Barbarelli or Giorgio del Castelfranco, nicknamedGiorgione or Big George). Giorgiones importance to Venetian painting iswell attested in (nearly) contemporary sources such as Castigliones The



14

Courtier and Vasaris Lives of the Artists; yet even Vasari was unable certainlyto identify a single work by the artist. The work that most scholars now acceptas the most authentic example, the Tempesta of the Accademia in Venice, wasnot attributed to Giorgione at all in the pioneering nineteenth-century textson connoisseurship. Another painting of the highest possible status, the FteChamptre of the Louvre (much admired by observers such as ThophileGautier and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) has been assigned to Titian andGiorgione in alternation for generations; indeed it is almost the case that eachLouvre catalogue switches the attribution: if the last generation considered thepainting to be a Giorgione, then the next will call it a Titian. The current attri-bution is to Titian, and perhaps it is a sign of the insecurities of our age thata large proportion of the more dubious attributions to Giorgione are nowreassigned to the young Titian. But to paraphrase - we know that Giorgionewas a painter (from Castiglione and Vasari, among other sources) - he musttherefore have painted some paintings.

Yet no contemporary art historian will admit what is certainly the onlyfact to emerge from this complex history: there is no single work that we canconfidently attribute to the historical person mentioned by Castiglione as aconsummate courtier. The same problem applies to Praxiteles, among themost famous names of ancient sculpture. We speak confidently of a Praxite-lean style characterised by grace and suavity, and we refer to sculptures inmajor collections such as the Hermes ... yet there is no sculpture currentlyin existence that can be identified with any confidence as the work of Prax-iteles hand.Both cases are made fascinating the non-correspondence of the artefactual

and textual archives, the twin resources of the art historian. In both cases wehave textual traces of a supreme artistic genius - the consummate Venetiancourtier of the Venetian High Renaissance, lover of noble women and adepton the lute - the great master of grace in Greek sculpture. In both cases wealso have a number of artefacts - paintings that can be identified as Venetianworks of c.1500 by either stylistic or scientific analysis, sculptures unearthedat relevant archaeological sites. The art-historian tries assiduously to matchthe two archives. But the results are ambiguous - if not fantastic. TheTempesta may, or may not be, the picture of a soldier and a storm recorded inan early Venetian inventory; the Hermes may or may not be the workPausanias saw at Olympia .... (Personal communication, 22 August 1998, DrElizabeth Prettejohn, Department of Art History, Plymouth University)

7 See Barham (1984). Barhams work reveals with great sensitivity that the apparentsilence of such patients, that is the silence that follows on from inability of theobserver to understand the inmates words, can be infused with meanings. But thisinvolves a considerable move away from the treatment of these subjects as mererespondents to exterior stimulants. More particularly it calls for the use of narrativetechniques deriving from a variety of disciplines but including politics, sociologyand literary theory.

8 I have included two Website references on how to do citations in this medium froma longer list provided by Beth Davis-Brown - to whom many thanks. (See Internet



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Citation Guide and ISO 690-2, under Websites below.) Nevertheless, at time ofwriting this journals publishers have themselves not issued a policy statement onhow to carry out this procedure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ascherson, N. (1996) Black Sea. London: Vintage.Barham, P. (1984) Schizophrenia and Human Value. Oxford: Blackwell.Borges, J. L. (1972) Library of Babel, in Labyrinths. London: Penguin, pp. 78-86.Bradley, H. (1999) Social Inequalities: Coming to Terms with Complexity, in G.

Browning, A. Halcli and F. Webster (eds) Understanding The Present. London:Sage.

Crews, F. (1998) The Mindsnatchers, New York Review of Books 25 June: 14, 16-19.Crompton, R. and M. Mann (1986) Gender and Stratification. Cambridge: Polity.Curtius, E. R. (1990) Sociology - and its Limits, in V. Meja and N. Stehr (eds)

Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute. London:Routledge, pp. 113-20.

Dean, J. (1998) Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyber-space. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Eriksen, R. and J. Goldthorpe (1992) The Constant Flux. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Ernst, W. (1999) Archival Action: The Politicisation of German Archives from ReadOnly Memory into Agencies of Politics in the Weimar Republic and under the National Socialist Regime, History of the Human Sciences 12(2).

Foster, J. and J. Sheppard (1995) British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in theUnited Kingdom, 3rd edn. London: Macmillan.

Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences.London: Tavistock.

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Geertz, C. (1989) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity.Genette, G. (1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Goldthorpe, J. (1987) Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Halsey, A. H., A. Heath and J. Ridge (1980) Origins and Destinations. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Hobbs, R. (1998) Boltanskis Visual Archives, History of the Human Sciences 11(4):

121-40.

Malcolm, J. (1995) The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. London:Papermac.

Malcolm, N. (1998) Kosovo: A Short History. London: Macmillan.



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Marcus, G. E. (1998) The Once and Future Ethnographic Archive, History of theHuman Sciences 11(4): 49-63.

Marshall, G. (1997) Repositioning Class. London: Sage.Marshall, G., D. Rose, H. Newby and C. Vogler (1988) Social Class in Modern Britain.

London: Hutchinson.

Nora, P. (ed.) (1996-) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York:Columbia University Press. (In progress.)

Preziosi, D. (1989) Rethinking Art History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Preziosi, D. (1996) Collecting/Museums, in R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff (eds) Critical

Terms for Art History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 281-91.Preziosi, D. (ed.) (1998) TheArtofArtHistory: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.Rose, J. (1991) The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago.Rugg, L. H. (1997) Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago,

IL: University of Chicago Press.Sebald, W. G. (1997) The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press.Sebald, W. G. (1998) The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill

Press.

Self, W. (1994) The Quantity Theory of Insanity. London: Penguin.Stephenson, A. (1990) Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. London: Penguin.Wolf, C. (1983) A Model Childhood. London: Virago.

WEB SITE

Defense Amended Offer of Proof Re: Fuhrman Tapes[http://www.php.indiana.edu/-dmiguse/OJ/fuhrman.html].

Internet Citation Guide

[http://www.stedwards.edu/cfpages/stoll/internet.htm].ISO 690-2, Bibliographic references to electronic documents

[http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/iso/tc46sc9/standard/690-2e.htm].Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts Website

[http://www.hmc.gov.uk/archon/noframes.htm].



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