Archive as Actor

In a  special issue of Archivaria, the premiere Canadian journal for archival theory, the lasting impact of Derrida’s mal d’archive was honored in essays that portended to the critical theoretical tradition in archival scholarship. 

I may be labelled conservative, but I am astonished by a lack of tradition in the evocation of critical theory. As in my last piece on modernism and postmodernism in archival thought, I fear there may be something lost in the breach -- poststructural thought was flooding the North American university system at the time of Derrida’s mal d’archive,  the same system into which archival studies hoped to embed itself as a legitimating field. For this reason, it entered the discourse of poststructuralism and postmodernism, I argue, without ground in the philosophical tradition that compels and orients it. For a field so dedicated to provenance, it opted instead to engage in fashion. It is my contention that archival theory would grow deeper and more expansive, and be more willing to exercise its rights in the halls of power if it was more firmly situated in the lineage of critical theory extending from Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, and Jürgen Habermas, rather than using Derrida as the impossible arche- whose “trace” overwhelms the archival metaphorics to the point of meaninglessness. 

What would it mean for the archives to reapproach critical theory with a historiographical sensibility? Might it lead to analyses of bureaucracy and messianism? To non-identity and dialectics? Where are the archival dialectics? Is Habermas’ theory of structural communication so out-of-style that we cannot dream the truth of historical change rendered in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere? If, as many archivists argued as early as the late 1960s, we are the “communications directors,” then why are we not asserting a dialectics of enlightenment reason? We come to this in the form of post-colonialism, but what about as it relates to the concept of Being as such? What if the only way home is through a negative diplomatics? If diplomatics is a positivist scientific methodology of recordkeeping, then the next clear response would not necessarily be Derrida and Foucault, but rather the critique of power out of which it grew, an end to the myth of enlightenment, of quantitative processes as inevitable terminus of thought. 

As Susan Buck-Morss writes, “Adorno affirmed neither concept nor reality in itself. Instead, he posited each in critical reference to its other. Put another way, each was affirmed only in its nonidentity to the other. Indeed, the “principle of nonidentity,” which Adorno was to develop with increasing richness, became the foundation of his philosophy, that is, of negative dialectics” (63). In my critique of the historiographical mechanism underpinning archival theory, I also develop a theory of negative diplomatics, or a diplomatics that reads records materially, and not merely on the surface. In this way, both diplomatics and poststructuralist archival theory, so often enemies, embody the same postmodern tendency to occupy oneself with the image of the record, even if concerned with broader structures of power or of bureaucratic apparatuses. Adorno believed the decaying categories of borgeoise idealism could be “refunctioned” into tools of dialectical materialist cognition.” It is my contention that diplomatics, understood as the embedded cognitive structure of the relationship between NARA and the DoD, should be performed upon the concept of diplomatics itself -- importantly, this can only be done if theory and practice are recognized as mutually determined, improbable, and critical.  As Buck-Morss continues: “[Adorno’s] argumentation from within [the history of philosophy], on the basis of philosophy’s own inherent, historically developed logic, in order to break out of bourgeois idealism and into revolutionary materialism, was Adorno’s meaning of “immanent criticism,” and it constituted the substance of his idea of a “logic of disintegration” (66). 

The issue begins with Brothman asking the right questions, establishing a true relationship with the work of Jacques Derrida that he has been cultivating since his first articles in Archivaria in the early 1990s. Derrida asks:

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•             I consider [the substrate] to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it. This is one of the theses: there are essential reasons for which a concept in the process of being formed always remains inadequate relative to what ought to be, divided, disjointed between two forces. And this disjointedness has a necessary relationship with the structure of archivization.

The disjointed and the discontinuous meet refunctioned. Brothman raises the conditions to which we must answer:

“The delocalizing push-and-pull forces of globalization and cosmopolitanism; climate-threatened disaster regions; corrupt, law-broken, violence- and terror-prone political regimes have all been stimulated by revolutions in transportation and information/communication technology.”

Adorno defines negative dialectics as a logic of disintegration, enacting a Hegelian logic of the MODERN sense against the death cult of modernity itself. It’s against the grain -- “The individual’s capacity for refusing to identify with the status quo, while at the same time dialectically acknowledging his own dependence upon the present and its determining conditions, was the prerequisite for true philosophial experience” (84). Negative dialectics is not merely knowledge of one’s socioeconomic position, but of “intellectual nonconformity.” It is to wrestle with reality as commodity, “the affinity which objects have for each other,” an inversion of intersubjectivity. Negative diplomatics is the documentary logic of disintegration, enacting a scientific methodology and infrastructural critique against the death cult of modernity itself. Negative diplomatics is not merely knowledge of the record’s imbrication in political/economic warfare, but of “intellectual nonconformity” -- to deny the rights of these records while simultaneously enacting a vigorous push for their protection under the rules of international law. It is to wrestle with reality as commodity, with the war of ideology guiding one’s active and negating rendering of information as transparent. Leninism.