Abstract
Archiving the Unspeakable follows the creation, utilization, and lived memory of a series of mug shots taken at the Tuol Sleng prison, torture, and detention center in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. Michelle Caswell contributes much to the larger argument for viewing archives as political, and potential sites for the redress of historical injustice, and to the specific history of these photographs. Caswell’s narration traces the creation of the photographs, the construction of the archive, and how the archive has been narrativized and mobilized in several different settings. She argues compellingly for viewing the archive as a nuanced, layered, and dynamic site for human meaning-making and collective memory. Archiving the Unspeakable is a formidable addition to the literature on the archive as a site of political change, demonstrating effectively how archival memories shape present and future material conditions.
In the introduction, Caswell lays out different theories that have been used within archival studies and outside of the discipline to explain the creation, formation, and utilization of the archive. Here, she introduces the mug shots and explains their context and how they have taken on a life of their own in international human rights efforts, Cambodian narratives of the Khmer Rouge regime, and commercial interest. These case studies are grounded in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s theory of the archive as a relationship of power, source, and the creation of historical knowledge. Specifically, she is interested in Trouillot’s conception of silence as embedded in the historical production of knowledge at four different moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history) in the final instance. (p. 10)
She dedicates a chapter to these four categories, but ultimately challenges their stability and finality—arguing that the community uptake of the Tuol Sleng mug shots is “in effect, replacing the silences of the dead with the voices of witnesses” (p. 12). In doing so, history shows its dynamism, and the distinction between the Trouillot’s categories, according to Caswell, become blurred.
The dynamism of history provides Caswell with a link to collective memory. She encourages us to think of the archive as having a social life—as material objects imbued with the ever layered meanings placed upon them by infinite human activations. Despite her use of the term, the author never lays out an explicit theory of collective memory, but offers her concept of the social life of records as an implicit framework for understanding how she is using the term. Collective memory, in this sense, is never static, but activated by the archive, allowing diverse, dynamic, and contested meanings to take shape (p. 22).
The first stage of the social life of archives in Caswell’s narration is the creation of the Tuol Sleng records as a part of the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy. In Chapter 1, Caswell delves into the function of mug shots as a relic of French colonial bureaucracy within the Khmer Rouge. Caswell mobilizes the genre of mug shot to explain how its influence was felt in French Cambodia and eventually used by the Khmer Rouge to categorize and index their prisoners. She draws upon Michel Foucault’s theory of the creation of the criminal body through state discourse, and Hannah Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil to argue that part of the social function of the mug shots was to “transfor[m] the suspects depicted in them into criminals and creat[e] a layer of bureaucracy that separated the administrative order to kill from actual violence, thereby enabling . . . mass murder” (p. 48). By placing the creation of records within the genre of French penal bureaucracy, Caswell articulates a powerful connection between the apparatus of photography (as invested with power by the Khmer Rouge regime) and the creation of truth. It recorded the silencing of those whose picture it took and is complicit in the near deafening silence of those who were killed during the Khmer Rouge regime of starvation, over-work, and unrecorded executions. In lieu of those voices, the mug shots are “inanimate surrogates for the dead … perversely imbued with a social life that the people they portray were denied” (p. 60).
Set within the context of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, a persistent culture of silence surrounding the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, and the material challenges of collecting and preserving photographic evidence in a developing country, Caswell depicts the creation of the archive as nearly miraculous. She argues in the second chapter that Western involvement, the Khmer Rouge, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have shaped the archive, thus implicating within its creation, acts of silencing. Her assessment is rhetorical rather than philosophical recognizing that power is inherent in the creation of an archive; the task of the viewer is to read the narrative proposed by the archive and examine the way it empowers and silences different perspectives.
In Chapter 3, Caswell examines how the mug shots have been used in the creation of narratives, arguing that these narratives become records themselves, negotiating the formation of memory. Specifically, she depicts their usage as evidence in legal testimony, interaction with survivors in documentary film, and presence in the Documentation Center of Cambodia’s monthly newsletter “Searching for Truth.” In an interesting move, Caswell devotes the later pages of the chapter to pictures of people looking at the mug shots, demonstrating the never-ending process of building and framing the archive as new narratives are incorporated into it. Chapter 4 examines the use of these narratives by several Tuol Sleng survivors who have used the tourism at Tuol Sleng as a site for profit, selling their stories and posing for pictures. Caswell concludes with a powerful return to Trouillot’s theory of silence. She acknowledges the way that power (in the Foucauldian sense) inscribes silence: deciding what becomes part of the record, but argues that it is constantly in flux as archive and viewer co-create new meanings. Viewing the archive as a record is an attempt at ethical engagement with those silencings, placing them within a context of human rights violations. She ends by reflecting on her own position as an ethical witness, asking, as many memory and visual culture scholars have asked, how can one ethically look at images of atrocity? While acknowledging that the viewer enters “a complex and ethically shaky terrain” in the act of looking, she argues that we have an ethical imperative to look at these photos contextually, recognizing the propensity of these photos to perform human rights, and the position of the archivists as “co-witnesses” to this process.
One of Caswell’s goals is to demonstrate that the role of the archivist and the witness of the archive, while necessarily political, is a powerful one—with enormous potential to promote human rights. The archivist can help to establish the record of what happened during the Khmer Rouge regime through the Tuol Sleng photographs, thus challenging former silences in the record and creating sites for legal accountability, individual healing, and future deterrence. Caswell demonstrates that in this instance, archivists have done just this, making the act of archiving an act of social justice. Although I have never had the impulse to hug my local archivists before, Caswell’s depiction of their roles as potential agents for good was powerfully persuasive and touching.
It is not clear whether Caswell actually believes in collective memory (despite her use of the term) or rather believes in some collective sensibilities that provide the resources for individual memories. Working within multiple disciplinary traditions, she is tasked with a heavy duty of speaking to multiple audiences. However, interacting more explicitly with theories of collective memory would have brought clarity to one of the central questions her book leaves me with, which is, how do we create a collective, ethical sensibility toward these photographs? Caswell is appropriately concerned with how power constructs the archive and argues persuasively for an ethical obligation “to look” (p. 164), but highlights individual examples of what she believes constitutes unethical looking. Given her insistence on the fragmentation and layered meanings of the photos, I am unsure how to establish a stable ethic for interacting with the archive.
Still, the strengths of this book far outweigh its weaknesses. Caswell’s theoretical contribution to understanding the role of the archivist and witness in co-creating the meaning of the archive could be helpful in a number of disciplines outside of archival studies, including memory, human rights media, rhetoric, and visual culture studies. If one is willing to fill in the theoretical gaps in memory literature, it provides a new valiance by implicating the archive in the ongoing negotiation of collective memory.