History of the Human Sciences

This article is an analysis of the Internet as a mnemonic system and an assessment of its debt to and impact upon the classical tropes of memory established by Plato in the dialogue Meno.

In German archival terminology, the term Akte (file) as the basic unit of storage corresponds with its actualization as discursive (re-)action: the word ‘acts’ can designate at once the content of what is to be archived and the archive itself (Derrida, 1995: 17). Whereas the network of Prussian state archives from post-Napoleonic Germany until the First World War figured as a non-discursive juridical Read Only Memory of internal autopoetic bureaucracy, the German Weimar Republic sought to develop a more democratically transparent archival information politics. This remained, however, for the most part an aspiration of the new political culture, and it was never systematically adopted by state institutions. By contrast, the National Socialist regime was the first to make use of archival memory in a partisan, active manner; Akten were actively instrumentalized as part of the programme for the annihilation of European Jewry. This article, based on the German state archives and also on a case-study concerning the ideologization of the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, examines archival micro-politics as the site of discursive repression and production, between the affirmation and the resistance of discretely segmented memory to holistic ideological demands.

The idea of considering the archive as a political technology of liberal governmentality is developed in this article, questions of the uses of archives (important as these are) taking second place here to the politics apparent in the design and idea of one particular form of the archive. This form is the public archive as it became apparent in the 19th-century institution of the public library, the two chief examples being in Manchester and at the British Museum in London. The public archive can be seen to constitute a liberal public which was itself increasingly a democratic one. This constitution turned upon ideas such as the ‘free library’, ‘self-help’ and the active constitution of new readings of social life and social conditions. These readings involved the management of class relations at the time, and parallels are drawn between a sort of ‘anthropologizing’ of the archive evident in India and its ‘sociologizing’ in Britain at the same time. The constitution of democratic, liberal citizenship through the archive also turned upon particular readings of the centre-locality relationship and upon notions of urban community. Library catalogues are considered, and the design of libraries, so that the importance of spatial dimensions of the archive is evident.

This article argues that the notion of the archive is of some value for those interested in the history of the human sciences. Above all, the archive is a means of generating ethical and epistemological credibility. The article goes on to suggest that there are three aspects to modern archival reason: a principle of publicity whereby archival information is made available to some or other kind of public; a principle of singularity according to which archival reason focuses upon questions of detail; and a principle of mundanity, whereby the privileged focus of archival reason is said to be the commonplace dimension of everyday life.

The article begins with Derrida’s etymology of the word ‘archive’: a privileged site to which records are officially consigned and in which they are guarded by legal authority. It explores contemporary variations on the theme of archive. The cases presented include efforts to construct scholarly archives that stand as personal monuments, struggles over the collection and consignment of records during official investigations of government scandals, and the ‘popular archive’ produced by the media spectacle surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial. The discussion orients to these archives not only as sources of documentary information but also as sites of historical struggle over the writing, collection, consignment, destruction and interpretation of writings.

By considering a variety of readings of Renaissance Florence from Burckhardt to the present, this article discusses the nature of the interrelation between the archive and the historian, with a view to illustrating the partiality of both. The records contained within the archives are by nature fragmentary; vestiges of the past, they are also partial in the sense of being subjective, testimonies to past relationships either between individuals or between individuals and institutions - social or political. Likewise, the readings of historians are partial both in the sense that the historian’s research is focused upon particular parts of the archive and in his or her subjectivity as an historian. Interestingly, in this context post-Burckhardtian Florentine historiography shares common ground, however unwittingly, with certain aspects of post-modern writing in decentring the subject, for observations concerning the partial subjectivity of Burckhardt’s Renaissance individual apply equally to observations concerning the partial subjectivity of historians as writers. The fiction of an objective historical method producing hard history becomes apparent once the static relation of historian as subject researching the archive as object is reconfigured as a dynamic and dialectical process. Through the acknowledging of the contingency of such archival readings it becomes apparent that the archive itself is a symbolic construct constituted through the process of writing.

The archive can take many forms but all are marked by a connective sequence: archive, memory, the past, narrative. The author explores this sequence through an account of her engagement with four different types of archive, constructing a phenomenology of the archive which highlights the promises and seductions offered to the researcher. Postmodern questioning may throw in doubt older conceptions, whereby the archive is used to legitimate knowledge claims about the past of a nomological nature. However, in a context where intellectuals become interpreters rather than legislators, the role of the archive as repository of inert meanings is strengthened rather than weakened; using the archive helps us to understand the dialectical nature of the relationship between past and present and our own positioning within this.