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Historical Archives, Events and Facts

Michal Kobialka
Published online: 06 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Michal Kobialka (2002) Historical Archives, Events and Facts, Performance Research: A Journal of
the Performing Arts, 7:4, 3-11, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2002.10871884

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 Historical Archives,
Events and Facts
History Writing as Fragmentary Performance
Michal Kobialka
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Nothing is thus more troubled and more troubling today than the concept archived in this word 'archive'.
(Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever 1998)

Let me start with a question: Can there be such a thing
as a postmodern archive?
What prompted this question were two articles
in the New York Times. 1 Rather than repeating my
argument regarding the role of performance in the
culture of the archive and the role of the performa-
tive site (museum, archive) in conceptualizations of
history, let me address the question by reviewing
these two articles and how they may contribute to
the current discussion about archives and
archiving.
In 'A Century's Photo History Destined for Life
in a Mine', Sarah Boxer announced that the
Bettmann archive, of more than 10 million photo-
graphs, would be sunk 220 feet down in a limestone
mine situated 60 miles northeast of Pittsburgh
(Boxer 2001: section 1, 15). Since 1995, the archive
has belonged to Corbis, the private company of
Microsoft's chairman, William H. Gates. Now it is
being moved from New York City to this subter-
ranean 10,000 square-feet mine that once belonged
to US Steel. Corbis will create a modern, sub-zero,
low-humidity storage area safe from earthquakes,
hurricanes, tornadoes, vandals, nuclear blasts, and
other natural and human-made disasters. 'But
preservation by deep freeze presents a problem',
writes Boxer.
The new address is strikingly inaccessible. Historians,
researchers and editors accustomed to browsing through
photo files will have to use Corbis's digital archive, which
has only 225,000 images, less than 2 percent of the
whole collection .... If Corbis had scanned everything, it
would have taken 25 years to finish .... The images
scanned first were those deemed most valuable, both
culturally and commercially. Pictures of Kennedys, Rocke-
fellers, Roosevelts, the Depression, the two world wars
and the Vietnam War have been scanned. As have money-
making 20th-century icons: Einstein sticking out his
tongue, Rosa Parks on the bus, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock,
Orson Welles doing his 'War of the Worlds' broadcast and
anything with Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie
Robinson, Babe Ruth, or Martin Luther King, Jr. in it.
If indeed a commercial rationale for the scanning
of images is given a priority, it is quite easy to
imagine the arguments presented for and against
this new storage facility. On the one hand, there is
Ms Buckland who insists that 'these images are
part of our history and culture, a sacred trust, and
if Bill Gates is buying it up, he is creating a

Performance Research 7141, pp.3-11 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2002

 monopoly situation by not giving access to it'. On
the other hand, there is Mr Hanningan, who asserts
the opposite: 'thousands of years from now, Bill
Gates will be remembered for having preserved-
and made digitally accessible- a very important
segment of our photographic history'.
The second essay was published in a book review
section of the New York Times on 13 May 2001.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose credentials include
The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the
Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma,
Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 18:26 10 November 2014
reviewed two books: D. D. Guttenplan's The
Holocaust on Trial (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001)
and Richard J. Evans's Lying About Hitler: Histmy,
Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New York:
Basic Books, 2001). Both of these publications
focus on the David Irving vs. Penguin courtroom
drama circling around Deborah Lipstadt and her
accusations against Irving, whom she described in
her Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on
Truth and Memory as one of the most dangerous
spokespersons for Holocaust denial, a man with
neofascist connections who bent historical evidence
to suit his purposes.
Wheatcroft's review not only deals with history,
memory, and the courtroom event, but also, and
maybe more importantly, draws attention to how
history, memory, and an event are grounded in
ideological and political maneuverings. It is
therefore puzzling to find in the review a passage
regarding postmodern theory, which, one the one
hand, is a testimony to the benefits gained by the
author from abandoning the modernist version of
history and, on the other hand, reveals his attitude
towards postmodern theory, or should I say
'method', as well as his desire for the traditional
historical virtue of objectivity:
Evidently someone for whom any criticism of the late
Michel Foucault is lese-majeste, Guttenplan is shocked by
In Defense of History, Evans's intellectually (rather than
politically) conservative assault on contemporary academic
fashion, with its 'crude' suggestion of a link between
Holocaust denial and an intellectual climate in which
'scholars have increasingly denied that texts had any fixed
meaning'. But surely Evans's point is well taken in precisely
this context. Once we allow the postmodernist notions that 0
historical data are relative, that all truth is subjective and
that one man's 'narrative' is as good as another's, the
Holocaust denial indeed becomes hard to deal with.
(Wheatcroft 2001: 13)
Can there be such a thing as a postmodern archive?
Why this question? Maybe because, despite the
fact that a lot has been written about the shifts and
transformations, which have taken place in the field
of theatre studies in terms of questions posed and
subjects to be discussed, the very historical investi-
gation still takes place within the epistemological
and ontological domain of a modernist archive- a
closed or open, stable or dynamic storage room for
the documents of the past. Michel de Certeau
rightly observes that:
in history everything begins with the gesture of setting
aside, of putting together, of transforming certain classi-
fied objects into 'documents'.This new cultural distri-
bution is the first task. In reality it consists in producing
such documents by dint of copying, transcribing, or pho-
tographing these objects, simultaneously changing their
locus and their status. This gesture consists in 'isolating'
a body- as in physics- and 'denaturing' things in order
to turn them into parts which will fill the lacunae inside
an a priori reality. It forms the 'collection' of documents.
In the words of Jean Baudrillard, it places things in a
'marginal system'. It exiles them from practice in order to
confer upon them the status of 'abstract' objects of
knowledge. Far from accepting 'data', this gesture forms
them. The material is created through concerted actions
which delimit it by carving it out from the sphere of use,
actions which seek also to know it beyond the limits of
use, and which aim at giving it a coherent new use. It
becomes the vestige of actions which modify a received
order and a social vision. The establishment of signs
offered for specific treatments, this rupture is therefore
neither uniquely nor from the first the effect of a'gaze'.
(de Certeau 1988a: 72-3)
To substantiate this series of statements, de
Certeau gives an example of the National Archives
in Paris, which, according to him, in effect imply
4
 the combination of a group (the 'erudite'), a place
(a 'library'), and a system of practices (of copying,
printing, classification, etc.) that were a conse-
+-
quence of a technical system inaugurated in the
ru
lL West with the private collections assembled by
"t:J great patrons in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and
c
ru
England, who wanted to appropriate history for
themselves.
+- Already in 1969 (English version 1972), Michel
c
QJ Foucault had asserted in his Archaeology of
>
LLJ Knowledge that history,
Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 18:26 10 November 2014
in its traditional forms, undertook to 'memorize' the
QJ
>
monuments of the past, transform them into documents,
and lend speech to those traces, which, in themselves, are
often not verbal, or which say in silence something other
<( than what they actually say; in our time, history is that
which transforms documents into monuments.
(Foucault 1972: 7)
In order to accomplish this, history deploys a mass
of elements, which are to be grouped, made
relevant, placed in relations to one another to form
totalities. Moreover, as Foucault reminds us, the
archive is not just 'that whole mass of texts that
belong to a single discursive formation', but '[t]he
archive is first the law of what can be said, the
system that governs the appearance of statements
as unique events' (1972: 126, 129). Foucault's
reference to 'the law of what can be said' and to 'the
appearance of statements as unique events' propel
his argument that objects housed in the archive do
not accumulate endlessly, nor do they disappear at
the mercy of chance, 'but they are grouped together
in distinct figures, composed together in accord-
ance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred
in accordance with specific regularities' (129). The
archive, Foucault notes, is not that which partici-
pates in epistemic violence perpetrated by and
through the ideological state apparatuses defining
how archival objects and subjects are or can be
thinkable, identified, or contrived, but that which
'differentiates discourses in their multiple existence
and specifies them in their own duration' (129). In
other words, for Foucault, there is no 'origin' to or
within the archive; rather there are only shifting
discursive domains that exist because of the law of
what can be said as well as of what can be enunci-
ated and specified about the functioning of these
discourses 'in their own duration'. Thus, the
archive is 'the general system ofjiJrmation and trans-
formation of statements' (130).
Whereas Foucault draws our attention to the
formation and transformation of statements,
including the formation of objects, enunciative
modalities, concepts, and strategies within the posi-
tivity of the archive,2 Jacques Derrida, in Archive
Fever ( 1998) begins at the level of logos, with the
etymology of the word 'archive'. Thus:
Arkhe, we recall, names the commencement and the com-
mandment. This name apparently coordinates two prin-
ciples in one: the principle according to nature or history,
there where things commence- physical, historical, or
ontological principle- but also the principle according
to the law, there where men and gods command, there
where authority, social order are exercised, in this place
from which order is given- nomological principle.
(Derrida 1998: 1)
Derrida's archive is a juridical concept, which
reveals how the law becomes institutionalized as
law. It is the process of thinking of the law that
materializes as law not so much discursively as
ontologically- 'the meaning of "archive", its only
meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion:
initially a house, a domicile, an address, the
residence of the superior magistrates, the archons,
those who commanded' ( 1998: 2). The archons
possess the right to make or to represent the law as
well as interpret the archive. 'On account of their
publicly recognized authority, it is at their home, in
that place which is their house (private house,
family house, or employee's house) that official
documents are filed' (2).
This is the reason why the archons are the
guardians of the documents ensuring their physical
security as well as juridical value: 'Entrusted to
such archons, these documents in effect speak the
law: they recall the law and call on or impose the
law. To be guarded thus, in the jurisdiction of this
speaking the law, they needed at once a guardian
 and a localization' (2). Thus, Derrida is less inter-
ested in a discursive domain than he is in the actual
place of the law - 'there where men and gods
command'- a site where the act of interpretation
takes place and the archons are engaged in the
hermeneutic practice of law interpretation. In an
important sense, this concept of archive focuses on
the actual archons that 'speak the law' not discur-
sively but hermeneutically through the interpre-
tation of the documents stored at their residence:
'It is thus, in this domiciliation, in the house arrest,
that archives take place' (2). At the same time,
Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 18:26 10 November 2014
Derrida warns us, the law's encounter with the text
always holds a problem for translation, since
'archivable meaning is also and in advance codeter-
mined by the structure that archives' (18).
In other words, what is no longer archived in the
same way is no longer lived or experienced in the
same way. Using the notion of archival violence,
Derrida attempts to explain the economy of the
archive that oscillates between the death drive and
the pleasure principle. If indeed the archive takes
place at the site of the originary juridical action and
the structural breakdown of the said action, the
conditions of archivization lead both to destruction
and to creating a supplement:
The death drive tends thus to destroy the hypomnesic
archive, except if it can be disguised, made up, painted,
printed, represented as the idol of its truth in painting.
Another economy is thus at work, the transaction between
this death drive and the pleasure principle, between
Thanatos and Eros, but also between the death drive and
this apparent dual opposition of principles, of arkhai, for
example the reality principle and the pleasure principle.
(1998: 12)
Whereas the transaction between the death drive
and the pleasure principle within the technology of
archivization has been in circulation since Sigmund
Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1929-30),
the questioning of the reality principle is a rela-
tively new practice, which could only occur once a
modernist concept of history was challenged by
poststructuralism. 3
De Certeau, Foucault, and Derrida introduced
the theoretical bases, which exposed the weakness
of the modernist constructs of history and the 0
CT
archive. De Certeau defined the archive as a place
llJ
that is produced by an identifiable group sharing a
A'
specifiable practice for organizing the materials. llJ
With the help of methodical invention of analytical
procedures and totalizing taxonomies, it aims at
reconstructing objects from 'simulacra' or
'scenarios' (de Certeau 1988a: 76). Foucault con-
ceptualized the archive as the law of what can be
said; the general system that describes the appear-
ance of statements as unique events which have
their own duration. Derrida saw the archive as a
juridical place where 'men and gods' command
with authority and social order is exercised through
the interpretation of the law.
Whether acknowledged or not, postmodern
theory redefined the very foundations of history.
With the dissolution of centralized perspective, the
idea of a single history had to allow for images that
were projected from different points of view. Thus,
for example, feminist and lesbian studies, gay and
queer studies, cultural and ethnic studies, and post-
colonial and subaltern studies are engaged in a
systematic analysis of coercive and disciplining
modes of representation by producing a space from
which the 'Other', traditionally marginalized,
subject could speak or enunciate its presence.
Employing various strategies, they keep reexamin-
ing dominant institutions of knowledge and power,
both real and symbolic, which control, shape, and
reproduce structures of expectations. What is
essential in them is that they question the notions
of visual pleasure, the gaze, narrative space, or the
construction of sexual difference and/ or gender as
well as the degree to which the traditional language
of intelligibility either marginalizes their histories
or, using multicultural techniques, maintains the
racial, social, gender, heterosexual order of things
(the so-called 'happy multiculturalism'). With the
proliferation of alternative histories and local
rationalities, history has acquired a new ethical
dimension of needing to be aware of, and to expose,
the conditions under which its knowledge becomes
legitimate and hegemonic.
 Whereas these strategies not only redefined the
very foundations of history, but also stripped naked
the modern myth of objective writing and the
possibility of regarding history as unlinear, as well
ru
LL as made visible the events which were kept at bay
""CJ by historical normative categories, there needed to
c
ru be practice that would address the issue of the
arrangement, rather than the historicizing, of
..... records. Historiography, that is a heterological,
c
QJ ethically responsible investigation of the arrange-
>
LLJ ment of records or events, enters the stage of
discourse. And to be more precise, spatial histori-
Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 18:26 10 November 2014
QJ ography - a heterological, ethically responsible,
> investigation of the arrangement of records or
events- enters the stage of discourse. It not only
generates different questions that are being asked
<(
of a research material, but also destabilizes, rather
than relativizes, the notions of an event and a fact.
The postmodern theory keeps posing questions
regarding the status of history and its methodolo-
gies by perturbing the authorities, which controlled
the emergence, delimitation, and specification of
the objects of study, with the questions:
• How is it possible that a narrative form claims
to produce not fiction but a (past) event?
• How is it possible for a scientific practice and
an institutional structure to constitute a type
of writing that makes these conditions of
producing an event invisible to the reader?
• How is it possible to negotiate between the
event, which is described by a scribe because it
is worthy of record, the event which is
brought to our attention by the scholars as
worthy of notice, and the event which is not
yet striated by their language and which will
soon be effaced by those two other events and
lose its privilege of being?
Thus, events which did happen are always margin-
alized by a system of the structures of belonging
that define what is worthy of being archived, how it
is going to be archived, where it is going to be
archived in order to maintain a particular visibility
of that 'event'. Similarly, the concept of a fact,
despite the outcry from the different corners of the
academe fearing the demise of the very foundation
upon which the scientific knowledge is built, intro-
duces the possibility that, its singularity notwith-
standing, a fact is defined as a designation of a
relation specifying a limit of what can be thought
(de Certeau), as a formation which is possible
because of a relation established between authori-
ties of emergence, delimitation, and specification
(Foucault), as a construct linguistically linked to a
privilege of being (Barthes), as an image verified by
science (Gianni Vattimo), and is produced from the
interests and concerns of scientists acting within a
broader social and cultural environment (Stanley
Aronowitz).
The Archive. The Event. The Fact. Can there be such
a thing as a postmodern archive?
Taking a cue from de Certeau and Giorgio
Agamben, I would like to shift the discussion
regarding the historical archive from evaluating its
position or function vis-a-vis academic research
towards perceiving the archive as a mode of
thinking, or as the general system of the formation
and transformation of statements, as Foucault
would have it. That is to say, the archive in a histo-
riographic practice should not be defined as a place
(de Certeau's 'place' as opposed to 'space' 4 )
housing a text of what was uttered, but as a
moment of enunciation of the taking place of the
formation and transformation of statements.
Insofar as this enunciation refers not to a text but to
its taking place, the territory of the investigation
cannot coincide with a definitive level of linguistic
analysis or with the specific domains examined, no
matter how deconstructive or interdisciplinary they
are. In other words, this enunciation is not a thing
determined by 'the reality effect' (Barthes,
Ranciere) or the habitus (Bourdieu), but a function
of existence exposing the intelligibility of the past
and the present by exploring the relationship
between a document and its taking place, between
the materiality of a document and the impossibility
to archive its language, between the historicity of a
document and how something like a document can
correspond to statements, to the taking place.
 Why this shift?
Maybe because I am a theatre historian who is
puzzled by the practices, which under the veil of
postmodern strategies, participate in the identity
politics that striate the movement of thought and
perpetuate the modernist regime of objective
history. Maybe because I am often faced with the
aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence
between history, which is written so that time
cannot erase human undertakings (Herodotus) or a
privilege of being, and history, which bears witness
Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 18:26 10 November 2014
to the missing articulation between the sayable and
the unsayable in every event.
Let me suggest that this aporia is also the site of
the tension between the living body and logos. This
tension is invariably accompanied by an enuncia-
tion of becoming, rather than being, perturbing the
order of things. At the same time, the existence of
that something which is becoming or taking its
course in the non-place is not a progressive
movement on a historical trajectory but 'a
procedure in "ana-": a procedure of analysis,
anamnesis, anagogy, and anamorphosis that elabo-
rates an "initial forgetting"' (Lyotard 1992: 80).
This procedure in "ana-" of anamnesis (or of a
process of recalling to mind), which elaborates an
initial forgetting and exposes the historicity of a
present moment, expresses the tension between
different enunciations taking place in a dynamic
space that makes room for the absence, rather than
establishes a singular presence and identity. The
procedure of anamnesis that elaborates an initial
forgetting expresses, thus, the very aporia of
knowledge: 'a non-coincidence between facts and
truth, between verification and comprehension'
(Agamben 1999: 12); between the events and the
representation of knowledge (modes of scientific
viewing, analysis, and education), culture (modes of
belonging and social/political interaction), and
memory (software as message, commercial
representation), or between the materiality of the
Self and the immateriality of the Other.
This may be the reason why when the postulate
of the missing articulation, or the aporia of
historical knowledge, is articulated, the
accompanying performative act will always be frag-
mentary. The fragments, like the shards of a broken 0
CT
mirror, cut through the remnants of the meta-
OJ
physics that have inhabited the structures of
::><""
thought since the Enlightenment. The performa- OJ
tive mode of fragments is a dynamic process of
rearrangement, which calls for the strenuous search
for the memory of the Other that coincides with the
Self, who will always remain beyond it and
preserves and protects these fragments from
becoming a material for consolation and pleasure.
Similarly, Adorno in his (1962) essay 'Commit-
ment' called for autonomous works of art that are
defined as non-conceptual objects, which are not
yet striated by a convention. Gayatri Spivak ( 1987)
introduced the notion of catachrestic space where
the existing words and categories lose their signify-
ing features, and Lyotard contended that 'the post-
modern ... invokes the unrepresentable in
presentation itself, ... refuses the consolation of
correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste per-
mitting a common experience of nostalgia for the
impossible' (Lyotard 1992: 15).
Giorgio Agamben notes:
Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by
a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, con-
ditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated .... The
original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never
merely to 'change the world', but also- and above all-
to 'change time'. Modern political thought has concen-
trated its attention on history, and has not elaborated a
corresponding concept of time.
(Agamben 1993: 91)
At the end of the essay, Agam ben suggests that it is
no longer possible to adhere to the fundamental
character of the Greek experience of time, which,
through Aristotle's Physics, has for two millennia
determined the western representation of time as
being a precise, infinite, quantified continuum, the
same way as it is no longer possible to conceive of
historical events as spatio-temporal determinations
in Newtonian absolute time and space. In the post-
Einsteinian universe, historical events should be
considered in terms of Einstein's famous dictum
 that, 'time and space are modes of thinking and not
the conditions by which to live' (in Forsee 1963: 81).
VI Consequently, it is no longer a matter of determi-
+-
u nate forms, which would be defined by knowledge,
ttl
IL or of constraining rules, which would be defined by
., the power of the absolute time and space, but a
c:
ttl
matter of practices or modes of a perpetual
VI
movement of reorganization and realignment. If it is
+- possible to fathom that history is a perpetual
c:
QJ movement of reorganization and realignment, the
>
LU function of a historian is to move around the past
and present rationalizations that established the
Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 18:26 10 November 2014
VI
QJ visibility of and gave life to his or her object of
> inquiry. If this suggestion can compel consideration
.,....
~
about history, it may be that the focus of a historical
u
r... investigation will be on the manner in which
<(
history's objects are or can be thinkable, identified,
or contrived - thus, represented; on the idea of a
historical event, which is produced as a specific
narrative according to this representational mode;
and, ultimately, on the challenges these present to a
historian moving through the 'archive'. 5 That is to
say, taking a cue from de Certeau, there is no
question that the events occurred and that the
documents were written. What is emphasized here
is how these events are described, how they are
made meaningful, and how they become worthy of
record or notice by the past and the present. Since
the focus is on historiography, rather than on
history itself, this essay contends that an event, or a
document, cannot be governed by pre-established
rules and categories that archive or simulate its
presence or materiality as the object of a historical
investigation. An event, or a document, enunciates
the taking place of fragments.
What then is the reality of these fragments?
They enunciate not the text of what is stated but
a function of existence. Only such a proposition can
explain why the subject (or the object) is a vacant
place that is occupied by different individuals lost
fully in the murmur of intelligible words.
If a proposition, a sentence, a group of signs can be
called 'statement', it is not therefore because, one day
9
someone happened to speak them or put them into some
concrete form of writing; it is because the position of the
subject can be assigned. To describe a formulation qua
statement does not consist in analyzing the relations
between the author and what he says (or wanted to say, or
said without wanting to); but in determining what position
can and must be occupied by any individual [or any
object] if he [it] is to be the subject of it.
(Foucault 1972: 141)
Can there be a postmodern archive?
The two examples, which open this essay and
which prompted this question, make us realize the
degree to which postmodern archive finds itself
complicit with a mediatization of the image in the
service of capital and postmodern theory is now
being circulated as yet another method or paradigm
to be used in an academic (modernist) discourse.
Fredric Jameson may be right when in 'Transform-
ation of the Image' he contends that 'social space is
now completely saturated with the culture of the
image' (Jameson 1998: 111 ). What this suggests is
that, because of the technologies of the complete
image-permeation of social and daily life by adver-
tising, communications media, or cyberspace, 'the
utopian space of the Sartrean reversal, the Fou-
cauldian heterotopias of the unclassed and unclassi-
fiable, all have been triumphantly penetrated and
colonized, the authentic and the unsaid, in-vu, non-
dit, inexpressive, alike are fully translated into the
visible and the culturally familiar' ( 111 ). The
regime of sensation, rather than a movement of
thought, is clearly marked in the practices of the
Bettmann archive. The desire to reduce post-
modern to a sensation is unequivocally demon-
strated by Wheatcroft's equating postmodern
theory with relativism, thus emptying it out of the
ethical responsibility that it entails. 6
It seems to me that only when acknowledging
that, indeed, the postmodern as well as a historio-
graphic practice, are 'a procedure in "ana-": a
procedure of analysis, anamnesis, anagogy, and
anamorphosis that elaborates an "initial
forgetting"' one will fully be able to embrace the
archive trouble:
 Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than
the word 'archive'. And not only because of the two orders
of arkhr; we distinguished at the beginning. Nothing is
more troubled and more troubling. The trouble with what
is troubling here is undoubtedly what troubles and
muddles our vision (as they also say in French). the
trouble of secrets, of plots, of clandestineness, of half-
private, half-public conjurations, always at the unstable
limit between public and private, between the family, the
society, and the State, between the family and an intimacy
even more private than the family, between oneself and
oneself. I thus name the trouble, or what is called in
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English the 'trouble', of these visions and of those affairs
in a French idiom that is again untranslatable, to recall at
least that the archive always holds a problem for trans-
lation. With the irreplaceable singularity of a document to
interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its
original uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic,
open to and shielded from technical iteration and repro-
duction.
(Derrida 1998: 90)
The very awareness of the archive trouble as
spelled out by Derrida as well as by Foucault and
de Certeau, may help us realize that archival
research is fragmentary and also expresses a mode
of coming to terms, of critically confronting the
lacuna- we bear witness to something it is imposs-
ible to bear witness to: since is it not true that all
can be archived but the language of the event.
We bear witness to that which determines the
structure of the archivable contents ....
NOTES
l In addition were the call for papers for this issue of
Performance Research, and the essay, 'Of the Memory of a
Human Unhoused in Being', (published in Performance
Research 5(3) 'On Memory') in which I drew attention to
Tadeusz Kantor's 'Silent Night' and Daniel Libeskind's
Jewish Museum in Berlin and their questioning of the
official (archived) historical narratives glossing over
Adorno's haunting question of what it means to
represent after Auschwitz. See: 'Of the Memory of a
Human Unhoused in Being' for a detailed description of
Kantor's cricotage, 'Silent Night' and Libeskind's archi-
tectural space - the Holocaust Tower, the Voids, the
exhibition space, and the ETA Hoffman Garden. In the
essay, I suggest that, in their works, Kantor and
Libeskind voided the history caught in the act of
inventing forms of presentation of the events in absolute 0
space and absolute time. CT
2 It may be worth reminding that, for Foucault, the ClJ
positivity of an archive defines a field in which formal
identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts,
procedures of intervention, and polemical interchanges
may be developed. (see Foucault 1972: 127).
3 See Roland Barthes (1986) and Jacques Ranciere
(1994) for a discussion of both the reality effect/ principle
and history, which escaped literature and acquired the
status of science.
4 In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau intro-
duces the following distinction between space and place:
[a] place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with
which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It
thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same
location (place). The law of the 'proper' rules in the place: the
elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each
situated in its own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it
defines. Aplace is thus an instantaneous configuration of
positions. It implies an indication of stability. Aspace exists when
one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and
time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of
mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of
movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect
produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize
it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual
programs or contractual proximities .... In contradiction to the
place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper'.
(de Certeau 1988b: 117)
5 I would like to make a reference to Libeskind's
Jewish Museum. The following is the description of the
museum space that prompted my investigation of his
treatment of a historical narrative. In the aforementioned
essay, I noted:
Yet another axis leads to the main staircase that stretches
through all the floors. The staircase, crossed by the beams
suspended in the air, provides an entry to the exhibition space.
These are not standard exhibition rooms- these were dissolved
and disseminated into the multiple and complex trajectories that
embrace the void structures painted black through an exhibition
area of some 1800 square meters. These void structures, visible
to the viewer but sealed so nobody can enter them, extend from
the basement to the roof. They form a straight line that is
traversed by the zigzagged form of the building. Two hundred
and eighty windows and light-slits provide illumination of the
exhibition space. The exhibition space is designed to reflect: (1)
the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without
understanding the contribution made by its Jewish citizens: (2)
the necessity to integrate the meanings of the Holocaust, both
physically and spiritually, into the consciousness and memory of
the city of Berlin; (3) the history of Berlin and Europe can have a
human future only through acknowledging and incorporating this
erasure and void of Jewish life in Berlin.
10
 The voids, cutting through the exhibition space, create an
irregular and accentuated set of displacements and disconti-
nuities. The unfolding of these displacements and discontinuities
V>
+- produces an experience of a space which no ocular vision can
condense or comprehend- a space which cannot be organized
ro
LL
in a predictable manner. That is to say, one is never sure of the
shape of the place that has been entered; neither is one sure of
""CJ
the design for the voids that seem to appear unexpectedly with a
c::
ro turn of the corner. The voids, that structure the field of visibility
displace one's desire to organize the exhibition space into a
+- recognizable museum room. The tension between the voids and
c:: the space corresponds to the relationship between the visible
QJ
and the not-visible that must be brought to light; let us say, a
> York: Hill and Wang.
UJ history of what is and what is not remembered. However, that
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which is not-remembered will always remain sealed or not fully
visible. Consequently, the history written in this space cannot be
QJ
reconciled with that which has an assigned place. It will remain
> De Certeau, Michel (1988a) The Writing of History,
an open spatial narrative that cannot be laid to rest or molded by
..c:: our desire for a nostalgic reconstruction of the past. This desire
u Press.
will be broken not only by an unexpected appearance of a void,
<( but also by a discontinuous movement through the exhibition
space that disallows for a territorial assemblage of information
into a coherent unit. Like a nomad, one walks through this space
where the ground constantly changes direction, and the trajec-
tory of movement frustrates a perspectival viewing of the space.
There is neither background nor center. Instead, there is
abstract line that has 'multiple orientations and passes between
points, figures and contours'.lt is motivated by the traces of
unborn history that will forever remain nonillustrative, nonnarra-
tive, and nonrepresentative.
(Kobialka 2000: 52-3)
6 More disturbing is the mode of grafting a historical
narrative by the curators of the Jewish Museum in
Berlin. Whereas Libeskind presents us with a spatial
mode of thinking which may help us overcome a
narrative practice of erasure by a history, the curators
organized the artifact in such a way in this space so the
visitor to the Jewish Museum in Berlin is presented with
a history of the Jews from the times of ancient Germania
to the time present. What is important to note here is
that Libeskind's desire to articulate that which is no
longer a part of mnemotechnics is completely striated by
the marketing strategies and a unlinear concept of
history. That which was supposed to be a nomadic
movement of a human unhoused in being through space
is now a linear trajectory clearly marking a direction of
the teological history. That which was supposed to be a
space of contemplation is now an example ofBaudrillard-
ian ecstasy of communication and surface represen-
tations.
11
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