Moot Points

archive: 1. From Greek arkheia, things kept at the public office, derived from arche, beginning, government; 2. A collection of documents such as letters, official papers, photographs or recorded material kept for their historical interest; 3. Backup computer file, kept often in compressed form on tape or disk for long-term storage; a directory of files that Internet users can access using File Transfer Protocol. — Encarta World English Dictionary

Ark: something that affords protection and safety; a chest or cupboard holding the scrolls of the Torah in a synagogue; a low hut used to house livestock; a ship or boat. — Oxford English Dictionary

An archive is where Mr and Mrs Noah and all the animals went to get out of the rain, but it rained and rained for 40 days and nights, so they just stayed put, luckily they had taken lots of story and picture books along with them so they weren't bored. — primary school pupil

It takes time for what has been erased to surface. Traces survive in registers, and nobody knows where these registers are hidden, and who has custody of them, and whether or not their custodians are willing to let you see them. Or perhaps they have forgotten that such registers exist. — Patrick Modiano, Search Warrant

Just as voluntary memory and utter oblivion belong together, so organised fame and remembrance lead ineluctably to nothingness. — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Modern memory is above all archival. It relies entirely on the materialities of the trace, the immediacy of records, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends in high fidelity and tape recording. No longer living memories, more or less intended remainders, the archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life, itself often a function of its own recording, a secondary memory, a prosthesis-memory. — Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire

The starting point of critical elaboration is the question of what one really is, 'knowing thyself' as a product of historical processes to date which have deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory — therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory. — Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

The function of the archive, as of art, is to hold unlikely things. ... The primary operations of the archive are no longer the contents of its files but rather their logistical interlinking, just as the Web is not primarily defined by its contents but by its protocols. — Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive

The question of the archive is not a question of the past. ... It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomorrow. ... Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive. — Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

We should not be deceived into thinking that heritage is an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies; rather it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath. — Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History'

The old word 'thing' or 'ding' originally meant a certain type of assembly. The point of reviving this old notion of assembly in a contemporary notion of assemblage, is that we don't assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible, but because we are brought together by divisive matters of concern into some neutral isolated place in order to arrive at some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement. — Bruno Latour, 'From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public'

Moot

Noun: 1) An assembly held for debate in Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval times

2) A mock proceeding set up to examine a hypothetical case as an academic exercise

Verb: To raise or broach a question or topic for discussion

Adjective: 1) Subject to debate, dispute, uncertainty

2) Having little or no practical relevance

Archive Fever: Coming in from the Cold?

The child's confusion of the Ark with the archive in the preceding quote makes us smile, as if it were no more than a charming elision of sounds and meaning, but the association of the two words points to a significant but often overlooked point of connection between them. The archive is a safe harbour for all manner of materials, artefacts, texts, images, documents, which might otherwise perish, whether from neglect or active suppression. It is an affordance of memory which may be a container of profane narratives or holy scripts, bureaucratic protocols or autobiographical memories, but it restores their capacity to survive the storms of history which produced them. The archive is an ark of the covenant we all make with the world in which we struggle to make our mark on posterity. What might appear initially to be a mere container of accidental traces of the past turns out, on closer inspection, to be an object of calculation, even intervention, albeit one that is largely disavowed.

Yet this arch-mnemonic can also be a trap, a siren call to unwary historians, a seductive invitation to immerse themselves in an oceanic feeling of omniscience about the past or, conversely, to drown in sea of nostalgic identification with lives other than their own. The archive can be a talisman for the multifarious desire to 'get to the bottom of things' which may start off with innocent acts of curiosity but all too often ends by being driven by an obsessive ambition to capture and sum up the world. Patrick Modiano draws our attention to an even less attractive face of the archive, its capacity to conceal, to resist disclosure, to obfuscate, even to cover its own tracks so that its existence is either unknown or mere rumour. So it is not only a question of what is lost by being excluded from the archive, but also...