Bell article - CLAS Users
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Bell article - CLAS Users
Infinite Archives Bell, David F. SubStance, Issue 105 (Volume 33, Number 3), 2004, pp. 148-161 (Article) Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: 10.1353/sub.2004.0034 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v033/33.3bell02.html Access Provided by University of Florida Libraries at 04/19/12 11:25AM GMT 148 David F. Bell Infinite Archives David F. Bell Jacques Derrida’s 1995 Mal d’archive is an essay with multiple resonances. One can speculate that after nearly a decade and a half of a trend that saw the development in French historical circles of critical thought and writing on the notions of memory and archive, represented most notably and emblematically by Pierre Nora’s massive project, Lieux de mémoire, originally published in seven volumes between 1984 and 1992, a certain fetishism of the archive needed to be analyzed. Deconstruction had supposedly shut the door on an old style philology as a viable manner for getting at the truth in its origins, but now another strategy seemed to have reared its head, suggesting that the truth of history could be found in documents, symbols, and objects, many of which were circumscribed in collections, repositories of knowledge about deep-seated belief systems. The Éditions Gallimard internet catalogue describes the project of Lieux de mémoire as follows: Today the rapid disappearance of our national memory cries out for an inventory of the places where it was selectively incarnated: celebrations, emblems, monuments, and commemorations, but also speeches, archives, dictionaries, and museums. . . . More than an impossible exhaustiveness, what counts here are the types of subjects chosen, how they are exploited, the richness and variety of approaches, and, finally, the broad equilibrium of a vast corpus on which more than a hundred of the most qualified historians have agreed to collaborate. France as a subject is inexhaustible. Taken together, [this is] a history of France, not in the habitual sense of the term, but—between memory and history—the selective and scholarly exploration of our collective legacy. (My translation here and elsewhere unless otherwise noted.) The expression “héritage collectif,” used in Gallimard’s marketing blurb and rendered here as “collective legacy,” might just as easily be translated “inherited collections,” that is, inherited archives. The trope of lost memory becomes a lieu commun: if one’s history cannot be remembered, the only recourse is to be immersed in the invigorating reservoir of accumulated texts and objects. Although a teleological historical narrative of progress is no longer available, remnants and vestiges can rejuvenate the frustrated historian, or so it would seem. The Lieux de mémoire project can be analyzed as a re-inscription of the discipline © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2004 148 SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 Infinite Archives 149 of history in a postmodern, poststructuralist phase, at a moment when all possibility of narrative closure seems remote indeed (“France as a subject is inexhaustible,” that is, infinite, without end.). Mal d’archive might well find one of its sources of inspiration in an attempt to analyze critically this fetishism of collecting, which results from something like a moment of crisis. Although he makes no reference to Nora and the Lieux de mémoire project, Derrida nonetheless wonders about the fear of loss motivating projects like the one Nora imagined, as well as all the emulations to which Nora’s work gave rise (one is tempted to characterize the historical and critical endeavors spawned by Lieux de mémoire as a veritable cottage industry). Why had the question of the archive come to the fore? In fact, Derrida had already taken a decidedly less euphoric view of how the past comes back when he lectured and wrote about the specters of Marx only shortly before he gave his lecture on the Freud archive. Far from constituting a source from which one might recover a certain plenitude of memory, the vestiges of the past return to haunt the present—both as reminders of the past and as announcements of the future. Mal d’archive, originally an occasional piece that grew out of reflections on the notion of the archive in the history of Freud’s foundational work in psychoanalysis and thus out of Derrida’s earlier analysis of the scene of writing in Freud (“Freud et la scène de l’écriture”), also finds the motivation for its argument in the damage done to archives by political repression and in the counter attempts to get at what was suppressed and thereby forgotten during the various political and social disasters that marked the twentieth century: “The disasters that have marked the end of the millennium are also the archives of evil: hidden or destroyed, off limits, stolen, ‘repressed’” (1; Derrida’s emphasis). 1 A lot is riding on the argument developed in Mal d’archive, certainly more than can be treated in a short essay. Let us try nonetheless to circumscribe a portion of the issues raised by Derrida’s text. In particular, it is fascinating to confront Derrida’s positions with several striking pronouncements on the history of psychoanalysis made by Friedrich Kittler in his work on media theory in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. The broad outlines of Derrida’s presentation are set out at the beginning of his essay. He immediately calls attention to the etymology of the term “archive” in Greek, its connection with the Greek word arkheîon, meaning the place, the address, the domicile of the archontes, those who govern and command. In this space, set off from public space, rulers have the right not only to store official documents, but also to interpret SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 150 David F. Bell them. The right to govern is always already a hermeneutic right, the right to assign meaning to and make sense of the documents which, taken together, furnish the foundation and justification for the law. These activities of collecting, storing, and interpreting are overlaid with an additional element, however—what Derrida calls consignation, by which he means assembling the documents together into a coherent corpus. The constitution of the archive does not consist simply in storing disparate documents together in juxtaposition. The interpretive function of the archontes implies that they make choices: they relate the documents in the archive to one another. In the end, they create an articulated corpus: “Consignment tends to coordinate a single corpus into a system or synchronous relation in which all the elements are articulated into the unity of an ideal configuration. . . . The archontic [from archontes] principle of the archive is also a principle of . . . gathering together” (14). The basic elements of this description of the archive are clearly laid out. Borders separate an outside from an inside. Gatekeepers make decisions about what crosses those borders to be stored inside, but they also construct a system out of the documents they control through a labor of interpretation that renders all parts of the archive present to all others. A political and social tradition of respect and veneration makes the constitution and preservation of the archive a function of a ruling group, whoever they may be. This structure furnishes Derrida with an entry point into a reflection on the history of psychoanalysis and on Freud’s role as the founder of the method. In what sense can it be said that Freud’s works, his correspondence, his house (which has now become a museum) constitute an archive? Inevitably this brings Derrida back to his earlier work on Freud’s curious little essay, “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” (1925: Notiz über den Wunderblock), in “Freud et la scène d’écriture.” The schema mobilized by the magic writing pad contains all the deconstructive force that inevitably puts into question the notion of boundaries and thus the discrete existence of the archive. In fact, Freud’s theory of the unconscious is a theory of memory, of how impressions are inscribed on the psyche, of how the psyche is a writing tablet ready to receive the marks of a certain kind of writing. A brief summary of Freud’s argument and how it uses the image of the mystic writing pad would be helpful . The writing pad in question here is a children’s toy, a wax tablet overlaid with a transparent plastic sheet. When one presses on the sheet with a stylus, a faint trace is inscribed on the wax backing and a darker trace on the transparent plastic, which adheres to the wax at the points where it is SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 Infinite Archives 151 pressed with the requisite force. Once the transparent plastic sheet is peeled away from the wax, the trace upon the transparent sheet disappears. A faint trace remains embedded in the wax backing, however, only to be overwritten by the next set of lines traced onto the pad. As Freud claims, “the appearance and disappearance of the writing” is similar to “the flickering up and passing away of consciousness in the process of perception” (19:230). What for Freud is an analogy conceived as an explanatory tool becomes for Derrida an emblematic moment that emphasizes the primacy of writing in Freud’s description of the unconscious and of memory formation. The marks on the mystic writing pad are not simply a result of the stylus depositing something from the outside on a more permanent storage surface (as is the case for an ink pen on paper or chalk on a chalkboard), but also a result of the impression left on the wax beneath the transparent plastic sheet, an impression that appears on the transparent plastic sheet from behind, as it were. Perception is always already subtended by writing and the trace: “If there were only perception, pure permeability to facilitation [frayage], there would be no facilitation. . . . But pure perception does not exist: we are written upon only through our own writing, through the agency within us that always already keeps watch over perception, whether it is internal or external” (“Freud et la scène de l’écriture,” 335).2 Writing supplements perception even as perception occurs. At the heart of psychoanalytic theory, Derrida argues in Mal d’archive, is a structure based on a notion of the archive, on what is written and collected by the unconscious/conscious perception apparatus and somehow systematized into recognizable experiences, which can be remembered—that is, archived. But we must immediately add to this analysis the fact that the development of psychoanalysis as a method and as a theory has a historical dimension: it is a history with its own archive, namely, a series of foundational texts written by Freud as well as a long series of correspondences and exchanges with collaborators and enemies of the theory. Derrida wants to suggest that this is all of a piece. Psychoanalysis describes the psyche as an archive, and simultaneously the existence of psychoanalysis as a field of theoretical research is the result of the creation of an archive of documents. No intellectual terrain is thus more emblematic for reflecting on the relationship between memory and archive. Up to this point, the analysis conducted by Derrida is classically deconstructive: he begins working, as he typically does, on the notion of SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 152 David F. Bell the boundary that separates an inside from an outside and slowly chips away until its function as boundary is crucially undone. At a certain point in this argument, however, Derrida unexpectedly asks a supplementary question, one that is highly suggestive: The question is whether—essentially and other than in extrinsic details— the structure of the psychic apparatus, the system . . . that Freud wanted to describe with the “mystic writing pad,” resists or does not resist the evolution of the techno-science of the archive. Would the psychic apparatus be better represented or otherwise affected by so many technological devices for archiving and reproducing—so-called live memory prostheses—simulacra of the living, which are already refined and in the future will be even more refined, complicated, powerful than the ‘mystic writing pad’ (micro-computing, electronics, computerization, etc.)? (Mal d’archive, 32; Derrida’s emphasis) And as for the historical archive of documents constituting the corpus of psychoanalysis, a comparable question arises: Whether it is a question of Freud’s private or public life, of the lives of his partners or inheritors, occasionally even of his patients, of his personal or scientific exchanges, of correspondences, of politicoinstitutional deliberation or decisions, of practices and their rules,... how was the entirety of this field determined by a state of the technology of communication or archiving? (33) This last question is mischievously put in another way as well: what if Freud and his interlocutors had possessed phone cards and email accounts? Unfortunately, this last formulation has the effect of trivializing to some extent the wider implications of new archive technologies to which Derrida had alluded at two different levels: at the level of the representation of the structure of the psyche and at the level of the institutional history of psychoanalysis. But Derrida does not release his grip on the reader at this point without a much more serious observation that eschews irony and goes to the heart of the matter: “The technical structure of the archive being archived also determines the structure of what can be archived in its very appearing and in its relation to the future” (34; Derrida’s emphasis). There is little doubt that he is well aware of the crucial nature of storage technologies, but he chooses not to pursue this issue in Mal d’archive: “I would have liked to spend my whole lecture on this retrospective science fiction” (33). The “science fiction” scenario in question is not just a fiction, however, which might have been amusing to pursue if time had permitted. I would maintain, instead, that it is a crucial dimension of any reflection on the notion of the archive: the invention of recording technologies at the end of the nineteenth century— SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 Infinite Archives 153 phonograph and cinemato-graph—provoked a questioning about the nature of the archive that has hardly abated since. Moreover, this happened during Freud’s lifetime, and the developments in question might conceivably have had an impact on how Freud imagined the unconscious. There are many consequences of what Friedrich Kittler has described as a media revolution. He argues forcefully that the very structure of the subject and the constitution of the archive are affected by the transformation of media technologies. With the invention of the phonograph, for the first time in history one could envisage archiving as an activity that excluded subjectivity as it had been understood before the existence of this new machine. Kittler puts it as follows: “The phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such” (23). And in yet another formulation: “Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there has been writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God” (44). Until the invention of the phonograph, hearing had been understood as a conscious filtering activity. The subject cannot hear everything and thus must choose to highlight as meaningful only a small portion of the sounds produced in the world. This filtering activity constitutes and defines the subject, the argument goes—that is, it creates consciousness and identity. Sounds left out and ignored in this process are simply relegated to the realm of noise, the non-significant, the meaningless. With the phonograph, a different kind of hearing suggestively appeared, no longer marked by choice and filtering. What had always been rejected as background noise now came to the fore and claimed an importance equivalent to that of language, words, music, or other organized sound systems. The distinction between sound and noise became considerably more blurred: “Thanks to the phonograph, science is for the first time in possession of a machine that records noises regardless of the so-called meaning. Written protocols were always unintentional selections of meaning” (85). What had always been considered to be the only meaningful noise, namely, language, had previously made it impossible to grasp noise at all, to include it in a description of the structure of the psyche. The impact of recording technologies on the formation of psychoanalysis was thus quite direct, Kittler argues. Simply put, the notion of the unconscious would be impossible in the absence of a technology through which “impressions” can be recorded without the presence of the subject to itself—in other words, which captures SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 154 David F. Bell something different from and beyond “perceptions” in the conscious sense. The unconscious becomes those unfiltered impressions. In an important way, then, the phonograph fundamentally defined the notion of the symptom. The symptom as trace emerged only when a recording medium had been invented that could actually capture it. Kittler again: The good old days in which a self-controlled and “flattering” face would “fool” eyes equally bereft of media are over. Rather, all the sciences of trace detection confirm Freud’s statement that “no mortal can keep a secret” because “betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” And because (we may add) since 1880, there has been a storage medium for each kind of betrayal. Otherwise there would be no unconscious. (84-85) It was only because recording without filtering was possible that the flow of nonsense provoked by free associations, speech parapraxes, and various uncontrolled movements could become objects for analysis (could be recorded without any written protocol and then perused at leisure and combed for significance afterwards). Bodily tics, for example, became the subject par excellence of cinema: “Nonsense is always already the unconscious” (86). In effect, then, Derrida’s passing remarks in Mal d’archive on the potential relation between psychoanalysis and the history of technologies allude to something richer than what he addresses explicitly in Mal d’archive. To undertake a study of the issues at stake in the technological developments that coincide with the beginnings of psychoanalysis would not be to write an ironic science fiction story about Freud and email accounts or phone cards. It would mean, instead, to write part of a history of technology and the effects produced by certain inventions on our concept of consciousness. But we must not forget that Mal d’archive was written within the wider context of an extended reflection on archive technologies. Derrida addressed the question of storage technologies much more directly, for example, in his interview with Bernard Stiegler in Échographies de la Télévision: Entretiens filmés, a videotaped conversation that took place in 1993, published in transcribed form in 1996, the year after the publication of Mal d’archive. The reader should be reminded, moreover, that the lecture from which the published essay Mal d’archive was derived was delivered in 1994, the year after the television interview with Bernard Stiegler. Échographies is therefore an important text to consult in order to broaden our perspective on archive technologies within Derrida’s work. It is crucial to point out, moreover, that Bernard Stiegler, with whom Derrida collaborated in Échographies, should probably be considered SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 Infinite Archives 155 Derrida’s principal intellectual heir in the domain of media theory. Stiegler has insisted forcefully on the importance of recording technologies in his own work. In La technique et le temps 3: le temps du cinema et la question du malêtre he takes up, as the title indicates, the question of the technology of the recorded image as it developed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The creation of the phonograph and of cinema fundamentally altered memory and consciousness, according to Stiegler: “The experience of an identical repetition of a temporal object was possible for the first time in the history of humanity only after Cros and Edison: by inventing the analogue phonograph, they profoundly transformed the play of memory, imagination, and conscience” (72; Stiegler ’s emphasis). Derrida’s interview with Bernard Stiegler immediately raises a constellation of concerns already evident in Mal d’archive—beginning with the question of the definition of and the access to archives. Shortly after the opening of the interview, Stiegler alludes to the 1992 French law establishing a copyright system for audiovisual materials (specifically, television and radio broadcasts).3 To create a copyright process for such materials means that a duplicate of each produced work must be deposited in a national copyright office and a process of public access must be established. The two elements (storage and access to what is stored) go hand in hand. As the director of the Institut national de l’audiovisuel stated on the Inathèque website at the moment of the tenth anniversary of the application of the law (2003): In the context of this law, for the first time the audiovisual domain was granted the same importance as the written domain and was considered to be an important archival source. Who would deny today that the audiovisual is an authentic patrimony and a fundamental source of knowledge for the understanding of contemporary societies? The law thus valorized audiovisual materials and extended the purview of the right to information, which is the indispensable converse of the freedom of expression.4 Derrida emphasizes precisely the same two sides of the equation in his initial comments on the law in question: “When such a law exists, . . . it recognizes that . . . a state . . . has the right or the duty to store . . . the quasi-totality of what is produced and broadcasted on the national airwaves. Once this has been put in reserve, accumulated, ordered, classified, the law must provide access . . . to any citizen” (43). The constitution of the archive, the establishment of its parameters, meaning both who organizes it and who can have access to it, are part and parcel SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 156 David F. Bell of the general presentation of the notion of archive at the beginning of Mal d’archive as well. In Échographies, moreover, Derrida confronts directly the potential of contemporary storage technologies to record everything—in a manner that is not part of his argument in Mal d’archive, but is clearly related to Kittler’s position: “Today one can conceive (or dream) of recording everything, everything or almost everything. . . . [E]verything that makes up the national memory in the traditional sense of the term—but just about anything at all—can and often is recorded: the mass is enormous” (74). 5 If everything can be recorded, however, a problem arises immediately: how to store what is recorded, that enormous mass? Although digital technologies constantly shrink the size of archived materials, such that the potential space available for storage approaches asymptotically the dream of recording everything, choices about what is to be stored must always be made: storage space will never catch up with the infinity implied by the notion of recording the entirety of events. The choices fall squarely on the shoulders of the state, and this paradoxically reinforces the existence and identity of the state in a world where instant communication would seem, on the contrary, to dissolve progressively its borders and thus its power over citizens: “As soon as one speaks about a ‘politics of memory,’ things become worrisome: in the end, does not the state—even though it represents only certain power groups in civil society—decide what the nation state will preserve, regularly privileging, moreover, the national and the public?” (74). On the other hand, the here-and-now of the individual’s existence within a state is undercut by the ubiquity of information transiting from all parts of the globe. In fact, the advent of digitizing and the internet has given to the individual a potential for constructing and for manipulating archives that did not exist in prior technological modes. As Bernard Stiegler puts it in one of his remarks in Échographies: “One can imagine that this technological evolution will profoundly modify conditions of reception, as is the case, for example, with rock music groups who have appropriated ‘sampling’ to work on sound archives. . . . [A] new music has appeared, principally produced by the manipulation of archives” (63). In other words, the very tools that allow access to digitized storage can be used to manipulate and transform what is stored. Even more is at stake here, however. It is not simply the case that certain instruments (software, fast internet access, global television, faxes, for example) allow access to and manipulation of archives: those very instruments put into question the here-and-now of human experience, SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 Infinite Archives 157 as suggested above. In a sense they “expropriate” the individual at the very moment when they are ostensibly empowering her. The consumer of such technologies is transformed in a very disquieting way, as Derrida explains: “Even if this expropriation can sometimes produce the opposite effect (the illusion of proximity, of immediateness, of interiority), the global and dominant effect of televisions, telephones, faxes, satellites, of the accelerating circulation of images, discourse, etc., is that the hereand-now becomes uncertain, without assurances: being anchored, the process of taking root, the home are radically contested” (91; Derrida’s emphasis). The individual is empowered against the nation state by global technologies that would seem to tear down traditional national borders, but simultaneously she undergoes an expropriation from a settled “situation” and is thus vulnerable to the nostalgia for a “home,” a nostalgia upon which the nation state can play in order to maintain and consolidate its power. These are the very effects of “live coverage” and of “real time” that Paul Virilio described in L’Art du moteur. What is happening elsewhere in the world is also simultaneously happening here, because I can see it or hear it without delay in the very moment it happens. Suddenly the notion of delay, vital to traditional analytical methods that structure our thinking by giving us room for some form of “objectivity” through spacing and distance, is not operative when these distances collapse. One can revel in the disappearance of borders, or one can play into the hands of the nation state and look to it as a way to protect the individual’s threatened experience of the here-and-now, which seems constantly to be undermined. We have roamed somewhat far afield from Derrida’s analysis concerning the archival history of psychoanalysis in order to show that his passing remarks in Mal d’archive on modern communication and archive technologies (email and phone cards) allude to a wider discussion of these issues within his own work. To return to this analysis, then, I want to suggest that the description of the invention of psychoanalysis proposed by Friedrich Kittler raises a theoretical question concerning the writing of a history of the technologies at stake in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Kittler clearly believes that the development of recording technologies created a moment of rupture—there is something like a Bachelardian epistemological break subtending his presentation. Naturally, he avoids any simplified causal argument. Kittler has consciously created a style of presentation that eschews the tradition of German philosophical writing—his exposition method proceeds instead by juxtaposition, aphorism, and image. Nonetheless, a statement such SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 158 David F. Bell as the one quoted earlier, namely, “Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there has been writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God” (44), suggests a certain causality and the finality of a radical transition or a passage into another theoretical era. Technological innovations seem ultimately to drive the reconceptualizing of the structure of the psyche that appears with psychoanalysis, and thus they are in some way its cause. Kittler wants to have his cake and eat it too: he wants to insist on the fundamental importance of technological developments without having to argue that they are ultimately the causes of conceptual change, but at a certain moment, juxtapositioning takes on the force of logical argument, ultimately appearing as causality despite all claims to the contrary. Derrida’s treatment of technology is typically more nuanced and hedged by historical detours during which he follows certain concepts back to previous states in a movement that has the effect of minimizing breaks. Take the preliminary remarks on the book in the first section of Papier machine: Le ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses, a text that originated in a colloquium presentation on the book at the Bibliothèque nationale in 1997 (with Bernard Stiegler and Roger Chartier in attendance) and which is very much a part of the constellation of reflections on the archive that marks Derrida’s work in the 1990s. As he begins to reflect on the status of the book, Derrida makes the following remarks: There are, there will be, as always, a coexistence and structural survival of past models when a moment of genesis brings forth new possibilities. . . . A new economy is being put into place. It allows the mobile coexistence of a multiplicity of models, of modes of archiving and accumulating. (29) At stake here is the notion of an economy, which is a more fluid concept for imagining the changes in archiving techniques and technologies (the choice of the adjective “mobile” is crucial). A new mode does not simply provoke a sharp break with an older mode; rather, new modes appear within the economy of existing modes, stimulating readjustments that alter the relationships among technologies over time. One might object that this is not an explanation at all, but a means of hedging bets. Since no one can be sure about the fate of the book at this point—because despite the existence of electronic media, the book stubbornly refuses to disappear—it is best to allow for the continuing coexistence of competing technologies in any argument one makes. Derrida’s discussion undercuts the notion of a break even more radically, however. In the course of an intricate rereading of Paul de SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 Infinite Archives 159 Man’s texts on Rousseau’s Confessions, which is at the heart of Papier machine, he works on the theoretical structure of the confession as speech act. Confessing or offering excuses for a culpable act, he argues, brings into play a language machine that works almost in the absence of the subject. The confession and the excuse are linguistic structures that can be mobilized in any circumstance, at the moment of any event. They work “by themselves,” one might say, like wind-up toys: The work works . . . all by itself, almost like a machine, virtually, and thus without the intervention of the author, as if, contrary to what is often believed, there existed between grace and machine, between the heart and the automaticity of the marionette, an invincible affinity, as if the excuse machine ran on its own, suddenly like a writing machine and, as such, like a machine that renders one innocent. (51; my emphasis) The choice of the noun “machine” is strategic to Derrida’s argument. Are various modern incarnations of writing machines (typewriter, word processor) any more machines than the speech acts of the confession and the excuse at the disposition of man ever since he began speaking? I cannot detail Derrida’s argument here, but Papier machine constantly works against the notion that the history of technology is a history of radical breaks. The roles that modern machines play are an extension of the “prosthetic” nature of man from the beginning. It follows that Derrida refuses to accept the Heideggerian argument about the difference between writing with the hand and writing with a machine: “When one writes by hand, one is not on the eve of technology, instrumentality is already present in the form of uniform reproduction, of mechanical iteration. It is thus not legitimate to oppose manual writing to ‘mechanical’ writing, the one being a pre-technological artisanship while the other is fully technological. Moreover, so-called mechanical writing is itself also ‘manual’” (152).6 The “machine” of communication has existed since language has existed. Moreover, it has been a theme of Derrida’s writing ever since he began arguing that the notion of writing undoes the metaphysical structure of presence: “But I never concealed the fact that, like every ceremonial act, [writing] must contain repetition and thus some kind of mechanization. This theater of the prosthesis and the graft quickly became one of my themes” (153). The question for a history of technology, then, becomes a question of whether modern recording devices introduce a qualitative break, or, alternately, simply exacerbate an existing tendency in a modified economy. When Kittler states that writing without a subject is a product of the invention of the phonograph and that “it is no longer SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 160 David F. Bell necessary to assign an author to every trace, “ he is, in fact, playing an ambiguous game with Derridean terminology. The term “trace,” which has been at the heart of Derrida’s philosophical work at least since De la grammatologie, is used in this instance precisely in a way that Derrida would refuse—for the very reason suggested by the presentation of a certain kind of writing as a machine in Papier machine. The trace in Derrida’s thought has never been authored; it has always been impersonal in the sense that it is an inevitable part of the functioning of language, automatically produced at the moment of the coming into language of any speaking subject. This means fundamentally that the notion of the event and of the archive (in the form of the always already existence of the trace) are locked in a ballet, in a circular movement of back and forth that makes the event dependent on the archive and vice-versa: “Doomed to the virtuality of the ‘sooner or later,’ the archive produces the event just as much as it records it or consigns it” (68). In other words, there are events only because there are archives of those events (and vice versa), and, moreover, the archive is directly related to the trace, is perhaps the trace itself. Thus the archive is necessarily infinite. It is not infinite now simply because contemporary technologies make us dream of recording everything, but because events are always already available only in the form of an archive—a trace that is constitutive of the event. Only political or institutional power can mobilize the authority to carve off finite parts of that infinity and transform them into collections that may or may not be open to consultation: “The archive is always the figure of a place and an authority or power” (68). A history of technology that revels in the marvels of recording devices and media revolutions risks failing to recognize certain underlying tendencies not simply produced by a given stage of technology, but present in language itself. In the end, then, it would not have made a significant difference if Freud had used email or a phone card: the problem of the archive would have arisen nonetheless, in one sempiternal form or another. David F. Bell Duke University Notes 1. “Archives of evil” is the translation of “archives du mal.” One cannot bring over into English the word play on the essay’s title, “mal d’archive,” contained in this expression. I would also remind the reader that the pagination for this quotation refers to the “Prière d’insérer,” four pages inserted into the original edition of the essay, but not bound with it. SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004 161 Infinite Archives 2. Facilitation (frayage in French) is the translation of Freud’s term Bahnung, the process of creating and strengthening connections by repetition. 3. As things presently stand, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Ministry of the Interior archive printed materials, the Centre national de la cinématographie archives cinema materials, and the Institut national de l’audiovisuel archives broadcast materials. The INA came into existence as an entity in 1975 as a result of the application of the 1974 audiovisual reform law, passed after the fallout of the events of May 1968 had provoked a crisis in French television. 4. Nearly two decades earlier, Marc Ferro, in essays later collected in Cinéma et histoire, had spoken of the refusal of historians to consider cinema materials as serious archival sources, in part because the question of authorship and copyright of cinema materials was so ambiguous and difficult to resolve. One could consider that the 1992 copyright law was in part a response to this problem. What is officially copyrighted and officially archived by the state becomes fair game for the historian. 5. Compare with Kittler, who quotes from Salomo Friedlaender: “All that happens falls into accidental, unintentional receivers. It is stored, photographed, and phonographed by nature itself” (70). 6. Kittler is suspicious as well of the Heideggerian distinction, treating it as an ideology that governs a certain historical moment, but, nonetheless, an ideology to be unpacked. See his Discourse Networks. Works Cited Derrida, Jacques. “Freud et la scène de l’écriture.” L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. 293-340. —. Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. —. Papier machine: Le ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Échographies de la télévision (avec B. Stiegler). Paris: Galilée, 1996. Ferro, Marc. Cinéma et histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Freud, Sigmund. “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad.’” Standard Edition. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74. 19:230-?. Les Éditions Gallimard. 28/7/2004 <http://www.gallimard.fr/>. L’Inathèque de France. 24/8/2004 <http://www.ina.fr/inatheque/10ans/ motpresident.fr.html>. Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metter with Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990 [1985]. —. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999 [1986]. Stiegler, Bernard. La Technique et le temps 3. Le Temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Virilio, Paul. L’Art du moteur. Paris: Galilée, 1993. SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004