THE ARCHIVE

ASSIGNMENT 1 / Michel Foucault – The Historical a priori & the Archive(The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969)

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This excerpt from Foucault’s text, included in the book on The Archive, was not an easy read! First I will make an attempt to summarize the text:

Foucault starts off this chapter by introducing the notion of ‘discourse’ by pointing out its ‘positivity’ - implying its visible or traceable form. This ‘positivity’ of a discourse encompasses a field “well beyond individual oeuvres, books and texts” and creates the condition for what he calls a ‘historical a priori’; “the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things actually said”.

From this reality of statements produced, systems are created which establish these statements as either ‘events’ or ‘things’. Systems such as these are what Foucault defines as ‘archive’. For the sake of argument, Foucault goes on to state that the archive is NOT

- “… the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity”

NOR

- “… the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve these discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation”

BUT, INSTEAD

- “… the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events”

It is important to stress that Foucault does not consider the archive as the mere repository of statements, but as the “general system of formation and transformation of statements” itself.

In his introduction to The Archive, editor Charles Merewether makes this clear as well: “For Foucault the archive governs what is said or unsaid, recorded or unrecorded. (…) Thus who determines, and what conditions enable, a history to be written depend upon the definitionof the archive.”

This leads to Foucault’s claim that “it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak.” A proper description of the archive can therefore only be approximated “on the basis of the very discourses that have just ceased to be ours”. Foucault locates the archive “outside of our own language” and considers it as “the gap between our own discursive practices”.

Michel Foucault concludes the text by remarking that the archive should be thought of in terms of ‘difference’, much like we ourselves are difference as individuals: “… our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks.” In the final paragraph, Foucault explains his choice of the word ‘archaeology’ as a metaphor for uncovering knowledge and defines it as “the general theme of a description that questions the already said at the level of its existence: of the enunciative function that operates within it, of the discursive formation, and the general archive system to which it belongs”.

THE ARCHIVE

After the summary I will now describe how this text relates to my own research and art practice.

When considering the notion of ‘discourse’, I feel that I need to address one specific field of discourse I consider myself to be part of, which is the discussion surrounding the documentation of live performance art. My research project Documenting Durational Live Performance Art Using Social Media is clearly invested in this sub-genre of contemporary art and also owes a great deal of its statements to what has already been said about the matter. But as soon as we begin to think of the ‘positivity’ of this discourse – that what can be seen and traced back - for me questions start to arise.

For what is fundamental in this whole debate around performance documentation is precisely this stubborn conviction that something is always lost after a performance, that not everything can be put into words or documents after the fact. The archive - in our conventional understanding of the word - that is left behind, is always lacking.

When I volunteered to assist in the documentation of the Live Laboratory Symposium The Pigs of Today Are the Hams of Tomorrow earlier this year, organized by the Marina Abramovic Institute and Plymouth Arts Centre, Transmedia classmate Filip Daniels and myself proposed to install a mapping table, Negotiated Map 1.0, inside the resource space that was created for the event:

picture of installation in resource space

“One table - offering a possibility to add tags to two original tags, being ‘Marina Abramovic Institute’ & ‘Performance’. The visitors use pencils, a ruler and an eraser. All media that can be or have been used to document performance get some sort of ‘felt disc’ with ‘Voting Poll chips’. Vote for your favourite medium for the future of documentation: Social Media / Writing / Photography / Video / Audio / Re-enactment.”

By the end of the 3 day symposium more fields had been added to the table than the 6 we had initially offered to choose from in the poll. Some included: 'Cryogenics', 'Body', 'Young Artists', ...

THE ARCHIVE

The idea to create this mindmap for the Institute was to have it be a conscious play on the polemical debate about live performance art's documentation and to discover how it would manifest itself in this format. A singular approach to the documentation - and archiving - of live performance art seems well out of sight in this moment in time and we find ourselves left with a sheer multitude of possible ways to go about it. And yet there will always be one other unique way to capture a live performance event. The challenge seems to be to make them all come together, while remaining on the lookout for current developments that seem fit in representing live art, such as the social media (Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, ...) which are the focus of my research.This is where I would like to return to Foucault's text and his idea that “…the archive governs what is said or unsaid, recorded or unrecorded …” and that it is hard for us to be aware of the limits of our own archive - in Foucault's sense - for “it is from within these rules that we speak.”

In the field of studies around social media and how they influence the perception of ourselves and others, a man by the name of Michael Wesch has stood up, calling himself a digital ethnographer.In his most popular YouTube video to date, The Machine is Us/ing Us (2007), Wesch basically celebrates the new ways in which we can connect with each other over new social networks. In his 2009 speech The Maching is (Changing) Us – YouTube Culture and the Politics of Authenticity, Wesch appears to take on a more ominous tone, shedding light on the ways in which social media effectively inhibit our means of communicating with one another. It is from within this perspective that the archiving of live performance art using social media should be re-evaluated again and again; by not only making simple use of its abundance of new possibilities but also by trying to become conscious of the restrictions these media impose upon us, although they have already become so inextricably linked to our lives.

Closing off with a thought on Foucault's analogy with 'archaelogy': Kunera is a research project initiated by the Radboud University in Nijmegen that collects information about medals and insignias dating back to the late Middle Ages. These objects were one of the most significant sources of memory production for that time. The website states: “For the image culture in the late Middle Ages, cheap craftsmanship in metal performed the role of what would later be taken over by graphic art and the art of printing. Depictions varied from Christ, Mary and many saints to utensils, plants, animals, literary subjects and even sexuality.”

insignia of holy Cunerapreserved in Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen

One could wonder why this form of memory production is no longer relevant to us in our modern society - why we no longer fabricate these tools of remembering - and ask what has come in its place. Should we really abandon what has come before in order to have it simply be replaced by something new? What are we losing in this successive process of archiving through new media, what is being left out, and, on the other end, what is there left to discover?