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SubStance, Issue 105 (Volume 33, Number 3), 2004, pp. 148-161 (Article)

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David F. Bell

SubStance #105, Vol 33, no.3, 2004

148

Infinite Archives

David F. Bell

Jacques Derridas 1995 Mal darchive is an essay with multipleresonances. One can speculate that after nearly a decade and a half of atrend that saw the development in French historical circles of criticalthought and writing on the notions of memory and archive, representedmost notably and emblematically by Pierre Noras massive project, Lieuxde mmoire, originally published in seven volumes between 1984 and 1992,a certain fetishism of the archive needed to be analyzed. Deconstructionhad supposedly shut the door on an old style philology as a viable mannerfor getting at the truth in its origins, but now another strategy seemed tohave reared its head, suggesting that the truth of history could be foundin documents, symbols, and objects, many of which were circumscribedin collections, repositories of knowledge about deep-seated belief systems.The ditions Gallimard internet catalogue describes the project of Lieuxde mmoire as follows:

Today the rapid disappearance of our national memory cries out foran inventory of the places where it was selectively incarnated:celebrations, emblems, monuments, and commemorations, but alsospeeches, archives, dictionaries, and museums. . . . More than animpossible exhaustiveness, what counts here are the types of subjectschosen, how they are exploited, the richness and variety ofapproaches, and, finally, the broad equilibrium of a vast corpus onwhich more than a hundred of the most qualified historians haveagreed to collaborate. France as a subject is inexhaustible. Takentogether, [this is] a history of France, not in the habitual sense of theterm, butbetween memory and historythe selective and scholarlyexploration of our collective legacy. (My translation here andelsewhere unless otherwise noted.)

The expression hritage collectif, used in Gallimards marketingblurb and rendered here as collective legacy, might just as easily betranslated inherited collections, that is, inherited archives. The tropeof lost memory becomes a lieu commun: if ones history cannot beremembered, the only recourse is to be immersed in the invigoratingreservoir of accumulated texts and objects. Although a teleologicalhistorical narrative of progress is no longer available, remnants andvestiges can rejuvenate the frustrated historian, or so it would seem. TheLieux de mmoire project can be analyzed as a re-inscription of the discipline

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of history in a postmodern, poststructuralist phase, at a moment whenall possibility of narrative closure seems remote indeed (France as asubject is inexhaustible, that is, infinite, without end.). Mal darchive mightwell find one of its sources of inspiration in an attempt to analyzecritically this fetishism of collecting, which results from something like amoment of crisis. Although he makes no reference to Nora and the Lieuxde mmoire project, Derrida nonetheless wonders about the fear of lossmotivating projects like the one Nora imagined, as well as all theemulations to which Noras work gave rise (one is tempted to characterizethe historical and critical endeavors spawned by Lieux de mmoire as averitable cottage industry). Why had the question of the archive come tothe fore? In fact, Derrida had already taken a decidedly less euphoricview of how the past comes back when he lectured and wrote about thespecters of Marx only shortly before he gave his lecture on the Freudarchive. Far from constituting a source from which one might recover acertain plenitude of memory, the vestiges of the past return to haunt thepresentboth as reminders of the past and as announcements of thefuture.

Mal darchive, originally an occasional piece that grew out of reflectionson the notion of the archive in the history of Freuds foundational workin psychoanalysis and thus out of Derridas earlier analysis of the sceneof writing in Freud (Freud et la scne de lcriture), also finds themotivation for its argument in the damage done to archives by politicalrepression and in the counter attempts to get at what was suppressedand thereby forgotten during the various political and social disastersthat marked the twentieth century: The disasters that have marked theend of the millennium are also the archives of evil: hidden or destroyed, offlimits, stolen, repressed (1; Derridas emphasis). 1 A lot is riding on theargument developed in Mal darchive, certainly more than can be treatedin a short essay. Let us try nonetheless to circumscribe a portion of theissues raised by Derridas text. In particular, it is fascinating to confrontDerridas positions with several striking pronouncements on the historyof psychoanalysis made by Friedrich Kittler in his work on media theoryin Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.

The broad outlines of Derridas presentation are set out at thebeginning of his essay. He immediately calls attention to the etymologyof the term archive in Greek, its connection with the Greek word arkheon,meaning the place, the address, the domicile of the archontes, those whogovern and command. In this space, set off from public space, rulershave the right not only to store official documents, but also to interpret

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them. The right to govern is always already a hermeneutic right, theright to assign meaning to and make sense of the documents which,taken together, furnish the foundation and justification for the law. Theseactivities of collecting, storing, and interpreting are overlaid with anadditional element, howeverwhat Derrida calls consignation, by whichhe means assembling the documents together into a coherent corpus.The constitution of the archive does not consist simply in storingdisparate documents together in juxtaposition. The interpretive functionof the archontes implies that they make choices: they relate the documentsin the archive to one another. In the end, they create an articulated corpus:Consignment tends to coordinate a single corpus into a system orsynchronous relation in which all the elements are articulated into theunity of an ideal configuration. . . . The archontic [from archontes] principleof the archive is also a principle of . . . gathering together (14).

The basic elements of this description of the archive are clearly laidout. Borders separate an outside from an inside. Gatekeepers makedecisions about what crosses those borders to be stored inside, but theyalso construct a system out of the documents they control through alabor of interpretation that renders all parts of the archive present to allothers. A political and social tradition of respect and veneration makesthe constitution and preservation of the archive a function of a rulinggroup, whoever they may be. This structure furnishes Derrida with anentry point into a reflection on the history of psychoanalysis and onFreuds role as the founder of the method. In what sense can it be saidthat Freuds works, his correspondence, his house (which has nowbecome a museum) constitute an archive?

Inevitably this brings Derrida back to his earlier work on Freudscurious little essay, A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad (1925: Notiz berden Wunderblock), in Freud et la scne dcriture. The schema mobilizedby the magic writing pad contains all the deconstructive force thatinevitably puts into question the notion of boundaries and thus thediscrete existence of the archive. In fact, Freuds theory of the unconsciousis 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 acertain kind of writing. A brief summary of Freuds argument and how ituses the image of the mystic writing pad would be helpful . The writingpad in question here is a childrens toy, a wax tablet overlaid with atransparent plastic sheet. When one presses on the sheet with a stylus, afaint trace is inscribed on the wax backing and a darker trace on thetransparent plastic, which adheres to the wax at the points where it is



pressed with the requisite force. Once the transparent plastic sheet ispeeled away from the wax, the trace upon the transparent sheetdisappears. A faint trace remains embedded in the wax backing, however,only to be overwritten by the next set of lines traced onto the pad. AsFreud claims, the appearance and disappearance of the writing issimilar to the flickering up and passing away of consciousness in theprocess of perception (19:230).

What for Freud is an analogy conceived as an explanatory toolbecomes for Derrida an emblematic moment that emphasizes theprimacy of writing in Freuds description of the unconscious and ofmemory formation. The marks on the mystic writing pad are not simplya result of the stylus depositing something from the outside on a morepermanent storage surface (as is the case for an ink pen on paper or chalkon a chalkboard), but also a result of the impression left on the waxbeneath the transparent plastic sheet, an impression that appears on thetransparent plastic sheet from behind, as it were. Perception is alwaysalready subtended by writing and the trace: If there were onlyperception, pure permeability to facilitation [frayage], there would be nofacilitation. . . . But pure perception does not exist: we are written upononly through our own writing, through the agency within us that alwaysalready keeps watch over perception, whether it is internal or external(Freud et la scne de lcriture, 335).2 Writing supplements perceptioneven as perception occurs.

At the heart of psychoanalytic theory, Derrida argues in Mal darchive,is a structure based on a notion of the archive, on what is written andcollected by the unconscious/conscious perception apparatus andsomehow systematized into recognizable experiences, which can berememberedthat is, archived. But we must immediately add to thisanalysis the fact that the development of psychoanalysis as a methodand as a theory has a historical dimension: it is a history with its ownarchive, namely, a series of foundational texts written by Freud as wellas a long series of correspondences and exchanges with collaboratorsand enemies of the theory. Derrida wants to suggest that this is all of apiece. Psychoanalysis describes the psyche as an archive, andsimultaneously the existence of psychoanalysis as a field of theoreticalresearch is the result of the creation of an archive of documents. Nointellectual terrain is thus more emblematic for reflecting on therelationship between memory and archive.

Up to this point, the analysis conducted by Derrida is classicallydeconstructive: he begins working, as he typically does, on the notion of

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the boundary that separates an inside from an outside and slowly chipsaway until its function as boundary is crucially undone. At a certainpoint in this argument, however, Derrida unexpectedly asks asupplementary question, one that is highly suggestive:

The question is whetheressentially and other than in extrinsic detailsthe structure of the psychic apparatus, the system . . . that Freudwanted to describe with the mystic writing pad, resists or does notresist the evolution of the techno-science of the archive. Would thepsychic apparatus be better represented or otherwise affected by so manytechnological devices for archiving and reproducingso-called livememory prosthesessimulacra of the living, which are alreadyrefined and in the future will be even more refined, complicated,powerful than the mystic writing pad (micro-computing, electronics,computerization, etc.)? (Mal darchive, 32; Derridas emphasis)

And as for the historical archive of documents constituting the corpus ofpsychoanalysis, a comparable question arises:

Whether it is a question of Freuds private or public life, of the livesof his partners or inheritors, occasionally even of his patients, of hispersonal or scientific exchanges, of correspondences, of politico-institutional deliberation or decisions, of practices and their rules,...how was the entirety of this field determined by a state of thetechnology of communication or archiving? (33)

This last question is mischievously put in another way as well: what ifFreud and his interlocutors had possessed phone cards and emailaccounts?

Unfortunately, this last formulation has the effect of trivializing tosome extent the wider implications of new archive technologies to whichDerrida had alluded at two different levels: at the level of therepresentation of the structure of the psyche and at the level of theinstitutional history of psychoanalysis. But Derrida does not release hisgrip on the reader at this point without a much more serious observationthat eschews irony and goes to the heart of the matter: The technicalstructure of the archive being archived also determines the structure ofwhat can be archived in its very appearing and in its relation to the future(34; Derridas emphasis). There is little doubt that he is well aware of thecrucial nature of storage technologies, but he chooses not to pursue thisissue in Mal darchive: I would have liked to spend my whole lecture onthis retrospective science fiction (33). The science fiction scenario inquestion is not just a fiction, however, which might have been amusingto pursue if time had permitted. I would maintain, instead, that it is acrucial dimension of any reflection on the notion of the archive: theinvention of recording technologies at the end of the nineteenth century



phonograph and cinemato-graphprovoked a questioning about thenature of the archive that has hardly abated since. Moreover, thishappened during Freuds lifetime, and the developments in question mightconceivably have had an impact on how Freud imagined the unconscious.

There are many consequences of what Friedrich Kittler has describedas a media revolution. He argues forcefully that the very structure of thesubject and the constitution of the archive are affected by thetransformation of media technologies. With the invention of thephonograph, for the first time in history one could envisage archiving asan activity that excluded subjectivity as it had been understood beforethe existence of this new machine. Kittler puts it as follows: Thephonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediatelyto filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic eventsas such (23). And in yet another formulation: Ever since the inventionof the phonograph, there has been writing without a subject. It is nolonger necessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God (44).Until the invention of the phonograph, hearing had been understood asa conscious filtering activity. The subject cannot hear everything andthus must choose to highlight as meaningful only a small portion of thesounds produced in the world. This filtering activity constitutes anddefines the subject, the argument goesthat is, it creates consciousnessand identity. Sounds left out and ignored in this process are simplyrelegated to the realm of noise, the non-significant, the meaningless. Withthe phonograph, a different kind of hearing suggestively appeared, nolonger marked by choice and filtering. What had always been rejected asbackground noise now came to the fore and claimed an importanceequivalent to that of language, words, music, or other organized soundsystems. The distinction between sound and noise became considerablymore blurred: Thanks to the phonograph, science is for the first time inpossession of a machine that records noises regardless of the so-calledmeaning. Written protocols were always unintentional selections ofmeaning (85). What had always been considered to be the onlymeaningful noise, namely, language, had previously made it impossibleto grasp noise at all, to include it in a description of the structure of thepsyche.

The impact of recording technologies on the formation ofpsychoanalysis was thus quite direct, Kittler argues. Simply put, thenotion of the unconscious would be impossible in the absence of atechnology through which impressions can be recorded without thepresence of the subject to itselfin other words, which captures

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something different from and beyond perceptions in the conscioussense. The unconscious becomes those unfiltered impressions. In animportant way, then, the phonograph fundamentally defined the notionof the symptom. The symptom as trace emerged only when a recordingmedium had been invented that could actually capture it. Kittler again:

The good old days in which a self-controlled and flattering facewould fool eyes equally bereft of media are over. Rather, all thesciences of trace detection confirm Freuds statement that no mortalcan keep a secret because betrayal oozes out of him at everypore. And because (we may add) since 1880, there has been astorage medium for each kind of betrayal. Otherwise there would beno unconscious. (84-85)

It was only because recording without filtering was possible that theflow of nonsense provoked by free associations, speech parapraxes, andvarious uncontrolled movements could become objects for analysis (couldbe recorded without any written protocol and then perused at leisureand combed for significance afterwards). Bodily tics, for example, becamethe subject par excellence of cinema: Nonsense is always already theunconscious (86).

In effect, then, Derridas passing remarks in Mal darchive on thepotential relation between psychoanalysis and the history of technologiesallude to something richer than what he addresses explicitly in Maldarchive. To undertake a study of the issues at stake in the technologicaldevelopments that coincide with the beginnings of psychoanalysis wouldnot be to write an ironic science fiction story about Freud and emailaccounts or phone cards. It would mean, instead, to write part of a historyof technology and the effects produced by certain inventions on ourconcept of consciousness. But we must not forget that Mal darchive waswritten within the wider context of an extended reflection on archivetechnologies. Derrida addressed the question of storage technologies muchmore directly, for example, in his interview with Bernard Stiegler inchographies de la Tlvision: Entretiens films, a videotaped conversationthat took place in 1993, published in transcribed form in 1996, the yearafter the publication of Mal darchive. The reader should be reminded,moreover, that the lecture from which the published essay Mal darchivewas derived was delivered in 1994, the year after the television interviewwith Bernard Stiegler.

chographies is therefore an important text to consult in order tobroaden our perspective on archive technologies within Derridas work.It is crucial to point out, moreover, that Bernard Stiegler, with whomDerrida collaborated in chographies, should probably be considered



Derridas principal intellectual heir in the domain of media theory. Stieglerhas insisted forcefully on the importance of recording technologies in hisown work. In La technique et le temps 3: le temps du cinema et la question du mal-tre he takes up, as the title indicates, the question of the technology of therecorded image as it developed at the end of the nineteenth century andthe beginning of the twentieth. The creation of the phonograph and ofcinema fundamentally altered memory and consciousness, according toStiegler: The experience of an identical repetition of a temporal object waspossible for the first time in the history of humanity only after Cros and Edison:by inventing the analogue phonograph, they profoundly transformedthe play of memory, imagination, and conscience (72; Stiegler semphasis).

Derridas interview with Bernard Stiegler immediately raises aconstellation of concerns already evident in Mal darchivebeginning withthe question of the definition of and the access to archives. Shortly afterthe opening of the interview, Stiegler alludes to the 1992 French lawestablishing a copyright system for audiovisual materials (specifically,television and radio broadcasts).3 To create a copyright process for suchmaterials means that a duplicate of each produced work must bedeposited in a national copyright office and a process of public accessmust be established. The two elements (storage and access to what isstored) go hand in hand. As the director of the Institut national delaudiovisuel stated on the Inathque website at the moment of the tenthanniversary of the application of the law (2003):

In the context of this law, for the first time the audiovisual domain wasgranted the same importance as the written domain and wasconsidered to be an important archival source. Who would denytoday that the audiovisual is an authentic patrimony and a fundamentalsource of knowledge for the understanding of contemporarysocieties? The law thus valorized audiovisual materials and extendedthe purview of the right to information, which is the indispensableconverse of the freedom of expression.4

Derrida emphasizes precisely the same two sides of the equation in hisinitial comments on the law in question: When such a law exists, . . . itrecognizes that . . . a state . . . has the right or the duty to store . . . thequasi-totality of what is produced and broadcasted on the nationalairwaves. Once this has been put in reserve, accumulated, ordered,classified, the law must provide access . . . to any citizen (43). Theconstitution of the archive, the establishment of its parameters, meaningboth who organizes it and who can have access to it, are part and parcel

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of the general presentation of the notion of archive at the beginning ofMal darchive as well.

In chographies, moreover, Derrida confronts directly the potential ofcontemporary storage technologies to record everythingin a mannerthat is not part of his argument in Mal darchive, but is clearly related toKittlers position: Today one can conceive (or dream) of recordingeverything, everything or almost everything. . . . [E]verything that makesup the national memory in the traditional sense of the termbut justabout anything at allcan and often is recorded: the mass is enormous(74).5 If everything can be recorded, however, a problem arisesimmediately: how to store what is recorded, that enormous mass?Although digital technologies constantly shrink the size of archivedmaterials, such that the potential space available for storage approachesasymptotically the dream of recording everything, choices about whatis to be stored must always be made: storage space will never catch upwith the infinity implied by the notion of recording the entirety of events.The choices fall squarely on the shoulders of the state, and thisparadoxically reinforces the existence and identity of the state in a worldwhere instant communication would seem, on the contrary, to dissolveprogressively its borders and thus its power over citizens: As soon asone speaks about a politics of memory, things become worrisome: in theend, does not the stateeven though it represents only certain powergroups in civil societydecide what the nation state will preserve,regularly privileging, moreover, the national and the public? (74). Onthe other hand, the here-and-now of the individuals existence within astate is undercut by the ubiquity of information transiting from all partsof the globe. In fact, the advent of digitizing and the internet has given tothe individual a potential for constructing and for manipulating archivesthat did not exist in prior technological modes. As Bernard Stiegler putsit in one of his remarks in chographies: One can imagine that thistechnological evolution will profoundly modify conditions of reception,as is the case, for example, with rock music groups who have appropriatedsampling to work on sound archives. . . . [A] new music has appeared,principally produced by the manipulation of archives (63). In otherwords, the very tools that allow access to digitized storage can be usedto manipulate and transform what is stored.

Even more is at stake here, however. It is not simply the case thatcertain instruments (software, fast internet access, global television, faxes,for example) allow access to and manipulation of archives: those veryinstruments put into question the here-and-now of human experience,



as suggested above. In a sense they expropriate the individual at thevery moment when they are ostensibly empowering her. The consumerof such technologies is transformed in a very disquieting way, as Derridaexplains: Even if this expropriation can sometimes produce the oppositeeffect (the illusion of proximity, of immediateness, of interiority), theglobal and dominant effect of televisions, telephones, faxes, satellites, ofthe accelerating circulation of images, discourse, etc., is that the here-and-now becomes uncertain, without assurances: being anchored, theprocess of taking root, the home are radically contested (91; Derridasemphasis). The individual is empowered against the nation state by globaltechnologies that would seem to tear down traditional national borders,but simultaneously she undergoes an expropriation from a settledsituation and is thus vulnerable to the nostalgia for a home, anostalgia upon which the nation state can play in order to maintain andconsolidate its power. These are the very effects of live coverage and ofreal time that Paul Virilio described in LArt du moteur. What ishappening elsewhere in the world is also simultaneously happeninghere, because I can see it or hear it without delay in the very moment ithappens. Suddenly the notion of delay, vital to traditional analyticalmethods that structure our thinking by giving us room for some form ofobjectivity through spacing and distance, is not operative when thesedistances collapse. One can revel in the disappearance of borders, or onecan play into the hands of the nation state and look to it as a way toprotect the individuals threatened experience of the here-and-now, whichseems constantly to be undermined.

We have roamed somewhat far afield from Derridas analysisconcerning the archival history of psychoanalysis in order to show thathis passing remarks in Mal darchive on modern communication andarchive technologies (email and phone cards) allude to a wider discussionof these issues within his own work. To return to this analysis, then, Iwant to suggest that the description of the invention of psychoanalysisproposed by Friedrich Kittler raises a theoretical question concerningthe writing of a history of the technologies at stake in Gramophone, Film,Typewriter. Kittler clearly believes that the development of recordingtechnologies created a moment of rupturethere is something like aBachelardian epistemological break subtending his presentation.Naturally, he avoids any simplified causal argument. Kittler hasconsciously created a style of presentation that eschews the tradition ofGerman philosophical writinghis exposition method proceeds insteadby juxtaposition, aphorism, and image. Nonetheless, a statement such

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as the one quoted earlier, namely, Ever since the invention of thephonograph, there has been writing without a subject. It is no longernecessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God (44), suggestsa certain causality and the finality of a radical transition or a passageinto another theoretical era. Technological innovations seem ultimatelyto drive the reconceptualizing of the structure of the psyche that appearswith psychoanalysis, and thus they are in some way its cause. Kittlerwants to have his cake and eat it too: he wants to insist on the fundamentalimportance of technological developments without having to argue thatthey are ultimately the causes of conceptual change, but at a certainmoment, juxtapositioning takes on the force of logical argument,ultimately appearing as causality despite all claims to the contrary.

Derridas treatment of technology is typically more nuanced andhedged by historical detours during which he follows certain conceptsback to previous states in a movement that has the effect of minimizingbreaks. Take the preliminary remarks on the book in the first section ofPapier machine: Le ruban de machine crire et autres rponses, a text that originatedin a colloquium presentation on the book at the Bibliothque nationale in1997 (with Bernard Stiegler and Roger Chartier in attendance) and whichis very much a part of the constellation of reflections on the archive thatmarks Derridas work in the 1990s. As he begins to reflect on the status ofthe book, Derrida makes the following remarks:

There are, there will be, as always, a coexistence and structuralsurvival of past models when a moment of genesis brings forth newpossibilities. . . . A new economy is being put into place. It allowsthe mobile coexistence of a multiplicity of models, of modes ofarchiving and accumulating. (29)

At stake here is the notion of an economy, which is a more fluid conceptfor imagining the changes in archiving techniques and technologies (thechoice of the adjective mobile is crucial). A new mode does not simplyprovoke a sharp break with an older mode; rather, new modes appearwithin the economy of existing modes, stimulating readjustments thatalter the relationships among technologies over time. One might objectthat this is not an explanation at all, but a means of hedging bets. Sinceno one can be sure about the fate of the book at this pointbecausedespite the existence of electronic media, the book stubbornly refuses todisappearit is best to allow for the continuing coexistence of competingtechnologies in any argument one makes.

Derridas discussion undercuts the notion of a break even moreradically, however. In the course of an intricate rereading of Paul de



Mans texts on Rousseaus 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 intoplay a language machine that works almost in the absence of the subject.The confession and the excuse are linguistic structures that can bemobilized in any circumstance, at the moment of any event. They workby themselves, one might say, like wind-up toys:

The work works . . . all by itself, almost like a machine, virtually, andthus without the intervention of the author, as if, contrary to what isoften believed, there existed between grace and machine, betweenthe heart and the automaticity of the marionette, an invincible affinity,as if the excuse machine ran on its own, suddenly like a writingmachine and, as such, like a machine that renders one innocent. (51;my emphasis)

The choice of the noun machine is strategic to Derridas argument. Arevarious modern incarnations of writing machines (typewriter, wordprocessor) any more machines than the speech acts of the confession andthe excuse at the disposition of man ever since he began speaking? I cannotdetail Derridas argument here, but Papier machine constantly worksagainst the notion that the history of technology is a history of radicalbreaks. The roles that modern machines play are an extension of theprosthetic nature of man from the beginning. It follows that Derridarefuses to accept the Heideggerian argument about the difference betweenwriting with the hand and writing with a machine: When one writesby hand, one is not on the eve of technology, instrumentality is alreadypresent in the form of uniform reproduction, of mechanical iteration. It isthus not legitimate to oppose manual writing to mechanical writing,the one being a pre-technological artisanship while the other is fullytechnological. Moreover, so-called mechanical writing is itself alsomanual (152).6

The machine of communication has existed since language hasexisted. Moreover, it has been a theme of Derridas writing ever since hebegan arguing that the notion of writing undoes the metaphysicalstructure of presence: But I never concealed the fact that, like everyceremonial act, [writing] must contain repetition and thus some kind ofmechanization. This theater of the prosthesis and the graft quickly becameone of my themes (153). The question for a history of technology, then,becomes a question of whether modern recording devices introduce aqualitative break, or, alternately, simply exacerbate an existing tendencyin a modified economy. When Kittler states that writing without a subjectis a product of the invention of the phonograph and that it is no longer

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necessary to assign an author to every trace, he is, in fact, playing anambiguous game with Derridean terminology. The term trace, whichhas been at the heart of Derridas philosophical work at least since De lagrammatologie, is used in this instance precisely in a way that Derridawould refusefor the very reason suggested by the presentation of acertain kind of writing as a machine in Papier machine. The trace in Derridasthought has never been authored; it has always been impersonal in thesense that it is an inevitable part of the functioning of language,automatically produced at the moment of the coming into language ofany speaking subject. This means fundamentally that the notion of theevent and of the archive (in the form of the always already existence ofthe trace) are locked in a ballet, in a circular movement of back and forththat makes the event dependent on the archive and vice-versa: Doomedto the virtuality of the sooner or later, the archive produces the eventjust as much as it records it or consigns it (68). In other words, there areevents only because there are archives of those events (and vice versa),and, moreover, the archive is directly related to the trace, is perhaps thetrace itself. Thus the archive is necessarily infinite. It is not infinite nowsimply because contemporary technologies make us dream of recordingeverything, but because events are always already available only in theform of an archivea trace that is constitutive of the event. Only politicalor institutional power can mobilize the authority to carve off finite partsof that infinity and transform them into collections that may or may notbe open to consultation: The archive is always the figure of a place andan authority or power (68). A history of technology that revels in themarvels of recording devices and media revolutions risks failing torecognize certain underlying tendencies not simply produced by a givenstage of technology, but present in language itself. In the end, then, itwould not have made a significant difference if Freud had used email ora phone card: the problem of the archive would have arisen nonetheless,in one sempiternal form or another.

David F. BellDuke University

Notes

1. Archives of evil is the translation of archives du mal. One cannot bring over intoEnglish the word play on the essays title, mal darchive, contained in this expres-sion. I would also remind the reader that the pagination for this quotation refers to thePrire dinsrer, four pages inserted into the original edition of the essay, but notbound with it.



Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Freud et la scne de lcriture. Lcriture et la diffrence. Paris: ditionsdu Seuil, 1967. 293-340.

. Mal darchive: une impression freudienne. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.. Papier machine: Le ruban de machine crire et autres rponses. Paris: Galile, 2001.Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. chographies de la tlvision (avec B. Stiegler).

Paris: Galile, 1996.Ferro, Marc. Cinma et histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.Freud, Sigmund. A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad. Standard Edition. London: Hogarth

Press, 1953-74. 19:230-?.Les ditions Gallimard. 28/7/2004 .LInathque de France. 24/8/2004 .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 cinma et la question du mal-tre.

Paris: Galile, 2001.Virilio, Paul. LArt du moteur. Paris: Galile, 1993.

2. Facilitation (frayage in French) is the translation of Freuds term Bahnung, the processof creating and strengthening connections by repetition.

3. As things presently stand, the Bibliothque nationale de France and the Ministry of theInterior archive printed materials, the Centre national de la cinmatographie archivescinema materials, and the Institut national de laudiovisuel archives broadcast materi-als. The INA came into existence as an entity in 1975 as a result of the application ofthe 1974 audiovisual reform law, passed after the fallout of the events of May 1968had provoked a crisis in French television.

4. Nearly two decades earlier, Marc Ferro, in essays later collected in Cinma et histoire,had spoken of the refusal of historians to consider cinema materials as serious archi-val sources, in part because the question of authorship and copyright of cinemamaterials was so ambiguous and difficult to resolve. One could consider that the 1992copyright law was in part a response to this problem. What is officially copyrightedand officially archived by the state becomes fair game for the historian.

5. Compare with Kittler, who quotes from Salomo Friedlaender: All that happens fallsinto accidental, unintentional receivers. It is stored, photographed, and phonographedby nature itself (70).

6. Kittler is suspicious as well of the Heideggerian distinction, treating it as an ideologythat governs a certain historical moment, but, nonetheless, an ideology to be un-packed. See his Discourse Networks.

bell david 2004 infinite archives

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