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Historical Archives, Events and FactsMichal KobialkaPublished online: 06 Aug 2014.

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Historical Archives, Events and Facts History Writing as Fragmentary Performance

Michal Kobialka

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 photo­graphs, 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 subter­ranean 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

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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 preserved­and 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,

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

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 investi­gation 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

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the combination of a group (the 'erudite'), a place (a 'library'), and a system of practices (of copying, printing, classification, etc.) that were a conse­quence of a technical system inaugurated in the West with the private collections assembled by

great patrons in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and England, who wanted to appropriate history for themselves.

Already in 1969 (English version 1972), Michel

Foucault had asserted in his Archaeology of

Knowledge that history,

in its traditional forms, undertook to 'memorize' the

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 accord­ance 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 posi­tivity of the archive,2 Jacques Derrida, in Archive

Fever ( 1998) begins at the level of logos, with the etymology of the word 'archive'. Thus:

Ark he, we recall, names the commencement and the com­mandment. 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

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and a localization' (2). Thus, Derrida is less inter­ested 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 discur­sively 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, Derrida warns us, the law's encounter with the text always holds a problem for translation, since 'archivable meaning is also and in advance codeter­mined 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 rela­tively 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 archive. De Certeau defined the archive as a place that is produced by an identifiable group sharing a specifiable practice for organizing the materials. 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 con­ceptualized the archive as the law of what can be said; the general system that describes the appear­ance 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 post­colonial 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 reexamin­ing 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.

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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 as made visible the events which were kept at bay by historical normative categories, there needed to be practice that would address the issue of the

arrangement, rather than the historicizing, of records. Historiography, that is a heterological, ethically responsible investigation of the arrange­ment of records or events, enters the stage of discourse. And to be more precise, spatial histori­ography - 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 margin­alized 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, intro­duces the possibility that, its singularity notwith­standing, 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 authori­ties 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 histo­riographic 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.

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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 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 elabo­rates 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 mirror, cut through the remnants of the meta­physics that have inhabited the structures of thought since the Enlightenment. The performa­tive 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 'Commit­ment' 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 post­modern ... 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, A gam 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 post­Einsteinian universe, historical events should be considered in terms of Einstein's famous dictum

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that, 'time and space are modes of thinking and not

the conditions by which to live' (in Forsee 1963: 81). Consequently, it is no longer a matter of determi­

nate forms, which would be defined by knowledge, or of constraining rules, which would be defined by the power of the absolute time and space, but a

matter of practices or modes of a perpetual movement of reorganization and realignment. If it is possible to fathom that history is a perpetual movement of reorganization and realignment, the

function of a historian is to move around the past and present rationalizations that established the 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 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

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 'Transform­ation 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 Fou­cauldian heterotopias of the unclassed and unclassi­fiable, all have been triumphantly penetrated and colonized, the authentic and the unsaid, in-vu, non­dit, 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 post­modern to a sensation is unequivocally demon­strated 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 historio­graphic 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:

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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

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 archi­tectural 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 space and absolute time. 2 It may be worth reminding that, for Foucault, the 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 intro­duces 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. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability. A space 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 1 988b: 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.

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The voids, cutting through the exhibition space, create an irregular and accentuated set of displacements and disconti­nuities. The unfolding of these displacements and discontinuities produces an experience of a space which no ocular vision can condense or comprehend- a space which cannot be organized 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 the design for the voids that seem to appear unexpectedly with a 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 the space corresponds to the relationship between the visible and the not-visible that must be brought to light; let us say, a history of what is and what is not remembered. However, that which is not-remembered will always remain sealed or not fully visible. Consequently, the history written in this space cannot be reconciled with that which has an assigned place. It will remain an open spatial narrative that cannot be laid to rest or molded by our desire for a nostalgic reconstruction of the past. This desire 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 trajec­tory 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, nonnarra­tive, 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 ofBaudrillard­ian ecstasy of communication and surface represen­tations.

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor (1978) 'Commitment', in Andrew

Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds) The Essential Frankfurt Srhool Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.

A gam ben, Giorgio ( 1993) Infamy and History, trans. Liz Heron, London: Verso.

-- (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Arrhive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books.

Barthes, Roland (1986) 'The Discourse of History', in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang.

Boxer, Sarah (2001) 'A Century's Photo History Destined for Life in a Mine', New York Times, 15 April, section 1, p. 15.

De Certeau, Michel (1988a) The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley, New York: Columbia University Press.

-- (1988b) The Practire of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Derrida, Jacques ( 1998) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: The Uni­versity of Chicago Press.

Forsee, A. (1963) Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physirist, New York: Macmillan.

Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books.

Jameson, Fredric (1998) 'Transformations of the Image,' in The Cultural Turn: Selated Writings on the Post­modern, 1983-98, New York: Verso.

Kobialka, Michal (2000) 'Of the Memory of a Human Unhoused in Being', Pe1formance Research 5 (3): 41-55.

Lyotard,Jean-Fran<;ois (1992) The Postmodern Explained, trans. Don Barry, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate, and Morgan Thomas; afterword by Wlad Godizch, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ranciere, Jacques (1994) The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy, Min­neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Spivak, Gayatri (1987) In Other Worlds, New York: Methuen.

Wheatcroft, Geoffrey (2001) 'Bearing False Witness', New York Times, Book Review Section, 13 May.

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