Un/archive

As the “archival impulse” is gaining ground both in performance and in everyday life, my proposal is to queer this headlong anticipated voyage into futurity. On the one hand, the political and cultural notion of the archive has been often deconstructed in critical theory (“an archive of process rather than of product”, cf. Cook 1997 in the journal Archivaria). Yet, the reflexivity of the archive as another site of performance can lead to contradictory effects, such as the belief in its cumulative inclusiveness, the imperative to memorialize, the re-enactment of its irresistible opportunities, in short, its inevitability. Enhanced by digitalization, the archival impulse returns to us as an endless promise, often supported by the technological availability of the media of reproduction. This compulsion to externalise our memory in the hope of making it permanent may be read as the operation of the death drive of an entire (Western, or becoming-Western) culture, a monumentalization already haunted by the dèja vu of its passing away. It is in/through the very act of archiving our passing moments that we realise that we shall certainly be forgotten. Against its own evidence, then, the drive to record is the opposite of staving off loss. It is an act of self-mourning while still ostensibly living: a figuration of ourselves as already dead and gone. Un/archiving the archive means resisting the urge to archive something, testifying the unseverable threads of our affective bond to an event. Un/archiving the archive means developing the undoing that is the unacknowledged core of every archive. Seem from the point of view of un/archive an archive is first of all the trace of our desire to archive, the only thing worth preserving. This is why instead of a positive view of the archive I will propose a negative one, a symptomatic rather than a referential one. I will do this by reviewing some instances of “negativity” advanced by queer theorists such as Lee Edelman and Peggy Phelan. Such a negative ontology may be better able to speak to the “future present” (Pinsky) to which un/archive aspires: un/archive as unasked-for and unanticipated “gift”, that which interrupts the economy of exchange, a meeting with otherness. A thin line of uncertain and unofficial visual “records” will provide un/archival evidence to my writing. Some of them are taken from the spectatorial archives of Doris Salcedo’s performative installation Shibboleth at Tate Modern, London 2007. Others come from my own archival impulse, at the edges between performance documentation and self-documentation. Inspired by hours of watching video records of performances I have never seen and by hours of recording performances I will never see again, my own un/archive neither resists documentation in the name of the purity of event, nor heralds a new democratic age of file-sharing and digital circulation in which the event is infinitely and collectively “saved”.