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SubStance, Issue 105 (Volume 33, Number 3), 2004, pp. 148-161 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/sub.2004.0034
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David F. Bell
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David F. Bell
Jacques Derridas 1995 Mal darchive 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 Noras massive project, Lieux
de mmoire, 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 ditions Gallimard internet catalogue describes the project of Lieux
de mmoire 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, butbetween memory and historythe selective and scholarly
exploration of our collective legacy. (My translation here and
elsewhere unless otherwise noted.)
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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 Freuds 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 scne de lcriture, 335).2 Writing supplements perception
even 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 and
collected by the unconscious/conscious perception apparatus and
somehow systematized into recognizable experiences, which can be
rememberedthat 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
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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 whetheressentially 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 reproducingso-called live
memory prosthesessimulacra 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 darchive, 32; Derridas emphasis)
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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, Derridas passing remarks in Mal darchive on the
potential relation between psychoanalysis and the history of technologies
allude to something richer than what he addresses explicitly in Mal
darchive. 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 darchive 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
chographies de la Tlvision: Entretiens films, a videotaped conversation
that took place in 1993, published in transcribed form in 1996, the year
after the publication of Mal darchive. The reader should be reminded,
moreover, that the lecture from which the published essay Mal darchive
was derived was delivered in 1994, the year after the television interview
with Bernard Stiegler.
chographies is therefore an important text to consult in order to
broaden our perspective on archive technologies within Derridas work.
It is crucial to point out, moreover, that Bernard Stiegler, with whom
Derrida collaborated in chographies, should probably be considered
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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
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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.
Derridas 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 crire et autres rponses, a text that originated
in a colloquium presentation on the book at the Bibliothque 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 Derridas 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)
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2. Facilitation (frayage in French) is the translation of Freuds term Bahnung, the process
of creating and strengthening connections by repetition.
3. As things presently stand, the Bibliothque nationale de France and the Ministry of the
Interior archive printed materials, the Centre national de la cinmatographie archives
cinema materials, and the Institut national de laudiovisuel 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 Cinma 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 scne de lcriture. Lcriture et la diffrence. Paris: ditions
du 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 <http://www.gallimard.fr/>.
LInathque
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 cinma et la question du mal-tre.
Paris: Galile, 2001.
Virilio, Paul. LArt du moteur. Paris: Galile, 1993.