Media Studies: Archives & Repertoires Mariam Ghani / Spring 2016 COURSE READER • Michel Foucault, “The historical a priori and the archive” from The Archeology of Knowledge (1971) • Giorgio Agamben, “The Archive and Testimony” from Remnants of Auschwitz (1989) • Giorgio Agamben, “The Witness” from Remnants of Auschwitz (1989) • Mariam Ghani, “Field notes for 'What we left unfnished': The Artist and the Archive” (Ibraaz, 2014) * recommended • Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” (Diacritics, 1995) • Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive” (October, 1986) • Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1937) • Alan Sekula, “Reading an Archive” from The Photography Reader (1983) *recommended • Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse” (October, 2007) *recommended • Okwui Enwezor, “Archive Fever: Photography Between History & the Monument” (2007) * recommended • Matthew Reason, “Archive or Memory? The Detritus of Live Performance” (New Theatre Quarterly, 2003) • Xavier LeRoy, “500 Words” (Artforum, 2014) • “Bird of a Feather: Jennifer Monson's Live Dancing Archive” (Brooklyn Rail, 2014) • Gia Kourlas, “Q&A with Sarah Michelson” (Time Out NY, 2014) • Gillian Young, “Trusting Clifford Owens: Anthology at MoMA/PS1” (E-misférica, 2012) • “The Body as Object of Interference: Q&A with Jeff Kolar” (Rhizome, 2014) *rec • Anthology roundtable from the Radical Presence catalogue (2015) *rec • Pad.ma, “10 Theses on the Archive” (2010) • Ann Cvetkovich, “The Queer Art of the Counter-Archive” from Cruising the Archive (2014) • Diana Taylor, “Performance and/as History” (T:DR, 2006) • Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” (e-fux journal, 2009) • Hito Steyerl, “Politics of the archive: translations in flm” (Transversal, 2008) • Paul Soulellis, “Digital Publishing, Unzipped” (Rhizome, 2015) • Ben Lerner, “The Custodians” (The New Yorker, 2016) • MoMA Inside/Out, Media Conservation series http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/category/media-conservation • Mariam Ghani, “Divining the Question: An Unscientific Methodology for the Collection of Warm Data” (Viralnet, 2006) • Akram Zaatari, “Photography as Apparatus” (Ibraaz, 2013) *recommended • Diana Taylor, “Save As” (E-misférica, 2012) *recommended RESOURCES E-Misférica 9.1-9.2, On the Subject of Archives http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-91/hirschtaylor Essays and artist projects about archives in transit in the Americas (2012) Ibraaz Platform 006, Archival Dissonance http://www.ibraaz.org/platforms/6 Essays and artist projects about the role of the archive in constructing visual culture and historical narratives in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (2013-14) Radical Archives http://www.nyu-apastudies.org/2012/radical-archives-resources Video & audio recordings, PDF program, Storify & photos from the international conference at NYU (2014), which brought together archivists, activists, artists, and theorists. See also radicalarchives.net Approaches to the Archive: Fictional Histories? Essays on the positions of archival artworks in museums (2013) http://post.at.moma.org/themes/6-approaches-to-the-archive-fctional-histories The Archival Impulse: Collecting and Conserving the Moving Image in Asia Videos from the 2015 conference at MoMA http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/705-the-archival-impulse-collecting-and-conserving-the- moving-image-in-asia Time-Based Media Conservation Templates and notes from the Guggenheim's pioneering work in the feld http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/conservation/time-based-media THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE &: THE DISCOURSE ON LANGUAGE excerpts from MICHEL FOUCAULT THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE DISCOURSE ON LANGUAGE published in 1971 THE HISTORICAL A PRIORI AND THE ARCHIVE The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which deter­ mines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amor­ phous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities; that which determines that they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale. The archive is not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards the event of the statement, and preserves, for future memories, its status as an escapee; it is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability.Nor is the archive that which collects the dust of statements that have become inert once more, and which may make possible the miracle of their resurrection; it is that which defmes the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the system of itsfunctioning. Far from being that which unifies everything that has been said in the great confused murmur of a discourse, far from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differ­ entiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration. 129 THE STATEMENT AND THE ARCHIVE Between the language (langue) that defines the system of constructing possible sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words that are spoken, the archive defmes a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated. It does not have the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of all libraries, outside time and place; nor is it the welcoming oblivion that opens up to all new speech the operational fieldof its fr eedom; between tradition and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the fo rmation and transformation of statements. It is obvious that the archive of a society, a culture, or a civilization cannot be described exhaustively; or even, no doubt, the archive of a whole period. On the other hand, it is not possible fo r us to describe our own archive, since it is fr om within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say - and to itself, the object of our dis­ course - its modes of appearance, its fo rms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance. The archive cannot be described in its totality; and in its presence it is unavoidable. It emerges in fr agments, regions, and levels, more fully, no doubt, and with greater sharpness, the greater the time that separates us fr om it: at most, were it not fo r the rarity of the documents, the greater chronological distance would be necessary to analyse it. And yet could this description of the archive be justified, could it elucidate that which makes it possible. map out the place where it speaks, control its rights and duties, test and develop its concepts - at least at this stage of the search, when it can define its possibilities only in the moment of their realization - if it persisted in describing only the most distant horizons? Should it not approach as close as possible to the positivity that governs it and the archive system that makes it possible today to speak of the archive in general? Should it not illuminate, if only in an oblique way, that enunciative field of which it is itselfa part? The analysis ofthe archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and different fr om our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which in­ dicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us. The description of the archive deploys its possibilities (and the mastery of its possibilities) on the basis of the very discourses that have just ceased to be ours; its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us fr om what we can no longer say, and fr om that which fa lls 130 THE HISTORICAL A PRIORI AND THE ARCHIVE outside our discursive practice; it begins with the outside of our own language (langage); its locus is the gap between our own discursive practices. In this sense, it is valid fo r our diagnosis. Not because it would enable us to draw up a table of our distinctive fe atures, and to sketch out in advance the fa ce that we will have in the fu ture. But it deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history; it breaks the thread of transcendental teleologies; and where anthropological thought once questioned man's being or subjectivity, it now bursts open the other, and the outside. In this sense, the diagnosis does not establish the fa ct of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, fa r fr om being the fo rgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make. The never completed, never wholly achieved uncovering of the archive formsthe general horizon to which the description of discursive fo rmations, the analysis of positivities, the mapping of the enunciative field belong. The right of words - which is not that of the philologists - authorizes, therefore, the use of the term archaeology to describe all these searches. This term does not imply the search fo r a beginning; it does not relate analysis to geological excavation.