1 INTRODUCTION The Past, the TRC and the Archive as Depository of Memory Brent Harris At a lecture presented in London on June 5, 1994, Jacques Derrida discussed the complexities of the meaning of the archive. He described the duality in meaning of the word archive ─ in terms of temporality and spatiality ─ as a place of «commencement» and as the place «where men and gods command» or the «place from which order is given».1 As the place of commencement, «there where things commence»,2 the archive is more ambivalent. It houses, what could best be described as ‘traces’3 of particular objects of the past in the form of documents. These documents were produced in the past and are subjective constructions with their own histories of negotiations and contestations. As such, the archive represents the end of instability, or the outcome of negotiations and contestations over knowledge. Yet as sources of evidence the archive also represents the moment of ending instability, of creating stasis and the fixing of meaning and knowledge. The archive has long been the hallmark for, and of, the production of history, particularly in the academy. Students of history have been taught that to do research, they have to go to the archive to ‘read’ the primary sources located there. The process, in historical research, of discovering new areas of research had tended to close the past contained in the archive. For decades most 1Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1996, p. 1. Emphasis in original. 2Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 1. Emphasis in original. 3The term ‘traces’ is taken from Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History, Routledge, London, 1991 and is preferred to terms such as ‘information’ or ‘evidence’ as these refer to objectivist claims and deny the subjective construction of ‘information’ and ‘evidence’. My usage of the term ‘evidence’ elsewhere in this paper should be read as an echoing of objective claims that the 2 researchers were not inclined to go back to the documents that preceding researchers had consulted, privileging not only the previous researchers’ first discovery of the documents but also their interpretations. This was partially due to the treatment of history as a science and the related assumption that research could, and that it should, be done objectively. In this event, the documents housed in the archive were taken to be neutral, and able to speak the truth. Hence, they were thought of as representing windows on the past. These assumptions have been challenged for some time now and have been dismissed in some quarters.4 It is more prevalent nowadays for subsequent researchers to go back to the archive to reread the documents that previous researchers had read. Through these practices, the past, as contained in the archive, is typically revisited, reread, reappraised, reinterpreted, revised and rewritten. In this regard, the archive does become the place from which the past commences. However, these commencements are restricted as the past contained in the archive is not complete. The archive can only hold some traces of some aspects of the past. Furthermore, the archive is itself an interpretation that influences future interpretations. From its establishment, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was seemingly presented in opposition to the Derridian sense of the archive as the place of ‘commencement’. Instead, the TRC presented itself, and was presented as «shutting the book on the country’s past», of coming to «terms with our dark past once and for all» and of closing «a horrendous chapter in the life of our nation».5 In the discursive statements of various members and components of paper is criticising. 4See, for example, Hayden White’s ‘The Burden of History’, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1985, pp. 27-50. 5Final Clause of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act, No 200 of 1993 quoted by Dullah Omar in The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Justice in Transition, Cape Times, c1996, p. 2; and Desmond Tutu quoted in ‘Commission «must heal nation»: True reconciliation main aim, says Tutu in first address’, Weekend Argus, Sunday, December 16/17, 3 the TRC and its public representations in the media, the TRC often referred to its role as that of ‘uncovering’ and ‘unearthing’ the past, with its functions of exhumation, identification and reburial, rather than revisiting and reinterpreting the past. Furthermore, with the TRC’s function of assembling an archive, it could be seen to represent the fixing of knowledge, the ending the instability of the meanings and the contestations over the truth of the past. The second implication that Derrida identifies in the name of the archive is more closely related to the production of knowledge. In his lecture Derrida alludes to the role of the superior magistrates or the archons in ancient Greece. «[T]he archons», Derrida says, [...] were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law. On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is their home, in that place which is their home [...] that official documents are filed. The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only ensure the physic security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They also accord the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law. [...]6 The notion of the archon is extremely useful in thinking about the TRC for, like the archons of ancient Greece, the TRC was also, simultaneously, the guardian and the interpreter of the archive. However, the TRC was the guardian of the archive not in the sense of protecting what was deposited with them, but in the sense of ensuring the gathering, institutionalization and preservation of evidence of the past. The TRC also claimed the ‘publicly recognized authority’ and the power to ‘interpret’ the archive that it had been entrusted to establish. It claimed this authority on the basis of representing and being representative of the ‘new’ nation. Indeed, as a 1995. Emphasis added. 6Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 2. Emphasis in original. 4 governmental commission, established by parliamentary decree and enshrined in the state’s legislature, the TRC was vested with official authority. The TRC used this authority to interpret the archive that it had been entrusted to assemble. It permitted the past to speak, and called on the past to be spoken, by inviting the nation to recall and recollect the past at the TRC’s public hearings. In this way, the TRC recalled and imposed a history that became an absolute rather than a possible history. Here a tension existed in the work of the TRC: the commission was established through the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act to ‘uncover’ «as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights» that occurred during the last three and a half decades of the apartheid era in South Africa.7 Yet it created the impression that, through its work, the past can be known ‘once and for all’. This impression was reinforced by the institutional nature of the TRC, as a parliamentary commission, by the TRC’s public hearings at which the past was presented to, and for, the nation, and by the TRC’s function of gathering evidence of the past for an archive.8 In this sense the work of the TRC was self-referential: the TRC archived the evidence it required to support the history that it produced and, by archiving its evidence, it ensured the veracity of that history and created the impression that that history is real because it is based on real evidence. The process of archiving evidence, of gathering information together for an archive, Derrida suggests, is associated with «the function of unification, of identification, of classification». This 7Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No 35 of 1995, 3(1)(a). Hereafter, Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No 35 of 1995, cited as Ponura. 8The latter, Archbishop Tutu described «from a research point of view», as the TRC’s «greatest legacy». It would, he suggests, be of «great value» to those «researching our history for decades to come». See ‘Chairperson’s Forward’,Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, October 1998, Vol 1, Ch 1, pp. 1-2. Hereafter, Truth and Reconciliation 5 process, he adds, «must be paired with ... the power of consignation.»9 For Derrida, consignation refers to two related processes: one is the «act of consigning through gathering together signs» and the other is the objective «to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all elements articulate the unity of the ideal configuration.»10 Thus, while the archive does not, and cannot, house a complete past, its consignation creates the illusion of being whole, an illusion that the archive fails to acknowledge. ‘Uncovering’ the Ethical Archive The TRC was established by governmental decree to fulfil particular, predefined objectives. As such, the government delineated, or at least presented the rudimentary framework by which the TRC would order the archive it was entrusted to consign. Here the TRC was assigned the task of ‘uncovering’ the past in order to provide [...] a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterized by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence for all South Africans [...]11 Through this phrase, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act which empowered the TRC, defined the commission as a vehicle for ‘bridging the divisions’ in South African society which had resulted in a legacy of human rights abuse.