Fictions of the archive

Abstract

1. Museums, archives, and libraries are often invoked collectively but less often comparatively theorized. Some notable exceptions are: A. Blair and J. Milligan, “Introduction,” Archival Science 7 (2007): 292–94; A. Walsham, “The Social History of the Archive: RecordKeeping in Early Modern Europe,” Past & Present 230, suppl. 11 (2016): 30–35. These articles preface two journal special issues on the history of archives, edited by the articles’ authors. See also the introductory essays for two further such special issues: A. Blair, “Introduction,” Archival Science 10 (2010): 195–200; F. de Vivo and M. P. Donato, “Scholarly Practices in the Archives, 1500–1800,” Storia della Storiografia 68 (2015): 15–20. There are also several excellent individual studies in all four issues. 2. D. Preziosi, “Collecting/Museums,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 2003), 407–8. See also especially S. Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France How does an archive transform an object? Everything in an archive is an object; even preserved digital codes have a physical existence. Charters, seals, rolls, registers: all of these have a material and formal character that is critical to their meaning. The objects I have in mind here, however, are of a particular kind: those without writing, not created as records, but that have somehow found their way into the archives. While medieval rulers kept some documents in their treasuries, modern states conversely sometimes keep paintings, sculpture, jewelry, and textiles in their archives. My purpose here is, first, to consider the effect of this archival incorporation on the “unwritten object.” What happens, conceptually, to nontextual objects integrated into an archive’s ostensibly textual environment? Second, it is to consider the effect of such unwritten objects on an archive. What part do they play in the archive as a representational whole (and, hence, in its epistemic scheme)? The discussion that follows therefore involves both structural analysis of the archive as a functional context and the formal analysis of individual objects. I hope these two lines of inquiry will contribute to understanding how an object’s meaning can be constructed by different kinds of institutions, as well as how different kinds of objects affect the production of historical knowledge. Museums, of course, hold many objects like the ones I describe. Both museums and archives, and the ways their respective keepers have structured their contents, often figure in discussions of the construction of