Literature in the New Archival Landscape

Abstract

Archiving has become an increasingly ubiquitous part of everyday life. Every e-mail we receive is instantaneously stored in the cloud, and every Google search we begin is autocompleted by an algorithm that draws on the archive of our past searches, clicks, messages, and purchases. The archive, in other words, not only stores the present even as it unfolds, it also actively produces the present and the future. Such ambient archiving is a far cry from the image we typically associate with archives: that of a stuffy, poorly lit room where our access to written or printed documents is carefully managed and often policed. By becoming part of everyday life, the archive has extended beyond its traditional institutions and users. As much as the shift from analogue to digital modes of registration is crucial in determining the archive’s expansion into the wider culture, recent changes to the archive have not only been technological, but also semantic. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, critical theory unmoored the traditional archive from its precise location and set it adrift with metaphorical meanings, making it both a “physical” and an “imaginative” site, a “conceptual space whose boundaries are forever changing” (Voss and Werner 1). The two unavoidable names in this context remain those of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida – even if, as the contributions to these two issues make clear, many other scholars have approached the archive in innovative and imaginative ways. A major part of Foucault’s work was based on actual archival research, but he also theorized the archive as something much more encompassing: as the epistemic infrastructure that allows statements to appear as singular events within a wider system of reference. This metaphorical archive, for Foucault, determines the truth value and the import of the statements that it allows. Derrida, for his part, situated the production of the archive in the psychic life of power: torn between a destructive deathdrive and a conservational drive linked to the pleasure principle, our “archive fever” manically records the present to salvage it for an insistent future. As