Traces and the Archive

The foundational theorists of this week’s readings, Freud and Foucault, provide alternative but compatible models for understanding what an archive is and how it functions. Freud explains how an individual’s perceptual system gathers sensory input and how permanent traces are laid in the mnemic systems that store/archive these memories. He likens this operation to what is called the mystic writing pad. I will date myself by saying a magic slate (wunderblock) was one of my favorite childhood toys. Its only disadvantage was that it didn’t last long. The point would break off of the wooden writing stylus, dead spots would develop on the writing surface or the sheet of gray plastic film under the transparent cover would rip- a metaphor for dementia-or the fragility of an ephemeral archive. According to Freud our mental apparatus is like a tabula rasa with unlimited receptive capacity and the ability to preserve permanent memory traces intact. The problem is we can alter our recollections of what has occurred and memories may not always be accessed either whole or in fragments.
Foucault complicates the traditional definition of an archive. Instead of defining it as a specific place (library, warehouse) or thing (document, evidence) for him it as a system that determines what can and cannot be said and how what IS said is transformed into statements and events that become a part of discourse. It as also a positive dimension, a plane, where transformations occur. He is not interested in historical truth but in uncovering the structures and rules that govern how discourses are constructed and how they are dispersed through time. Freud’s focus is the individual Foucault’s is societal and systemic.
Agamben returns the individual (the speaking subject) to the center of a Foucauldian discussion by introducing the testimony of a witness. He sees it as the relationship between the possibility of speech and its actual occurrence giving voice to those for whom speech is impossible.
The artists show the influence of Freudian and Foucauldian theories in life and in art. I found these accounts to be interesting and instructive. Merewether groups them into those that resonate with Freud (Boltanski, Kabakov in counterpoint to Warhol, and Hiller) and those that align with Foucault (Green). It is pathetic that we have lost the boundary between spaces of garbage and non-garbage (my house will attest to this) and ennobling that humans try desperately to leave some tangible trace that would prevent death from erasing evidence of their/our existence. I identified with Hiller’s attempts to create interventions by finding connections between cast-off objects that resonated with her personally and more universal concepts. Her example of dealing with her feelings about sexual insult by placing cow creamers and a photo of a cowgirl toting a phallic pistol within a vitrine in Freud’s house was intriguing. For me, it is the artists accounts that flesh out the theory and make it real and relevant. They create traces in an archive of a 20th c. discourse.