Retracing the Effects of Archivization and Archiviolence

Moving beyond Hiroshima and the Holocaust, this week we see other examples of uses, abuses, reconstructions and reinterpretations of the archive from 1976-2006 taken from different parts of the world. Moving from the unspeakable and unimaginable to the curious and intriguing are: Kujundzic’s example of Yehiel Denur at the trial of Adolph Eichmann whose eloquence in his inability to testify to the unspeakable and unbearable experience of the Holocaust reiterated the dehumanizing reality of people reduced to numbers; Rosangel Renno’s monument to the dozens of workers who died in building Brasilia and who are buried in its foundations, “dismissed due to death;” the intriguing photos of the Arab Image Foundation that can be examined through the imagination of the observer and through the originally culturally biased (but ever changing) “keywords” used to classify these images in the archive; the identity of India and the Lebanese Civil War constituted by various discourses (including western and colonial views) and by different ways of constructing and interpreting information.

I thought a particularly poignant example was from the fictive archive of the Atlas Group in which a surveillance camera operator filmed the sunset over the Corniche in Beirut. He was dismissed but allowed to keep the footage of the sunsets. Merewether says these archival documents are really “hysterical symptoms” of cultural fantasies taken from collective memory. They question the facticity and historicity of the archive and push the limits of what can be thought and stated. This reminded me of a tension-filled German film, “The Lives of Others,” in which a highly placed surveillance operative in the East Germany Stasi (secret police) begins to identify with the writer who is the subject of his surveillance. He changes his archival reports and tampers with evidence to hide the fact that the writer smuggled a damaging article on repression in East Germany into the West for publication. The state authorities suspect the operator of sabotage and his career is ruined. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer reads his now public archive file and realizes what has transpired. What is truth and what is fiction? Who decides? Where is justice in a system that uses the archive and a system of surveillance to control people’s actions in order to ensure its own survival?

As Kujundzic asserts, archiviolence replicates itself throughout history and on the bodies of the people chosen by archivization. Walter Benjamin was right, even the dead are not safe when only the victors, those in power, have the right to tell the story. Again, Freud and Foucault are instructive in our investigations of retracings through the archive.