And yet the sigh and the voice, in their ethereal immateriality, seem to escape the archive, to reverberate against its heavy thingness and fade away. Resnais’s microphone, like his camera, is extraneous to the library, brought to it from outside, and the voice‐over emanating from it (as the word “over” implies) is laid on top of the image, exceeding its frame. The questions of the voice and of what the archive fails to contain are the object of my essay. In fact, I might as well tell you, what I hope to find at the bottom of the archive of quotations and ideas that I am collecting and piling up here is the problem of sound for the archive. Sound, I would suggest, to the degree that it responds to containment, resonates against walls, insists on and makes apprehensible the archive’s boundaries even as it fails to be contained by them. In this, sound perfectly performs and illustrates the archive’s peculiar subject–object relation. While sound resonates with the archive, animating the material structures (walls, panes of glass) that constitute its exterior, reverberating against the very thing that separates the subject from the object, it is also vibrant (vibrating) matter, leaking out and dying away. In Bennett’s sense, sound has a “tendency of its own” to trouble the archive’s thoroughly human work by escaping it.
We can think of the archive as an act of “putting into pastness,” of burying things in a sedimentary temporality so that linear time can be easily read (down down down down down) in the core sample. Sound, by contrast, even when it is captured and recorded, tends to resist the lure of pastness and the gravity of burial. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and there are layers that first must be worked through and sorted. There is also a fair amount of dust.
The dolorousness of the archive, the panic and fear it produces, derive not only from the material deluge—the mania that arises when one is faced with the question, “What shall be done with it all?”—but also from the fact that even the word “archive” (as Derrida famously explains), even the idea of the archive is itself an archive. “Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive,” Derrida urges. “But rather at the word ‘archive’—and with the archive of so familiar a word” (Derrida 1998, 1). The very word (dry as toast, dull as brown paper) is an archive, a bazaar of meanings and languages, histories of conquest and influence. Once opened by etymology, the dull word, like a cracked geode, sparkles and fascinates, shines brightly with the color of words in ancient Greek—like archeion, the town hall and house of higher magistrates—and Latin—like arca, the ark, the chest, the covenant. Thus, within the mise en abyme of “so familiar a word,” within the idea itself, is contained an archive of all possible archives: ice cores, fossils, sedimentary rock, bones, cemeteries, words and their etymologies, books, public records, files, magazines, newspapers, photographs, prints, maps, DNA, biological traits, garbage, memoirs, sound recordings, slides, digital files, dust, precipitation, sand, shells, taxidermy animals, relics, antiquities, documents, transcriptions, detritus, bodies of water, the ocean bed, works of art, collages, memorabilia, souvenirs, collections, manuscripts, wrinkles, scars, circumcisions, sacred scriptures, junk yards, garbage pits, the dead neatly laid in rows, memories, films, diaries, journals, scrapbooks, epigraphs, coins, shards and sherds, microfilm and microfiche, the vast digital online world, the entirety of the planet and all that has been saved and thrown off, piled up, arranged and ordered, kept and buried.
Even this word, “archive,” has a dizzying effect on account of its seemingly infinite connotations, which are only constrained by the grid‐making glance, the authority—Derrida traces it to the archons, the superior magistrates—who determines what is to be kept and what is to be discarded, and who thereby constructs an episteme, a treatise on the nature and limits of knowledge (Derrida 1998, 2, 37). “‘Archive,’” Steedman (2002, 6) remarks, “is thus inflated to mean—if not Everything—then at least, all the ways and means of state power; Power itself, perhaps, rather than those quietly folded and filed documents that we think provide the mere and incomplete records of some of its inaugural moments.” Indeed, as Derrida and Foucault both suggest, the archive, rather than being a mere repository, a place to which things are consigned (library, records office, museum, closet, shop, warehouse, box, etc.), is a logic, “a way of knowing,” a power that appraises and confers value, includes and excludes (Steedman 2002, 2).
“But where does the archive commence?” Derrida asks. “This question is the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others” (Derrida 1998, 8). As the omniscient voice‐over in Resnais’s film explains with respect to a single volume in the library’s collection, “[b]efore it was part of a universal, abstract, indifferent memory where all books were equal and together basked in attention as tenderly distant as that shown by God to men. Here it’s been picked out, preferred over others.” And Susan Stewart (1993, 155) remarks: “The collection is not constructed by its elements; rather, it comes to exist by means of its principle of organization.” The archive—the obscure ashes, the blinding snow, the invisible dust—is most clearly seen at its edges, limned by the logic of its ontology (the logic of its very being). To know it, then, we must discover its limit, draw a line (however illusory) in the dust.
Let us take for example the museum, the preeminent archive for art history and visual culture studies. André Malraux, the French novelist and art theorist, writes in his museological treatise: “For over a century our approach to art has been growing more and more intellectualized. The museum invites comparison of each of the expressions of the world it brings together, and forces us to question what it is that brings them together” (Malraux 1967, 10). Like Derrida, Malraux wonders aloud about where to locate the archive’s limit, posits the logic of the great European museums’ acts of inclusion and exclusion. Interestingly, he concludes that it is the thingness of artworks that permits or bars their entry into the grand temples of art, for it is their size that makes them transportable, their media that allow them to survive, their removability that makes them valuable spoils. Although the museum with walls prohibits the inclusion of items such as other architectural structures, large murals or stained glass, or things too fragile for transport, the museum without walls, that is, a vast and seemingly limitless collection of photographic reproductions, presents no such prohibitions. “A museum without walls has been opened to us,” Malraux marvels, “and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their walls” (12).
The art historian Peter Geimer explains Malraux’s assertion as an answer to the challenges created by the thingness of archived things when he writes: “The classical museum isolated works of art from their context while mostly leaving their physical integrity intact. The imaginary museum obliterates materiality. The work of art enters it as a flat piece of paper” (Geimer 2009, 81). One might counter that even a piece of paper is still fully material; but I take his point. The bronze statue? Paper. The vast cathedral? Paper. The Pollock painting? Paper. All the same size, all black and white, urging the viewer to discover the infinite rearrangements and juxtapositions made possible by their interchangeability, suggesting stylistic comparisons as though they were inevitable, and unifying everything under the banner of art (Figure 7.2). This, of course, was before the advent of the Internet, which has far exceeded, in terms of both its expansiveness and its immateriality, anything that Malraux might have dreamt of. Even so, Geimer (2009, 80) points out: “[Malraux’s] text is less a study of the changing technical vehicles of art history than an essay on its changing archives, of the way memory in art history is produced and organized.”
More inclusive or less, the museum as archive has for some time been the subject of intense analysis and critique within art history and visual cultural studies. Scholars have questioned its ideological structures (Duncan; see Duncan 1995), its role in colonialism and in the illegal trade in antiquities (Karp; see Karp and Lavine 1991, Karp et al. 1992), its racist exclusions and sexist erasures (González; see Gonzáles 2011), and its domesticating and homogenizing effects (Crimp). In particular the art historian Douglas