The photograph as document, as objective and rational witness, is the apparatus of the archive, the means by which the epistemological completeness and finitude of the museum with walls is created. And yet these photographs (which we can only imagine through the witness’s ekphrasis), with their peculiar magenta and green colors, their floating surreal imagery, are more like the art photograph than the documentary record, for they seem to capture a fugitive dream or hallucination rather than a material truth. “The dream can thus be thought of as a repair, or darn, to the ego,” Milne (2004, 143) writes, “producing ‘wrinkles’ in reality around the repair.” “Such motifs,” she continues, “acknowledge a fundamental principle in the construction of dreams and visions. When the ego undergoes a hiatus, the virtual experience is remembered in a fragmentary or partial way. There is no such thing as a ‘whole’ dream.” Nor is there, of course, such a thing as a whole archive, though wholeness, coherence, and logic are among its aspirations.
What intrigues me about this particular archive is the sound that it generates, the trembling waves of disturbance that it produces in the air or that vibrate against the walls of the exhibition space by which it is contained. Like the otherworldly beam of light, the alien being, or queer changes to the atmosphere, sound defies the thingness of things, the material weight bearing down upon the library shelf. It hovers. It echoes. It eludes capture. Although the wax or vinyl record, the reel‐to‐reel tape, the 8‐track tape or the cassette, and the CD can be catalogued and filed there, these media are mute substrates for something livelier and more vibrant.
The sound itself must be brought out of and magically elicited from these otherwise inert objects; it can only exist in the present moment of its playing, and thus it maintains what I have described elsewhere as an ontological nowness (Blocker 2015). Contrast this with the photograph, which, even as it points urgently to its referent, even as it declares the presence of what stands before the lens, is a form of entombment. Photography, as Barthes (1980, 14) remarks, is an art of embalming, of preserving things in a state of death. By contrast, the ontology of recorded sound, as Salomé Voegelin (2010, 169) observes, “is its immediate sensibility: unordered and purposeless, always now.” Sound, resonating with the disarrangement of the archive, respects neither its temporality (its devotion to what is past) nor its borders. While sound might be complexly harmonic or cacophonous, it does not lend itself easily to the archive’s vertical spatial orientation, its protracted accrual. While it may be muffled or silenced, it cannot really be buried, since to be buried is to be kept still. Even as it vibrates against the archive’s walls and is, in a sense, made audible by them, sound seeps outward (or inward) as far as the force of the wave will carry it.
“At 3 p.m. on November 18, 1957,” a witness from England explains, “I suddenly sensed an oppressiveness, a heavy atmosphere like before a thunderstorm. I saw a being—a man—materialize with a whistling noise near our fireplace … He said he had come from a world of peace and harmony in a space ship shaped like a saucer. I saw a picture of this in my mind as clearly as anything. Then somehow he was gone” (Hiller 2000, 56). The extraterrestrial magically enters the domestic space as a sound, as a whistle, as a curious noise from outside (a sound that produces a picture in the mind). It occupies the hearth, the very center and origin of the archive itself. “The meaning of ‘archive,’” Derrida (1998, 2) explains, “its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek archeion: initially a house, a domicile, an address.” The uncanny shock produced by this being’s ease of movement, by its having entered the interior, private space of the home without warning, and then by its inexplicable disappearance from that space is the realization that the walls’ impenetrability is an illusion.
And here we arrive at the elusive and deeply ironic nature of the archive. For all its crushing weight, overwhelming accrual, and disorienting materiality, the archive is constituted by the fleeting; for it is what escapes it that is its impetus. Loss is the object of its obsessive fear and dictates its fundamental logic. In Susan Hiller’s work, we experience this point physically, performatively. As we stand among the dangle of wires, we cannot explain how the voice itself both is and is not a human presence. The Australian woman is not actually there, and yet we hear her voice as though she were. Mechanically rendered, these voices, these witnesses to strange phenomena, themselves eerily become humanoid extraterrestrial beings to which we vainly testify. The archive, then, is the means by which the fugitive is given momentary form. Exactly how this happens is difficult to describe, because it is a phenomenon that occurs at the border where the material and immaterial (what sinks down down down down down with gravity and what rises up like air) meet and become confused, in playful irony. As Steedman (2002, 160) remarks in a chapter on the topic, dust “is first solid matter, but comes to be so pulverized or comminuted as to make it able to rise in a cloud.”
With the image of the cloud we come to the only conclusion one can bring to the archive. For, if you came here looking for order and origin, if you meant to get to the bottom of things, you will be disappointed. You will find the world upside down and inside out. When it comes to the archive, there is no bottom (no stable truth to take home in your pocket, no evidence to cite, no inaugural moment at the start of time). The line I drew around the archive, the better to see its contours, its inside, was, I warned you, made only of dust, and that has since been kicked up in a cloud of obscurity. To put it another way, you have been peering through the window of my essay, so to speak, browsing through the oddments I’ve collected here (Sebald’s squirrel and Hiller’s Freudian artifacts, Malraux’s pile of photographs and Crimp’s museum in ruins, the elusive Gradiva and the UFO) trying to make sense of it all. In your efforts to interpret these things and give them order, you discover that the window through which you have been staring is also a mirror in which you and your own mind are made the object of another’s grid and someone else’s glance.
References
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