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Chapter 7 The Archive

Jane Blocker

Down. Down. Down. Down. Down. The archive produces a vertiginous spatial orientation, a relentless, suffocating, and overwhelming accrual that simultaneously requires and prevents searching; a memorialization that engulfs memory. Dominated by the habit of imbrication, the archive’s contents tend to pile and build up organically, like the iceberg’s layers of snow deeply falling year upon year, only to compress and crush under their own massive weight, or the strata of earth and stone deposited over millennia, or the mineral‐laden water that, drip by heavy drip, forms a stalactite. It beckons an archaeology, a digging that, layer upon layer, seeks order and origin—that which is imagined to lie at the bottom of things.

The archaeologist—or, more properly for our purposes, the historian—is the subject for whom the archive is an archive, and not simply an iceberg. “Order,” as theorist Michel Foucault (1970, xx) writes, “is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance.” By this he means that a requisite feature of the archive is the subject who stands outside it, who gives it order through her grid‐creating glance, gets to its bottom, and takes meaning from it (16). The historian believes fervently in the inner law of the archive’s contents, in the authenticity and evidentiary value of its accumulated things, in the self‐evident “pastness” exhibited in the patina of its material remains, in the inevitable linear chronology that these things manifest and into which they may be confidently placed.

And here we run almost immediately into confusion, the infinite regress of the archive, for the subject who, with his grid‐creating glance, takes in the archive’s contents is also himself a mass of material and psychological remains. Arrayed around the subject, the self, the most immediate archive is that of the mind—the junk heap of thoughts, sensations, memories, dreams and imaginings that we fundamentally are and that we attempt to interpret as though it were an obscure text composed by someone else. The respectable distance between the historian as subject and the object of her study, the past carefully arrayed before her, is an illusion. She comprises both the archive’s limit, that which stands outside looking in, and its ontological center, the consciousness around which it has come into being.

The German novelist W. G. Sebald illustrates this idea beautifully when the eponymous character of his book Austerlitz, a historian of architecture, stands gazing into a junk shop window in the Czech town where his mother had been interned during the Holocaust. “It was a long time before I could tear myself away from staring at the hundreds of different objects, my forehead pressed against the cold window, as if one of them or their relationship to each other must provide an unequivocal answer to the many questions I found it impossible to ask in my mind” (Sebald 2001, 195). The junk shop is, like the mind, a collection of overdetermined remnants, randomly ending up in the psyche, each a token of memory or trauma. Among the shop’s inventory (presumably the material remains of middle‐class Jewish lives destroyed by war), Sebald lists a white lace tablecloth, cut‐glass bowls, ceramic vases, earthenware jugs, a tin advertising sign, a box of seashells, globe‐shaped paperweights, a model ship, pale linens, a Russian officer’s uniform and cap, a fishing rod, a hunter’s bag, a Japanese fan, a painted lampshade, and a taxidermy squirrel (195–6). When Austerlitz describes “these ornaments, utensils, and mementoes” as “stranded in the Terezín bazaar, objects that for reasons one could never know had outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction,” he is describing both the material and psychological archive (197). For, upon seeing the stuffed squirrel, the Czech word veverka (squirrel) leaps to his mind—a word in a forgotten language from his obliterated childhood. With this revelation, the reader understands that the glass through which Austerlitz peers is as much a mirror as it is a window, that he himself is the consignment shop of the past. It is the subject who gives meaning to the word, just as he does to the strange object to which it is attached, in relation to the archive’s accumulated contents. The essayist and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (2001, 1) declares: “All psychoanalyses are about mess and meaning, and the link between them.”

Linking the dig, the archive, and the mind, Wilhelm Jensen’s messy novel Gradiva, published in 1902, about which Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida both write, describes a German archaeologist who is fixated on seeking the trace of a footstep in the ashes of Pompeii (Derrida 1998). The main character, Norbert Hanold, encounters a beautiful marble bas‐relief at a museum in Rome that depicts a young Greek maiden carved in profile, captured in midstride as she walks, her robes draped gracefully behind her. The inspiration for this fictional work of art is a real Roman stone relief copy of a fourth‐century Greek work showing the Horae—a work that is now in the collection of the Chiaramonti Museum in the Vatican. Naming the maiden Gradiva (the woman who walks), Hanold is captivated. He obtains a plaster cast of the sculpture as a token of his enchanting encounter and as a fetish of the elusive creature. Increasingly obsessed by the figure, who visits him in his dreams and fantasies, he goes to Pompeii to find her. There she appears to him, but he does not know whether she is real, a figment, or an apparition. Nearly mad with longing and uncertainty, he seeks some evidence of her, some material trace. The footprint is a figure for memory and desire; it is buried in layers of consciousness as obscure as ash, sifting down like dust, which makes it the perfect image of the psychoanalyst’s art.

The grid‐creating glance, the order‐imposing subject, the archaeologist, historian, or psychoanalyst who constitutes the archive’s exterior limit (and the interior logic around which it is arrayed) swoons at the abyss of its contents. Enormous rooms full of paper, mountains of waste and garbage, or fine layers of dust: the heavy thingness of the archive suffocates and threatens, making the topic ripe for affect theorists and new materialists (Appadurai 1986; Bennett 2010; Brown 2001; Massumi 2002, 2010). Such scholars attempt to understand what Martin Heidegger describes as the “thingness of things” and Jane Bennett famously calls the vibrancy, the vitality of matter. “By ‘vitality,’” she writes, “I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett 2010, viii; see also Heidegger 1967, 8). The matter in the archive, the stuff deposited there elicits illness and fever, produces fear and perverse forms of avarice.

One thinks of Charles Dickens’s Golden Dustman, Mr. Boffin, who delights in tales of great misers and whose vast “estate” consists of towering mounds of ash and broken crockery harvested and piled up from the grates and dustbins of London, which he strangely hoards like gold (Dickens 1998 [1865]). The poet Theodore Roethke (1975, 44) describes a more modern version of dust’s vitality in his short lyric poem “Dolor” where he writes: “I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,/ Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,/ Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,/ Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,/ Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.” Here the omnipresent and unceasing dust mortifies and slowly, silently buries its victims. As if disturbed by gazing at Man Ray’s eerie photograph Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Motes) from 1920, which records a year’s worth of dust accumulated on Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (Figure 7.1), historian Carolyn Steedman writes of her suffocating experience in the archive: “You think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in” (Steedman 2002, 19). The downward‐falling, ever‐accumulating dust attends the archive—coating every object, drifting over every artifact—and is itself an archive of pollen, dirt, and epithelial cells.

Figure 7.1 Man Ray, Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Motes), 1920.

No wonder the archive’s mood is haunting and fearful, like the panicked music Maurice Jarre composed for Alain Resnais’s 1956 quasi‐documentary Toute la mémoire du monde (All the World’s Memory). The short black‐and‐white film, shot at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, opens on piles of books, newspapers, magazines, manuscripts, and journals moldering in the library’s dimly lit attics and storage rooms. As the camera pans across and makes its way through these piles, as though it were backing slowly out of an asylum, a large rectangular microphone hung on a cord suddenly drops into view. “Faced by these bulging repositories,” a voice‐over (as though spoken into the microphone) remarks in French, “one fears being engulfed by this mass of words.” “I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,” Roethke (1975, 44) sighs. “Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,/ All the misery of manila folders and mucilage.”

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 Crimp, who sees the museum as dangerously ideological—an expression of conservative politics, neoliberal, bourgeois, and state values—is skeptical of the supposed freedom of a museum without walls. “Thanks to the rather specious unity imposed by photographic reproduction on a multiplicity of objects,” Crimp asserts,

ranging from the statue to the bas‐relief, from bas‐reliefs to seal‐impressions, and from these to plaques of the nomads, a “Babylonian style” seems to emerge as a real entity, not a mere classification—as something resembling, rather, the life‐story of a great creator. Nothing conveys more vividly and compellingly the notion of a destiny shaping human ends than do the great styles, whose evolutions and transformations seem like long scars that Fate has left, in passing, on the face of the earth. (Crimp 1993, 55)

Figure 7.2 Maurice Jarnoux, photograph of André Malraux with the photographic plates for The Museum without Walls, 1956.

In his trenchant critique, Crimp argues that the subject of the museum as archive does more than impose a grid or create a logic to govern its contents’ meaning and value; he does so and then pretends to find in the archive, as if by fate, what he had in the first instance placed there. In a strange form of Freud’s fort–da game, the subject tosses “style” into the museum and then exults when she pulls it back out again, as if discovering it for the first time.

In his effort to expose that charade, Crimp points to something that Malraux, it seems, did not expect to find in the archive. Even in the seeming infinitude of the museum without walls, Crimp tells us, there is a boundary, the outside edge formed by the difference between a photograph of a work of art and a photograph as a work of art. “Malraux makes a fatal error near the end of his Museum,” Crimp warns:

He admits within its pages the very thing that had constituted its homogeneity; that thing is, of course, photography. So long as photography was merely a vehicle by which art objects entered the imaginary museum, a certain coherence obtained. But once photography itself enters, an object among others, heterogeneity is reestablished at the heart of the museum; its pretentions to knowledge are doomed. For even photography cannot hypostatize style from a photograph. (Crimp 1993, 56)

The totalizing logic of Malraux’s archive is troubled by that which it cannot contain: the photograph cannot simultaneously be a reproduction, the copy or index of another thing (another work of art), and a thing (a work of art) in itself. Malraux’s museum without walls seems to provide direct evidence of Roland Barthes’s (1980, 15) ontological assertion: “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.” Crimp merely points to the museum’s blindness, or rather to the ways in which, with the introduction of the art photograph, it cannot stop seeing what it had previously ignored. And this in turn leads to a troubling question for the museum as archive. Do we prize the footprint in the dust as an index of its origin (the lovely foot of the once present Gradiva) because it precedes, and thus tacitly promises the longed‐for Gradiva, or because of the beauty and fragility of the trace itself?

The photograph (according to the logic of the art museum) cannot stand both outside, as the archive’s organizing gaze, a tool to pry up style from the smooth surfaces of artworks, and inside, as an aesthetic object to be contemplated, its own effects delaminated. As Geimer (2009, 89) explains, “Malraux reverses the causality that normally is attributed to originals and their copies. The photographic reproduction precedes its model. If we enter the walls of a chapel, the museum without walls is already there.” Malraux’s revolutionary idea is that the photographic copy supplants, precedes, the original; but that idea is thrown into question in the vertiginous presence of the art photograph. We might liken this uncanny effect to that which was produced when, at some point after 2009, Resnais’s film, which looks at and documents the Bibliothèque Nationale from a position outside it, was added to the library’s contents, filed as a film among its countless artifacts.

Despite the patenting of photographic technologies in the 1830s, US and European museums (with a few prominent exceptions, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) have been slow to see photography, to admit it as a kind of art, as a thing to be looked at and not simply looked through. The Museum of Modern Art in New York began collecting photographs in 1930, but did not establish a curatorial department in photography until 1940. The National Gallery in Washington had no such program until the 1980s, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had no curatorial department until 1992. Photography’s admission into the museum, through the front door rather than the servants’ entrance, disrupts the aura of art, an aura that Malraux’s museum was designed, according to Crimp, to drift over everything like dust.

Crimp points to the work of Robert Rauschenberg, who famously includes silkscreened photographs in his paintings, as an example of the “postmodernist gesture” that photography enables. “The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum, are undermined” (Crimp 1993, 58). Rauschenberg’s medium is the archive itself, the accumulation of photographs, postcards, calendar pages, newspaper clippings, bits of fabric and clothing, a disused tire, a taxidermy goat, pieces of wood, random sign letters, squeezed out paint tubes, a stuffed eagle, a blanket, pillows, and so on, down, down, down, down, down.

The museum, of course, does not sit idly by and allow its logic of valuation to be disturbed, so it must work to deny such threats and to invigorate the aura of photography (and, in turn, the other works of art that it domesticates) through appeals to the archive as public treasury, appeals that marshal the language of timeless masterworks and apolitical beauty (Crimp 1993, 60). Indeed, a key argument of Crimp’s book is that the museum’s rapacious ability discursively to absorb every object it collects and to launder those objects’ colonial, racist, neoliberal, military, and capitalist stains is potentially unbounded (or at least is imagined to be so). From his point of view, the museum as archive, to the degree that it aspires to a state of what we might call “everythingness,” comes to embody, in Steedman’s (2002, 6) words, “all the ways and means of state power.” The grid seems, threateningly, to expand infinitely in all directions, to spread to “all times, places, and cultures,” as Malraux himself said, like a virus (Geimer 2009, 82).

And yet the limit is a constitutive feature of the archive. Stewart (1984, 159) explains: “In the collection the threat of infinity is always met with the articulation of boundary.” Or, as Derrida (1998, 11) puts it more bluntly, “[n]o archive without outside.” The gesture indicating “this, but not that,” “in here, not out there” is essential. It performatively produces the material, aesthetic, and cultural value of the museum’s (the archive’s, the library’s) collected objects. This might explain Alain Resnais’s visual meditation on the architecture of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the vaulted ceiling and soaring cast iron columns of Henri Labrouste’s magical nineteenth‐century reading room, the exoskeleton of catwalks that offer fine views of the building’s domes and innovative fenestration, the beautiful stonework that decorates the façade. Through a series of exterior and interior shots, he effectively miniaturizes the library and its contents, as though looking at a lively organism or a tiny world through a microscope. From a high vantage, for example, he makes the teeming human population of the reading room appear as a colony of insects, each one of which, the voice‐over remarks, chews on its paper. As the omniscient gaze of the camera cranes back from this scene, the godlike voice declares: “Here we glimpse a future in whom all mysteries are solved. When this and other universes offer up their keys to us.” The universe of the library (or Borges’s universe as library), the universe of the archive, of human knowledge, finds its limit at the gaseous frontiers of other universes, borders marked by mystery and ignorance (Borges 1998, 112). It is at that frontier that Susan Hiller’s work lies.

Hiller, an American‐born artist living and working in the United Kingdom, is captivated by archives and, like Rauschenberg, is a creator for whom the archive is itself an artistic medium. Originally trained as an anthropologist, since her first exhibition in 1973 she has created multimedia works that comment on the epistemologies of the encyclopedia, the vitrine, the museum, the photographic collection, and the natural history display. The archive is prominently featured, for example, in her large installation work From the Freud Museum (1991–7), for which she collected curious objects (a Ouija board, glass vials filled with liquid and sealed in wax, small toys, masks, ceramic dolls’ heads, photographs, the hand of an automaton Gypsy fortuneteller, stone arrowheads, earth samples, bars of soap, string, paper puppets, etc.); then she ordered them in fifty tan archival cartons, “neat in their boxes,” and labeled them, thereby mimicking “the archiving techniques of the archaeological museum” (Robinson 2004, 99). They are arranged on shelves behind glass, with their lids open, so that their compartments, precisely fitted to the curious artifacts they contain, perform their work of preservation in a way that is, strangely, both clinical and loving (Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 Susan Hiller, From the Freud Museum. 1993.

This work, just like Derrida’s book on the archive, was inspired by the Freud Museum in Maresfield Gardens in London, where it was displayed in 1994. (This museum, by the way, is inspired by the character Hanold and contains a plaster copy of the Gradiva sculpture.) Hiller’s is a collection that contemplates Sigmund Freud as collector. In this grouping of carefully organized and preserved objects, which are at once random and without material value, “the theory of psychoanalysis,” Derrida (1998, 19) might suggest, “becomes a theory of the archive and not only a theory of memory.” In homage to Freud, the objects, texts, and images that Hiller gathered here become tokens of memory, yes, but also remnants of trauma, the material of dreams, fetishes for desire and fantasy.

The logic of their collection, the order of their presentation, the texts and labels that accompany them, all attempt historiographically to make sense of their non‐sense, to make meaning from their mess. “Let us note this at least on account of the archive,” Derrida (1998, 40) urges, “to recall that there could be no archiving without titles (hence without names and without the archontic principle of legitimization), without laws, without criteria of classification and of hierarchization, without order and without order, in the double sense of the word.” Taken together, these strange and estranging things are the oddments shaken up and tossed out by the archive of the mind.

Adam Phillips (2007, xi) asserts: “Psychoanalysis as a form of therapy works by attending to the patient’s side effects, what falls out of his pockets once he starts speaking.” In this lovely metaphor, Phillips links together the materiality and immateriality of psychoanalysis, the physical pathology tethered to the evanescence of memory, the things one carries around in the pockets of one’s mind made manifest in the elusive sound of the speaking voice. It is the hearer, the witness, or the analyst who finds and asserts a principle of organization on these sonic oddments, who converts the intangible sigh, stammer, or obscure tone into evidence and into a trace (as elusive as Gradiva) of the real.

Like Hiller’s earlier work, Witness (Hiller 2000) deploys the habits of the archive, but it also builds upon the fundamentally sonic nature of the psychoanalyst’s auditory art. It is here that sound simultaneously makes manifest and troubles the archive’s limit, the line that marks its outside. Susan Hiller collected hundreds of recordings of people from around the world who described encounters with UFOs and alien creatures. The audio sculpture consists of 400 small round speakers, each suspended—like the microphone in Resnais’s film—at different heights from cords attached to the ceiling in a circular pattern (Figure 7.4). Witness was first shown at an abandoned echoing chapel in London and then, in 2011, at the artist’s retrospective at Tate Britain. Participants initially experience the work as a dense forest of wires in a darkened room, eerily lit from above, from which emanates a low whispering—the murmur of human voices. The participant moves from one randomly chosen speaker to the next, putting each to her ear and listening to voices that describe an array of unnatural occurrences. Like the analysand, these 327 witnesses speaking in a variety of languages attempt, each, to give words to the terror, shock, rupture, beauty, and wonder produced by an inherently fugitive experience, an experience that, like a dream or a fantasy, is invariably puzzling to the dreamer and met with skepticism by the listener.

Hiller’s art installation exposes the archive’s hard edge; it draws attention to the place of its commencement. Ironically, however, by doing so, it also challenges that boundary, which circumscribes what is inside and protects the archive’s totalizing logic, its grandiose claims of containing, to borrow Resnais’s title, all the memory of the world. All the more permeable for its rigidity, the archive’s (the museum’s) walls vibrate with what passes easily through them, what they cannot contain. In the end, as Steedman (2002, 18) explains, “the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, constitute practically nothing at all.” The “practically nothing” that rains down like dust on the archive constitutes what she describes as “the everyday disappointments [a word that means disarrangement or mess] that historians know they will find there” (9). As for the archive, the disarrangement of what is material and immaterial, real and imagined, visual and auditory, present and absent, explicable and inexplicable is this artwork’s most compelling, one might say eerie, effect.

Figure 7.4 Susan Hiller, Witness, 2000.

An anonymous woman from Australia, for example, explains that she was cleaning her sitting room one day and “suddenly I felt quite ill and thought I was going to be sick, so I sat down on the sofa to see if the sick feeling would subside. I then saw that I was not alone: there were three strange little people standing alongside the sofa, just looking at me” (Hiller 2000, 16). Even as one bears auditory witness to this report, even as its details are strange and estranging, hearing this woman’s story through the small speaker held to one’s ear produces an uncanny telepathy. Listen to the woman’s voice (her Australian accent) and just try not to picture the little people, the sofa, the middle‐class sitting room. It is impossible. Although Hiller did not include any images in this work, no photographs or drawings, no pictures to accompany the stories, they exist nonetheless in the mind of the listener. “Storytelling,” Hiller insists, “is a compelling art form because we see pictures through the power of the voice” (73). The alien and fleeting pictures drawn by this witness in the mind of the listener (the strange little people standing alongside the sofa) and by the other witnesses whose recorded voices animate the work (the UFOs, flashing lights, objects hovering in mid‐air or streaking past at terrific speed, cigar‐shaped vessels, flying disks, little men with enormous eyes) come to the art participant’s mind unbidden, enter her consciousness unexpectedly, ethereally, as sound. The art theorist Louise Milne (2004, 145) suggests that “the occult is the proper home less for the UFO itself [rather] than for its missing explanation.” We have no more explanation for the UFO than we have for the voices’ and the stories’ unearthly power to conjure images of things that are not there.

Like the labels in From the Freud Museum, these witnesses attempt to make sense of what they have experienced, to order their memory (to organize and command it), to produce a narrative suture, as Milne explains it, that binds up the gaps in understanding. A commercial photographer from Japan describes what she discovered upon developing a roll of film that contained images of Mount Fuji she took in 1999:

When the roll of film was developed … I found images of two UFOs, at one time travelling side‐by‐side [sic]. The photos show a transparent magenta light that leaves a trail behind it. In one photo, there appears to be a powerful light source that emits a strange magenta/green energy field. Also, at some points, the flying objects appear to hover over Mount Fuji. I am a professional, free‐lance photographer specializing in portraits. I have been trying over and over again to find a rational explanation for these unusual photos, which I simply can’t understand. (Hiller 2000, 11)

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.

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