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| THE ARCHIVE |
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Technologies of Culture: The Archive
"Language is the archives of history."- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"'To read what was never written.' Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use. It seems fair to suppose that these were the stages by which the mimetic gift, which was once the foundation of occult practices, gained admittance to writing and language. In this way language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic."- Walter Benjamin
"Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning."- Richard Chevenix Trench
"Formless.- A dictionary would begin as of the moment when it no longer provided the meanings of the words but their tasks. In this way formless is not only an adjective having such and such a meaning, but a term serving to declassify, requiring in general that every thing should have a form. What it designates does not, in any sense whatever, possess rights, and everywhere gets crushed like a spider or an earthworm. For academics to be satisfied, it would be necessary, in effect, for the universe to take on a form. The whole of philosophy has no other aim; it is a question of fitting what exists into a frock coat, a mathematical frock-coat. To affirm on the contrary that the universe resembles nothing at all and is only formless, amounts to saying that the universe is something akin to a spider or a gob of spittle."- Georges Bataille
"Language is an archeological vehicle . . . the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history."- Russell Hoban
"We do not know all that well what we are, so much does our vocabulary define us, in the manner of a lasso firmly anchored from behind; but if it were possible for us to catch, be it only in snatches, the language that is yet to come, we would immediately become men of more than one country. This enterprise will appear foolhardy to some, but since it is by no means proven that that which must be does not already exist and that the division of time into past, present, and future is not due solely to our present incapacity to embrace everything in a single glance, the method we envisage is perhaps an expedient, a short cut, which will enable us to reach where other, more ambitious disciplines show themselves incapable of leading us." - Encyclpedia Da Costa, eds. Robert Lebel & Isabelle Waldberg
"Man alone has a language that is complete both in its universality and its intensiveness."- Walter Benjamin
"Methodical writing distracts me from the present condition of men. But the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all. I know of districts where the youth prostrate themselves before books and barbarously kiss the pages, though they do not know how to make out a single letter. Epidemics, heretical disagreements, the pilgrimages which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned the suicides, more frequent each year. Perhaps I am deceived by old age and fear, but I suspect that the human species- the unique human species- is on the road to extinction, while the Library will last on forever: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly immovable, filled with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret."- Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
"The development of museums has plainly surpassed even the most optimistic hopes of the founders. Not only does the totality of the world's museums today represent a colossal accumulation of riches, but, above all, the totality of visitors without any doubt represents the most grandiose spectacle of a humanity freed from material cares and dedicated to contemplation."- Georges Bataille
"The never completed, never wholly achieved uncovering of the archive forms the general horizon to which the description of discursive formations, the analysis of positivities, the mapping of the enunciative field belong. The right of words- which is not that of the philologists- authorizes, therefore, the use of the term archaeology to describe all these searches. This term does not imply the search for a beginning; it does not relate analysis to geological excavation. It designates the general theme of a description that questions the already-said at the level of its existence: of the enunciative function that operates within it, of the discursive formation, and the general archive system to which it belongs. Archaeology describes discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive."- Michel Foucault
"Graphology has taught us to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer conceals in it. It may be supposed that the mimetic process that expresses itself in this way in the activity of the writer was, in the very distant times in which script originated, of utmost importance for writing. Script has thus become, like language, an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences."- Walter Benjamin
"The topology and nomology we have analyzed up to now were able to necessitate, as an absolutely indispensable condition, the full and effective actuality of the taking-place, the reality, as they say, of the archived event. What will become of this when we will indeed have to remove the concept of virtuality from the couple that opposes it to actuality, to effectivity, or to reality? Will we be obliged to continue thinking that there is no thinkable archive for the virtual? For what happens in virtual space and time? It is hardly probable, this mutation is in progress, but it will be necessary, to keep a rigorous account of this inherited concept of the archive."- Jacques Derrida
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