WRITING
BETWEEN THE ARCHIVE AND THE ARCHIVE
Derrida writes at length on the archive in Archive Fever, introducing its linguistic origin “Arkhē,” meaning both commencement (natural) and commandment (nomological). It was at the private homes of the Greek archons who “held and signified political power” and “were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law” where these archival documents were held. Not only were the archons presented with the power of guarding these documents but their interpretation as well, perpetuating a distinct authoritative state hierarchy which remains today.
In taking Derrida’s ideas one step further, I propose that there are in fact three types of (a)Archives, of which we will focus on the latter two. The first is the intrinsic human archive derived from our ability to preserve memories and typically in opposition to the second type of archive. The second being the nomological state archive functioning to some extent as a method of control, guarded by the modern-day archons. And the final being the (natural) Law or Truth; The Archive. It is my belief that the state archive is actively disguised as the Archive by the archons to maintain its power as “Law.”
One can easily refer to Kafka’s Before the Law as a parabolic interpretation of Derrida’s historical findings. Following the story, a country man approaches a gate in search of the “Law,” which resides behind this threshold. The country man is barred admittance to the Law by a “doorkeeper" (archon) and is surprised since “the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone.” The Law, here, is interpreted as the Archive, the potential of all knowledge (or the knowledge of all potential) while the gate operates symbolically by creating a difference in which order can be established. Proverbially, the gate to the Law is open but the doorkeeper states, “I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last,” and so the man awaits permission to enter. The implicit authority awarded to the keeper of the Law creates an asymmetry of knowledge. The power of the state archive if you will.
Now in old age, the (im)patient country man’s world becomes darker. He enters a stage of unsuccessful mourning characterized by his refusal to give up on the Law which has now become his “ghost.” The country man, near death, becomes “aware of a radiance that streams… from the gateway of the Law.” Derrida describes the specter (that which haunts) as unable to be fully present claiming that “it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet.” The radiance signifies two simultaneous features of haunting; “a path not taken,” and “a future possibility, a hope.”
The doorkeeper, in the old man’s final moments “roars in his ear: “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.” The gate was always open to the Law for the country man but the keeper, with his authority, instilled a fear of the unknown, anxiety towards the future, and finally depression from resistance. The keeper “scare(s) normalization into a state of nervous exhaustion,” a method of control which is critical in maintaining the power of the archive, and therefore the power of the archons.
Ghosts exist as a glimmer of truth, manifesting from the grey area between the lies the archons feed our archive and the truth the Archive creates. Therefore, the country man’s ghosts are our ghosts as well. We are faced with the same questions of entering or waiting, discovering the Law or being complacent with appeasing the doorkeeper. Our decisions haunt us, and our complacency creates ghosts. The ghosts of our archive live outside it as a requisite of being a ghost, placing ghosts, specters, the haunting, in a specific temporality of a break in time or possibly in the absence of it entirely. Within the space between our archive and the Archive, our lacunae.
The consequences of Modernity, the emergence of technological capitalism, and naturalized ‘tele-technologies’ collapsed both space and time to generate a present where “events that are spatially distant become available to an audience simultaneously.” Producing a particular “capitalistic universal anxiety” which permeates our relationships with people and things. Fortunately though, I believe that this flattening of time has the dual capability of fostering what I would call a “truth zone.”
The truth zone has always existed but in a globalized world in combination with the digital somewhat-public archive of the internet, we have new tools to confront the ghosts of our racist, colonial, capitalist past, present, and future. If we are to think of our archive residing within the Archive, and if our goal is to confront the ghosts inhabiting the area between, we must understand how the Archive operates to confront the specters of the past and our lost futures. To demonstrate this, the Archive can be conceptualized as a singularity, or a black hole.
A black hole is infinitely warped spacetime, containing mass, but no matter. To better perceive this, consider all matter and energy as "information.” All particles carry several “information,” which define it. If a particle falls into the black hole, its “information” directly passes to the singularity. The singularity carries all this “information” and the particle(s) that form the black hole no longer exist.
The Archive exists in much the same way. As an “indifferent” to information of which all particles will always pass through and are collected. I speak of “information” here in a Batesonian sense, as a “difference that makes a difference.” To expand upon Derrida’s original ‘différance,’ Bateson utilizes the example of a piece of chalk:
“...there is an infinite number of differences around and within the piece of chalk… Of this infinitude, we select a very limited number, which become information. In fact, what we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them.”
This infinitude of differences constitutes the basis of Bateson’s theory of mind, but we must take this one step further to connect it to the Archive. These differences Bateson speaks of create mental maps which we observe to always be different from the territory they exist in. Opposedly, the Archive works as a theoretical singularity outside the bounds of human cartographic representation, collecting all information as it is being produced. When speaking of our archive, we are always talking about some sort of human representation; the mind is an “infinite regress, an infinite series of maps.” Moving outside the mind, to the physical world, we continue to receive maps or “information/differences” and act upon these, receive more information, and act on it once more, ad infinitum. A systemic loop or a “transform of differences traveling in a circuit.” This mental processing system, this “world of information processing,” Bateson says though, “is not limited by the skin.”
Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick… Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is ,it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round.
Here “Me,” the individual, ceases to exist as a pure separate entity. You become a collection of systems with which you interact. Viewing the Archive through this systems-thinking lens asserts that all life is joined together as a cybernetic system. Not only are we not limited by the skin, but this interconnectedness insists upon “a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem.” Bateson speaks of this larger “Mind” as a type of God or higher power, one which we all participate in due to our inherent systemic connections. The Archive operates as this higher power; a collection of all information and differences which comprise all systems of ideas which ever were, are, and may be in circuit. Consequentially fundamentally altering our view of survival which “becomes different when we stop talking about the survival of something bounded by the skin and start to think of the survival of the system of ideas in circuit.”
To believe the archons are guarding the human archive would be to fall into their trap. Upon closer inspection they guard the space between the Archive and the archive, the truth zone. This ghostly ethereal (non)space holds within the remnants of minds which the archons have forcefully and unnaturally estranged from the systems they took part in. This estrangement leaves inextinguishable traces, imprints on the systems they were a part of. Ghosts live on until the systems used to estrange them are dismantled; the ghosts of our past surround us, awaiting their release. The state archive is simply a collection of the preserved systems in circuit.
Now, ghosts have always existed and will always exist as a consequence of the human condition but if we are to view the ghosts of the past 600 odd years, or the beginning of global exploitative capitalism, we can see how the systems used then have been essentially remixed to maintain their power of exploitation in the modern world. The global anxiety I spoke of, as well as an unprecedented rise in depression and general melancholy is merely a symptom of our global estrangement from nature and from ourselves. The cacophony of ghostly cries reverberates in our heads with no relief in sight as if we committed these acts of estrangements ourselves.
“Why can’t I forget. It’s as if I were responsible. Why do I wake up so often in the night with a feeling that they’re watching me.”
-Ghost Dance (1983)
If we are to trust Bateson, if only for the nature of a mental exercise, I hypothesize that our cultural melancholy is directly related to our global reliance of extractive systems. This feeling, exacerbated by modernism and its push for the future (to which we have arrived, only to look towards the past as a shining castle on a hill) has rewarded the general human populace with residing either in a state of survival or excess, both of which obfuscate, by lack of time and energy for the former and (non)deliberate ignorance for the latter, the necessity for deconstructing the systems which have put us in this position in the first place.
Remember this; The Archive never forgets. The gate to the Law is open if you choose to cross its threshold to release the ghosts that haunt us.