Luciana Duranti, "Archives as a Place" (1996): 243-44
"Thus, the archives was a place of preservation under the jurisdiction of a
public authority.... We can still today look at the Roman Tabularium and understand its
function from its structure. Corridors and enclosed stairs connect the building
to the public offices of Republican Rome, so that the documents can securely
and safely flow from the place of creation to that of preservation. However,
this flow is not a simple transition from one place to another. It is the locus of
recognition and empowerment. Somewhere between the outside and the
inside of the archival building, the documents must unfold into evidence
and memory, prior to being ensconced within the building as testimony of
past actions. There must be a space, an in-between space, where this happens,
a space bound by two limits, one bordering the documents and the other
bordering the evidence: the
archii limes or 'archival threshold'. The archival
threshold is the space where the officer of the public authority takes charge
of the documents, identifies them by their provenance and class, associates
them intellectually with those that belong in the same aggregation, and
forwards them to the inside space. At the archival threshold, and beyond it,
the authenticating function took place....
... From this moment on the archival
documents and their network of relationships were immutable, as not even
the loss or destruction of some of them could change the relations that their
previous existence had determined among the remaining ones....
The place of deposit of the archival documents was in the most remote
part of the archival building, completely isolated from the areas of work and
from any possible source of contamination or corruption, and the documents
entering this restricted zone would live forever in their own time of creation,
in their own context, as stable and immutable entities, untouchable by political
or social events, interests, trends, or influences. Just like the Eastern archival
basements of four millennia ago, accessible only from a hole in the ceiling,
and the Westem stacks of our times, carefully segregated from any space
open to the public, the inner place where the deeds were kept, by its physical
inaccessibility, transformed them in the most authoritative and powerful
testimony of actions.
Testimony for whom?... The Tabularium contained evidence and memory
of the people for the people. It was a permanent, unforgettable reminder of
whom allegiance is owed to and so is accountability."
Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" [PDF] (1967): 86
"... The successes of history belong to those
who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had
used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert
their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially
imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will
make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own
rules.
The isolation of different points of emergence does not conform
to the successive configurations of an identical meaning;
rather, they result from substitutions, displacements, disguised
conquests, and systematic reversals. If interpretation were the
slow exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin, then only
metaphysics could interpret the development of humanity.
But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of
a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in
order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its
participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary
rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations."
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.