A R C H I V E

F O R

T H E

F U T U R E

The Imaginary Archive: Current Practice

Tess L. Takahashi

The term archive usually connotes an officially sanctioned repository of objects and documents that reinforce a group or nations identity and origins. What then can be made of the deluge of imaginary archives produced by artists and critics in the past decade? Why the almost frantic proliferation of faked and fictionalized archives, as in those of Walid Raads Atlas Group Archive, Julia Meltzer and David Thornes Speculative Archive, and Camera Obscuras current archival project?1 These experimental documentary projects take their cue from Derridas deconstruction of the archives meaning and function in Archive Fever.2 Here Derrida suggested that the fever to archive was not just a compulsion to store, oriented toward the past, but a promise to reveal, pointing to the future. Likewise, the artistic projects of the past decade that I examine here treat the archive not as an official storehouse of past objects, but as a structure that underlies the current ways we interpret the world; what Derrida points to as an unquantifiable, and unarchivable, excess of feeling.

Camera Obscura 66, Volume 22, Number 3 doi 10.1215/02705346-2007-019 2007 by Camera Obscura Published by Duke University Press

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Artists and critics take on terms like archive and encyclopedia to draw on their implied authority, even as they use the terms imaginary and speculative to undermine the right of law associated with the official institutional archive. These imaginary archives often envision unrecorded pasts, produce other means of legitimizing information, make old systems signify differently, and imagine as yet undetermined futures through the evocation of everyday peoples personal experiences of suffering, displacement, and loss. Today the artistic and intellectual deconstruction of the archive operates as a prescription and a manifesto an alternative form of medicine for a sick and feverish culture plagued by forgetting.

The Atlas Group Archive (Walid Raad) The Atlas Group is a project established by Walid Raad in 1999 to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. One of our aims with this project is to locate, preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary and other artifacts that shed light on the contemporary history. In this endeavor, we produced and found several documents including notebooks, films, videotapes, photographs and other objects. The Atlas Group

However imaginary the Atlas Group foundation, however suspicious the origins of the documents it produces, and however uncertain the status of the individuals it claims to speak with and for, Raad and the Atlas Group do nevertheless attempt to get at the conditions and experiences generated by a specific set of conflicts emplaced in a locatable geographic space in a specific historical period: the civil wars in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. They present a range of archived documents said to have been produced by a collection of native informants including prominent Lebanese historians, a former hostage, and an ex-president, among others.3 Raads continuing project since 1996 has been twofold: (1) to produce an archival history of the Lebanese civil wars, a period whose events (along with its prior architecture and the archeological sites unearthed by repeated bombing) have been too quickly buried in what one historian calls a desire to move on

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to a period of renewal and reconstruction to leave behind the old, bad past and the tense conflicts between battling religious and political groups that not only created and sustained such a civil war but still threaten Lebanon today; and (2) to get usually Western, museum-going audiences to think about how historical evidence is employed in the representation of Middle Eastern politics, present and past. In the documents that comprise the Atlas Group Archive, Raad frames the writing of this history of civil war as an impossible but necessary project. There is a lack of material evidence of the crimes that occur under such conditions: secret abductions and torture rarely produce bodies or photographs. These produced and appropriated documents take part in an ongoing meditation on the problem of producing a useful public history adequate to the representation of such chaos, restriction, and personal suffering. The work also insists that despite the inadequacy of representation, the writing of such a history is essential for the people who lived through it. By operating in the realm of art, Raads archive works to produce a counter public sphere as part of the cure for a community divided by religion and politics in desperate need of a nonsectarian public sphere. These methods also operate as a space of freedom for the artist himself sidestepping the art worlds implicit requirement that the ethnic artist speak as native informant.

The Speculative Archive ( Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) The Speculative Archive produces video, publication, and installation projects which seek to open a space for the critical contemplation of violence within the field of politics. Archive projects approach political violence not through its most visible effects, but rather through the operations of its documentary forms and procedures the records of its effects. The Speculative Archive

Like the Atlas Group, the Speculative Archive examines objects both produced and found. Through a historical examination of the ways in which knowledge and power circulate, Julia Meltzer and David Thornes Its Not My Memory of It (US, 2003) suggests

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the consequences for the forgotten individuals attached to official historical records an Iranian CIA informant from the 1970s, drowned Cold War Soviet submariners for whom no records exist, and those unknown individuals killed in an otherwise unremarkable bombing in present-day Yemen. In their Speculative Archive, Meltzer and Thorne aesthetically interrogate the material bodies of historical documents shredded paper, grotty VHS video, 16mm film, and digital photos. What is the status of documentary evidence in relation to aesthetic form, they ask, in a world in which meaning is slippery but the stakes are high? Utilizing the digitals capacity to easily and seamlessly animate, edit, move, and integrate information, Meltzer and Thornes Its Not My Memory of It attempts to render visible the historical and political conditions under which information is produced, travels, and is collected and received. The piece brings to life through digital animation recovered documents that have no official historical record in a way that makes them speak to the present governmental management of both material information and human informants.4 Meltzer and Thornes audio and visual mediations describe a kind of human experience that is heavily fragmented, unstable, and subject to massive outside forces. The one Gayatri Spivak calls the subaltern and Giorgio Agamben calls the Musselman (his term for the walking dead of the World War II concentration camps, representing the inhuman state of bare life) is the person whose story we most want to hear yet who, by definition, is unavailable to speak.5 While the individual behind the CIA code name SDurn, the dead Russian submariners, and those killed in the Yemen desert have undergone different kinds of disappearance, Its Not My Memory of It produces a speculative form of witnessing for those who cannot speak because of the very nature of their political status. In this way, Meltzer and Thorne take a familiar strategy, that of the transformative power of witnessing, and use it to speculate about how the recovery or invention of an unwritten past can produce another kind of recovery mediated by the artist as societys witness, archivist, activist, and doctor.

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Camera Obscuras Archive for the Future Camera Obscura continues to invite our readers to compose statements . . . that would contribute to a conceptual archive for the future of feminism, culture, and media studies. Selected submissions will appear serially in consecutive issues of the journal, beginning with a special issue marking the thirtieth anniversary of Camera Obscura. As this will be an imaginary and theoretical archive, existing in print rather than material space, we hope youll take the opportunity to fantasize about and then, briefly, comment upon, elucidate, and/or critically analyze what you would like to place there: a word, a text, an image, an object, a space, a methodology, a mode of contemplating the present and future. The Camera Obscura Editorial Collective

One might ask how these imaginary and speculative archives relate to Camera Obscuras imaginary and theoretical archive for the future of feminism, culture, and media studies. What value do these projects, which do not investigate gender or feminism specifically, have for us here? Like the national archive, Camera Obscura calls up the folklore the important words, texts, images, objects, spaces, and methodologies of our discipline to gather a community with a shared past and common identity. Like the artists archive, it takes its cue from Derrida in that it seeks to recover a past and through the activities of fantasizing, elucidation, analysis, and comment to reanimate it in the hope of producing a more promising future. Like the apostrophe of lyric poetry, Camera Obscuras call to fantasize seeks to animate this scholarly communitys consideration of our influence on film studies future generations, many of whom today question the efficacy of gender and feminism as categories of analysis. In so doing, this call seeks to recall not only objects but also the energy, urgency, and hope with which Camera Obscura began thirty years ago.

Notes

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See also Susan Schuppli, Anthony Purdy, and Bridget Elliott, The Heterotopia Project, heterotopia.users.neocodesoftware .com/about.php (accessed 20 January 2006); Tate Modern, Anticipating the Past: Artists: Archive: Film (2006), www.tate

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.org.uk/modern (accessed 20 January 2006); Miranda Mellis, Tisa Bryant, and Kate Schatz, eds., The Encyclopedia Project, www.encyclopediaproject.org (accessed 1 February 2006); as well as the work of Abigail Child, Tony Cokes, David Gatten, Lynne Kirby, Jay Rosenblatt, Anri Sala, Deborah Stratman, T. Kim Tranh, and Travis Wilkerson, among others. 2. 3. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs (dir. Walid Raad, US, 1999) and the Atlas Group Archive, www.theatlasgroup.org (accessed 5 January 2006). As Meltzer and Thorne write elsewhere, their audio recording of one Iranian CIA informants story is a speculative document based on their investigation of actual documents from an abandoned US embassy. As they say, We wrote the text for his narration based on what we could learn about him in his 12 page dossier, found among the thousands of pages of paper that make up the 72 volumes of Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den. Here, they are interested not only in the role of documents in producing what we know but also in the links between acts of rememoration and the constitution of our political present (personal e-mail correspondence with Meltzer and Thorne, 2 August 2005). See also the Speculative Archive, www.speculativearchive.org (accessed 5 January 2006). See Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), and Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).

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Tess L. Takahashi is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Oberlin

College. She recently completed a dissertation in modern culture and media at Brown University entitled Impure Film: Medium Specificity and the North American Avant-Garde.