Archivology

IN THIS CHAPTER, I set out how the archive can be understood as concept and trope, as well as material and structure, in order to focus on the specific relevance of this broadly defined term for remembering and commemorating the violence of National Socialism, in particular, the Holocaust. The archive can refer to different things: a physical place of deposit, storage, and preservation; the material housed there; and the order, or house rules, according to which this material is kept and used. Archive material can refer to official documents produced for the purposes of being archived, to other official sources gathered together because an archival authority deems them significant, or to unofficial material— personal letters, family photographs, objects—collected and preserved by their owners or subsequently by others. This expanded definition of the archive reflects the cultural as well as scholarly tendencies in recent decades to question the hegemony of official sources in constructing historical narratives and to use personal, ephemeral, and contingent material in trying to understand the past. As a result, the archive is no longer seen primarily as the site and resource of traditional historiographic pursuit (although it of course continues to serve this function); rather it has become part of the discourse of memory and as such the subject of theoretical reflection about its relation to the work, culture, politics, and ethics of memory. The archive is part of the discourse of memory, but shifts the focus of critical engagement to a new set of questions. According to Ann Laura Stoler, the humanities has witnessed an “archival turn” that can be seen in the shift from “archive-as-source” to “archive-as-subject.”

Refocusing on the archive in this way has led to its re-theorization in the mode of “archivology.” Such theoretical perspectives draw on the insights of Freud and Foucault, who act as what Knut Ebeling calls “agents” of the archive; Derrida, whose Archive Fever is a founding text of archive theory; Achille Mbembe, who has developed an important critique of archival power structures; and more recently Georges Didi- Huberman, who has written about the particular relationship between visual archives and cultural memory.