My own interest in archives has been transformed in the past year through the experience of researching in various archives of the polymath Otto Neurath: most famous for his logical positivist philosophy, and also the inventor of the Isotype pictorial statistics. Neurath’s archives, which can be found in Reading, in Holland, and in several locations in Vienna, exist because of his own efforts, and of his family and friends. In the late 1930s Neurath was forced to migrate one step ahead of the Nazis and for him, as for a whole generation of artists, scientists and writers, the strategic depositing of documents in different places, and the keeping of duplicates, took place against a background of upheaval, emigration, invasion and detainment. The archive exists not just in spite of these upheavals but also because of them, insofar as the events of World War II Europe gave an urgency to the idea of the archive, to the need to remember and record, to preserve amidst the destruction.
Friends took on the tasks of archivists in such circumstances: when Neurath’s apartment in the Hague had to be abandoned, he walked to the docks in Schevingen with nothing except some apples and papers shoved in his pockets. But four of his friends quickly entered the apartment and removed all the letters, documents and books they thought might be important. When the German army sold the house contents, friends were there to buy them, while in New York basements, boxes of materials belonging to Neurath were hoarded till the end of the war.
I am struck by the contrast between this aspect of archiving: the relationships of loyalty, of obligation and affiliation it implies, and the kind of archive we find described and analysed in the writing of Allan Sekula, or Michel de Certeau: the police archive. Sekula famously argues that the police archive visibly constructs the figure of the criminal, while Certeau used the 19th century French police chief Nisard’s collection of popular literature to show how acts of archiving and acts of violent suppression often go hand-in-hand.
The memory role of the archive is often to do, I think, with the prefiguring or anticipation of death. The 19th century photographic archive of the American Indian by Edward Curtis was premised on an anticipation of the end of native American cultures and peoples. And to some extent the preservation of Neurath’s things by his family and friends was a recognition of the danger he was in and the importance that his work outlive him. But the memory role of the archive is also to do with reconstruction. The archive helps the work of Neurath and the Isotype institute to be reconstructed. But to do this the archive itself had to be reconstructed. In Britain, where Neurath arrived in 1940, public libraries and booksellers enabled him to reconstruct his own library, even buying back his own books. In 1942 he wrote to a friend:
“You see, to be deprived of all letters, notes etc. means that I have to rebuild my memory, as it were. Even if one does not read old letters and notes, you look at them, your library, your furniture reminds you of so many things. Now I am reading many books I read before because I do not have them with my notes. It is not useless and not uninteresting.”
Through rebuilding his archive Neurath reconstructs himself, furnishes his new home, makes himself at home in Britain.
As Walter Benjamin observed, it was characteristic of Victorian bourgeois culture to fill the home with traces of oneself, as if without things we are nothing. This is why Victorian bourgeois interiors are so oppressive and stifling. The extreme opposite of this is not the modernist reaction of the Bauhaus, but more accurately the bare rented rooms of the émigré, the dissident, the wanted man or woman who must leave no traces and who can never be entirely at home.
Collections and archives might be understood as such traces that make us feel at home: the objects and documents that constitute, or at least locate a self in an era of possessive individualism: to be surrounded by these things is oppressive, yet to be free of them can be to be unmoored, lost, invisible, past-less. The archive may be associated with bureaucratic rationalization, with a backward-looking conservatism, yet the idea of there not being an archive, somewhere (even if we may choose to ignore it) seems to somehow plunge us into darkness.
I once read a frightening book as a child: it was the story of a boy who raged at the world, saying he hated animals and so on, and one by one the things around him began to disappear – beginning with the wool blanket on his bed (he hated sheep, naturally) until in the end he was left floating in unending nothingness. The story was of course about our dependence on nature, and the moral lesson about gratitude perhaps, but it drove home to me the terror of being cut off from the things that locate me in the world. Archives too have oppressive and comforting sides: this double aspect of the archive is one of the things that perhaps makes it so interesting.
In another book for children, Ernst Gombrich’s 1935 “A Little History of the World”, Gombrich uses an analogy to help his readers think about the past and our relation to it. “let’s light a scrap of paper” he says, and drop it into a bottomless well. “Can you see it? It’s going down and down. Now it’s so far down it’s like a tiny star in the dark depths…” Gombrich compares the burning scrap to memory, which we use “to light up the past”. From our own memory, to those of the older people we talk to, through reading the writings of those already dead, through the archive, we go further and further into the well, but as we go further back we only catch glimpses, the past appears in scant traces.
What form do these traces of the past take? In the archive, they exist as media, media that are themselves either obsolete or in the process of becoming obsolete. My research in Otto Neurath’s archive owes an enormous amount to two under-regarded and workaday media – the typewriter and carbon paper. Neurath’s habit of typing his letters, with a sheet of carbon paper below, has meant that this is a rare case of an archive of correspondence containing both sides of a conversation. What becomes of our traces now, our conversations – on the hoof and on the mobile phone - are they even archivable any more and does it really matter?
Fifty years on, the poor quality paper of wartime Britain has yellowed, and the carbon paper somewhat smudged. But they have endured so far – 50 years, not very far down the well of the history of the world, it is true. The fact that media have an inbuilt material temporality is one thing, but how they are cared for counts for a lot, too – in other words, questions of technology and media need to be thought about in relation to questions of custodianship. But also in relation to perceptions of time – notions of lastingness and brevity, permanence and transience – that may be very different in the minds of the archivist and the media technician.
Questions of memory, of media, of reconstruction and of temporality seemed to Julian and myself to be four themes that could usefully animate these workshops. Of course there are more, equally interesting themes we have had to put aside, for now. The fact that so many of you deal in your work with the ephemeral, the performative, and with archives that are much less fixed, individual or straightforward than the one I’ve been describing, will make the discussion much richer.
Michelle Henning 2008
