Chapter One[1]:
Infrareading the Bio-Biblio-Processing of Virtual Bare Life:
the Archive, the Passport, and the Camp,
or Exhuming the Yet to Be Read, Yet to Be Archived[2]
A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac[3]
Bildung Box
The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia by Anke te Heesen and Ann M. Hentschel (2002)
Vismann makes it clear (inadvertently) why storage is so important as a master figure of the archive as well as the way a dynamic of divisibility determines our metaphorology (and metonymology) of reading as unread –ability.
To put it another way, storage recalls reading, either disappearing it or flatlining into recording media and information processing, user instead of reader, with passage retrieval being the goal. So speed and the elimination of repetition (what you don’t have to reread) is progress, and we could se a linear progress in terms of speed and efficiency from scroll to codex, from dictation to speedwriting, from mss to print, from book to pdf. The storage unit becomes a morgue for (re)assemblage of parts of the corpus. This flatling of reading is one of many modes of unreading that get recalled by storage, a resistance to reading as resistance to reading, but unread –able for us because of a problem of classification—there is no poetics of the archive—every attempt to order it disorders it (as WB says of the collector’s library). And we are concretizing Derrida’s archive as oriented to the future, to the imperative to remember not to forget the victims of injustice overtaken by the erasure of the anarchivic death drive of the archive, as a future yet to be read that repeats a past lapse. Our model of the not yet read is the aubiographical anecdotes about lapse that perform or stage lapses by de Man and Derrida—a not yet read text is one you return to having failed to understand it, not knowing if you will understand it less or more.
That is not a calculable experience. It is beyond calculation. It is not exactly blocked mourning either since you are given time (or assume you have time) to return to it. Unreading is about rereading, repetition but not redundancy (closer to the uncanny). Or as Perec does, you can (re)write yourself to death (but again as a kind of implicit apostrophizing). Ray Johnson How to Draw a Bunny is another example.
Inscription / recording is not reducible to visible / invisible, writing and erasure (see Chartier’s book). The metaphor is a contact zone, itself a metaphor for a space that may have an architecture but which is discursively available only through a nomotopological similes (see Freud on the psyche as dossier in vol 2 standard edition, Studies in Hysteria or the end of the mystic pad essay were the similes all break down, he says; our version of psychoanalysis is about a problem of modeling the psyche, a dynamic that has no coherent topology), that calls forth a dream of interpretation that gets immediately resisted since it proceeds as a metaphorlogy.
Agamben makes the camp singular either as an aberration the importance of which gets mystified by the sacralization of the Holocaust, the focus on the victim or as the paradigm of modernity . He moves from the Nazi to the Not See. But is point about pattern recognition of the camps to come is still bound by the Nazi concentration camp (his confusion of he concentration camp with the camp).
Vismann on the other hand, normalizes the Nazis by blending them with a continuous legal historygoing back to late Roman antiquity and Justinian, through the Middle Ages and Frederich II, to Prussia and Germany, the 1920s, the Nazis, and the stasi.
We could position the importance of 1933 and 1945 for us between these two options. The camp has to be understood as an archive which for is a storage unit.
Vismann’s history is very much parallel to Agamben’s. they complement each other very well. She leaves out constitutional history; he leaves out administration (files and emdiatehcnology). Her model of power is pre-Foucaldian; his model is Schmittian—legal absolutist historicism (indifferent to recording, transmission, reading aloud or silently, etc) as a replacement narrative for Foucault’s biopolitics (Agamben radicalizes it by totalizing it).
We are seeing the storage unit come into focus as a historical construct only now, the way files become one in the 1920s. But we are situating the moment of its visibility in books already in the 1930s, around the moment when the state of exception becomes the norm, when all life becomes virtually bare life.
Files makes a perfect triangle with Homo Sacer and Archive Fever. She cites Archive Fever and Foucault (she has a chapter on governmentality) mentions “sovereign power” and the Nazi, decision ( 82), but never mentions Heidegger, biopolitics, nor Schmitt nor Agamben. Meanwhile Agamben has no account of administration (of the law and writing) even though he is a philologist, and Derrida does not think through the relation between the archive and archived as a series of divisible media (not just postal relay and email): it’s not just he letter that is divisible; everything is divisible the book / file; literature / law’; document / record; work of art / / monument / waste; treasury / archive / office; sealed, scrolls, wired scrolls, glued documents; forgers / replicas / relics, flying leadletss /loosleaf binders; scattered leaves (cut out single pages from medieval mss and sold for auction).
IS the envelope divisible forDerrida?
Visman aslso talks abotu shifts from the addressee to the address of the sender.
Her model remains fucntionalist andprgamatic (kind of bad sociology dressed up as Weber and Foucault—power as a thing relation than productive or a relation)
The other brilliant move for us is that she links the res gesta as things that come back to the registry (a treasury of sorts, sometimes put on public display even though secret) as Acta or registrata (file as self-stroage and retrieval system, though she does not use the term self-storage). The thing here is a record (p.77) And this is government as a file machine (76; 82).
And then she adds that res gestas was the database for the chronicle , for history.
So here is how we can intervene in thing theory and material culture studies of things. The thing is a record, which is also an act, which is also an event.
Storage is the master metaphor because it recalls / retrieves reading (that otherwise goes missing or gets reduced to a new economy (time saving), as an irreducible unread –ability produced by the dynamics driving the metaphorology of the archive, a metaphorology which produces various kinds of blind spots (74-75) to particular metaphors and their metonymic weakness (they can be exchanged for other, stronger yet weaker, metaphors for administration, storage, architecture, rationalization, modernization, the modern state, empire, government, bureaucracy, and so on). A history of the archive depends on a constant sorting out of these dynamics into binary oppositions such as material and virtual, interior administration as external ceremony, aesthetics versus prestige (72) history and prehistory, mobility versus immobility of the archive (77) records for eternity or for permanent update (79) (which can be made either totally calculable, according to a universal exchange through which archiving becomes book keeping) or irreplaceable treasures, the latter of which can be made more or less paradoxical. Vismann thinks that files are the only blind spot.
“the erratic side of the law—the administrative operations, the transmission medium itself—remains a blind spot for legal history” (75)
It is not until the beginning of the twentieth centiry that files turned into an object of historiography” (75)
We could make a similar move on the historical specificity of the self-storage unit.
“Diplomatics” is like CSI except specific to forgery—perfect for passports (72-73)
What we can do is show that the material studies, history of the book / new media are caught in a structure of knowledge of which they are entirely unaware. The are totally unconscious of the mediatic unconscious that is the condition of their own disciplinary practices (and all of the unrecognized and unacknowledged contradictions that go with them).
Homogenous text, homogenous time, (83) closed text, closed law, uniformity, standardization, synchronic—an ideal she both assumes functions and shows not to function (64-65).
“archeo-archival layers” (65)
She is certainly not a close reader of Derrida.
Thebook’s Kittlerian moment happens on p. 82.
Event , 81
“virtual registries (81)
Hitler’s oral orders, p. 185 n. 68
Telephone (164)
Self-historicizes (120)
Sovreign act 110
Paper as treasure, 84
Materiality and mediality (76)
Seal as sealant versus certification (73)
Glue
“stored tehmsevles as texts” (72)
“inside a text” (72)
attached (68)
paratitla (68)
montage (66)
sacred text (66) –no reading allowed
trash , 64
closure of the law (62)
Virtual reference (62)
Preface (63)
Silent reading versus reading aloud (61)
Sealed with a thread (60)
Transmitted versus otredversion (60)
Time becomes sptial (58)
Strat (59)
Archive or office: onemerges in the other, for in bothcases thesimp[le fact of storage generates work with and on htat which has been stored (59)
The symbolic or ciruta reference to old texts (59)
Wiped from history (57)
Rumor (56)
Law becomes writtenlw (56)
Aura (54)
Speed writing (54-55)
Simultaneity (54)
Whitewashed (55)
Surface / substrate (55) wax tablet, Freud
Tool of writing is both a means fo writing and of erasure 955)
See Chartier, Inscription and Erasure
See Touhc of Evil scene with Hestonin the archives realizing Quinlan has faked all the evidence for all the cses. (52)
Glue p. 53, 60
Outside the city (51)
Empire has a centeryet can be dispersed as well, translated. Much more complex topgroahy htan the polis of Agamben
File meaning ot put in its place (48)
Death of emperor (48)
Message = the messenger (49)
Administration is about usage, newest, revised edition; historiography is about the oldest version (as opposed to mutilated, distorted older versions) (46-47)
Compilation as
Ur-text as relic (40) quest for origins (40)
Files as notebooks (41)
Legal violence (29), mentions WB’s Critique of Violence, later his Task of the Translator, but never has an actual reading of the work.
Unreadable ur-text (27)
Deletion (26)
Preambles (24)
Unalterable status of scripture (25)
Re-script (71)
“programmed” p. 71
news versus eternal (70)
law becomes literature (70)
Books
Scrolls become art become files beocome book of photo reproductions of the work of art (which c cannto be sued and is htus a work f art) Kiefer, 161-62
Prescript (23)
Tedious rereading (81)
Files become object of discourse15hand 16ens (76)
Nazi index of Jews (740 “murdering texts (44) body of law (45) liivn glaw (44)
“The murder metaphor used by the historian Franz Weieaker . . .” (44)
prestige versus aesthetics (72)
Documents are stored individually, partly because of their external appearance (parchment, format, hanging seal), while files area always blasted, bundled, or bunched collection (cited on p. 75)
Vault, p. 99
Poe’s purloined letter (84)
“the last secretary of the chancery to peruse records. He stood at the threshold of the decoupling of archiving and administering. For archival purposes, he was the very last to read the files that the registered, so that no one else had to read them after him. (99)
We could say that even Adonro remained blind to the complexity of administration in his critique of the administration of aesthetics.
Speed (100)
From chariot to dirigible (100)
Historians taken out of the processing loop (120)
Office as the poltical space of modernity (123)
Phone calls, 127,
1933, p. 126
despotism versus automation as restraint (138)
1932, p. 138
power was expressed metaphorically (149)
“highly unmetaphorical fashion, files and their techniques organize the very architecture of digital machines” (164)
techniques for controlling transmissions and the life of files . . . . has promoted archivists and administrative experts to reflect on the near-extinct medium of files.” (163)
“material files” 163
Books versus files in terms of use versus uselessness (as works of arts or monuments), 162
Cornelia Vismann ; translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.
Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2008.Vismann
Been reading Vismann's Files: Law and Media technology this weekend rather than writing.
The book is excellent. It's much, MUCH better than Spieker's Big Archive and is friendly to theory (mostly Kittler) while remaining a pretty straightforward history.
Anyway, it's really nice to read a fine work of scholarship that is itself highy readable and extraordinarily ambitious and informative in its scope.
I came up with "Unarchiv -ability" as a companion concept to "unread -ability."
We're devising a new concept of the device, removing the device from the vice for the vicegrip of positivist historicism.
We a DeVice Squad.
Wikipedia entry on the trace.
Introduction
Some more quotations from her book:
The sovereign turned into an interactive unit that acted and reacted, either in proxy or in person. (95)
History of boxes, pp. 96-99
"The reformed Prussian Reform State no longer simply founded and arranged empirical data into tableaus; it created itself by way of writing and recording. It generated itself in files that did not merely accumulate but grew organicially. Prussian files are, have, and institute the life of the state. To write the history of Prussia, then requires only retrieving the administrative procedures that have been laid ad acta and reviving the history deposited in the lower strata of the archive. That is how the Protestant historian Ranke proceeded." (121
because historians search for the essence of the state behind profane administrative techniques, they do not dwell for very long on the files themselves. Rather, they deduce the spirit of Prussian bureaucracy form the imprint it left on its administrative structure.”(122)
"the micrologisitics of record keeping presents itself as a narratable story. The result is not an overview of the developments of controlling administrative algorithms, but a story of the spirit of officialdom materialized in files. (122)
In the second quotation above that ends with Ranke, it is difficult to tell who speaks. She seems to be speaking for Ranke, almost ventriloquizing him. She falls apart in her last sentence on p. 122 (the end of the chapter entitled "Governmental Practices.")