Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-Archive

There is nothing that is not as though between indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can occur but once, nothing is preciously in peril of being lost.

— Borges, "The Immortal"¹

The role of the archive in the elevation of political authority over cultural tradition is mostly unaddressed in contemporary anarchist theory, which focuses on oppression, cultural production and political resistance. However, having been a theme of anarchist writings since Elisée Reclus (1830-1905), the politico-archival dominance of the singular intimacy of cultural memory should again come to the fore. Given that Lewis Call, Todd May and Saul Newman have strenuously explored "post-anarchism" at the confluence of classical anarchism and contemporary poststructuralism, there is reason to believe that this is now a conceptual possibility. It is at this nexus that the question of the an-archic aspect of archival, lived and "counter" memories can be addressed in a way that does not fall prey to obsolete essentialist and humanist requirements common in the current output on the "ethics" and "politics" of remembrance—the "duty" and "right" to remember (or forget), forgiving and granting amnesty, honoring by remembering, etc.² In fact, the "revolt culture" over whose ruins Julia Kristeva laments is one in which the disruptive economy of memory and forgetting could play a vital role in the emergence of new figures and modalities of temporality—an emergence already precluded by the "ethics" or "politics" of remembrance (Kristeva 2000: 8-9, 28-29).

The work of Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever is invaluable for this project because it establishes the connection between political archivization and lived (counter-) memory, thereby opening the question of forgetting as neither merely the absence of remembrance nor a spin-off of Freudian repression models. The "an-archive" and the hypo-amnesic history of its tracing in political authority, I am suggesting, is as much a post-anarchist topic as cultural production, disruption, or reterritorialization have proved to be, and indeed, may foster yet other perspectives on anti-authoritarian issues.

Adopting a "postanarchist" perspective, I would like to explore the effects the archive and memory have upon one another in terms of

(a) the an-archic dimension of remembering and forgetting vis-à-vis the political process of archivization (the an-archive);

(b) the "transignative" play of memory-event and the archival act of consignation; and

(c) the possibility of techniques of forgetting at work in the archive as a nexus of political forces and counter-memory (hypo-amnesic history).

From Memorabilia to Memoranda

An archive is, one might say, the dead-letter office of lived memory. Being a repository of contracts, oaths, amnesties, records of taxation and claims to property, it is a myriad of instantiations of power and authority whereby lived memories are transformed into documentation, and where the public/private distinction is superimposed upon the free play of memory. In discussing Derrida's study of the archive, David Bell has noted that prior even to the damage done to archives by twentieth-century political repression, there is the loss of cultural memory represented by the archive itself. Those who have the authority to create the archive and select its contents acquire the further power to utilize such contents for social and political ends. Although we are often told that the archive offers a way to "remember" the past, the gathering of the contents of cultural memory consigns them to a cultural oblivion in which no one "remembers" (or even could "remember") the mnemes³ consigned there.⁴ And whether one establishes and preserves it, or destroys it in a revolutionary conflagration, the archive is dangerous because it is easily manipulated by those archivists, administrators, and technicians whose own memories are politically irrelevant: they are neither victors nor vanquished, neither archons nor subjects of exclusion. Despite its seeming banality as a mere collection of "old records," the archive is the result of an incessant historical violence—a violence it bears within itself in the form of preservation of cultural memories eradicated from culture itself, and the articulation of an authority established precisely by such eradication. In illustration, Lyotard detects...