Discipline and Pleasure: Response

Picture the middle-aged John Stuart Mill testifying in 1852 in the House of Lords that the governance of India was enacted through writing (Aguirre 289). Writing and recording, he argued, ensured good practice, another among the many justifications for British imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. Mill's idealization of both record-keeping and of its consequences for scrupulous rule connects the archive to the empire in critical ways, as do both Joseph Childers and Robert Aguirre in their essays considered here. And while Oz Frankel's concern in his essay is largely with the infamous blue books, his interest in knowledge-based government links his concerns firmly with those of Childers and Aguirre, for imperial rule rested squarely on the amassing and recording of knowledge about colonial geography, populations, and habits. The contents and reach of the blue books extended well beyond the domestic realm.

All three of these sparkling essays are concerned with the record and/or the archive as it demonstrated command over the subjects of governance at home and in the colonies. And picking up on their collective interest in the effects of archiving, we might also point to the way in which that same archive serves as proof of the historian's command over her or his subject, a doubling of containment effected first through rule and latterly through the condescension of the past. Nor should we pass over without comment that critical intermediary— cataloguing—without which order in the archive would look quite different and perhaps less malleable. It will not be news to readers of Victorian Studies that the archive conceals as much as it reveals, that it privileges particular forms and styles and therefore kinds of information. Aguirre points out that exclusion shapes the nature of the archive quite as much as does preservation (293). Still, as Childers deftly shows, we cannot assume that the separation effected by the discipline of the archive will invariably illuminate simple categories of ruler and ruled. His reading of Trailoyka Nath Mukharji's trip to England to oversee some of the Indian exhibits at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition blurs the line. In his willingness to travel abroad, in his expertise in the skills of cataloguing and curating, Mukharji epitomized the "modern" Indian, cosmopolitan rather than inward looking, intellectually curious, and appreciative of the need for order. Yet Mukharji finds himself as much an object of interest and curiosity as the exhibits he oversees, a phenomenon he is powerless to control. And so much of what the archive can do and mean turns on this question of control. Frankel points out that the "archive in print" (312)—the government- sponsored blue book—once disseminated through the medium of publication can be exploited by many constituencies; the state loses control of information it has collected and catalogued in controlled forms, but which can now be read, interpreted, reformulated by all and sundry. Likewise, Carolyn Steedman notes that the formal archive enshrines a practice of reading materials never intended for the eyes of the reader (150). Herein, it seems likely, lies some of the pleasure Childers invokes as also characteristic of the archive. But if the archive offers up materials not intended for prying eyes, and if the dense information that typifies the blue book is uncontainable once distributed, then how should we read the power of the archive? Is it perhaps a more subversive power than the perspective of containment can admit?

The archive unquestionably asserts discipline through its categories as well as its rules, yet following Frankel's logic, its materials might be used for purposes and in ways alien and inimical to its organizers or originators. And in this tension perhaps lies much of the discipline and the pleasure of the archive. The continued insistence among historians on the importance of "proof" assumes that archives and records reveal and clarify; the more militant version of that reliance on verifiability cannot recognize the register of silence, dismissed as merely and impossibly speculative. But for the expositor of the muted, the archive's possibilities are of a different magnitude. Frustration can give way to reinvigorated...