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  • Handbuch Archiv: Geschichte, Aufgaben, Perspektiven ed. by Marcel Lepper and Ulrich Raulff
  • Randolph C. Head
Marcel Lepper and Ulrich Raulff, eds. Handbuch Archiv: Geschichte, Aufgaben, Perspektiven. Stuttgart. J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2016. 294pp. €69.95 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-3-476-02099-4.

Handbooks form a long-established genre and make important contributions to knowledge—aptly captured by the German expression Handbuchwissen. Archives, meanwhile, form a category that plays an important role in many disciplines, not only through its traditional epistemological centrality for historiography and archival science, but also in critical theory, literature, and media and cultural studies. Creating a Handbuch Archiv (as part of a series that also includes a Handbuch Bibliothek and Handbuch Museum) therefore represents an important contribution to scholarship, and particularly to scholarly methodology in multiple disciplines. The challenges that this volume faces, however, go beyond the tension between interdisciplinarity and canonicity implicit in a handbook that crosses disciplinary lines, because of the diverse and indeed incommensurable ways the terms the archive or archives are approached in the disciplines involved. The editors, both active in literary archives, are well aware of the terms’ instability and modestly describe their work as a “Perspektivierung” that aims to bridge the “Graben wechselseitiger Missverständnisse” (viii) among the disciplines that give (the) archive(s) a central place in their work. Such misunderstandings arise primarily from the way that first Michel Foucault and then Jacques Derrida deployed the term archive in their contributions to critical theory in The Archaeology of Knowledge and Archive Fever, respectively. Their broad metaphorical appropriation has directly shaped work in literature, continental philosophy, and cultural studies and has had significant resonance—but also generated significant pushback—among historians and archivists.

Handbuch Archiv consists of a series of substantial essays on topics across this broad range of meaning, written by authors whose specializations range from literature and law to digital technology and document preservation. To bring these voices into dialogue, the editors have chosen to divide the Handbuch into six perspectival sections: “Erfindung des Archivs,” “Archivgeschichte,” “Archivpolitik,” “Archivmaterial,” “Archivpraktiken,” and “Produktivität des Archivs.” Each section comprises contributions that rest on differing epistemological assumptions; among these, “Erfindung des Archivs” is particularly heavy on philosophical and theoretical approaches, whereas “Archivpraktiken” leans primarily toward practical knowledge articulated by working archivists. The editors’ choices often succeed in juxtaposing perspectives. While this architecture leads to considerable repetition, it is also frequently productive because it allows key questions to be approached from different vantage points. Readers seeking an overview and literature on topics [End Page 297] relevant to their own projects may need to probe a number of articles, but they are likely to leave well-informed on current disciplinary positions, and they may also have their eyes opened to alternative stances about archives.

Reading all of the contributions, however, makes the incommensurability at the heart of this volume—that is, around the category of (the) archive(s)—visible in several ways. Some essays take one disciplinary view of what an archive is but then incorporate research practices and perspectives that suggest that alternative readings were also in play. In his contribution on “Gedächtnis und Gegengedächtnis” (a stimulating contribution to discussions of state knowledge, resistance, and revenge), for example, Ulrich Raulff parenthetically defines a state’s archive (“sein Archiv” in the singular) as “Summe seines gespeicherten Wissens” (119). He thus follows the metaphors of critical theory rather than the tradition of historians and archivists. In the seemingly minor gap between “its archive” and “its archives” lies a major difference in understanding, since one refers implicitly to Foucault’s “law of what can be said,” while the other refers to particular sites within a larger landscape of material and institutional arrangements that preserve documentary traces from the past. Raulff’s careful attention to the layered meaning of particular archival sites succeeds but also demonstrates Knut Ebeling’s astute observation (in “Archiv und Medium”) that, when scholars in media and cultural studies work in archives, the Foucauldian definition of the archive as “Medium der Geschichte” can lead to a “verwirrendes Changieren zwischen realen und theoretischen Archiven” (130). A second consequence of the epistemic tensions that the Handbuch Archiv seeks to bridge consists...

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