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First published May 1999

The seductions of the archive: voices lost and found

Harriet BradleyView all authors and affiliations

https://doi.org/10.1177/09526959922120270

Abstract

The archive can take many forms but all are marked by a connective sequence: archive, memory, the past, narrative. The author explores this sequence through an account of her engagement with four different types of archive, constructing a phenomenology of the archive which highlights the promises and seductions offered to the researcher. Postmodern questioning may throw in doubt older conceptions, whereby the archive is used to legitimate knowledge claims about the past of a nomological nature. However, in a context where intellectuals become interpreters rather than legislators, the role of the archive as repository of inert meanings is strengthened rather than weakened; using the archive helps us to understand the dialectical nature of the relationship between past and present and our own positioning within this.

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I am indebted to Irving Velody for many discussions that have helped the development of this piece. In writing it my thoughts were informed by the paper by Thomas Osborne that appears in this issue, by Carolyn Steedman’s piece in History of the Human Sciences 11(4) and above all by the magisterial (the phrase seems appropriate) account offered by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria (1990) in Myth and Archive of the form and evolution of the Latin American novel seen as an archive of stories and myths. Thanks to Charles Martindale for helpful comments. I would also like to thank the Saatchi Gallery and the Donald Young Gallery for their kind permission to reproduce a detail from History Modernised by Josiah McElheny.

1 This idea is notably explored in Mario Vargas Llosa’s wonderful novel El Hablador (The Storyteller) (1990) in which Saul Zuratas, a student ethnologist and Peruvian Jew (himself a member of a diasporic people, which has survived exile and the threat of extinction), takes up the role of storyteller for a nomadic Amazonian tribe, the Machiguengas, who are threatened by acculturation, assimilation, or extinction, and becomes both chronicler of their diaspora and an archive of their myths.

2 Bradley, 1989.

3 The archive has a powerful legitimating function. Gonzalez Echevarria makes the interesting point that the first novels were frequently legimated in terms of fictional archival sources, with the novelist claiming to have stumbled across an old manuscript, letters, diaries; for example, Cervantes in Don Quixote spoke of having to ‘search and ransack all the archives of La Mancha’ for his tale (quoted in Gonzalez Echevarria, 1990: 5). Connerton (1989) also notes the legitimating function of social memory.

4 Home at least to the historian: Steedman also makes this point; ‘the Historian goes to the Archive to be at home as well as to be alone’ (1998: 70).

5 Parliamentary Papers, 1845, xv, Royal Commission on the Condition of the Framework Knitters, Report, Vol. 1: minute 6259, evidence of Thomas Heafield; minute 759, evidence of Benjamin Underwood.

6 See also Brown and Davis-Brown, 1998.

7 Parliamentary Papers, 1845, xv, Vol. I: minute 720, evidence of Thomas Revil; minute 4048, evidence of Amos Foxon. Foxon proposed the idea of a cooperative ‘union of all classes’, reflecting the attachment of the knitters to a succession of radical collectivist schemes (Bradley, 1989).

8 Minutes of Leicester Amalgamated Hosiery Union, AGM, 19 February 1924; Trade and Shop Minutes, 30 July 1920 (Leicester Record Office, deposit DE 1655). Jabez Chaplin, the union secretary at this time, was a committed socialist and member of the ILP, if a moderate union leader, but given to irascible outbursts (see Bradley, 1989).

9 Depositions in Leicester Records Office, DE1313.6, by Mrs Hames and Mrs Birkin.

10.

10 The research was funded by the ESRC, research grant no. R000234124. An account is given in Bradley, Gender and Power in the Workplace (London: Macmillan, 1999) and in it I hope some echoes of the voices I listened to may make themselves heard, however refracted by my concerns as a sociologist.

11.

11 These comments are from two civil servants and a factory worker.

12.

12 See Max Weber’s (1949) indispensable discussion of the limited sense in which objectivity can be understood in the social sciences.

13.

13 The ‘pure relationship’ according to Giddens (1991) is one that is ‘internally referential’; that is to say, it is valued or entered into for its own sake, rather than any extrinsic considerations or gains.

14.

14 Transcripts of the Starr Report can be consulted at: htt://reports.guardian.co.uk/sp_reports/Starr/

15.

15 A graphic illustration of this point is provided by the work of Josiah McElheny entitled History Modernized (1998), which was dispayed in the Young Americans 2 exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in 1998 (see Figure 1). McElheny’s exhibit consisted of a number of pieces of handworked glass reproducing objects held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, dating from the 17th to early 20th centuries. However, each ‘reproduction’ in fact subtly altered or modified the original so that, for example, a clear glass 17th-century goblet was reworked in heavy blue glass; an art nouveau tumbler by Adolf Loos, engraved with sinister eyes, was transformed by being painted with pretty coloured flowers.

16.

16 I use scepticism here approvingly, as a desideratum of successful sociological practice.

17.

17 Fentress and Wickham make a similar point in relation to social memory: ‘Behind the display of knowledge and the representation of experience, behind the facts, emotions and images with which memory seems to be filled there is only we ourselves.... The moment we “think” our memories, recalling and articulating them, they are no longer objects.... At that moment, we find ourselves indissol ubly in their centre’ (1992: 201).

References

Bauman, Zygmunt (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: on modernity, post-modernity and intellectuals. Cambridge: Polity.

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