The architecture of archives: Whose form, what functions?
Tóm tắt
This article examines the claim that, through its overt symbolic messaging, the Gatineau Preservation Centre, opened by the National Archives of Canada in 1997, embodies a perfect transparency between function and form, with the shape of the place being derived seamlessly from the needs of the archival work done there, and the proof being in the exposure of all the elements to view. It reveals the undercurrents of contending oppositions to this claim, both in the subversive, Mannerist, or “impure” architectural eccentricities designed into the structure, and in the embodiment of archival narratives whose symbolism is challenged by unacknowledged resistances. While the building is clearly inspired by Modernist and Enlightenment orientations, such as the ambition to preserve unchanged a universal, transcendent historical authenticity, these diverse resistances buried in it are manifested, for example, in the contest of maleversus female structural elements, and in the authority of the monumental and exposed set against the seduction of the varied and secret. Most importantly, the absorption of the body both metaphorically and physically into the many disciplines of the place unconsciously calls into question the building's self-image as the epitome of a liberal-humanist and objective-scientific activity; it reflects instead the destabilizing plays and displays of power which are increasingly seen to form the indeterminate field of the archival pursuit.
Tài liệu tham khảo
This essay grew out of a conference paper first presented at this Annual Meeting of the Association of Canadian Archivists, Ottawa, Canada, June 1997.
Cf. Jacques Derrida,Writing and Difference, trans. with intro. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Le Corbusier,Towards a New Architecture (1923), trans. in 1927 by Frederick Etchells (London: The Architectural Press, 1970), pp. 146–147.
Roland Barthes,Mythologies, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957).
Recent expression of anti-visuality has occurred in poststructuralist French thought. However, it needs to be noted that the same godhead metaphorized as the Word has also been visualized as an all-seeing Eye. Why, therefore, has the picture never achieved the legislating legitimacy of the text? Why has the power of the gaze not transferred to those objects of sight, pictures? is it because pictures submit to the gaze, and, from this submissive position, are open to the gendered associations which are inscribed, inevitably verbally, in descriptors such as “pretty” (“...as a picture”), “illustrative” (merely an adjunct to texts), “visionary” (hence, fanciful, fantastical), even “vain” (as in the picture/mirror metaphor), and “poetic” (as inut pictura poesis)? In contrast, words are associated with “logical” (marking all those academic studies which end in “ology”), “trustworthy” (as in “I give you my word”), and not least “final” (as in the “final word”). Hence, where the word is framed as faithful and credible, the picture is treacherous or worthless, at least as document. Paradoxically, to warrant discussion of them in postmodern academe, pictures may now be referred to as “texts”, once again suffering the negation of their own affects beneath the override of the word. Regarding poststructuralist anti-visuality, see Martin Jay,Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth=Century Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); also Jacques Derrida,Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For a start on the voluminous literature on “the gaze”, see Norman Bryson,Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
Jean-François Lyotard,The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979], trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra”, in Brian Wallis (ed.),Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, with David R. Godine, Boston, 1984), p. 259.
Barbara Maria Stafford,Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
Ibid.. p. 61.
Ibid., p. 78.
Ibid..
They share this ambition with museum and gallery curators who collect, preserve, and exhibit their own universes of fragments. Cf. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,”Art History 13(4) (1980): pp. 448–469; also, for examples of subsequent theorizing, Peter Vergo (ed.),The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989); Susan M. Pearce,Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (eds.),Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).
“There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” Michel Foucault,Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 27.
Ibid.. pp. 27–28.
Ibid.. p. 28.
Diane Morgan, “Postmodernism and Architecture”, in Stuart Sim (ed.),The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998) p. 85.
Relevant archival analyses informed by postmodern debates include a number of articles by Brien Brothman and Terry Cook, such as: Brien Brothman, “Orders of Value: Probing the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice”,Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991): pp. 78–100; and Terry Cook, “Electronic Records, Paper Minds: The Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the Post-Custodial and Post-Modernist Era”,Archives and Manuscripts 22 (November 1994): pp. 300–329. A selection of further authors and subsequent publications are Joan M. Schwartz, “‘We make our tools and our tools make us’: Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics”,Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995): pp. 40–74; Richard Brown, “Death of a Renaissance Record-Keeper: The Murder of Tomasso da Tortona in Ferrara, 1385”,Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997): pp. 1–43; Tom Nesmith, “Still Fuzzy, But More Accurate: Some Thoughts on the ‘Ghosts’ of Archival Theory”,Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999): pp. 136–150; Bernadine Dodge, “Places Apart: Archives in Dissolving Space and Time”,Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997): pp. 118–131; Carolyn Heald, “Is There Room for Archives in the Postmodern World?”American Archivist 59 (Winter 1996): pp. 88–101; Lilly Koltun, “The Promise and Threat of Digital Options in an Archival Age”,Archivalia 47 (Spring 1999): pp. 114–135; Verne Harris,Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa, 2nd edn. (Pretoria, 2000); and Elizabeth Kaplan, “We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are”,American Archivist 63 (Spring/Summer 2000), pp. 126–151. For recent updates on postmodernism and the archival profession from a visual and general perspective, see, respectively, Joan M. Schwartz, “’Records of Simple Truth and Precision’: Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control”,Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000): pp. 1–40; and Terry Cook, “Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth: Postmodernism and the Practice of Archives”,Archivaria 51 (Spring 2001): pp. 14–35 (and the listing of sources in note 14).
Cf. Earl of Shaftesbury, who once remarked, “The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system.” Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, with Robert J. Yudell,Body, Memory, and ARchitecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 25.
Daphne Bramham, “Smaller Definitely Better in Global Economy, Futurist Says”, OttawaCitizen, Saturday, 24 May 1997, J5.