Genres of the trace: memory, archives and troubleFootnote¹

1. This essay is based on a paper entitled ‘Memory, Archive and Trouble’, the keynote address at the Archives Society of Alberta conference, ‘Memory in Archive, Archive of Memory’, in Calgary, May 2012. I am grateful to the following friends and colleagues for their readings of early drafts of that paper – Terry Cook, Chandre Gould, Carolyn Hamilton, Kerry Harris and Emily Sommers, as I am to the Archives and Manuscripts referees for their readings of the later essay version. Elements of the piece were used for the paper ‘Deconstructing “the Tattoo”’, presented at the Society of American Archivists’ 2012 Annual Conference, ‘Beyond Borders’, San Diego, August 2012. Feedback on the latter impacted on the final re-write of the essay. The views expressed in the essay are those of the author and do not represent those of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.

1. This essay is based on a paper entitled ‘Memory, Archive and Trouble’, the keynote address at the Archives Society of Alberta conference, ‘Memory in Archive, Archive of Memory’, in Calgary, May 2012. I am grateful to the following friends and colleagues for their readings of early drafts of that paper – Terry Cook, Chandre Gould, Carolyn Hamilton, Kerry Harris and Emily Sommers, as I am to the Archives and Manuscripts referees for their readings of the later essay version. Elements of the piece were used for the paper ‘Deconstructing “the Tattoo”’, presented at the Society of American Archivists’ 2012 Annual Conference, ‘Beyond Borders’, San Diego, August 2012. Feedback on the latter impacted on the final re-write of the essay. The views expressed in the essay are those of the author and do not represent those of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.

2. This introduction is based on the text prepared by me in 2011 for the Archives Society of Alberta to use in its pre-publicity for the 2012 conference ‘Memory in Archive, Archive of Memory’.

3. Michael Piggott, ‘Archives and Memory’, in Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed and Frank Upward (eds), Archives: Recordkeeping in Society, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, 2005, p. 307.

4. See Verne Harris, ‘“Something is Happening Here and You Don’t Know What it Is”: Jacques Derrida Unplugged’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, vol. 26, no. 1, 2005, p. 135; Verne Harris, ‘Ethics and the Archive: “An Incessant Movement of Recontextualisation”’, in Terry Cook (ed.), Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions, Society of American Archivists, Chicago, 2011, pp. 350–1.

5. Christopher Norris and Andrew Benjamin, What is Deconstruction?, St Martin’s Press, London, 1988, p. 10.

6. These are offered, in the first instance, not as case studies, but as elements of autobiographical (re)contextualisation. Deconstruction insists that personal contexts are unavoidable, even in the most robust research environments. One need not go as far as Derrida – who argued that there is nothing outside context and who also argued that ‘there are only contexts without any centre or absolute anchoring’ – to concede that my thinking (of) archives and memory has been shaped by my contexts. I begin, then, by paying heed to this shaping. See Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1988, pp. 12, 136.

7. I tell this part of the story – but, very deliberately, not the part that follows – in Verne Harris, ‘“They Should Have Destroyed More”: The Destruction of Public Records by the South African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990–1994’, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective, Society of American Archivists, Chicago, 2007, pp. 305–36.

8. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004, pp. 21, 494–7.

9. ibid., p. 443.

10. Eric Ketelaar, ‘Recordkeeping and Societal Power’, in Sue McKemmish et al. (eds), Archives: Recordkeeping in Society, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, 2005, p. 287.

11. Today, Kerry and I lean towards an interpretation with three movements: first, in those early days, I conveyed to her my desire to get married in ways other than writing, and she affirmed me in writing; second, I was relatively secure and wielding power in the relationship and; third, we both had a long way to go in our struggle against patriarchy.

12. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993, p. 51. Maurice Halbwachs made a similar argument: ‘There are hence no perceptions without recollections’. See his argument in Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992, pp. 168–9. This Halbwachs text, which is edited and translated by Lewis A Coser, is not to be confused with his 1950 book The Collective Memory.

13. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 29.

14. ibid., p. 4.

15. Piggott, ‘Archives and Memory’, pp. 305–7.

16. Margaret Hedstrom, ‘Archives and Collective Memory: More than a Metaphor, Less than an Analogy’, in Terry Eastwood and Heather MacNeil (eds), Currents of Archival Thinking, Libraries Unlimited, Santa Barbara, 2010, p. 163.

17. This understanding of archives is shaped most directly by the work of Professor Carolyn Hamilton (in our collaborative work, Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (eds), Refiguring the Archive, David Philip, Cape Town, 2001, by many subsequent discussions and by Jacques Derrida (his whole opus, but especially Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996)), indigenous ways of knowing archives in southern Africa and Paul Ricoeur (especially Memory, History, Forgetting, pp. 13–16).

18. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Parages, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2011, p. 197. It should be noted, and here I am indebted to an Archives and Manuscripts referee for pointing it out to me, that Ricoeur uses the same French term translated as ‘archivation’ in Derrida for what is translated as ‘archiving’ in Memory, History, Forgetting – see pp. 166–7.

19. Jacques Derrida, ‘Living on Border Lines’, in Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller. Deconstruction and Criticism, Continuum, New York, 1979, p. 86.

20. For an account of Nelson Mandela’s relationships with Swart and other warders, see Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, ‘Nelson Mandela’s Warders’, available at <http://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/nelson-mandelas-warders>, accessed 18 October 2012.

21. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 16.

22. So, two versions represented in different genres or sub-genres of archives, implicated in one another, overlapping, folding into one another and contaminating each other. Each is at once ‘text’ to the other’s ‘context’ and ‘context’ to the other’s ‘text’. I am merely signalling complication, for, in truth, the complication of genre is endless. The tattoo must also be accounted for and counted as a genre of artistic endeavour, as a genre of craft, of decoration, of rite of passage and so on. The interfolding and contaminations are endless. They are endless, but subject to what Derrida calls ‘the law of the law of genre’, namely – and precisely – ‘a principle of contamination’ (see Endnote 26). This is a law which determines every boundary to be soft and porous – more precisely, to be being folded in processes of invagination. Processes of sheathing through unsheathing; processes of being folded inside out – invagination, of course, is the thrust of tattooing as a process. While the trace of the tattoo appears to be on the surface of the skin, it is, in fact, beneath the surface. The tattooist’s needle pricks through the surface layer – the epidermis – and takes the ink with it into the next layer – the dermis – so that the ink is folded into the skin. Being foreign material, the ink activates the body’s immune system, which enfolds the ink in sheaths called fibroblasts. This is invagination. The tattoo, then, is not a trace on the skin, but in the skin. The tattoo is a folding inside out. So that what is inside is outside, annd what is private is – at least in principle – public.

23. This is the central thesis of Maurice Halbwach’s seminal work The Collective Memory, Harper, New York, 1950.

24. John Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, Fordham University Press, New York, 1997, pp. 79–80.

25. Both ‘genre’ and ‘trace’ are used here, of course, in Derridean terms. In this essay, my use of the former relies especially on Derrida’s use of the term in ‘The Law of Genre’, Parages, pp. 217–49, and my use of the latter relies on his use of the term in Archive Fever (see note 17) – ‘the trace’ precisely as ‘archiving trace’. This use is not unrelated to Ricoeur’s use of the word in Memory, History, Forgetting. In this work, Ricoeur distinguishes between three categories of trace – documentary, cerebral and affective. For him, only the first of these three is an archiving trace – see, for instance, pp. 13–15, 166–8.

26. Derrida, Acts of Literature, Routledge, London and New York, 1992, pp. 226–8.

27. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Harper and Row, New York, 1962, p. 312.

28. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 412.

29. ibid., p. 448.

30. ibid., p. 426.

31. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 51.

32. Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever in South Africa’, in Caroline Hamilton, Refiguring the Archive, David Philip, Cape Town, 2002, p. 54.

33. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 443.

34. ibid.

35. For a sustained engagement with these questions, see psychologist James Hillman’s The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, Random House, Sydney, 1999, chapter 10, pp. 84–93.

36. Derrida, ‘Archive Fever in South Africa’, p. 42.

37. Ricoeur, Memory, History Forgetting, p. 440.

38. ibid., pp. 417–46. Also see Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Allen & Unwin, London, 1950.

39. For examples of science naming this meddling, see Bob Holmes, ‘When Memory Plays Us False’, New Scientist, no. 1935, July 1994; Graham Lawton, ‘The Grand Delusion: Head Full of Half-Truths’, New Scientist, no. 2812, May 2011.

40. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, pp. 7–21.

41. ibid., p. 457.

42. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Routledge, London, 2001; Nicolai Hartmann, Ethics, Allen & Unwin, London, 1932; Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, pp. 457–506.

43. This idea is explored by Anne Michaels in her novel The Winter Vault, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 2009. See, especially, pp. 93–4, 331–2.

44. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 90. The lecture on which the book is based was delivered in 1994.