Declining Derrida: Integrity, tensegrity, and the preservation of archives from deconstruction

Archivaria

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 64-88

  Brothman, Brien ^a  

^a Rhode Island State Archives and Public Records Administration   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33644559202     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. See, for example, Mark Lilla, "The Politics of Jacques Derrida, " New York Times Review of Books (25 June 1998), pp. 36-41.
2. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
3. On the political content of Derrida's work, see Nancy Fraser, "The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?" and Robert Bernasconi, "Politics Beyond Humanism: Mandela and the Struggle Against Apartheid, " in Gary B. Madison, ed., Working Through Derrida (Evanston, Ill., 1993), pp. 51-75.
4. George Cotkin's description of the American reception of the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the years following the Second World War bears some striking resemblances to the reception accorded deconstruction in North America forty years later. George Cotkin, "French Existentialism and American Popular Culture, 1945-1948, " The Historian 61, no. 2 (Winter 1999). See also, Rebecca Comay, "Geopolitics of Translation: Deconstruction in America, " Stanford French Review 15, nos. 1-2 (1991), pp. 47-79.
5. Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 11-16. On the significance of various versions of the story of deconstruction's demise, see Jeffery Williams, "The Death of Deconstruction, the End of Theory, and Other Ominous Rumours, " Narrative 4, no. 1 (June 1996).
6. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, 1995).
7. Of course, many believe that memory and archives differ because archives concerns a written past and psychological memory concerns images stored in the mind rather than on a medium. However, in his survey of the history of western writing on memory-in Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty, and recent writings in the neurosciences-philosopher David Farrell Crell explores the significance of the constant resort to metaphors of inscription on a material medium to explain the operations of memory. David Farrell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington, c. 1990). On the difficulty throughout history of discussing memory without resorting to metaphor, see also Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, 1991), p. 455.
8. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology Gayatri Chakravorty Spivack, trans. (Baltimore, 1976), p. 15.
9. This pragmatism is a more elaborate version of the notion that archives is a "craft, " a code word meaning that archivists have successfully resisted the temptation to over intellectualize their work, while also avoiding the less savory aspects of modern professionalism. Accordingly, archivists have often insisted that archives is a practical, that is, no nonsense occupation, undeterred by fruitless abstraction.
10. See Stephen Waring, Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC., 1998). Waring surveys the theories of such important figures as Alfred Chandler, Elton Mayo, Herbert Simon, Chester Barnard, and Peter Drucker. There are many studies attesting to the pervasive social influence of the engineering professions, particularly its dominance of the ranks of corporate management beginning back in the 1920s. See David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 138-42.
11. Derrida, "Differance, " p. 11. For a discussion on the values frequently accompanying use of the term "information, " its "transferability, " "nobility, " and the "preservation of meaning, " for example, see Geoffrey Nunberg, "Farewell to the Information Age, " in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), pp. 106ff. Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, and James Gleick, all arguably neo-Taylorites,55 all insightful, imaginative, and even prescient, have emerged as the most influential philosophers of knowledge for our time. On the persistence of the influence of Frederick Winslow Taylor in management thought, see Waring, Scientific Management Since 1945, passim.
12. Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity. Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New York, 1968).
13. The structure of Derrida's own published works embodies this view. Take a look, for example, at Archive Fever. The book runs to 111 pages. An introductory "Note, " "Exergue, " "Preamble, " and "Foreword" take us to page 83. The "Thesis" chapter consumes all of thirteen pages, and the "Postscript, " "Translator's Notes, " and "Works Cited" cover the remainder of the book. This may be one reason why readers find Derrida's writing so frustrating. It is difficult to tell the thesis, the heart of the matter, from the "externals"-the introductions, preambles, and so on. This is one of several tactics Derrida uses to elicit the fragile, tentative nature of our differentiation between what is "central" and what is "marginal" in texts, what is peripheral in life-and in archives, for that matter. Interestingly, there is an etymological relation between "heart" and "record. "
14. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics, " in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago, 1978). This essay is an ethical meditation on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, whose philosophy centers around the status of "otherness, " and the effects of human acts to impose what "is" and "is not" the case on the "other. " This will have implications for Derrida's view that in writing's attempt to state the heart of the matter by resort to a language of transparent, settled meanings always fall short of the author's mark.
15. Irene Harvey, Derrida and The Economy of Differance (Bloomington, 1986), p. 3. Derrida himself explicitly repudiates the characterization of deconstruction as a form of criticism, and explains why. See "Lettre a un ami japonais, " in Jacques Derrida, Psyche. Inventions de l'autre (Paris, 1987), pp. 387-93. In this same letter, Derrida also briefly and explicitly tries to explain the nature of deconstruction.
16. Rodolphe Gasche's widely admired The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass., 1986) remains unsurpassed as a treatment of deconstruction as a work of philosophy. In addition, Derrida's commitment to philosophy, problematic though it may be, is evident in his membership in GREPH (Groupe de recherche sur l'enseignement philosophique), a group dedicated to promoting the introduction of philosophy at the pre-college level. His status as a founding member of the International College of Philosophy also demonstrates his commitment to philosophy. See also Derrida's speech at UNESCO, "Of Humanities and the Philosophical Discipline, " reproduced in Surfaces 4 (1994). It makes a claim for the importance of the autonomy of philosophy.
17. Most of the following discussion of differance draws on one of Derrida's most important and widely cited essays, "Differance, " which, not surprisingly, largely concerns the meaning or non-meaning of the term, and its implications for the status of meaning and being in general. "Differance, " in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1986).
18. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1966). This classic book in linguistics was pulled together from notes his former students gathered and published in 1915 as Cours generale de linguistique.
19. Derrida, "Differance, " p. 3.
20. Jacques Derrida, "The Double Session, " Dissemination (Chicago, 1981), p. 177.
21. Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Los Angeles, 1977), p. 148.
22. Mark Taylor, "Introduction: System. Structure. Difference. Other, " in Mark Taylor, ed., Deconstruction in Context. Literature and Philosophy (Chicago, 1986), pp. 13-14. For an indepth study of the relationship between deconstruction, systems theory, and cybernetics, see Christopher Johnson, System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), pp. 148-50 and passim.
23. Derrida, "Differance, " p. 7.
24. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
25. Jacques Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials, " in Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds., Languages of the Unsayable. The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York, 1989), pp. 3-30.
26. "It is because it extends to solid structures, to "material" institutions, and not only to discourses or meaningful representations that deconstruction is always distinguishable from an analysis or a critique. " Derrida cited in Harvey, Deconstruction and the Economy of Differance, p. 3.
27. Donald Ingber, "The Architecture of Life, " Scientific American 278, no. 1 (January 1998). A life scientist, Ingber discusses how the principles of tensegrity might be used to characterize cell structures.
28. R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics. Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (New, 1975), p. 356.
29. Ingber, "The Architecture of Life. "
30. Hugh Kenner, Geodesic Math and How to Use It (Los Angeles, 1976).
31. Fuller, Synergetics, p. 357.
32. Anthony Judge, "Transcending Duality Through Tensional Integrity: Part I: A Lesson in Organization from Building Design, " and "Part 2: From Systems-Versus-Networks to Tensegrity Organizations, " Transnational Association 5 (1978), pp. 248-57, 258-65.
33. Anthony Pugh, An Introduction to Tensegrity (Berkeley, 1976), p. 56.
34. Bataille was a French essayist and theorist who in fact trained as an archivist at L'École des Chartes in Paris.
35. The literature on the notion of text and textuality is vast. One of the earliest to propose the authorless text, and to formulate the concept of cognomen of "literature" to apply to all forms of writing is the late Roland Barthes. See "From Work to Text, " in Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, 1979), pp. 73-81.
36. The "linguistic turn" is a phrase first used to describe philosophy's identification of issues of language in the 1920s and 1930s as holding the key to solving philosophical problems. It then reappeared in the 1970s and 1980s in several other disciplines, including history.
37. With his primary concern to criticize what he construes as archivists' continuing delusional and obsessional relationship of dependence upon history, leading archival academic Richard Cox invokes as support for his case David Harlan's remarks (in The Degradation of American History) to fellow historians concerning the resilience of postmodernism and the influence of its idea of textuality on historical practice, which many historians hope and believe has disappeared from the scene. Harlan's central argument is that the abandonment of literary criticism for documentary criticism and the search for objectivity has lead to the moral degradation of American history. Unabashedly present-centered, Harlan is not warning other historians against the influence of literature on history. Rather he is urging them to embrace it. Curiously, Cox seems to side with Harlan. Indeed, in Harlan's criticism of the historical profession as in decline because of its neglect of literary approaches to documents, Cox purports to have found evidence that the profession to which archivists have slavishly turned for guidance is falling apart. Cox even seems to cite as support for his own point Harlan's complaint that historians have ignored the insights of literary criticism in teaching students how to analyze and interpret records. It is not clear what point Cox is trying to make. Is he citing Harlan's criticism as itself an example of historical practice gone terribly wrong? Or is he agreeing with Harlan's criticism of the historical profession as a correct diagnosis of an ailing profession? If the latter, he seems to miss the point entirely that Harlan's clear invocation of the methodology of literary criticism is incompatible with, if not inimical to the commonly accepted principles of archives, and current record theory. By my reading of the passages Cox cites, Harlan is actually critical of approaching sources as "documents. " On the contrary, Harlan seems to be a proponent of approaching sources as "text. " In fact, he endorses decontextualized textual criticism because he thinks it is supportive of an "ethics of reading, " which, he claims, historians lack. What seems like a fundamental misreading prevents Cox from appreciating, and therefore stating fully and confronting productively the stakes that are involved in the differences between the contemporary concept of "textuality, " which Harlan promotes, and the concept of "recordness" that archivists, including Cox himself, have been working hard to establish, or to reestablish. Either way, he seems determined to read Harlan in a way that accommodates his determination to diminish, if not to dismiss, the relevance of history for archival practice. (It is also unclear as to what Cox is referring to when he mentions "history. ") Richard J. Cox, "American Archivists, Cyberculture, and Stasis, " in Cyber, Hyper, or Resolutely Jurassic? Proceeding of an International Symposium Marking Twenty-five Years of Professional Archival Training in Ireland, University College, Dublin, Oct. 2-3, 1998. (Http://www.ucd.ie/-archives/sympos.html [as of 17 October 1999]). David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago, 1997), pp. 191-92. At the same conference, another leading academic archivist, Luciana Duranti, marshaling the weight of long European tradition, similarly attempted to convince her audience of archi vists' misplaced reliance on history, which, starting in the late nineteenth century, served to draw archivists away from the original, presumably authentic, juridical and diplomatic roots of their practice. Duranti, "The Future of Archival Scholarship, "
38. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space. The Computer in the History of Literacy (Hillsdale, N.J., 1990), p. 144.
39. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York, 1976).
40. On the notion of text as an anti-disciplinary object, one whose nature is being contested among various disciplines, and which resists accommodation of the "ossifying" agendas and needs of the established disciplines, see John Mowatt, Text: The Genealogy of an Anti-Disciplinary Object (Durham, N.C., 1992), p. 103 and passim.
41. This famous, or infamous, phrase appears in. " That Dangerous Supplement. " an essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. In a way, the supplement to which Derrida refers is media. There is always something mediating-standing between-us and our wish to make contact with the outside "real" or "natural" world, something (present) between full absence and full presence. That something is text, or writing. The writing to which Derrida refers, however, can occur on paper, in speech, or in thought. To be fair, it is worth quoting from this passage at length. "There is nothing outside the text [there is no outside-text.
42. For other interpretations of Derrida's phrase, see Nicholas Royle, "Yes, Yes, the University in Ruins, " in Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1999), p. 147ff and note 3.
43. The term "intertextuality" was coined by French psychoanalyst and semiotician Julia Kristeva in Semeiotike. Recherche pour une semanalyse in the late 1960s. In 1974, Kristeva suggested that the word "transposition" better expressed her meaning and that "intertextuality" had mislead people into believing that it merely concerned the "study of sources" rather than the passage from one sign system to another. Margaret Waller, trans. Revolution in Poetic Language, (New York, 1984), pp. 59-60.
44. Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism. An Advanced Introduction (New York, 1983), p. 161.
45. On the relation between "contractualist discourse, " the concept of signature, and the sovereignty of authorship, see Gilbert Larochelle, "From Kant to Foucault. What Remains of the Author in Postmodernism, " in Lisa Buranen and Alice Roy, eds., Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World (New York, 1999), p. 125. A cursory review of law journals will quickly reveal the concern about intellectual property issues that the emergence of cyberspace has occasioned among lawyers and legal scholars. Notions of "personal jurisdiction, " "physical" versus electronic presence, copyright, originality, and "sequential innovation" all revolve around the enlightenment ontology of the person as a sovereign being and creator, and author versus reader rights. See, for example, David Nimmer, "Brains and Other Paraphernalia of the Digital Age, "Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 10, no. 1 (Fall 1996).
46. The Victorian Electronic Records Strategy Project final report, for examples, refers to locking a record, and various legal texts discussing the definition of records refer to "fixity" and "fixation" of meaning.
47. George Allan's elegant, wistful prose beautifully expresses this condition: "The problematic character of temporal achievement must be transcended without transcending its distinctive and unrepeatable quality, lest the very effort at salvaging what is most precious result in its perishing. " The Importances of the Past. A Meditation on the Authority of Tradition (Albany, 1986), p. 154. On the kind of paradox involved in Allan's characterization, Derrida writes that writing both evokes and at the same time necessarily transcends the absent, dead intentional moment of writing. Otherwise, he insists, it would not be writing. Writing, by definition, survives and transcends its moment of subjectivity. This is what makes historicity possible: "The silence of prehistoric arcana and buried civilizations, the entombment of lost intentions and guarded secrets, and the illegibility of the lapidary inscription disclose the transcendental sense of death as what unites these things to the absolute privilege of intentionality in the very instance of its essential juridical failure. " Thus, "the originality of the field of writing is its ability to dispense with, due to its sense, every present reading in general. " Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry. An Introduction (Lincoln, 1989), p. 88.
48. Pat Bigelow discusses the relationship between silence, writing, and existence. Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing (Gainesville, Fl., 1987).
49. Interestingly, the French term for default is défaut. It translates as absence or lack, failure to meet obligations, as in defaulting on loans. Through its usage in the context of computer programs, however, we have come to think of default as a normal state.
50. Arkady Plotnitsky, Complementarity. Anti-Epistemology After Bohr and Derrida (Durham, N.C., 1994), p. 73.
51. On the applications of Bohr's notion of complementarity to the unpacking of philosophical and religious issues, see Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (London, 1960), pp. 207-8. For an exploration of the affinities between Bohr's physics theory and philosophy and Derridean deconstruction, see Plotnitsky, Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology After Bohr and Derrida, passim.
52. In "Lettre a un ami japonais, " Derrida expresses surprise at how the term "deconstruction" arose to become so closely associated with his work. It is a term that Derrida first used almost in passing in the French version of Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie) back in 1967. There he wrote: "The 'rationality. which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition, but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all significations that have their source in that logos. " Of Grammatology, p. 10.