#generalarchivetheory

“Contemporary cultural theorists largely approach and critique archives as sites of power that employ a perceived, naïve belief in adherence to objectivity, despite transparent absences and gaps amid collection. Archivists, however, share this concern, remaining acutely and forever concerned over what has been lost and the areas of their collections will never cover” (Frick 12).

“[T]he archive” is increasingly imbued with notions of sanctioned cultural value, protection, ownership, and power-power emboldened and sanctioned by the archive's emphasis on preservation....cultural theorists, media scholars, and film archivists tend to share an additional assumption or belief that is rarely integrated:the status of the moving image as heritage” (Frick 13).

“The archive cannot be described in its totality; and in its forms of existence and coexistence ; and its presence is unavoidable. It emerges in fragments, regions, and levels more fully no doubt, and with greater sharpness” (Foucault 130).

“It is obvious that the archive of society, a culture, or a civilization cannot be described exhaustively; or even, no doubt, the archive of a whole period. On the other hand , it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say—and to itself, the object of our discourse” (Foucault 130).

“The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statement as unique events” (Foucault 129).

“...it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement thing; it is the system of its functioning” (Foucault 129).

“The meaning of “archive,” its only meaning, comes to it from Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (Derrida 4).

“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives” (Derrida 18).

“The archive augments itself, engrosses itself, it gains in auctoritas. But in the same stroke it loses the absolute and meta-textual authority it might claim to have. One will never be able to objectivize it while leaving no remainder. The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future. How can we think about this fatal repetition, about repetition in general in its relationship to memory and the archive?” (Derrida 68).