Archive Fever by Derrida

Archive originally meant an address or house of the magistrates, or those who had political power. Therefore, the meaning of archive changed to signify the place where the official documents and record were kept. These were the documents that spoke the law, and they needed a “guardian and a localization.”

Derrida states that “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” This rings especially true today, where “fake news” is becoming a reality in our world, and people in political power are falsifying facts and changing people’s minds through social media without censure. The author then goes on to state that the democratic society can be measured by access to and interpretation of the archive.

The internet is changing the concept of the archive dramatically. We all have access to information and memories, and no longer is the archive an untouchable, guarded, secret wealth of information. Libraries can be viewed in this way, too, as archives available to the whole population. Today, most all of us can contribute whatever we want to the online archives of our time.

“This dwelling…marks the institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the non-secret.” This quote means, that although libraries and the internet may exist, there is still information that although it’s technically “public,” it’s not available to the wider population.

Derrida speaks to the idea of consignation, saying “Consignation aims to coordinate a singular corpus, in a system in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.” Hiding behind all these long and erudite phrases is a simple thought that archives should be available in one system to a larger group of individuals. This, in some ways, is what the Internet does.

People say that making archives more widely available is insurmountable due to the law or relations between secret and non-secret, or property rights, or reproduction rights. Where do we draw the line between what should be archived and available to the public, and what is private? Nowadays, with the advent of social media, our lives are less private than ever before, and people share so many intimate details of their life that the line between private and public information gets more and more blurred.