Performance in the archives.(Essay)

On Christmas Eve in 2001, New York City's outgoing mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, signed an agreement with city authorities that allowed him unprecedented control over his public records. Giuliani convinced the commissioner of Records and Information Services to allow him to box up his mayoral papers and transfer them to "The Fortress," a high-security storage facility in Queens. He then incorporated a private consulting firm to manage the archives with the aim of depositing them in a new site, to be called the Giuliani Center for Public Affairs. (1)

Among those who protested the mayor's action was the Society of American Archivists, the oldest and largest professional organization of archivists in North America. On February 20, 2002, at a conference convened to register the society's outrage at the mayor's maneuver, archivist Thomas Connors said: "By transferring his documentary record as a public servant to a private entity ... Mr. Giuliani effectively removes his actions as mayor from the scrutiny of members of the public who wish to learn how, why, and when certain decisions were made in order to assess specific Giuliani-era policies.... What particularly concerns the Society of American Archivists is that Mr. Giuliani's action is taking place against a national backdrop wherein other government officials, namely President Bush, are attempting to create barriers to access to public information." (2)

Giuliani's flaunting of civic protocol was so flagrant, so egregious as to recall the legendary antics of Tammany Hall. His actions nicely illustrated Jacques Derrida's notion of the archive as both an exterior site that houses truth in the form of original documents and as a site of power and authority. Clearly, Giuliani understood the link between public memory, power, and the archive. He hijacked his own archive because he knew that such documents might reinforce or drastically revise public memory. In Derrida's words, "There is no political power without control of the archive ... democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation and access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation." By sequestering the raw data of his mayoral administration, data that were waiting for evidentiary interpretation and critique, Giuliani gave municipal archivists, political historians, and future plaintiffs a nasty case of "archive fever"--Derrida's term for the hunger for evidence, the desire for full knowledge, and the delusional belief that definitive origins are recoverable and redemption attainable by delving into the archive's inner sanctum. (3)

What I have just recounted might be the initial foray for an essay in Antoinette Burton's wonderful new anthology Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History. Historian Burton goes beyond the historian's typical "boot-camp narrative ... the drama" of getting to an archive, living in terrible digs (inevitably too hot or too cold) while working at the archive, and surviving the gatekeeping caprices of the guardians of the archive. The boot-camp narrative usually has a self-congratulatory happy ending when the long-suffering scholar hits pay dirt by finding "it"--the proof needed for his or her tome on the domestic handicrafts of Brabant in the Middle Ages.

Instead, Burton wants to go "backstage" in order to "historiciz[e] the emergence of state and local archives, interrogat[ing] how archive logics work, what subjects they produce, and which they silence in specific historical and cultural contexts; enumerating the ways in which archival work is embodied experience, one shaped as much by national identity, gender, race, and class as by professional training or credentials, pressing the limits of disciplinary boundaries to consider what kind of archive work different genres ... do, for what audiences and to what ends." (4) "Embodied experience"? "Pressing the limit of disciplinary boundaries"? As I hear this admirable list I would say Burton has been reading Joseph Roach or Shannon Jackson or Diana Taylor or Mike Pearson.

While our performance studies scholarship has annexed the archive to the hegemonic written record of history, and has aligned performance to the deep continuities of social memory or the embodied repertoire, certain historians have decisively crossed and intertwined these vortices and taken performance to the archive. Tavia Nyong'o and Kenneth Schlesinger, our conveners at the 2006 American Society for Theatre Research plenary session, asked us to consider the following question: To what degree should performance studies scholarship seek to make visible the silences, tensions, and/or contradictions of the archival record? To a large degree, professional historians are borrowing our tools and doing just that. But I am not offering another useless disciplinary binary. Theatre historians and scholars who use the archive often take performance to the archive. But it is interesting that, at this theory-dead moment, when performance and literature scholars--professors and graduate students alike--know that work in the archives hikes the value of their research, the historians, who as a group have long claimed the archive as their badge of legitimation, their proudly worn letter "A," now view their beloved cobwebby archives as a vexing force field or, as Carolyn Steedman writes, an "oneiric space ... that is to do with longing and appropriation." (5) Is it possible that under the historians' A-for-Archive badges are the even more ornate letters "PS" for Performance Studies?--to be revealed only in dark bars far from academic conferences? We in theatre and performance studies surely have something to say about this.

The archive sits in its silent vault, but when you and I take hold of it, it becomes a performance site, a materialization of an implied narrative already spatialized and arranged. Like performance, the archive is a site of transformation, its "material substrate" transformed by touch and interpretation into knowledge. Like performance, the archive solicits and interacts with a reader/spectator who, drawn by texts, objects, or perhaps something unlooked for, is seduced into desirous identification with writers, figures, and events. (Steedman notes that Jules Michelet, upon reading the work of Vico in 1824, wrote in his diary, "I was seized with a frenzy caught from Vico, an incredible intoxication with his great historical principle") (6) Like performance, the archive conceals its backstories, like the one I've told you about the former mayor of New York City. Like performance, activity in the archive often departs from the script: How many times do we approach the archive with one question only to have it deflected into another? Apparently dormant until the labor of interpretation begins, the archive soon takes on its own voice: it reads us as much as we read it. And like performance, the archive has secrets, "ghosts," as Derrida puts it, that promise an untold story. If I analogize the archive to performance it is not to be fanciful. Jon McKenzie reminded us years ago that to speak of performance is to invoke hidden systems of meaning and power, from the molecular to the spectacular. And, writing of the legal implications of social performance, Joseph Roach notes that there are no trivial rituals.