[Reader-list] History and archival freedom of the subject etc.

[ARNAB CHATTERJEE]

Dear Ritwik,Sadan and Prem,
                            A warm welcome to Ritwik.
Welcome to the discussion and "broadening our horizon
thus." This is also to introduce Ritwik to Reader list
readers: Ritwik is the one of the most brilliant of
the young generation scholars from Kolkata and is
going to give all of us an intellectual nightmare but
presently he has started with a chip.
 I'll be brief today because as Sadan had predicted in
an earlier mail,as an apprentice I'm learning from
arguing and  I'm really cooking something and warming
up. Lets see where it stands. A few rejoinders are in
order :
 
Sadan:
Archive as a narrative of collection tied to
governmentality apart from others and its gradual
gravitation or usurpation by history--if this is the
way you put it-- I've no problem( though I think the
trajectory is different). For that, if remembrance,
recollection etc. are substituted  in an act of
lioberation, I have no problem too, but why would they
be called archive which would be a transmutation of
the same aesthetic, dear Sadan, not because they ( the
re-ones)are preceeding, primordial forms.Speech is
before writing but bears the same grammatological
structure, but speech is not writing.And secondly,I'm
not interested in freeing archive from history, if you
are, I have no problem; My orginal question was, are
there forms of history which were and still are free
from the archival dependence?

Prem : 
That a positvist de -temporality you don't understand,
I cannot believe that. All scientific paradigms,
formulas are readily a temporal. Recall our school
days with science.I'll give you a nearer explanation :
remember Benjamin's description of the loss of aura of
art objects. Transfer that to the archival objects,
you'll get to know what I'm hinting at and this a well
known argument. And history ought to thematize time
and be temporal--disciplinarily. but archival history
with evidence is as stale with its source and
origins--as Foucault described it.

Ritwik : 
Welcome again! I have no problems if you start with
Archaeology and come to terms slowly through
subjectivity and say, interobjectivity. But
archive,I'm learning from you though --isn't it more
close to the Foucauldian provenance of governmentality
than subjectivity as a primary first? The self
constitution appears in that episode precisely( this
is different from the Greek same self comportment).
And again, as an apprentice I may remind you I'm not
investigating the 'status of archives' Ritwik, I'm
trying to get at some form of history or
critical/effective history or genealogy which can do
without 'archives' ( used in the disciplinary sense of
history, ok?)

Let us see where we get down
arnab

            



--- ritwik bhattacharyya <0supplement at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Archive and the Subject
> 
> 
> 
> As has already been argued, the passage from
> Foucault's earlier works,
> especially 'Archaeology', (which stands for a sort
> of explanation of what
> Foucault had been doing in his first two or three
> works) to what would be
> called genealogy is important for adressing the
> question raised on the
> archive or its status. And this would draw our
> attention to the problem of
> subject formation/self-constitution of the subject
> -relating it to the
> archive. Much of later Foucault is valuable because
> of the questions on
> subjectivity that has been posed there.
> 
> 
> 
> But for the time being if one concentrates on
> 'Archaeology of Knowledge' one
> would find that Foucault is trying his best to
> contest a certain idea of the
> subject found in the extant historiography  and  is
> attempting to look at
> the historiographic operation as a whole with this
> contestation in mind. It
> would be imprudent for us to pose the questions
> surrounding archive and its
> function etc. without at once raising the problem of
> subjectivity for
> discussion.
> 
> 
> 
> Hopefully this shall broaden our horizon a bit.
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks
> 
> 
> Ritwik.
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