Off the record; an archivist's nightmare

INTENT on wresting a secret from the real world, the hero of the film Blow-Up repeatedly enlarges a detail in a photograph. The title of the film is a play on words.- when the man blows up the image, he explodes it. Finally all that can be Seen is,3 myriad of silver nitrate particles. in a similar vein, the writer Jorge Lui,; Borges went even further when he imagined a group of geographers doing their best to produce the most accurate possible map of their country. Ultimately this meant reproducing it exactly as it was, on a scale of one to one.

Although it is clear that what the geographers project is crazy, and the situation iS so implausible that no reader could believe for a second that the story is true, hardly anybody seems surprised that historians should harbour the same utopian ambitions.

According to one definition, the purpose of modern archives is the collection, conservation and classification of "all the documents produced in the functioning of an institution", and the provision of access to them, Imagine! The kilometre of shelf space becomes the true yardstick of History.

Every day 5,000 different periodicals arrive at the French national library, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Nobody has ever calculated the probability of a copy of one of these periodicals some day being consulted-the figures would probably be too cruel. "Sacrilege!" cry the librarians, thereby revealing that they are engaged in a sacred enterprise. And the absurd stock reply to critics is, "Even if, there is only a chance in a billion that a future historian might want to Consult a single one of these documents, that document should be preserved".

The "future historian" is the hypocritical pretext for all our fantasies about historicity, the scapegoat for our present anxieties. IS it really because of this hypothetical figure that we shoulder this impossible task, this remorseless unending business of collection and classification? in doing so we enter the nightmare world of total conservation, of History as a kind Of Protected species, of the reconstitution of Time past.

The issue is not that the quantity of documents is growing exponentially, but what criterion should be used to decide which ones to preserve. After swallowing our amazement at the legal definition of archives, so comprehensive as to be self defeating, let's look at the astonishing system of legal deposit, whereby national libraries receive, by legal right, one free copy of each book, periodical and other printed matter produced in the country. . Forget about books. They take up little space and if, as everyone wants, a few thousand more curators are recruited, the problem will soon be solved.

But take posters. Every advertising poster displayed in France is subject to legal deposit. Consider just those that are featured nationwide. Since they are produced in large format, they generally arrive at the Bibliothbque Nationale in sixteen pieces, each one folded in four. Vast quantities of them are delivered and nobody even bothers to unfold them any more, which is just as well since they would be sure to get damaged owing to the poor quality of the paper. But even if these posters were catalogued, it would be impossible to give the public access to them (what kind of table or shelving would be needed to lay Out flat a poster meant to be seen on the side of a building?) and, in any case, the paper on which they are printed is perishable. As a result, they are condemned to remain in their folded state until they decompose.

And yet the posters pile up at the Bibliothbque Nationale. I know. I have piled them myself, meticulously and with a heavy heart, often wondering why I was doing it. I have been haunted by another nightmare image: why not collect advertisements painted directly on walls, moulded in polystyrene or printed on sheet metal? Why only posters? The answer is simple. You can fold posters in four and pile them up, but you can't do that with sheet metal. Admittedly, that's all you can do with posters, but at least you've done your best.

Please don't think I'm exaggerating, or making fun of French officialdom. I have visited the Lenin Library, the Library of Congress and the National Diet Library in Tokyo and everywhere I have asked: "What do you do with your posters?" And everywhere I have been given the same answer: "We pile them up."

When we have solved the problem of posters and photographs, what about photocopies and desktop publishing? The other day I came across a street trader who was selling phials of a liquid that could transfer any printed image (especially scenes from comic strips) onto any surface (especially T-shirts). Besides noting that the man was openly infringing copyright law, I wondered whether his customers should not be compelled to go and deposit copies of their shirts at the national library, which happened to be just round the corner.

I don't intend to ignore the problem of the preservation of software. You may think that nothing is simpler to file than magnetic tape or floppy disks. Quite true. However, as well as the floppy disks you really should preserve the computer on which they can be used. There is an unfortunate tendency for computer hardware to be superseded very quickly. Why not change the law on legal deposit so as to make it compulsory for computer manufacturers to deposit all their models and keep them in working order forever?

And what about the new technologies? What about digital photographs that are

transmitted electronically, and fourth-generation printers whose typographical ski Is are part of the program that directs the laser beam?

Why this madness? There must be a patch of firm ground somewhere in this morass. Let us, for example, ask what we actually do preserve, since clearly we do not preserve everything. The answer is that we preserve only objects. Any object is liable to be preserved and only objects can be preserved. Since keeping records for historians is only an excuse to justify our mania for conservation, what possible use can be found for these heaps of objects?

Here again the answer is simpler than it might appear. There are only two reasons why most people visit the public record office. They go there either to consult the register of births, marriages and deaths in order to determine kinship, or to consult the land register in order to determine ownership. Only archives of this kind seem to have much importance in the life of the community. This is proved by the fact that, when revolutions break out, one of the first things revolutionaries do is go to the record office to burn property deeds. Between revolutions, the archives that remain interest few but historians.

How did the utilitarian" function of conservation, which explains the revolutionaries' love of bonfires, yield to a sacred or "cultural" function in the service of historiography?

The origin of the idea of preserving objects can be traced back to the worship of relics, to the regalia which attested to the legitimacy of royal power, and to property deeds in general. Have objects become the regalia" of a society that produces objects, a new form of relic adapted to democratic market economies which find an overall legitimation in these symbolic tokens? Believing that our survival hinges on the production of objects, which we have made the basis of our community life, we pretend to believe that our knowledge also hinges on them. This accounts for the religious fear inspired by the idea that they might be allowed to disappear, suggesting a kind of ancestor worship in which catalogues and inventories serve as the litany.

I have become aware that the passion for conservation is growing. Far from declining into insignificance as it has become more and more ridiculous and frenzied, the conservation principle has on the contrary gained in strength, as can be seen in the burgeoning of ecomuseums and nature parks, the use made of private archives, the protection of sites and entire cities and the growth of museums of every kind. The amount of satisfaction that this has generated is proportional to the regret expressed at the wholesale destruction of other objects, due not so much to wars as to rampant urbanization, the industrialization of rural areas, the reallocation of land, the building of motorways, the harnessing of energy sources, and so on.

e gaining on the roundabouts what we are losing on the swings. We worship and wish to preserve some objects, just as we destroy for economic reasons other objects which themselves tend to destroy landscapes, ways of life and beliefs. The life cycle of objects is becoming shorter with the increasingly rapid rotation of stocks, which is designed to encourage consumption., sumption. Some believe that the lifespan of a hundred-storey skyscraper should not exceed ten years. How can we accept this built-in obsolescence when we take such extravagant measures to preserve an old mantelpiece for posterity? n

COPYRIGHT 1990 UNESCO
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