"You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place ? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one
can at least still know." Rene Daumal
I will have Derrida introduce him self to my discussion of memory thus: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not o f memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution and its
interpretation. ”410 What he is saying is that a certain appeal to a politics of
knowledge-control informs the drive toward progress characterizing Enlightenment and liberal hum anistic rhetoric. Derrida calls this “arch ival v io le n c e”*11 In addition to being a depository of preserved or recovered facts, an archive is also a museum of memory, an ‘imprint.’412 As a museum, it contains information that is controlled, edited and represented with regard for the particular m essage intended for
comm unication and with regard both for its particular keepers and for its audience.4^
Furthermore, as suggested by Michael Lynch regarding the relationship betw een archiving and truth-claims, Derrida’s remarks on the archive
also point the way to a critical examination of the belief that archives provide a hom e for primary sources and that such sources provide the raw data for writing h isto ry ... By situating archives in historically specific arrangements o f ‘archontic power’ - offices, institutions and practices for gathering, filing, authorizing, certifying, classifying and redacting records - Derrida’s
etym ology enables us to recognize that archival data are never ‘raw.’414
That is, the business of making truth is always informed by the ethnography and genealogy of data itself. This will be important in thinking through the disciplinal intentionality toward objectivity underwriting the drive toward scientific knowledge resonant within international relations.
410 J a c q u e s D e r r id a . A r c h i v e F e v e r . (C h ic a g o , IL: T h e U n iv e r s ity o f C h ic a g o P r e s s , 1 9 9 5 a ), P4-
4“ D e r r id a , A r c h i v e F e v e r , 7. 412 D e r r id a , A r c h i v e F e v e r , 3 0 .
■t'i E d k in s, T r a u m a a n d th e M e m o r y o f P o litic s . 191.
i‘ t M ic h a e l L y n ch . “A r c h iv e s in F o r m a tio n .” H i s t o r y o f th e H u m a n S c ie n c e s 12, n o .2 (1 9 9 9 ): 67.
“To discipline” is understood not only as an outcome of an uneven relationship between an authority figure and a subordinate, but also as always underwritten by a desire to impose, solidify, and perpetuate the kind of ‘normal’ power relations that inform the drive toward progress, development, and security. Archives are disciplined. Memory is disciplined. Truth-claims are definitely
disciplined. An exegesis on how this works will inform the remainder of this chapter.
The practices recruited to assemble, control and determine the access to information play an important role in the reconstruction of memory as testimony. The need to problematize this relationship goes hand in hand with a responsibility to examine the role of language in the production of justice. In this sense and taking lead from Linda Hutcheon, my subsequent use of terms such as “problematization,” “deconstruction,” “contextualization,” and “totalizing” will be understood as part of working within a postmodern rhetoric. The latter will be discussed as “fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political.”4^ This carries potency not only for questioning the given nature of deterministic assumptions, but also for an engagem ent with how we write and use language to help exemplify and honour the relationship between singularity, politics, bearing witness and memory.
Being docum ented is built into writing and depends as much on idioms of generalization as it does on idioms of invention and performance. In the next
chapter, m eans o f documentation with respect to refugees will be shown to exceed the prescribed legal parameters o f nation-states or international organizations. What is more, if we concede that “the world of signs and meaning is m ade,”416 then how we bear witness to that world is a question of interpretation, re-production and
engagement of these signs. Testimonies to trauma, made public through exhibitions
-i's L in d a H u tc h e o n . A P o e t i c s o f P o s t m o d e r n i s m . (L o n d o n : R o u tle d g e , 1 9 8 8 ) , 4. -i1'’ B r a d y , “In D e f e n s e o f th e S e n s u a l,” 6 2 4 .
and m emorials, point to the fact that m useums not only enable but also, delimit testim ony by “making the dangers of testim ony ... thoroughly contained”417 in the form of controlled narratives. James Booth calls this the “willed silencing” we “en co u n ter... in our m useums and libraries, and in our curious cannons, all of which are, in part, exercises in determining what will be left in silence and what will occupy a place in our collective memory.”418 Mainstream IR showcases one grand narrative.
Memory, addressed as an idiom of bearing witness, problematizes otherwise taken for granted, comm on-sensical, and “natural” historical, literary or political research testifying to the fact that “all cultural practices have an ideological subtext which determ ines the conditions of the very possibility of their production of
meaning. ”419 In that sense, it offers a sensitivity to a world where post-m odern and
critical engagements are “especially significant politically in undoing pure binary oppositions that subtend and are generated by a scapegoat mechanism involving the construction as well as the victimization of the other as a totally, external, impure contam inant or pollutant.”420
Postmodern concerns offer a critique of opaque representational models not sim ply by substituting fact with fiction, but by challenging the “com m on-sense naturalness” of the assumptions of totalizing theoretical and practical approaches.421 A critical engagement with questions of memory and bearing witness, in turn, poses as problematic the ways in which knowledge is preserved, interpreted, quantified and used in the service of ends. By offering one such engagement, this chapter shows that as a discipline directly implicated in the study of real-life events, it behooves
International Relations to examine the ways and practices through which it comes to
E d k in s , T r a u m a a n d th e M e m o r y o f P o litic s , 191. 418 B o o th , C o m m u n i t i e s o f M e m o r y , 7 6 .
419 H u tc h e o n , A P o e tic s o f P o s t m o d e r n i s m , x ii-x iii. t-° L aC ap ra, W r i t i n g H i s t o r y , W r i t i n g T r a w n a . 6 8 .
-t'-1 L in d a H u tc h e o n . T h e P o l i t i c s o f P o s t m o d e r n i s m . (L o n d o n : R o u tle d g e , 1 9 8 9 ) , 3 2.
know what it knows. Next, I will com m ent on a weakness of Derrida’s regarding mem ory which will, in turn, be discussed as “politics of singular novelty.”