Índice de Percepción de la Corrupción

The themes of time and the control of time by means of psychological experimentation, and the repetition–compulsion that impels Hardoon to construct and compile his own useless archive of empty buildings, also suggest the close proximity between preservation and destruction, survival and death. Architecture is his time machine. The archive, whether it is a library or architecture-filled lot, fictional conceit or real space, is the dialectical scene of these tensions. Ballard’s unfinished but preserved story and its content are arguably approachable through psychoanalysis not only of its characters but perhaps of the writer himself, who like Freud was aware of the implications of the connection of pen, paper with the archive’s capacity to stand itself for destruction, not least of its authorial subject. Ballard’s initial disavowal of an archive devoted to him and his later reconciliation to its creation suggest a similar concern to Hardoon’s: to control one’s own time and to produce a symbolic and practical response to the death instinct, in which the archive’s purpose is to prevent decay by burying content so as to preserve the unconscious.

As Ballard and Derrida indicate in different ways, in psychoanalysis and science fiction the relationship of technology to time is central to the meaning and existence of the archive. Derrida suggests how the legibility, impact and reach of Freud’s work and ‘school’ would have been entirely altered when posited from the perspective of a retrospective science fiction.

Ballard negates the anachronisms besetting the predictive sci-fi writer, who would construct the future from the perspective of current technology, so that valves might still exist 100 years hence. Ballard instead proposes the opposite scenario to Derrida’s: in place of the imposition of current technology and media onto the past he welcomes the persistence of obsolete technology in the future or a parallel present. The technologies mentioned (television, computers), and the magnetic tapes featured in Ballard stories, are means to store and communicate information. As Derrida observes, such storage and dissemination have dramatic implications for the authority of the archive. He proposes that it is compromised by its contradictory impulse to store and disseminate. In both cases technology and media are represented as time-travelling. The means of information storage holds the promise and possibility both of the archive’s endurance or its recovery in the futures and pasts Derrida posited through recourse to science fiction.

Here, in conclusion, lies the strength of Derrida’s analysis, in his orientation to the future of the archive:

The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future. How can we think about this fatal repetition, about repetition in general in its relationship to memory and the archive? It is easy to perceive, if not to interpret, the necessity of such a relationship, at least if one associates the archive, as naturally one is always tempted to do, with repetition, and repetition

with the past. But it is the future which is at issue here, and the archive as an irreducible experience of the future. (Derrida, 1995: 45)

Derrida’s deconstruction of the ‘archive’ points to the endlessness of the archive, as the archivist keeps archiving. The archive is inconclusive. One could conclude that Derrida’s own deconstruction of Freud’s archive is itself unfinished, as he would have liked to find the space and time to include his notion of anachronistic technology in science fiction in its undertaking: an endeavour thwarted by his confinement to one medium (the voice) rather than another (writing). Ballard’s archive nearly ended before it began, judging by his reluctance to associate himself with his symbolic and real death in the face of his archiving; however, he relented.

Certainly, the archive is predicated on this form of destruction, as much as those consonant with Freud’s psychoanalysis, and other forms of decay, technical failure and obsolescence. Yet, the academic archaeology performed on the archived subject’s physical traces and textual clues, as though it were disinterring and restoring history to itself, is also the event conducted in the archive’s technological present and future. Perhaps this is what Ballard, and even Freud himself, resisted: a form of destruction less to do with the death of the author–subject than the continuous semiosis of their texts in their absence. Yet for Ballard and Freud, the solace of burial, which preserves the archive, may be the missing part of Derrida’s analysis.

Rather than retrofitting present technology into Freud’s ‘archive’, we should consider the other option: to project the archive anachronistically into a science-fiction future, where the archive is nothing other than a place of refuge for exiles and wanderers, its archive-function itself an anachronism in a present yet to come.

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Chris Horrocks is a cultural historian and lecturer at the School of Art

& Design History, Kingston University, London. His previous publications include ‘Conflicted images: Ballard and Paolozzi at war’ (in C Black, ed., Terminal Atrocity Zone Ballard, Sun Vision Press, 2013); Cultures of Colour (ed., Berghahn Books, 2012); Baudrillard: A Graphic Guide (with Zoran Jevtic, 2011), and Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality (Icon Books, 2000).

His books – Genteel Perversion: The Films of Gilbert & George and Objekt:

Television – are forthcoming with Solar Books (2014) and Reaktion Books (2015).

Address: School of Art and Design History, Faculty of Art, Design &

Architecture, Kingston University, Knights Park, Kingston KT1 2QJ, UK.

[email: [email protected]]

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Copyright © The Author(s), 2013. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav Vol 12(3): 431–449 DOI 10.1177/1470412913504374

Piercing Brightness as an Exploration of the An-archic