Libraries and power

Abstract

The question posed by the archive is that of its place: why is it there? Why is it still there? In other words, since we have defined the archive as all material or visible libraries, what is it that keeps material libraries going, and therefore, through them, the invisible libraries they reflect?

The answer lies precisely in this coincidence, underlined by Jacques Derrida in his text, Mal d'archive: une impression freudienne (1995), between beginning and command. The archive is a beginning instituted by a commandment. It is a beginning that makes what precedes it invisible. A beginning that invisibilizes the rest, and invisibilizes it by command. Therein lies the secret of the archive's stability: its role in the edifice of power - of one power, at least.

It might be thought, however, that the stability of the archive lies elsewhere: in its material. Physical libraries, built of stone, wood and paper, are stable and durable. The mistake, however, would be to believe that material alone is enough to preserve a library from the ravages of time. For a start, materials are not eternal. It is itself subject to the accidents of history. When we think of accidents affecting libraries, the first that springs to mind is undoubtedly fire. The library fire is a commonplace in the library imagination, as Umberto Eco showed in his famous novel, The Name of the Rose.

Physical libraries, then, don't exist on their own. Were it not for a force that holds the documents they contain together, a force that contributes to the library's survival, it would fall into ruin or see its documents reduced to dust. The stability of the archive lies in a force that enables it to survive. The archive needs a creative force to come into existence, but also a continuing force to enable it to continue, as in the Cartesian concept of continuous creation: if God did not sustain the existence of beings at all times, they would disappear.

The link between power and knowledge, highlighted by Michel Foucault, is essential here if we are to understand another link, that between the material or visible library, on the one hand, and the mental or invisible library, on the other. The library is one of the places where the link between the power to collect, to institute, to show - political and/or economic power - and a conception of the world and of knowledge is most clearly manifest, and this relationship between power and knowledge exactly doubles the relationship between the concrete institution of the library and the invisible library of which it is in some way the expression or incarnation. The invisible library is the political motive that enables the material library to exist. It is because power has an interest in promoting a certain knowledge, a certain organization of knowledge, a certain conception of culture and the world, that the material library finds the justification for its existence.

The lesson develops the example of public libraries in Rome, as well as the exile of Ovid by Augustus, which was also a banishment of his work from public libraries. And yet Ovid's work has been preserved for us. The solution to this paradox is as follows: Ovid's work, the work of exile, illustrated imperial omnipotence, so it had to be preserved. The exclusion of Ovid from the collections of public libraries, at least during the late reign of Augustus and under Tiberius, thus defines an exemplary space, where even what remains outside the library, Ovid's work, serves as a striking example for everyone. The outside of the library is the territory of misfortune, devoted to the unhappy voice of the poet, and this outside is no less significant than the inside. We could call this outside of the library the invisible library of the excluded, and the existence of this invisible library is perhaps the real, fundamental reason for the existence of material libraries: the inside serves to define an outside.