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and which will end up destroying the very gnoseological possibilities
of the archive, for all technology comes to its aid, on the basis of
trying to grasp everything, that ‘mal d’archive’ is particularly
crystallised in the archives of disasters, wars, violence. Opening
the archive like that, exposing it, making it circulate is a way of
looking for those traces, of including those vestiges – of introducing
what cannot be spoken of – yet keeping the archive ‘free of all
evil’. The ‘machine’ proposed, the cinematic gesture thus works
as a gag, according to the brilliant attribution proposed in this
long quotation from Agamben: ‘By having the gesture and not the
image as its centre, the cinema belongs essentially to the order
of ethics and politics (and not simply aesthetics). In that sense the
gesture is the communication of a communicability. It has really
nothing to say, because what it shows is the being-in-language
of man as pure mediality. But since being-in-language is not
something that can be uttered in propositions, the gesture is always,
in essence, the gesture of not managing to find language, it is
always a gag, in the true meaning of the term, which most of all
indicates something put in the mouth to prevent the person from
speaking, and then the actor’s improvisation to fill a blank in the
memory or an inability to speak. Hence not only the proximity
between gesture and philosophy, but also between philosophy
and film. The essential ‘mutism’ of film (which has nothing to do
with the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, like the mutism
of philosophy, an exhibition of the being-in-language of man, pure
gesture. Wittgenstein’s definition of the mystical as the showing of
what cannot be said is literally a gag definition. And any great
philosophical text is the gag exhibited by language itself, beingin-language
itself as a gigantic gap in the memory, an incurable
defect of the word.’ That transcendence of the gag – a kind of
metaphysics of the joke – triggers the classification system of F.X.
We understand techniques of the gag to be the whole modern
repertoire of art forms, from homophony to chance, from the
readymade to the construction of situations.
That is where Marcel Broodthaers managed to understand
the archive, the museum, the catalogue like nobody else, not
only making a criticism of the straight discourse that always sustains
it, not only questioning the closed order of the world which
any archive represents, not only torpedoing the water line of
the knowledge project of the Enlightenment which any archive
represents, but in the end what Marcel Broodthaers has expounded
is the only way the archive, as a model of everything that has
been indicated, as an example of the modern project of knowledge
of the world, can survive. And he did so through the gag, through
the transformation of the archive into staging, choreography,
dramaturgy, cinematography. Through the theatricalisation of
the archive, he managed to uproot it from the modern project,
without it losing its critical effectiveness.
Indeed, Marcel Broodthaers may be the artist who, with his
fictitious museum, has best demonstrated the impossibility of
classification, and the violence against reality it supposes. And it is
precisely through fiction that he in turn has managed to unmask the
conditions of production of meaning and representation, establishing
the archive and the collection as the place for structuring discourse,
regardless of its real existence.
How more precisely does that symbolic machine, generator
of fictions, which is F.X. Archive work? And, most of all, what does
it aim to achieve?
Here I am going to reproduce Machado’s well-known definition
of Jorge Meneses’ ‘ballad machine’, an artefact capable of
composing the songs of a human group, of a people, of the crowds.
I take the book and read: ‘In the prologue to his Coplas mecánicas
Mairena praises Meneses’ artifice. According to Mairena, the poetic
hurdy-gurdy is a means, among others, of rationalising the lyric,
without lapsing into the conceptual Baroque. The maxim, reflection
or aphorism contained in his coplas are inevitably attached to
a human emotion. The poet, inventor and manipulator of the
mechanical artifice is an investigator and collector of elemental
feelings; a ‘folklorist’, in his way, and an impassive creator of
popular songs, without ever lapsing into a ‘pastiche’ of the popular.
It dispenses with his own meaning, but notes that of its neighbour
and recognises it in itself as a human feeling (when he notices it
objectified in his apparatus). His apparatus does not use padding
or pedantry, and can still be a fertile source of surprises, recording
strange emotive phenomena. Naturally, its value, like that of other
mechanical inventions, is more didactic and educational than
aesthetic. The ballad machine, in short, can entertain the masses
and initiate them into the expression of their own feeling whilst
the new poets, the singers of a new sentimentality, arrive. That
last fragment is where Machado’s position is shown most clearly
– the new sentimentality – which I think is different from Mairena’s
and that of the young Meneses. We may suppose that for the
‘inventor’ of the machine, the ‘conceptual Baroque’, the risks
of padding and pedantry, pedagogy and didacticism, the
entertainment of the masses and their initiation into a feeling of
their own are not handicaps, but a lucid diagnosis of our time.
I hope that its operation, at least its ideal operation, will be what
Zizek describes for the acoustomatic voice, in a personal reading
of Lacan. Zizek gives as examples the eponymous title music from
two films: Brazil, as used by Terry Gilliam in his film, and Lili
Marlene, the theme song of the film by Rainer Weiner Fassbinder.
In both films the song invades reality in a crushing, totalitarian
manner and becomes the only element that makes that reality
bearable. It is the same observation made by Gilles Deleuze
about the capacity for fascination and the Fascism implicit in the
music of Richard Wagner and the way it is overcome in the films
of Luis Buñuel. Or Guy Debord when he goes beyond nostalgia
by reclaiming the ‘red’ anthems of the Spanish Civil War, since
what were anthems are now joyful songs of defeat.
In short, these are mechanisms that overcome the dogmatic,
acritical, spectacular and totalitarian ideas implicit in a world
dominated by aesthetics and the fascination of art, their main
soundtrack.
Exteriority of the Archive
From its creation in the late nineties, F.X. Archive has been shown
in many ways. It has been presented at exhibitions, in publications,
lectures, pages for free circulation, films and participation in public
or historiographic debates. There had even been some attempts to turn
it into a monument, which I suppose the logic of the archive itself
has deposed. How have the contents of F.X. Archive circulated in
academic or artistic circles? And how is it shown?
The idea is that F.X. Archive should work like a public institution,
with one unusual feature. The centre of its works often runs into
the surpluses of the sacred, with ‘effects’ that go beyond semiotics,
with everything Agamben locates in his Homo Sacer cycle ‘on
the outskirts of the city’. As I have said before, a few years ago
I went to a seminar with Agamben, and it would be unfair not to
acknowledge my debt to those days, which were fundamental
for orienting the activities of F.X. Archive. Indeed, once the base of
the archive has been consolidated, the idea is to apply the mechanics
of it more dynamically in spheres closer to the present, immediate
applications of these archaeologies. Which does not mean that it
abandons the documentary dimension, though there is something
of everything.
Naturally, in many cases those applications respond to demands
that have arisen from effects parallel to the project. For example,
taking part in debates, spoken and written, around that aberrant
idea of the ‘historical memory’, an oxymoron which has half of
Spain raising corpses from the war that followed the coup d’état
in 1936. F.X. Archive, as an impugnation of history, requires
approaches of other kinds in which the melancholy salvaging of
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