MONUMENT TO TRANSFORMATION

REMEMBRANCE OF OBLIVION

Having agreed to work on a project that remembers while it continues to change (as a monument, it must continue to remember something which may continue to change), let us start by clarifying a fact which is related to the kind of monument we are dealing with and which is of particular interest: the vigilance evoked by the collective work under construction may thematize oblivion and the inner impetus which - in a way - suspends memory, and not so much the object itself to be monumentalized, which, in this case, by definition, eludes us.

Through a monument of this kind we are asking more to remember forgetting rather than something which must remain indelibly etched somewhere; we are asking to remember something which was destined to be forgotten: and the way in which we ask to remember something that was destined to be forgotten is completely different to the way in which we usually ask to remember events that merit monumentalization.

Every monument, in the conventional sense, is thrown, at the outset, against the logic of oblivion which it resists. The monument retains the fragment which must become valuable and points out that this fragment must be an exception to the "blindness to the past" brought on by oblivion. And yet one could recall here Shklovsky's thoughts on oblivion and the morality of the work of art working against the oblivionizing of the daily routine [1]. I cite Shklovsky as my first reference to monumentality because it is perhaps in the writings of this Russian intellectual that we find - formulated with such pure intensity - an antimonumental manifesto that links invocation to truth, in a description of the art work as a mnemonic disorder. The prospect of disorder emerges blind and "free of content", while it is organized inside an interesting contradiction: Shklovsky seeks out vigilance for vigilance's sake (i.e. the form of vigilance and not its meaning), while at the same time not pointing to any other hope for the meaning of things beyond the one that lies within this very vigilance. In "The Resurrection of the Word"[2] but also in "Art as Technique", we often find ourselves faced with this naive and attractive determination of meaning: meaning is lost in habit and is reinaugurated almost as unfamiliarity without ever touching something which would promise it any kind of depth. Thus, meaning remains necessarily empty, exhausted in the mere possibility of invocation or - conversely - of oblivion of invocation [3]. Meaning is a pure, given mnemonic possibility for active reading. The existent - given but forgotten - archive, the archive of language, offers the possibility for active reading, provided we sabotage the way in which ordinary formulations are organized by current practical speech. In terms of this prospect, I believe there is no anxiety about meaning - at least no other anxiety besides the anxiety of oblivion. The active supervision of meanings is the simple, sudden emergence from darkness [4].

The same mental impasse that demands the memory of a certain meaning lies at the heart of a monument to transformation like the one announced here and to which the present text is submitted. The monument, which is explicitly mentioned in specific historic events, refuses any kind of conventional character in order to reinaugurate a process of cutting off from the trivial, a process which will take place through art.

If, therefore, the monument under construction is a monument to oblivion or to regularity (which cultivates a sort of antimonumental oblivion), the reference to Shklovsky orients the particularity of this special monument. There is an entry in Tolstoy's diary which I have used before and which Shklovsky quotes in order to explain his theory. Here it is again:

"As I was walking around dusting things off in my room, I came to the sofa. For the life of me, I couldn't recall whether I had already dusted it off or not. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I felt that it was already impossible to remember it. If I had in fact dusted the sofa and forgotten that I had done so, i.e., if I had acted unconsciously, then this is tantamount to not having done it at all. If someone had seen me doing this consciously, then it might have been possible to restore this in my mind. If, on the other hand, no one had been observing me or observing me only unconsciously, if the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been."[5]

Perhaps the building of the monument to transformation will invoke the restoration of the act of cleaning carried out by a witness to the cleaning; someone who would record that which the person actually doing the cleaning would forget because of the clouding of his mind by daily repetition: imprints of actions executed in oblivion. The work which will constitute the project as a whole will not describe the stability of a certain change, as the hurried visitor might imagine, nor will it ask for the simple mnemonic nuisance that would hinder the promoted forgetting of the, already old, European partition: the project to which we aspire may perhaps capture the conditions of oblivion produced then or produced today by the particular daily routine: oblivion is the human social work (societies can communicate within themselves only within the framework of a certain legislation of oblivion) and it is this oblivion - which is especially sophisticated: ensuing according to its own rationale, while its law eludes any attempt to define it - that this particular work, to which we are submitting excerpts, works or entries, is called upon to capture and, perhaps, to file. I perceive the monument to transformation as a particular archive: it is organized like a collection of fragments from life in oblivion. It is made of forgetting. In such a repository of diverse fragments that monumentizes oblivion, we are forced to remember – programmatically in the case of the specific work - something, the memory of which disturbs.

GUILT AND AUTHORITY

On July 19 2007, the webpage of the Hellenic National Intelligence Service [6] offered very little information and limited data on the legislative framework, the mission, as well as the monitoring of the service. Nothing original there, though it was all quite typical of an Intelligence Service. Even through this hurried visit to a webpage under construction, we were able to certify something which we would normally look for in another environment:

From among the very limited data that is available, one learns that the "mission of the ΝΙS includes […] the gathering, processing and distribution to the proper authorities of information that relates to the country's national security." That is the only information offered concerning the activity of the service, while Greek Law  1645 describes, quite emphatically, the mechanisms that monitor it, as well as its administrative set-up.

The gathering and distribution of information: the activity of the secret service is archival. The service is structured, as are similar ones all over the world, as an active archive: it attempts to gather and classify necessary information which would be useful to the mechanism that rules the country. Its very name describes an archive of information (Intelligence Service). The NIS files data which may result from the surveillance of suspects or certain individuals whose actions are deemed for some reason to be of interest, or even of places where something interesting may have been recorded. Of course, none of this is mentioned in the official documents according to which the NIS is organized.

The Hellenic National Intelligence Service (NIS) is monitored by the Hellenic Parliament's Special Committee on the Protection of Classified Communication [7]. It is also monitored by the Hellenic Data Protection Authority which protects the rights and fundamental liberties of individuals and especially individuals' private lives.

In article 2 of the most recent law according to which the service is organized, it is mentioned that the NIS "constitutes an independent political public service; its mission is the country's security and it comes under the direct authority of the Prime Minister." Its function is to "coordinate, within the framework of the decisions of the National Security Council and the Prime Minister, the activities of all of the State's intelligence and security services in the sector of gathering and distributing information concerning the objects for which it is responsible."  

The idea of the secret gathering of data containing information which the prime minister of a country is entitled by law to be the first to see; a hidden archive, the contents of which are made available at the highest governmental level: it would be interesting to examine this in psychoanalytical terms. The need, by those in authority at any given time, for a stabilizing mechanism, for a secret, legally established space which is allowed to conceal, underscores a deep sense of guilt, linked to the establishing of such a mechanism. It is the same sense of guilt which, at the same time, arises and affirms the baselessness of all authority. A secret organization that carries out surveillance is always the plan of the weak; it is not a sign of power since the powerful have no use for conspiracy or the concealment of plans. Secret services clearly represent the weakest aspect of every authority, a legalized institution at its very center. [8] The fact that a state bases its power on a political weakness reminds us that - undoubtedly - the concepts of power and weakness are defined cyclically, in a way that never reveals the stability of power but in adulteration and immobilization on a point of observation.  

If the meager web page of the NIS simply mentions the law that constitutes the service, emphasizing the mechanisms that monitor the Service's activities, then that surely hides a certain haste to fend off any questions concerning the legality of the service's activities: its legality is guaranteed by the elected prime minister and a representative parliamentary committee. The appearance of information that concerns the monitoring of the service before the display of any other data is not accidental. Arguments are needed which will offer proof of the legality of its actions, which, though not named, appear unconstitutional and illegal. The web page, which remains under construction (its translation into English is still pending), does not inform us of the NIS's responsibilities.[9].

I begin with this reference to the secret services of the country in which I spend most of my time, because the collapse around which the monument to transformation is assembled, the collapse to which we refer in one way or another, the fall of the "Iron Curtain" has opened up spaces of important secret archives in Eastern Europe.

I saw the dynamics of the situation of the absolute secret which was revealed at the state mechanism's center as a sign of weakness that exists at the authoritarian system's center. I am interested in the turn towards the secret services that concentrate on the observation of the citizens themselves, the secret services archives in Eastern Europe and their opening following the collapse of the communist regimes.

One could propose a political-psychological formula which would relate the quantity of secret information to the faith of the citizens in their political system: the more the need for secret information at the center of the system grew, the more the system would display an increasingly authoritarian and correctional character; the more it would tend to become totalitarian; and the more vulnerable and shallow its authoritarian power would become. This authority, which may, at first sight, appear classical, raises questions and exhibits complications if it is examined at two different moments that substantiate a transformation in the way the individual functions when faced with an archive that contains information about it. In order to see the complications and the questions I refer to, we need only construct the concept of "residing in the archive" and consider that - first of all - the surveillance archives reserved a compulsory residence of this kind for all citizens. We will also need to approach the present-day moment of the - usually voluntary - registration of data on the Internet as another kind of "residence in the archive."

 FIRST RESIDENCE IN THE ARCHIVE

In the first case, the filing is undertaken by a secret service which operates according to the powerful logic of an organizational fear of an unforeseen strike, conspiracy, mutiny. Then, the residence of the citizens in the archive is a residence in an undesirable place. The archive is the collection created by the eye of the system as it watches them, and residing in it realizes a centrally supervised society. One might naively perceive the comparison we propose as a mere passage from lack of freedom to freedom: that would certainly constitute a rhetorical victory for the liberal Internet. But I think that the interpretative schema that considers the transformation of the residence in the archive is more complex.

The power of the secret archive is conceived at the moment at which the secret space is pillaged. We can make certain that daily life in the archive is a life under supervision only through reading the secret entries which would reveal the logic of the surveillance archive.

The condition for remaining in the archive is, in this case, an abstract condition and it dominates society's "imaginary" without the archive ever having to reveal its presence beyond certain indications. The archival mechanism substantiates the everyday in a transcendent way: supervision records and remembers. A citizen's any given action may constitute a wrong step which will lead to complications.

Nevertheless, the system of a powerful presence in oblivion, which justifies the term "residing in the archive" when referring to the imaginary presence of the secret services archives in the life of the community, is revealed here at the moment when the archives are opened. The condition of concealment organized by the secret archive honors, from the outset, the opening of the archive and the collapse of secrecy. It is an accident for any secret archive. The way in which such a secret archive concerns each one of us renders this revelation a dramatic event.

The nullification of the specific limit that keeps the secret of the archives offers a defusing of the difference in dynamics between a locked up space and the space that is defined outside it: it immediately reminds one of the mythologies of the locked secret and, perhaps, specifically, the door to Bluebeard's room [10]. The social narrative is organized around the closed archive and the opening of the archive is equivalent to the social narrative itself, but also to the end of this narrative. The narrative is constructed in order that we may never see the archive and all it takes is for the door to the archive to open in order for the narrative to end. In Perrault's story, the opening of the secret room is described as  a passage from darkness to light: 

“D'abord elle ne vit rien, parce que les fenêtres étaient fermées; après quelques moments elle commença à voir que le plancher était tout couvert de sang caillé, et que dans ce sang se miraient les corps de plusieurs femmes mortes et attachées le long des murs” . [“At first she saw nothing, because the windows were closed; after a few moments she began to see that the floor was all covered in curdled blood and that in the blood were reflected the bodies of several dead women hanging along the walls."] [11]

In only a few words, the narrative energy of the story is vented. But we can nevertheless claim that the story was organized in the anticipation of and the mourning for the phrase. The phrase which describes the opening of the room as well as the simple opening of the eyes puts an end to and, in a way, exhausts the story while gathering around itself. Moreover: the interior of the room is especially important as it is presented as a [fairytale] space of horrible betrayal.

The hidden room is, concurrently, the work, the archive and the narrative. At the same time, in the story there is a space, the opening of which means betrayal, but which is the secret of providence that hides the second betrayal (Bluebeard's betrayal of his wife), which is more powerful in narrative terms [12].

The secret of the room and the double betrayal of its opening construct the future of the person that opens the archive and a prospect for the unwanted visitor to reside among the archive's corpses. The opening of the forbidden door of archives such as that of Stasi has a similar narrative power.

The evidence contained in the secret archive tends to be interpreted one-dimensionally - like inside Bluebeard's room - as evidence of betrayal. This archive is not the kind that served simple functions but rather which serves, in an icy manner, functions that are forbidden : the archive is organized along with the hypothesis of its concealment. It is a confidential archive, not because it contains information that will expose those who are listed in it, but because, through the opening of the archive, through its revelation, that which is exposed is the spirit which organizes the archive. This spirit is identified with the spirit of betrayal created by the archivist. The organization of the archive is carried out according to the method of secret services, by a systematic classification of documents which are systematically and secretly amassed: without the knowledge of those who constitute the archive's targets, and without the knowledge of those who do not constitute the archive's targets. Any publicizing of the existence of the archive puts in danger its very rationale which is to survive beyond the actual filing; to save itself while its idea of survival is the dominance of the general rule that manages to preserve the secret. A certain authority that monitors the archive, guards it as if there were no question of its possible overthrowing, since its overthrowing demolishes an important part of the system's exterior image. The archive exists with the certainty of the longevity of a hidden, threatening secret.

Concealment is marked by yet another development which does not escape us. The authority that files the document is also the one that asks and constructs the document in its univocal reading. Something is hidden in order to achieve or to avoid a certain situation. That, for the sake of which something was concealed, clearly forms a world that must remain hidden. It forms an exclusion in the interior, it makes a room, a door and a prohibition of entry. It's probably not surprising that the word archive initially meant "a house, a residence, an address, the abode of the highest-ranking noblemen, those that commanded".[13] The same secret evidence is organized as a concave space of exclusion but is read as such only when it is conquered and reveals, through an explosion of unimaginable force, the thing it is hiding in its interior. It is then possible to read instantly, not only the content that substantiates the traumatic revelation, but also the systematic, coolly organized deception perpetrated by both the concealment and the content.

And the authority that monitors the archive lies installed in a despicable way in the interior of a structure that has been made in order to receive and exclude the one it awaits inside it: the authority that monitors the archive has betrayed everything that lies outside the archive so as to construct this unpleasant interior for itself.

Significance is attached to the installation as a treacherous installation, as well as to its examination in every detail that organizes it. Significance is also attached to taking a stand in the interior of this archive as taking a stand against mendacity and immorality, in a time when mendacity and immorality no longer cause any disturbance as value mechanisms: in the contemporary West, people converse without being scandalized by mendacity and they no longer seek the moral element the way they used to. Νevertheless, the archival of betrayal truly scandalizes and creates the image of a revelation in a time when there are no revelations. The archival of betrayal nods towards the region of a certain elusive faith in a certain morality.

The secret archives construct an old narrativity, reminiscent of the drama of fairy tales. I claim that authority avoids narrativity more and more. If we agree, as I am suggesting here, that the powerful structure of supervision constructed some sort of imaginary residence in the archive, the moment of recognition and opening of the secret archive substantiates and sheds new light on the formation of the societies of Eastern Europe within the aim taken by the secret services. The moment at which the archives are opened is perhaps symbolic of the greatest moment of the collapse of Eastern Europe's regimes. I place it at the center of the present text, even though this is where I am weighing the concept of "residing in the archive" then there and now here.

The revelation of the secret archives did not bring to light something unheard of which we were not already suspecting. However, what is emphasized here is the change, and indeed the change that arises as the onset of the inauguration of the period needed for the healing of the wound. According to Derrida:

"The archive never surrenders ... during a visionary commemorative act which would rekindle, alive, innocent or neutral, the origin of an event." [14].

Perhaps it does not surrender and it certainly does not rekindle an innocent or neutral origin, but the archive of a betrayal is ideal for one to realize how a univocal reading constructs an illusionary, live duration, at the moment when the archive's time of reference has certainly elapsed. The archive of betrayal installs a new time and that is its deeper narrative work: the tracing of betrayal organizes, using even the tiniest details, the new treacherous regions for the time of the secret, extending the reading of betrayal to an absurd malice without limits. The problem with betrayal is that it always has reason at its core and it is always confined by limits. Its immorality is not due so much to an overstepping of limits but to the underestimation of the presence of the betrayed. Some kind of non-existence of the other is always being constructed at the core of every treacherous act.

Based on the evidence of betrayal, the archive constructs a time which did not exist but now installs itself as the time of the plan of betrayal which is now necessarily distorted from the place of observation that is set up in space "after the betrayal."

The violation of the secret and the installation in "space after the betrayal" leaves behind it a void: a road towards the monumentation of betrayal or towards its oblivion [15]. What is left is the space of betrayal, already organized as a monument to itself. In order for social life to continue, a work of oblivion is certainly undertaken: this is a nullification of the horror borne by the very fact of the secret. In Greece we witnessed the literal destruction of secret archives by authority itself, on two very different occasions. I can mention two typical cases: the destruction by the right-wing government of the archives of Makronissos (an island of exile and torment used to silence dissenters by the same government) and the destruction by the first socialist government of files on left-wing citizens, which was carried out in a spectacular way, to the sound of national reconciliation rhetoric. The attempted covering up or a preliminary forgiveness in order to attain closure lie at the basis of two different strategies which end up in the same action and demand oblivion. It is clear that the destruction of the treacherous secret by the one who was betrayed maintains a certain self-deluding civility which belongs to a different narrative order.

Besides the spectacular, conscious destruction of secret archives which takes place in the form of an event, the archive itself sees to the regular destruction of its documents when they cease to be of use: the secret archive aims at its annihilation: its ideal is non-existence. We might be able to see any archive of bureaucratic order in this light, but in this case erasure usually means the deletion of the treacherous act and is therefore tantamount to an "acquittal." Moreover, the possibility of the complete obedience of a social body to the biddings of authority creates, once again, the same ideal of the non-existence of the archive.

The task of "consciously repressing" the space of betrayal - through more or less obvious mechanisms of a different nature - attempts to obliterate or to heal the great wound. If we assume that the moment of the wound freezes time and nullifies its unfolding, then the need for oblivion functions as violence for a new constitution of time. The period of residence in the archive has elapsed and will be forgotten, but its opening and its wound haunt time like a symbol or a monument that sails independently through time, as if it is not placed in the interior of its flow.

Shereshevskii, a patient of the psychiatrist Luria who treated people with serious mnemonic problems, ended up in an asylum because he remembered too well [16]. The excessive arousal of his memory didn't allow him to distinguish the place his memories had in time. He couldn't distinguish between conversations that had taken place a little earlier and others that had taken place years before. Moreover, in order to forget, he would have to write down the things he remembered and then burn the paper or come up with other tricks by which to express a living faith and an active desire to eliminate something from his memory. Oblivion was a matter of decision and not the passage of time: this did not simply nullify the mechanism of memorizing; it also nullified one of the very concepts of time.

The book and the computer have achieved a certain simulation of memory and the commemorative process, but we are missing a representation of oblivion which is achieved with the passage of time. This oblivion which is often organized as a healing schema exhibits something special concerning the character of human memories. Oblivion itself has its own character; it is not only one and one alone; it does not occur as a mere void: oblivion is organized each time in its own particular way. Human encounters and sociability are formed within the invisible planning of a certain oblivion which may be reminiscent of the oblivion of normality which Shklovsky denounces. But the flow towards this oblivion may lead to the other: a certain primal oblivion devises ways of incorporating oneself into the time of the other. Oblivion, in the particular case of the secret archive, is the objective of the guilty, but also the final desired destination of the innocent; the hidden game of the supervisor and the hope of the supervised [17].

The imaginary residence in the secret services archive is founded in strong, dramatic, narrative structures: betrayal, oblivion, forgiveness, covering up, all these constitute important concepts for the description of time which is organized around the explosive opening of the secret archives. Even when they are closed, even as they remain hidden, the secret archives of the traditional Western European countries - though they may not grow to such a scale as to have the entire population under surveillance - may still exhibit the living basis for the dramas that might unfold in the sphere of politics. They are important works in progress, even the most despised among them, such as the Greek archive of the NIS: each one has its own particular narrative and political interest.

SECOND RESIDENCE IN THE ARCHIVE

In order to describe societies that were organized and functioned for decades based on the rationale of secret surveillance and under the shadow of the intelligence services, I used the phrase "residing in the archive." The person under surveillance was always potentially inside the archive which might be documenting him. Furthermore, anyone could be among those being watched. It has been already twenty years since the fall of the "Iron Curtain" and almost as many years since the appearance of the first hyper text browser and the first www application. Something which had been in preparation for a long time is, therefore, creating a residence condition inside the Internet. On the Internet or in the Western world, the time has come again for us to talk, in completely different terms, about a certain literality of the same concept: about "residing in the archive" of the Internet.

The commitment to this residence is, this time, voluntary. There is no obvious eye (at least not today), monitoring citizens on the Internet, their communications having taken on forms that can be digitally entered and filed.

The residence in the archive offered by the Internet presents structural differences in the way we perceive the formation of any specific thing and empirical reality. What is specific inside the archive and how is something specific there? The impression of openness and the rhetoric of randomness play a decisive part in the formation of the Internet. But there's also something more going on: according to Derrida:

"There is no archive without a locus of documentation, without a technique of repetition and without a certain externality. There is no archive without an outside" [18].

If the Internet is termed an archive or an archive of archives, it should be emphasized that it is presented without a place of documentation and, possibly (which constitutes this essay's working hypothesis), "without an outside." Based on these traits, it continues to organize itself like a special archive. What also makes the Internet a distinctive archive is the fact that its size seems to be practically limitless, not so much because it is constantly growing, but because its scale reverses, within the social imaginary, the concept of limitation to which Derrida referred. Its swelling allows us to observe it in a different way.

The intellectual scope of the Internet appears in the reversal of the concepts of interior and exterior. The momentum of the archive succeeded in constituting, through tags and entries, the entire world. The ancient Greek word "cosmos", describing the world, also has the submeaning of inner construction. The concept of a world described as an archive carries the rationale of the formation of the whole to the concept of a structured heap consisting of separate entries; a well-ordered warehouse that facilitates the finding of excerpts and access to them. The post-Internet world is organized on an imaginary level as just such a warehouse and as a series of versions for every single thing. Concreteness is at risk, especially in the interior of this post-Internet formation. Every single thing is an entry open to the addition of new information. Residing in the archive, I form the world as structured by entires. Thus, for once, we can conceive the idea that nothing exists beyond the archive. Something general or specific exists if it can take the form of an entry or if it has already been entered that way: the difference is of no particular significance here [19].

So we may be moving on from the illness of the archive, which Jacques Derrida called the “mal d’archive”, to another archival syndrome of this era, which arises this time from the particular condition of the intellectual confinement in the archive, in which the condition of the Internet unfolds. We don't need to perceive this passage as an event registered on a certain historicity. Derrida  used the term mal d' archive to describe the incessant research for an archive where the archive is hidden; he referred to the desire to return to origin as already archival. Nostalgia for the return to the locus of the absolute beginning was, according to the description of mal d'archive, the particular element that constituted the archive internally.

In order to describe the syndrome of confinement in the archive which organizes a large part of modern-day "reality", we will have to accept that - for reasons unknown - this conservative mania for the return to the origin, by virtue of which Derrida formulated the mal d’archive, can be considered ended and senseless when living, without anxiety, between the entries and data of the hyper-archive of the Internet and the rationale according to which it is organized today. A certain stability of the data entered relegates any movement towards origin to a position of lesser importance. That is to say, we can consider that the quest for origin, which (besides the conservative reflex of metaphysical thought) might develop based on a post-Freudian unfolding of curiosity [20], is obliterated inside the multi-entry rationale according to which the Internet archive is constructed internally: if an entry on the Internet is organized as a series of diverse data entered, this does not simply draw attention to a structure that responds to search engines· the expansion of the function of the entry has already formed a way of perceiving things. The object is identified by a series of versions of itself. Within this "democrartic" conception of the object, concreteness will be redefined while the idea of anxiety concerning depth, which explains the state of things at any given time, is already being mourned.

Residing in the archive today nullifies, in this perspective, the anxiety about origin which constituted the description of the archive according to Derrida. The data entry depends on the entry, not on some elusive, vague origin it may have. Every entry of data functions on a multi-entry level, it arrives at the archive formed as a total of entries, and it can change, and a new one can be added to the same entry.

We described a wounding caused by the opening of the secret archives, the treacherous dynamics of residing in the particular archives and the conditions of social supervision carried out by intelligence services. Hurriedly, but not at all accidentally, next to this residence we construct the schema of a different residence, in a different archive.

On the Internet, a momentum is displayed in terms of the archive: instead of explaining the phenomenon let us describe it through the same wiki logic, but also through the pointing out of so many data repositories, which, through a certain mental geotagging, chart the map of the world as a grouping of its different versions.

The space of the archive of the secret services, seen through a modern-day perspective, appears extremely old and obsolete.  But is it? It doesn't really matter. Perhaps that which could take on political value is precisely this imaginary transformation of the rationale of the archive within the new syndrome of archival confinement that I am trying to describe. This confinement, it should be noted, is not unpleasant. It is, moreover, presented at the outset as a realistic possibility for the removal of any confinement. In its interior there are no dramatic tensions. Its narratives are flaccid. The terrible disasters that open up rooms like that of Bluebeard, betrayal, forgiveness, the concepts of the secret, all appear in its interior either as laughable or as old and nullified. The revelations in the condition of the contemporary residence in the archive are carried out in obviousness. The secret itself is submerged in obviousness and the syndrome of confinement introduces us to a certain populization of the secrets of Lacan's purloined letter [21]. The secret services are working for authority, when authority is formed with religious sanctity. But how can one stand before authorities that are enforced through the use of the syndrome of confinement in the archive [22], i.e. through the use of the invisible presence that allows this syndrome? The juxtaposition of any one of their performative structures alongside inert structures that are lost while questioning it? The plethora nullifies the difference between that which takes place and the alternative proposal [23]. Thus, the significance of opposition, dispute and conflict is lost in the interior of the archive. The panoptical world of versions constructed during the development of the archive's confinement syndrome dedramatizes reality. Narrative dynamics is burned within the exposition of different versions: the short narrative reigns and thus no betrayal seems so terrible any more. An archive of betrayal deserved condemnation, war against a certain obviousness of evil. The question concerning the continuation of political vigilance is that it can function within the conditions of this blinding from the viewing brought on by the particular condition of residing in the archive. Within the archive, political weighing cannot circumvent the fact that - in terms of structure, for the forming of today's world - nothing is left that deserves utter faith: the risk is for one to imagine ways towards a subversive political stance in the interior of the condition of residing in the archive.

The inner apology to each betrayal renders any thought on the politics of oblivion and the ways we forget most urgent. We remain constantly busy, concentrating keenly on distinctive mnemonic pockets to which we surrender without faith. Outside of these, all that exist are other similar ones. We will remain for quite some time in the condition of the syndrome of the archive. A kind of post-event, organized in a different way than Badiou [24] imagined, is under formation. The internal denerving of the event using the rationale of the version suspends the meaning and intensity of any action. The event is always rendered "not specific enough". As long as the world of politics remains a world "outside the archive", outside the hypnotism of the various distinct versions and quotations, the world, from our viewpoint, appears non-existent. The future of politics would then also be a way to reside in the archive.

[1] For examlpe, Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as technique", in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, (Regents Critics Series) , ed. Lee, T. Lemon, Marion, J. Reis,   Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press [c. 1965].

[2] The Resurrection of the Word, (1914), find some fragments of the text in http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/WORD.HTM, visited on 20.07.2007.

[3] In Heiddeger and his concept of a-letheia we see a certain projection of Shklovsky's rationale which now exhibits a concepual orientation. Heidegger holds that the vigilance of a-letheia (the exit from oblivion) brings everything out of the obscurity to which they have been relegated by the function of language. A-letheia can make things be. Some kind of primal concept of familiarization lies behind these two syllogisms, which are not so unrelated as we tend to consider them. For more on the subject of aletheia in Heidegger ttp://www.formalontology.it/heideggerm.htm, 20.07.2007

[4] That is to say, active supervision has a certain naive and, at the same time, revelatory character: despite the fact that the question shakes the conventional use of words and illuminates meaning, illumination is never a question here. 

[5] Notes from Leo Tolstoy's diary, 28 February 1897, Nikolaskaïe, Letolis, December 1915, p.354, as referred to in V. Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, (Regents Critics Series) , ed. Lee, T. Lemon, Marion, J. Reis, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press [c. 1965].

[6] http://www.nis.gr .

[7] Its term of office is equal to that of parliament. It consists of a Deputy Speaker of Parliament as its chairman (named by the Speaker), a representative MP from each party represented in Parliament, and a person of acknowledged prestige who has special knowledge of communications issues (also named by the Speaker of Parliament).

[8] Perrault's "Bluebeard", a parallel reading of which is proposed below, ends with a reference to the moral of the cyclical structure we are describing. The inner weakness of authority and the sudden handing over of power to the one being dominated corresponds, narratively, to the opening of the secret archives and produces excellence along with confusion in the characterization of those involved in the narration. "On a peine à juger qui des deux est le maitre" ["One is hard-pressed to judge which of the two is the master"].

[9] I consider the stated "dealing with espionage activity, against the country, by foreign Intellligence operatives" a hypocritical shift of the very logic of espionage to action that is taken against other named foreign spies which must exist in order to justify the existence of the service.

[10] George Steiner uses the mythology of Bluebeard in a different way. See Bluebeard's room, ...In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, 1971.

[11] Perrault, Charles. Contes. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k101479h, 27.07.2007. Perrault's Fairy Tales.[12] Let us not forget that the moral is mentioned in the story itself: "La curiosité malgré tous ses attraits, / Coûte souvent bien des regrets" [Curiosity, attractive though it is, often causes much regret.]

I have included it here, and should point out that one might expect this - initially inconceivable - moral to make some sense after the end of this essay.

[13] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, Greek edition, p. 16.

[14] Ibid., p. 12.

[15] Simmel writes about the forming of sociability from a secret in Secret et Sociétés secrètes, Circé, Paris, 1996. On lying and the forming of social power based on that, there is a text which is also on the Internet: Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le mensonge, 1943: http://perso.orange.fr/espace.freud/topos/psycha/psysem/mensonge.htm.

[16] S.V. Shereshevskii was a Russian journalist with a seemingly unlimited memory (1968), in part due to his fivefold synesthesia. His case was presented in the The Mind of a Mnemonist.  

[17] Here we have a conscious reversal of a certain reading of the residence in oblivion by Agamben's homo sacer. There, the disdain of the face is organized through forgetting; here, it is organized through the memory which is stabilized by being entered into an archive. See Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998, Stanford University Press, (1995, Einaudi).

[18] The emphasis is Derrida's, Archive Fever, p. 28, Greek edition.

[19] Thoughts on residing in the archive as a continuation of Vilém Flusser's early and prophetic thoughts in his book on writing and the transition to the digital age, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft?, Göttingen, 1987.

[20] The unfolding of scientifc curiosity, which, for Freud, stems from the curiosity about one's genitals. See Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory from His Childhood, New York, 1964, (1910).

[21] See also Lacan's thoughts on Edgar Alan Poe's short story, The Purloined Letter: a lecture on the topic was given on April 26, 1955 during the seminar "Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse", first published in 1956, La psychanalyse, n° 2, 1957, pp. 15-44, with an "Introduction", pp. 1-14.

[22] In the writings of Slavoj Zizek, we often come across the concept of complication which is exhibited by the authority that accepts any opposition remaining intact in the face of any opposition. The description could be interpreted by the syndrome of the archive that we are describing here. Zizek gives a Lacanian version regarding the origin of this condition, e.g. Interrogating the Real, Continuum, 2006. The issue of the invisible action and the absence of concreteness constitute the perspective I am organizing here, the condition itself of life in the archive.

[23] The nullification to which I refer may be linked to the understanding of equality which Rancière connects to writing: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is the indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available as it is to everyone's eyes?", The Politics of Aesthetics, New York, 2004, (Paris, 2000).
[24] Alain Βadiou, Being and Event, Translated by Oliver Feltham, Continuum, 2007, New York and London, (L'être et l'événement, Paris, Seuil, 1988).