Shelf-Life Biopolitics, the New Media Archive, and Reading “Paperless” Persons

addressed the effects of the shift from the era of paper to multimedia technologies ofwriting.1 In Archive Fever, Derrida returned to his essay on Sigmund Freud’s “Note uponthe ‘Mystic W

Shelf-Life: Biopolitics, the New Media Archive, and Reading “Paperless” Persons

It is possible that I now know something that he did fear Let me say how I arrived

at this assumption Well inside his wallet was a sheet of paper, folded long since,brittle and broken along the creases I read it before I burned it It was written inhis finest hand, firmly and evenly; but I perceived right away that it was only acopy ‘Three hours before his death,’ it began It was about Christian IV I read itseveral times before I burned it … I now understand very well, by the way, that aman will carry, for many a year, deep inside his wallet, the account of a dyinghour … Can we not imagine someone copying out, let us say, the manner of FelixArver’s death? … He became perfectly lucid, and explained to her that the wordwas ‘corridor’ not ‘collidor’ Then he died

Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs

Half-read books once replaced among the splendid rows of books in our library will never be read to the end Indeed, it is enough for some sensitive souls to buy

a book whose beginning they like, and then never pick it up again

Robert Musil, “Monuments,” in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

My dear reader I pronounce the matchless prophecy that two-thirds of the book’s few readers will quit before they are halfway through, which can also be expressed in this way—out of boredom they will stop reading and throw the book away My dear reader but to whom am I speaking? Perhaps no one is left at all Alas, alas, alas! How fortunate that there is no reader who reads all the way through, and if there were any, the harm from being allowed to shift for oneself when it is the only thing he wishes, is, after all, like the punishment of the

men of Molbo who threw the eel into the water Dixt [I have spoken]

Soren Kierkegaard, "Letter to the Reader from frater Taciturnus” in Stages on

Life's Way

this was an administrative and no longer religious arrangement: a mechanism of registration, and no longer of pardon The objective aimed at was, however, the same But here the avowal does not play the same role that Christianity had reserved for it For the implosion of this grid, old, but previously localized

procedures were systematically utilized; the denunciation, the indictment, the inquiry, the report, the use of informers, the interrogation And everything thus said is registered in writing, accumulates and constitutes dossiers and archives build themselves up through time as the endlessly growing memory of all the wrongs of the world.”

Michel Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men”

In Jacques Derrida’s later work one frequently encounters notable semantic shifts interminology with regard to writing, storage devices, the archive, and paper as he

addressed the effects of the shift from the era of paper to multimedia technologies ofwriting.1 In Archive Fever, Derrida returned to his essay on Sigmund Freud’s “Note upon

the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” to ask what difference itwould make to psychoanalysis had Freud sent faxes and email rather postal letters, and in

Paper Machine, Derrida returns to his rereading of Freud in Archive Fever to ask what

difference the shift from paper as a material support to virtual “paper” might make.2

Moreover, in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” Derrida returned to his account of

archive fever he had formulated “elsewhere” in Archive Fever.3 The writing machine andtypewriter ribbons, the answering machine, word processor, tape recorder, and otherstorage devices, photography cameras, and the subjectile, the material support or

“technical substrate,” all came to matter increasingly to Derrida in ways they did not inhis earlier accounts of non-phenomenal arche-writing, the trace, and the supplement towhich he contrasted phenomenal “writing in the general sense” (hieroglyphs, ideograms,alphabets, and so on).4

While rethinking the archive in relation to new media, Derrida was also rethinking, onadifferent channel, the relation between papers and persons, a biopolitical question relating

to documents and the materiality versus virtually, the human and the machine, the humanand the animal.5

The “paperless” person is an outlaw, a nonsubject legally, a noncitizen or the

1 This essay is deeply debted to Julian Yates, whose fingerprints, handprints, footprints,voice-prints, and answering machine may be traced everywhere in this essay I would likealso to thank John Archer for his many conversations, his trenchant comments on manydrafts of the introductory section, and “John Archer’s answering machine” too

2 Sigmund Freud, “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”, in The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, William Strachey (ed and trans.),

London Hogarth Press, 1961, Vol 6, pp226-32; Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene

of Writing”, Yale French Studies 48, (1972), pp74-117, republished in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Alan Bass (trans.) Chicago University Press, 1978, pp196-231;

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp13-19; and Paper Machine, Rachel

Bowlby (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, pp48-50 See also Derrida’s

parallel comments on bank notes, checks, and credit cards in “Priceless,” Negotiations:

Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, Elizabeth Rottenberg (ed and trans.), Stanford,

Stanford University Press, 2002, pp326-328

3 “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits,’)” in Tom Cohen et al (eds),

Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2001), pp 302-03, p359n11 This essay was published in Paper

Machine, Paris: Galilée, 2001, 35-150 but was not included in Paper Machine, op cit.

“Fichus” was originally published as a book but is included as a chapter of Paper

citizen of a foreign country refused the right conferred, on paper, by a temporary

or permanent visa, a rubber stamp The literal reference to the word papers, in the

sense of legal justification certainly depends on the language and uses ofparticular national cultures (in France and Germany, for instance) But when in

the United States, for example, the word undocumented is used to designate analogous cases, or undesireables, with similar problems involved, it is the same

axioms that carry authority; the law is guaranteed by the holding of a “paper” or

document, an identity card (ID), by the bearing or carrying [port] of a driving

permit or a passport that you keep on your person, that can be shown and thatguarantees the self, the juridical personality of “here I am.” We shouldn’t bedealing with these problems without asking what is happening today underinternational law, with the subject of “human rights and the citizen’s rights,” withthe future or decline of nation-states.6

At the end of this long passage, Derrida concludes “we are all, already, ‘paperless’people.”7 After having insisted that he and other supporters of the “paperless” people arenot “calling for the disqualification of identity papers or of the link betweendocumentation and legality” and having pointed out that “when we support them

[paperless people] today in their struggle, we still demand that they be issued papers”,

Derrida adds that what he metaphorically calls “the earthquake” of virtual, paperlessmedia “touches nothing less than the essence of politics and its link with the culture ofpaper The history of politics is a history of paper, if not a paper history.” Op cit., pp60-1

(Derrida uses the earthquake metaphor in Archive Fever as well.) Clarifying the force of

the final subordinate clause qualifying the meaning of a “history of paper” (not the samething as “a paper history”), Derrida restates his earlier point that “although theauthentication and identification of selves and others increasingly escapes the culture ofpaper the ultimate juridical resource still remains the signature done with the person’s

‘own hand’ on an irreplaceable paper support Ibid., p57

In this essay, I will ask what it means and for people to default to the condition ofbeing paperlesss inside of the “earthquake” of new media, when the archive is no longerfounded on paper supports, when files go virtual, when the state and paper aredecoupled.8 Under the double heading of the archive and paper, I initiate up a critique of

6 Jacques Derrida, 'Paper or Me, You Know… (New Speculations on a Luxury of thePoor)' in Paper Machine, Rachel Bowlby (trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press,

2005, pp60-1 See also Derrida, 'Machines and the Undocumented Person', ibid,

pp1-3; Derrida, 'Derelictions of the Right to Justice: (But What Are the "Sans Papier"

Lacking?)' in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, Elizabeth

Rottenberg (ed and trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp133-46; and

Jacques Derrida H.C for Life, That Is to Say Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter

(trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p137 and p171n123

7 Ibid., p61

8 Derrida’s descriptions of papers as “literal” derives from a legal understanding ofhuman rights in which papers have an officially approved and authentic and recognizablematerial support that authorized bearers carry on their persons Derrida presumably puts

“paper” in scare quotes in order to indicate that the literal referent is materialized in

Agamben’s biopolitics and German media theory, both of which are derived from MichelFoucault One of the problems with Agamben is that he has no account of media and noaccount of materiality either The camp in Agamben’s account is a political space, anindeterminate zone, indifferent to its various phenomenalizations, materializations,

localizations, places, and its virtualization Agamben extends the category of homo sacer

so far that it includes “virtually” everyone and can no longer be identified exclusivelywith victims of crimes (against humanity) but include “neomorts” as well.9 If today there

is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all

virtually homines sacri.”10 The virtualization of homines sacrii would not be possible

without the virtualization of the archive It is through the virtualization of the archive (understood as its mediatization in electronic form) that makes this condition visibleeven in the so-called pre-histories of the archive and, say of the law not yet virtualized oronly virtualized in relation to a specific medium (tape recorders, but not television;drawings, but not photographs) According to Agamben, there is no difference between abare life “lived” in a hospital room, on death row, or in a detention center, and a bare life

“lived” in a Nazi concentration camp; no does it matter to Agamben whether or notcrimes are committed in a particular morphology of the political space of the camp

I enlist Derrida to reconceptualize Agamben’s virtualized bare life, or biopolitics as biobibliopolitics: in modernity, persons are defined by their relation to paper.11 Entry various kinds of identification documents

9 The state of exception and reference to the concentration camps –112—in the Time that

Remains he gets to inoperatively, informulability of the law, this is where he finds himself

at the moment of deconstruction but does not deconstruction Agmaben effectively turns the remnant into an aporia (space and time actually become substitutable variations of thesame structure the same figure of the "contracted" remnant) and hence all reading can

do is to "render inoperative" certain kinds of misreadings (misreadings which have nevertheless clearly persisted, hence the need for him to write his book and correct past

mistakes) There's also a way in which The Time That Remains reads as an ars moriendi,

a saving of a time for the end, a fantasy that you can prepare yourself for your

death “Operational time” is the time you have to think the end in the present, not think about the end (eschaton), and so is implicitly distinguished from what operational time renders inoperative Inoperativity (111) and impotential as opposed to operationability and potential

10 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (115)

11 Agamben’s accout of virtual, virtualemente in Itlian original, skips ovr the questions of paperlessness asked by Derrida The result is a philogical confusion over virtuality itself:

What is included in the camp according to the etymological sense of the term

“exception” (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own exclusion But

what is first of all taken into the juridical order is the state of exception itself Insofar as the state of exception is ‘willed,’ it inaugurates a new juridico-political paradigm in which the norm becomes indistinguishable from the exception The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception—the possibility of

deciding on which founds sovereign power—is realized normally The sovereign

no longer limits himself, as he did in the spirit of the Weimar constitution, to

into concentration camps and all other zones of exception always archive includes the camp s involves identity papers and paperwork; similarly, preserving memory always bears on media of archiving, including film, photography, and print Agamben’s account

of the camp as the political space that is opened when the life becomes bare life and the state of exception becomes the norm, even though it is a delocalization and covers the planet as well as invades the interior of the city, it is still, in terns materialization a

holding pen, a cage, temporary or not Agamben confinement model of biopolitics is unnecessarily reductive Even if all life is bare life and hence may be caged, bare life is still minimally “free” to range (with papers or without them; with genuine papers or forged papers) within the planetary space of the political as the archive, even when

phenomenalized as camp or cage The archive is the nomos of the earth, the paradigm of

the political space opened up in modernity when the state of exception becomes the norm

and all life becomes virtually homines sacri, not the camp The political space of the

archive includes the camp within it The camp is always already an event of

archivalization Biopolitics is therefore not about confinement (only, or even primarily) but about various kinds of mediatized transmission, translation, transit or bio-biblio-processing

In order to translate the camp into the archive, I enlist Derrida’s accounts of the media archive and paper in a critique of attempts to positivize or literalize grammatology by introducing a seeming stable opposition between material and virtual kinds of media capturing paper (as opposed to textuality) by materialists and new media theorist of

paper such as Markus Paper Machines (MIT) and the Foucault and Kittler default model

of German media theory, which takes both as read, the problem of Foucault and life as read and the evasion of literature, the send off of Rilke as epigraph to this essay as my point of departure.12 In saying that the political space is the camp as archive, I retain the

deciding on the exception on the basis of recognizing a given factual situation (danger to public safety): laying bare the inner structure of the ban that

characterizes his power, he now de facto produces the situation as a consequence

of his decision on the exception This is why in the camp the quaestio iuris is, if

we look carefully, no longer strictly distinguishable from the quaestio facti, and in

this sense every question concerning the legality or illegality of what happened

there simply makes no sense The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the

two terms have become indistinguishable (HS 170) In Agamben’s terms, then the

lack of mediation means that media disappear along with the question of the human and the machine; it means, moreover, that that question can only be posed

in the same ay See The Open, as a question of rendering the machine operational.

12 On Rilke’s notebooks he kept while writing the Notebooks of Maltis Laurid Brigg, see Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Betz, Rilke in Paris Will Stone (trans) London Hesperus Press, 2012, pp21-26; 39-44; 71-78; 107-111 Vismann Files—returns to literature, even

if literature is reduced to citations Files, Paper Machines Sven Spieker, The Big

Archive Lothar Müller, Weisse Magie: Die Epoche des Papiers (Carl Hanser Verlag

2012) deals with canonical European literature throughout, and begins with a mention ofpaperless or undocumented persons, 11; Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, The Myth of

cage aspect of Foucault carceral genealogical practice of historicism and the camp of Agamben while saying that within the paradigm of the archive, confinement is not

primary: citizens and illegal immigrants live virtual bare lives regardless of whether they live as “free range” people or in cages and camps This move form biopolitics to a Derridean inflected bibliopolitics will reorient Foucault away from discipline,

technologies of the self, governmentality, and toward the archive as a delivery system, a heavily dependency on literature to provide the hit of so-called real materiality.13 What is apprehended as the political value of Foucault’s work—discipline and punish,

technologies, governmenentality, sovereignt ends up being a misunderstanding of what

is really political about it, namely, allowing the archive to model what you do with it Foucault looks a lot more grammatological in terms of what haunts him He is actually a historian, not a philosopher His job is telling stories about the past as opposed to

interrupting the past And on dreams Biobibliopolitics relats tehnics to reading, about reading as a filing and shelving operation No longer inoperable, as it is for Agamben, butunreadable, a fetishism of reading which calls into question the limits of the readable, how to distinguish the readable from the unreadable Not just a question of memory and the archive either Nt just biological life and death but also survivance

Having initiated this double critique of biopolitics and media theory as amisapprehension of the politics of the archive in Foucault’s work, we are now able toelaborate and examine in the remainder of this essay what I call various kinds of shelvingoperations in which reading both takes hold through them and is held off by them: thewallet; a youtube video about the U.S passport both as identification papers and as a kind

of book; Alain Resnais’s parallel film documentaries Nuit et broulliard (Night and Fog, 1955), devoted to the Holocaust, and Toute la memoire du monde (All the Memory of the

World, 1956), devoted to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library ofFrance); and autobiographical essays by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno aboutshelving and shipping their books

I

Let me return to Derrida’s comments on the “paperless” person I quoted at length above

13 Michel Foucault, "Part Five: Right of Death and Power Over Life," in The History of

Sexuality Vol 1 An IntroductionThe Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 by Michel Foucault, Michel Senellart, Arnold I Davidson, and

Alessandro Fontana (2008) Agamben's problem lies the way he constructs Foucault's work: Agamben sees a line of thought about internment that should have ended with an account of the concentration camp Agamben then completes the line of thought He does connect this work to Foucualt's work on the archive in Remnants, but doesn't see a fissure within Foucault's own work between Foucault's account of the archive (Lives of Infamous Men; I, Pierre Riviere) and discipline through incarceration Foucault did not think through the connection between the prison and the archive, in short He was too invested in a politics that separated the body from biopolitics Giorgio Agamben "The

Birth of the Camp," in Means Without Ends and "Archive andTestimony" in Remnants of

Auschwitz For a very hars critique of Agamben, see Beast and the Sovereign, vol.1 Errol

Morris, dir Mr Death

By saying that we are all “paperless” persons, Derrida means, I take it, that thesubstitution of a material paper support by a paperless electronic support has entailed aglobal network in which even those with papers are effectively reduced to those withoutthem It might be tempting to appeal to Michel Foucault for the explanation of whatDerrida is looking at the epiphenomena of, namely, paperlessness as a technology ofsurveillance.14 Derrida describes a “‘paperless’ setup” that that both covers the entireearth and extends beyond it:

new powers delete or blur the frontier in unprecedented conditions, and at an

unprecedented pace… These new threats on the frontiers are…phenomenal; they

border on phenomenality itself, tending to phenomenalize, to render perceptiblevisible, or audible; to expose everything on the outside They do not only affectthe limit between the public and the private – between the political or cultural life

of its citizens and their innermost secrets and indeed, secrets in general; theytouch on actual frontiers – on frontiers in the narrow sense of the word: betweenthe national and the global, and even between the earth and the extraterrestrial, theworld and the universe – since satellites are part of this “paperless” setup.15

14 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge Some of French collegues of La Bastille ou : A travers les archives de la BastilleDanielle Muzerelle and Elise Dutray-

Lecoin, eds; Bruno Racine (Préface) See contributions by Arlette Farge Selections from

Arlette Farge's Subversive Words Jacques Rançiere chapter on paper and the writing desk, "The Dead King," in The Names of History

I rather believe the idea came to me one day in the Bibliotheque Nationale when I was reading an internment register drawn up at the very beginning of the eighteenth century.” Foucault, "Lives of Infamous Men," The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other, books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that

contains it: its unity is variable and relative As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, on the basis of a complex field of discourse

Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, Trans A M Sheridan Smith New

York:Patheon, 1972, 23 (on this page and 24, MF’s examples are almost all literary texts)

15 Ibid., p57

To these threatened frontiers, Derrida might have added life and death.16 Yet for Derrida,paperlessness is not only a moment of danger and a source of anxiety but also a moment

in which certain kinds of things become possible Elsewhere in Paper Machine, Derrida

defines philosophy as paperless, undocumented in the more literal sense To aninterviewer asking “What does it mean to a French philosopher today?” Derrida responds

that “in principle, a philosopher should be without a passport, even undocumented

[sans-papier]; he should never be asked for his visa He should not represent a nationality, or

even a national language.”17 Derrida transvalues the condition of being without papers inthe literal sense from the negative meaning of being undesirable to the positive meaning

of a principle of philosophical cosmopolitanism: philosophy today is defined by its being

16 See the wallet as tomb in Rilke’s example Similar examples in Farge Le bracelet de parchemin is all about autopsies—papers found on cadavers that helped identify them These are people who drowned or froze to death She uses the word “inscribes” in a Foucauldian manner enonce par l’inscription sur papier, tablettes ou parchemins 77 Butsurvivance is not reducible to life and death Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death (130)

Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment on, is a dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in cellars,

living-in urns, drowned living-in the worldwide waves of the Web

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 131

A tout le moin peut-on preciser qu’il y a de minuscule carnets, des missives ou tablettes, des dessin, et ce que tout cela est inscrit sure des fueilles de papier aux formats mutliples,aux bords dechieres, aux forms incertaines parce que uses par le temps, griffes aussi par l’enfouissement sans precaution dans les poches Bien entendu se reconnaissent vite les imprimes (certificats, passeports, extraits de bapteme, etc.) ainsi ceux supportant une ectriture manuscrite 37

5 Archives nationals, Z2 41333 “Registre de levee de cadavres, 17 avirl 1783

Tous ce ecrits minuscule forment sans doute un livre, un livre unique ou se dirait par ecrit

ce qui—de fait—ne pouvait jamais etre ecrit par ceux qui les portaient, puisqu’ils ne possedaient aucune des forms de la culture tradiotnelle Ces papiers ne sont pas lies au monde savant et, pourtant, ils s’y rattachent forcement Ce bruit peu audilble, ce livre difficile a dechiffrer eminent bien en partie du monde savant: quleques comptes sur un papier dechire font etat d’un unives marchand, meme s’il est pratique pratique sans emphase ou de facon embryonnaire: une adresse mal orthgrahiee or des mots de pei Les objets, les vetements, les petit billets sur soi aident a l’identification du corps 31

ne ecrits de crayon et de phonetique emprutent a la culture savant 35

17 “What Does It Mean to Be a French Philosopher Today?”, in Paper Machine, op cit,

p112

outside geopolitical laws, if not an outlaw I think it would be a mistake to dismiss thistransvaluation as a kind of weak exceptionalism Derrida claims for philosophy

II

How is a “paperless” person, someone whose support takes the form of identificationpapers, caught up in new kinds of virtual biometrics and bioprocessing? What kind ofvirtual life supports might international law offer to replace paper supports? I want toaddress these questions by turning to Derrida’s account of the thing that holds papers

together, namely, the portefeuille, or wallet Taking this turn means that we begin to grasp

what I call the “hold” of reading, or in this case the holdover of readings to be continued.Derrida’s account of the wallet is textually deferred and placed in the storage unit of anendnote.18 However, this endnote does not follow Derrida’s first mention of the wallet atthe end of a very long parenthetical comment regarding paper: “(Indeed a reflection on

paper ought in the first place to be a reflection on the sheet or leaf [feuille] … We should also, if we don’t forget to later, speak about the semantics of the portefeuille, at least in

French).”19 Derrida’s endnote begins as if taking up where his parenteheical remarks left

off: “I had forgotten to come back to the French word portefueille [wallet].” A note does follow the parenthesis that defines the meaning of Portefeuille.20 Yet this note has beenadded by the translator, who seems to forget that Derrida remembers he forgot in endnote

29.21 (Dear reader: please hold on while I hold up my essay by attending to the holds inDerrida’s interview The translator’s arguably unnecessary note is not merely an uncaughterror; rather, it echoes perhaps even mimics Derrida’s own textual repetitions Forexample, the phrase “we are all, already, undocumented, paperless” occurs in the first

chapter of Paper Machine and Derrida rewrites it almost verbatim, dropping

“undocumented in “Paper or Me, You Know.”22 Similarly, Derrida has an endnote onendnote “biblion” in “Paper or Me, You Know,” that similarly repeats much a passage inthe body of the of “The Book to Come.”23 Endnoting allows for Derrida to put certainissues into storage or take them out, often marking his discussion in the body of the text

as a lapse: for example, in “Typewriter Ribbon, Limited Ink”, he says “I don’t know why

I am telling you this” in the middle of an rhetorically unmarked digression on the ambervampire insects and then ends the three page digression by apparently recalling hispurpose: “I didn’t know, a moment ago, why I was telling you these stories of an archive:archives of a vampire insect.”24 Yet a clear distinction between an unmarked lapse and alapse rhetorically marked as a “hold on” moment of interruption is very difficult,probably impossible, to draw in Derrida’s work Moreover, these “hold on” both “holdup” moments may mean both delay or stopping and support, as in holding a place.Derrida’s many returns to Freud’s “Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad” mentioned above

may be construed as placeholders that enabled him to hold up reading by folding it up,

unfolding it, and refolding In Archive Fever, Derrida writes: “an exergue serves to stock

in anticipation and prearchives a lexicon, which out to lay down the law and give the

order In this way, the exergue has at once an institutive and conservative function .

It is thus the first figure of an archive.”25 The “exergue,” “preamble,” “foreword,” and

“postscript” of Archive Fever paratexutally mark a series of hold ups that auto-immunize

the already auto-infected archive fever Derrida has already caught Derrida’s thoughtremains unfinished not just because he died but because the hold of reading means that

no reading can ever be finished or complete: reading is always unfolding, leaving on asliving-on, or survivance).26

Let me now cite Derrida’s endnote on the wallet so we may understand how actuvirtuallife supports in variously virtual and material forms relate to the “hold of reading” moreconcretely:

I had forgotten to come back to the French word portefeuille [wallet] Which says just about everything on what is invested in paper, in the leaf or the feuille of

paper Current usage: when its “figure” does not designate a set of documentsauthenticating an official power, a force of law (the ministerial portfolio),

portefeuille names this pocket within a pocket, the invisible pocket you carry [porte] as close as possible to yourself, carry on your person, almost against the

body itself Clothing under clothing, an effect among other effects This pocket isoften made of leather, like the skin of a parchment or the binding of a book Moremasculine than feminine a wallet gathers together all the “papers,” the mostprecious papers, keeping them safe, hidden as close as possible to oneself Theyattest to our goods and our property We protect them because they protect us (theclosest possible protection: ‘This is my body, my papers, it’s me…’)”27

Derrida proceeds to account for the partially paperless contents of wallets

They take the place, they are the place, of that on which everything else, law andforce, force of law, seems to depend: our “papers,” in cards or notebooks: theidentity card, the driving permit, the business or address book; then paper money– banknotes – if one has any Nowadays, those who can also put credit or debitcards in there These do fulfill a function analogous to that of other papers,maintaining the comparable dimensions of a card – something that can behandled, stored away, and carried on the person – but they also signal the end ofpaper or the sheet of paper, its withdrawal or reduction, in a wallet whose future ismetaphorical … One effect among others: the majority of the “rich” often haveless cash, less paper money, in their wallets, than some of the poor

25 Op cit., p7

26 Parages, Beast and the Sovreign 2

27 Op cit., p188n29

Wallets traverse both papered and paperless, or “pauperized” people.28 Is the wallet anarchive, then, regardless of the materiality of the papers it holds? Is it a “biologicalarchive?”29 To be sure, Derrida lays out, in the first pages of Archive Fever, certain

conditions on which he says any archive depends: there can be no archive “withoutsubstrate nor without residence,” no archive without archons as guardians and interpreters

of the law, “no archive without outside,” no archive without psychoanalysis.30 Yet asDerrida engages questions of the difference new media make to the archive, he beginsquestioning the limits of the archive: “is not the copy of an impression already a kind ofarchive? … Can one imagine an archive without foundation, without substrate, without

subjectile?” and begins to talk of “virtual archives” and “ an archive of the virtual.”31 In

several essays including in the French edition of Paper Machine, Derrida refers to storage devices as different as two editions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and a piece

of amber containing fossils of vampire insects, and he refers elsewhere in Paper Machine

to “computer archives” having been “locked up”.32

If we grant that the wallet too is a kind of archive, even an archive that may contain otherarchives in the form of copies, it follows that the archive may be portable, eventransportable Near the end of his endnote on the wallet, Derrida relates anautobiographical anecdote about his home having been burgled twice over the previous

two years; the thieves took his laptop the first time and his “portefeuille the second

time.”33 “So what was taken away,” Derrida writes, “was what was included or condensed

– virtually, more in less – less time, space, and weight What was carried away [emporté] was what could most easily be carried [porté] on the person and with the person: oneself

as an other, the portefeuille and the “portable.”34 If the wallet is an archive, the archiveitself becomes potentially portable, both nomological and virtualized “We are all,already ‘paperless’ people” may be read broadly as follows: the biological and virtualarchive offers various kinds of life support even when material supports are lacking.Portable, virtualized archives may become virtual life support systems in the form oftrans/portable reading materials, materials that go unnoticed and unread

The material support, or survivance comes into focus, as a materiality, spectrality Bare life and life Cite or biopolitics in biobibliopolitics

quasi-Inoperability versus unreadability Agamben defaults to a philological more ofcommentary, line by line, which takes the text as given, as if it had never been edited inorder to be rendered readable

28 Op cit., p187n25

29 Op cit., p340

30 Op cit, pp3-4; p11

31 Op cit., p28; pp26-7; p64; p66

32 “Typewriter Ribbon,” op cit., p286, p289; p331; “Machines and the ‘Undocumented

Person,” in, Paper Machine, op cit., p2 and “The Word Processor”, ibid., p29

33Ibid., p189n29

34 Ibid., p189n29

Carry through anarchivity thread and relate it to biopolitics?

III

With this account of the way the displacement of biopolitics by biobibliopolitics follows from Derrida’s deconstruction of new media and paperless persons and the archive, we may now turn now an example of an material object, an archive in the form of a passport,that resists becoming phenomenal, that resists or defers reading State of emergency (Passports go back to the 16th century, however.) Biometric information is at the core of the of the passport document: it certifies some physical connection of the documented identity to the body of possessing it Before the widespread use of photography,

applicants were obliged to describe their facial features, faircolor, eye color, heigh, and

“any visible distinguishing marks or peculiarities.“ These descriptions were

supplemented by the photograph, and as photographs became more reliable as a

technology, biometric information that was visible on the photograph ceased to be

duplicated (94) The Passport Office and the passport itself were temporary, pragmatic solutions to a governmental problem of movement Once institutionalized, the

“emergency” was normalized, and passports became “necessary“ even in peacetime

Mark B Salter, Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations, Boulder and

London: Lynne Reinner, 2003 (92)

„Machine readable identity“ pp 93-95

I will look at a Youtube video on the U.S passport, as it effectively raises borderlinequestions about borders and border crossing As Derrida writes,

the crossing of borders always announces itself according to the movement of a

certain step [pas] – and of the step that crosses a line An indivisible line And one

always assumes the institution of such an indivisibility Customs, police, visa orpassport, passenger identification – all of that is established upon this institution

of the indivisible, the institution therefore of the step that is related to it, whetherthe step crosses it or not.”35

The passport figures a problem of form related to materiality, a problem of determiningthe form of the object / thing The passport as “book” offers resistance to a narrative,especially a genetic narrative of its construction and assemblage; the passport is a hybrid,both a printed book and yet also a kind of e-book, a Kindle that doesn’t function (youcan’t read the digital data or subtract from it, add to it / alter it).It is first a “thing,” then a

“book” with fine print and microprint, first made of a foreign, imported cover (thing)with three blank but formatted memory chips, then becomes American (book) whenassembled (the paper covering over the foreign chips, which are loaded and locked), andfinally a “personalized” book (sort of like on demand publishing) Only machines “read”the passports (officers “skim” them) This narrative of passport production reveals andhides its own double Un/American construction (the side of the inside (chip) beingcovered by the paper laminated onto the plastic cover): the made in America for

35 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, Thomas Dutoit (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1993, p11

Americans book metaphor of assemblage beginning and ending in America (printing,stitching, lamination) competes with a global industrial model of assemblage in whichnon-American digital parts and cover get imported and data then gets “loaded on” to theimports and covered up without Americans even knowing (unless they watch this video).Like any (transnational) commodity, American passports alienate American citizens fromtheir own identity papers, covering up the foreign, protective cover, literally secreting thechips that fully functionalize the identity papers from their “owners.”36 The printed pages

of the passport as book become a cover, literally and metaphorically, for the storage ofcitizens as data, their reduction to microchips And the question of “reading” and

“skimming” the book is all the more bizarre since there is no narrative to read, just aprofile reduced to one’s life span and home

The YouTube video does not say what is stored on the chips (the word “information” isnot used), whether it is the same as the information on the passport or in excess of it It isinformation about us, however That much is clear But we are alienated through our dataprocessing; we are booked by the State even, just into persons through personalization.But we are only informed by changes in how U.S passports are made Their makingwould usually seem to fall under state secrets, so the effect of the ideas that we arelearning is like seeing something that we are not supposed to see The video is itself athreat because it gives forgers information they could use to forge But the issue is thatpersons are stored as data when they are turned from persons into citizens Citizenshippasses though the person in enabling him or her to pass through customs, institutingdistinctions between guest and host, alien and host, and the inhuman outside citizenship(equated with aliens as animals, vermin, threats, viruses, flus, and so on), hostage andhostage taker Citizenship not as securing of human rights but as Host-age taking

IV

Paperless / the passport/ new media and biopolitics of the camp as an archive by turning

to film as archival material of the camp We may thereby better appreciate the limitations

of Agamben’s structuralist thinking and argument by analogy (two analogous structures are regularly said to “coincide” (9, 38), “correspond” (8; 9), “converge (9; 9)”, and so on) Agamben’s metaphysical account of the camp’s absolute political space is stuck in arhetorical groove: he can only reveal again and again the essential hidden structure / matrix / paradigm and “foundation” (9) of the space of the camp, an effort that proves more and more futile given both that he tells a story of the gradual “penetration” of politics over bios, of increasing “intimacy” (66) and “complicity” (10,) and “secret complicity” (67) between a Rights or Humanitarian discourse and biopolitics, the

movement of the camp from the margins to the center of the “political order” (9); the

“steady dissolution” of “categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right / left, private / public, absolutism / democracy, etc.)” (8).37 Along parallel lines, Agamben

36 “Paper, or Me,” op cit

37 Hence, Agamben can only imagine a “new politics” that would stop the extension of the West’s conception of bare life in the Third World in a future to come; his recourse to the future perfect tense: “only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to

linearizes the “extratemporality” of the camp by making biopolitics and thanatopolitics analogous (the camp, Agamben writes, only becomes operational when it becomes a

“lethal machine” [175] and that it then never ceases to be in operation).38 Whereas Alain

Renais’s Night and Fog (1955) alternates between color photography of Auschwitz in the present and black and white archival footage of the camps and Marcel Ophüls’ The

Sorrow and the Pity (1969) confronted interviewees with documents from the archive

about their collaboration with the Nazis and inserting archival footage, Claude Lanzman

decided to film Shoah ( 198) without using any archival footage, just filming in color

interviews with survivors By contrast, Jean-Luc Godard included archival footage in his

Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988), though the film is not a documentary about the holocaust

as is Shoah Despite this split, the anti-archivist Claude Lanzmann and archivist

Jean-Luc Godard share a similarly phantasmatic view of the archive, both imagining the existence of film footage of the camp in operation Lanzmann says that if he had found a Nazi snuff film of gas chambers in operation, he would have destroyed it:

Spielberg chose to reconstruct To reconstruct, in a sense, means to manufacture archives.And if I had found an existing film—a secret film that showed how three thousand Jews,men, women, children, died together in a gas chamber at a crematorium II at Auschwitz,

if I had found that, not would I have shown it, I would have destroyed it I am unable tosay why It is obvious (95) Godard says something similar about the actual existence ofNazi film footage of the camp, arriving, however, the inverse conclusion that the footageshould be shown (destroying it does not occur to him): “We always discover archives along time afterward [ .] I have no proof whatsoever of what I am claiming, but I thinkthat if I worked with an investigative journalist on this, I would find the images of the gaschambers after about twenty years We would see the prisoners entering, and we wouldsee in what state they come out” (cited by Didi-Huberman, p 216, n 73) We perhapssomewhat precipitously hazard from these two quotations the following generalization:both the archivist and anti-archivist Lanzman creates a camp with a camp, the two campsbeing early mirror opposites: the anti-archivist imagines the archive as the contents ofwhich are to be burned, a crematorium, as it were; the archivist imagines thiscrematorium within the camp (for burning pornographic, “bad” images) while creatinganother space, an unmarked urn, for not yet ashed remnants rendered readable

the civil war that divides peoples and cites of the earth” (180) Agamben attaches no time

to the accomplishment of this task as his notion of the future here is implicitly messianic

38 At this same moment, the camp takes on a Kafkaesque inflection, as Agamben uses the metaphor of inscription twice, calling up “The Penal Colony” (see his discussion of Franz

Kakfa in Homo Sacer, pp 49-58): “the camp is the new, hidden regulator of the

inscription of life in the order—or rather, the sign of the system’s inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine” (175); “inscribed” (174), “inscription oflife” (176) See also Agamben’s mention of the scribe who is about to write but does not

as a figure of sovereignty (45) and his account of Kafka’s “Before the Law”: “Law that becomes indistinguishable from life in a real state of exception is confronted by life that,

in a symmetrical but inverse gesture, is entirely transformed into law The absolute intelligibility of a life wholly resolved into writing corresponds to the impenetrability of awriting that, having become indecipherable, now appears as life” (55) Agamben’s account of absolute intelligibility and impenetrability of life resolved into law and writingdepends crucially on his uncritical use of the word “real” here to modify “exception.”