While conceding that, of course, taxonomies are made in the service of
power and control, simply to imagine that we can dispense with them
seems to me to be problematic. I suggest the alternative is not the
occupation of some space beyond the control of categories and so on,
such as Patrick seems to suggest the avant-garde continually seeks and
achieves (after all what is the avant-garde but one of the most
insistent and overdetermined of all artistic taxonomical definitions in
modernity), but rather the danger of invisibility and silence. The issue
here is perhaps one of the politics of the archive, which Derrida
engages with in Archive Fever.
"&[T]he question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the
past. It is not the question of a concept of dealing with the past that
might already be at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive.
It is a question of the future, the promise of the future itself, the
question of a response, of a promise and a responsibility for tomorrow.
The archive: if we want to know what that meant, we will only know in
times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or
perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the
archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself,
to a very singular experience of the promise."
|