Stoler 2009

Ann Laura Stoler. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton UP, 2009.

• READ Ch 2, 7

Ch 1

• 1 archive as site of dreaming: a future facilitated by these documents, "dreams of comforting futures and forebodings of future failures"
• "It is a book that asks what we might learn about the nature of imperial rule and the dispositions [mentalities?] it engendered from the writerly forms through which it was managed, how attentions were trained and selectively cast."
• "...producing rules of classification was an unruly and piecemeal venture at best. Nor is there much that is hegemonic about how these taxonomies worked on the ground. Grids of intelligibility were fashioned from uncertain knowledge"
• "colonial archival documents serve less as stories for a colonial history than as active, generative substances with histories, as documents with itineraries of their own."
• 2 documents as collective agents: "Kilometers of administrative archives called up massive buildings to house them...Accumulations of paper and edifices of stone were both monuments to the asserted know-how of rule, artifacts of bureaucratic labor duly performs, artifices of a colonial state declared to be in efficient operation."
• 3 "...documents in these colonial archives were not dead matter once the moment of their making had passed...these colonial archives were an arsenal of sorts that were reactivated to suit new governing strategies. Documents honed in the pursuit of prior issues could be requisitioned to write new histories, could be reclassified for new initiatives, could be renewed to fortify security measures against what were perceived as new assaults on imperial sovereignty and its moralizing claims."
• 4 Ontologies, as Ian Hacking writes, refer to "what comes into existence with the historical dynamics of naming." Pursuing an "historical ontology," then, demands something that the philosophical study of ontology tout court might pursue but more often does not: identification of mutating assignments of essence and its predicates in specific time and space. On the face of it, the notion of essence implies stability and fixity, the enduring properties of people and things. But if there is anything we can learn from the colonial ontologies of racial kinds, it is that such "essences" were protean, not fixed, subject to reformulation again and again.
  • a conceptual tie then to the status of a work’s relationship to its texts and indeed to the ontology of the realist subject in a novel
• ...these archives are not simply accounts of actions or records of what people thought happened. They are records of uncertainty and doubt in how people imagined they could and might make the rubrics of rule correspond to a changing imperial world. Not least they record anxious efforts to "catch up" with what was emergent and "becoming" in new colonial situations. Ontologies are both productive and responsive, expectant and late.
• 9 ...the question of "accessibility" to the workings of the Dutch colonial administration in the c19 Indies...Inaccessibility has more to do with the principles that organized colonial governance and the "common sense" that underwrote what were deemed political issues and how those issues traveled by paper through the bureaucratic pathways of the colonial administration.... Navigating the archives is to map the multiple imaginaries that made breastfeeding benign at one moment and politically charged at another.... In short, an interest in European paupers or abandoned mixed blood children gets you nowhere, unless you know how [10] they mattered to whom, when, and why they did so.
• 11 detailing the assemblages of distinct types of documents which "constituted the evidentiary packages for decisions to be made."
• 14 My interest is not in the finite boundaries of the official state archives but in their surplus production, what defines their interior ridges and porous Sean’s, what closures are transgressed by unanticipated exposition and writerly forms.

Ch 2

• 19 contrasting the novelist Pramoedya’s vision of the colonial archives as a dead "pyre of empire" with her vision of an over-abundant, pulsing, anxious, partial one: "for P the tremors of colonial rule are outside the archives. In the present volume I pursue how deeply epistemic anxieties stir affective tremors within them."
• 20 ...what insights into the social imaginaries of colonial rule might be gained from attending not only to colonialism’s Archival content, but to the principles and practices of governance lodged in oarticilar Archival forms.
• By archival form I allude to several things: prose style, repetitive refrain, the arts of persuasion, affective strains that shape "rational" response, categories of confidentiality and classification, and not least, genres of documentation. The book’s focus is on archiving-as-process rather than archives-as-things.
• 21 the conditional, future-anticipating tense as an archival form with the power of reshaping policy
• 25 Nice epigram from Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think l/u: "Institutions created shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked. They made other areas show in finely discriminated detail, which is closely scrutinized and ordered. History emerges in an unintended shape as a result of practices directed to immediate, practical ends. To watch these practices establish selective principles that highlight some kinds of events and obscure others is to inspect the social order operating on individual minds."

Sources to l/u

• l/u Arjun Appadurai, "Archive and Aspiration," Information is Alive
• Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information
• Francis Blouin and William Rosenberg, Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory
• Antoinette Burton, Archive Stories
• Chartier, Boureau, Dauphin, Correspondence
• Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think
• Michel Duchein, "The History of European Archives"
• Marlene Manoff "Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines"
• Achille Mbembe "The Power of the Archive and Its Limits"
• Penelope Papailias, Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece
• Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive"