At a recent exhibition in Paris, I saw a few of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, a serial work consisting of 610 standard-sized cardboard boxes which, beginning in 1974, Warhol filled, sealed and sent to storage.



Warhol used these boxes to manage the bewildering quantity of paperwork that routinely passed through his life. Photographs, newspapers and magazines, fan letters, business and personal correspondence, art work, source images for artwork, books, exhibition catalogues, telephone messages and countless ephemera such as announcements for poetry readings and dinner invitations, were crammed on an almost daily basis into a box kept conveniently next to his desk. In Warhol’s factory, which at least in this instance looks more like a (crammed) archive, documents go into the box not because they are important, valuable, or otherwise memorable, but because they are “there,” on the desk, just like a photograph records what is “there,” at a certain time, in a certain place. It all seemed like so much clutter and background noise—until, that is, I was suddenly struck by a small collection of Concorde memorabilia—napkins, tickets, dinner knives—that Warhol had brought back with him from one his flights across the Atlantic. A few weeks before I visited the exhibit a Concorde had crashed on an airfield near the French capital, killing all passengers aboard. Eerily, the presence of these articles in Warhol’s archive only a week or so after the fatal crash commemorated an event, a trauma—Warhol’s own trauma, the trauma of those killed on the plane some three decades later—that had not even yet occurred when the archive was put together. What the archive records, my experience with Warhol’s boxes suggests, rarely coincides with what our consciousness is able to register. Again, archives do not record experience so much as its absence, they mark the point where an experience is missing from its proper place and what returns in them is something we never possessed in the first place. Is there a part of the archive that exceeds and escapes the archivists’ control and navigation? Is there a “beyond the archive” that is not encompassed by its storage or finding tools?

Being located both inside and outside of the arkheion, such a beyond could be described as un-heimlich, a term Freud reserved for “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”⁵ The uncanny suggests the sudden return of a record we recognize as familiar despite the fact that it is missing from our file registers. Not surprisingly, such a return of an expunged file is indexed by a sense of fright and unease. What, we might ask, would happen if something returned to occupy its place in the archive that was never expected to appear there, since no place is reserved for it in the archive? What if the archive failed to account for a record that no archival finding tool, no inventory number can help locate? In this case, the project of the archive as a healthy organic body in which every single element has (and takes) its appointed place would, once and for all, collapse—the archive would become a haunted place.

One of the goals I hope to achieve with this book is to reveal the uncanny underside of modernity’s archival connection, and to place this underside in a context that gives it the necessary historical traction. History, and time more generally, is key. While archives have existed ever since humans started to commit culture to the medium of writing, the technical and administrative modalities of archival storage have changed greatly. The archive not only preserves records that reflect time, it is also itself subject to development as the methods and media we use to record and file our activities change. (Among the technologies used for the registration and organization of information I deal with at some length in this book are the typewriter, the card index, carbon paper, and the vertical file). And while 20th-century art points to the archive in any number of ways, this does not mean that the archival model it invokes is always the same, or that an interest in the archive and its relationship with the problem of representation was confined to postwar art, or to art in Western Europe and the United States.