Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense by Ann Laura Stoler 314 pp. Princeton University Press. Paper, $22.95
“Universals appears to have two connotations. One is that of totality; in this sense, universal designates the whole world at all times. The other is one of generality: that which is applicable to a large number of instances.”[1]
“Common sense has its own necessity; it asserts its right with the weapon peculiarly suitable to it, namely, appeal to the ‘obviousness’ of its claim and considerations.”[2]
“There are many kinds of eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes—therefore there must be many kinds of ‘truths’ and consequently there can be no truth.”[3]
There are no absolutes, no guaranteed categories, no definitive markers, in essence no Truth. Conjecture erupts through momentary snippets of time, the seemingly insignificant recesses and grooves of innocuous objects (i.e. colonial missives and personal correspondence) and is constantly transformative, washing in and out of itself leaving remnants, what Pierre Bordieu referred to as “sedimented knowledge”[4]. As Wendy Brown states, convictions [i.e. Truth] “are, precisely, refusals to allow history and contingency to contour the existing dimensions and possibilities of political life”[5]. Convictions bred, born, and fed in the colonial conscious and unconscious mind are exactly what Ann Stoler attempts to challenge within Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Stoler wrangles with the process of colonial archiving in the 19th century Netherlands Indies as one not filled with conviction and certitude but rather, constant uncertainty filled with gaps, of questioned credibility and rumor. Stoler maps (to reference Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘map’) out a colonial heritage through a genealogy, a genealogy that is “neither an ‘acquisition’ nor a ‘possession that grows and solidifies’ but [is] an ‘unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile interior from within or from underneath”[6]. In the following few pages, I hope to accomplish four things: to discuss what I mean by genealogy and Stoler’s relationship to Foucault and Nietzsche in her book, where we find Foucault’s notion of the emergent history, how it is conceived as well as what work it does, to discuss Stoler’s choice of Frans Carl Valck as agent of colonial sentiment, and finally, offer a few questions that the work brought forth in light of genealogy, archival work, historical ethnographies and in reference to the formulation of my own work.
A man places the record “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis on the turntable, a woman screams at her child as the blouses and trousers flutter in the wind on the laundry line stretched taut between two crumbling brick walls, a car sounds its horn in the distance and a silently operating multitude of operations have brought us here, to this point, at this particular moment, through the “endlessly repeated play of dominations”[7]. Genealogy, as envisioned by Foucault and Nietzsche, destabilizes notions of origin, that fixed point from where a particular moment, person, or event has evolved. It cultivates details and takes notice of the accidents which accompany every beginning, plumbs and excavates the depths and awaits eruptions and emergents[8]. In short, it is cognizant of the utter complexities constantly at play in historicized or imagined moments of origin and thus, explodes any preconceived notions of Truth. Through this lens of constant inconsistency, Foucault states that, “every sentiment, particularly the most disinterested, has a history”[9]. And so it is, in a very real sense that Stoler takes head-on the notion that, “the mastery of reason, rationality, and the inflated claims made for Enlightenment principles have been at the political foundation of colonial regimes”[10]. Instead, she argues, things are a bit more complicated. Hesitation, anxiety, uncertainty, fear, confliction, and irrationality could often be found within the fissures of the Dutch colonial project in the Indies and she reveals such conflictual sentiments through ‘minor’ histories in the archives which attend to structures of feeling and force that in ‘major’ history might be otherwise displaced[11]. It is through focusing on such ‘minor’ histories that Stoler reinvigorates Foucault’s notion of the emergent, “the entry of forces…their eruption, the leap from the wings to center stage, each in its youthful strength”[12]. By focusing in on the entrance exams of the Indies civil service, the demonstrations at the Harmonie Club on May 22, 1848, the Inlandsche Kinderen (pauperized whites) and resulting state commissions of inquiry, the Mattray agricultural colony in France, Frans Carl Valck, and the Luhmann family murders, Stoler pushes up and through the façade of a unified, hegemonic colonial force and the emergent leaks forth from conflictual accounts of mistrust, rumor, love, pain—in short, sentiment. Stoler’s sense of the ‘sentiment’ is not opposed to political reason but act as modalities or tracers of it; as judgments, assessments and interpretations of the social and political world[13]. These sentiments reveal more than they conceal and beg us as readers to question the importance of the sidelined, the seemingly innocuous, or the mundane. This questioning, as Wendy Brown states in reference to Nietzsche, “produces an experience of vertigo, and the vertigo gives way to demand. The demand is not of a conventional political sort but rather seeks new knowledge—vertiginous knowledge”[14]. The archive, seen in this light and through the lens which Stoler fuses her work together through, is torn asunder and the infinite screams to be noticed between the interstices of words on archival documents, the space between photographed subjects and most importantly, within that which is not said. She focuses instead on archival form: “prose style, repetitive refrain, the arts of persuasion, affective strains that shape ‘rational’ response categories of confidentiality and classification, and genres of documentation”[15]. Knowledge is sought but never garnered and labeled as such and the interrogative replaces the declarative in much of Stoler’s work. Colonial sentiment is thus sought through an emergent history and it needs to be understood how she employs this within her work.
Stoler begins part one of her book (entitled “Colonial Archives and their Affective States”) writing against the “Weberian model of rationally-minded, bureaucratically drive states outfitted with a permanent and assured income to maintain them, buttressed by accredited knowledge and scientific legitimacy and backed by a monopoly on weaponed force”[16]. Although successful in doing so, how does she succeed and what does such a pursuit do?
Stoler posits the idea that the Dutch colonial authorities were most concerned with the distribution and states of sentiment, pertaining particularly to whether or not family, language, and homeland were at odds and whether they should—or could ever-be under the state’s control”[17]. As colonial authorities watched such ‘sentiment’, it was not, Stoler argues, through the sharp Cartesian lens of passion versus reason but rather existed and made decisions in large swaths of grayness[18]. Stoler then dives into the archives to explore the entrance exams for the Indies civil service and in doing so, illustrates clearly and succinctly the affective criteria set out by the state for advancement in education, inclusion in Dutch racial membership, claims to citizenship, and social entitlements[19]. But this is not to say that such affective criteria was consistent for it took the Dutch colonial authorities much work to uphold and standardize such criteria. Morality became a ‘manufactured consent’ in Chomsky’s terms that the colonial state treated as a business which was run, as Stoler states, on “affective judgments”[20]. Statecraft “was not opposed to the affective but to its mastery,” Stoler states and through such attempted mastery of the affective erupts what Bourdieu referred to as the habitus, “the product of history, [which] produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history”[21]. Such normalized matters of the state were in no way static but instead had to constantly be remade, reworked, re-stretched, and fit over an ever-changing landscape of sentiment and ‘the moral’, Pulling on such examples from the dusty archives such as the entrance exams, the Harmonie club, debates concerned with ‘mixed blood’ and poor white inhabitants and more does the work that Foucault speaks of when mentioning ‘eruptions’, that “hazardous play of dominations”, and shows us as readers how such attempted mastery of the affective reveals its successes and falterings within the wording and distribution of archived colonial communications[22]. Particularly to this point, the missive which Stoler surfaces from the annals of the events at the Harmonie Club in Batvia on May 22nd, although seemingly innocuous, is exactly the type of ‘minor’ history that can be overlooked but when strung out from the wash of history, can speak volumes from the minor alterations made and more importantly, from that which is carefully avoided. This is effective history in every sense of the term; it “shortens its vision to those things nearest to it…it unearths the periods of decadence, and if it chances upon lofty epochs, it is with the suspicion of finding a barbarous and shameful confusion”[23]. The documents which Stoler pulls on are not mere dusty piles of parchment but instead are weapons wielded by the state for evidence, particularly in the Dutch colonial state’s attempt to create racial categories in the face of ‘mixed bloods’ and poor whites. The framing of archives in this way uses this bundle of seemingly inanimate objects and does work with them, outlining a blueprint of colonial distress which was given cumulative and historical weight, justified inaction, reduced allocations, and caused the state to abort policy[24]. In eking out the boundaries of racial categorization, people were categorized via state statistical analysis and commissions. Importantly, Stoler says, “characterizations of people and things not only lodge in the tenacious hold of words: they burrow into bodies and then re-emerge as resurrected knowledge, upholding oppositional positions as they take on new political forms”[25]. This is vitally important as it reveals the work of archives and the people that participated in their creations to be participants in organic knowledge-creation processes of becoming, receding, emerging and re-emerging, not static actors fixed to particular points in history but actors constantly operating in and through the archived past as well as the present. Frans Carl Valck is a prominent player within Stoler’s work and I wish to explore her choice of Valck before presenting a few questions the overall work prompted.
Frans Carl Valck, at one point Assistant Resident on Sumatra’s East Coast in 1876, is a ‘minor’ figure in the overall Dutch colonial history and through Valck, Stoler lays out the colonial “sensibilities of the everyday—to what pressed on their bodies; what they chose to communicate differently to kin, colleague and superior; what occupied their feelings; what slipped to the edges of their awareness, erupted, and then escaped their minds”[26]. Within Chapters 6 and 7, Valck is utilized as an object of colonial sentiment and in the latter part of Chapter 7, fleshed out with a familial history. Stoler, by her own accounts, writes against “charmed accounts” revealing “jagged analytic edges” and avoids coating “complex commitments in generic ideologies and “shared” imaginaries as if people had little work to do with them”[27]. Although not nearly in the schizophrenic form in which Deleuze and Guattari write A Thousand Plateaus, Stoler is employing the essence of the rhizome as “short term memory or antimemory”, something that “grows between, among other things”, “blow[s] apart strata, cut[s] roots, and make[s] new connections”, and “collective assemblages of enunciation”[28]. The rhizomatic direction as delineated by Deleuze and Guattari, tries to “overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings…Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction…”[29]. Stoler, in affect, does overthrow the common usage of ontology or metaphysics, searching instead for the “ascribed being or essence of things…such ‘essences’ [being]…protean, not fixed, subject to reformulation again and again”[30]. Valck does this work, carrying the readers through the official missives about the Luhmann family murder which erupted with colonial fear, misunderstanding, apprehension and scapegoating, surfaces European planter’s atrocities, and shows rumor to often be treated as actionable fact. Valck’s eventual dishonorable discharge from the Dutch colonial apparatus reveals the man of flesh and blood, disappointed and angry with the colonial apparatus, longing for a real connection with his daughter, and attempting to bring together disparate distances in familial and empire relations. As Stoler states, we “are privy to lives in which the politics of empire bleeds into the texture of the personal and then, as if too present, is carefully washed out”[31]. The troubled account of Valck’s life pulls together empire of the external and internal if only for brief moments and allows glimpses into the ever-morphing essences of conflicted colonial existence.
A few questions arise when reading Stoler’s work, questions which are aimed at understanding choices rather than critiquing the work as a whole. Along the Archival Grain is of course an academic work but more so, it is a work of art and as such is imbued with choices, made at the time of writing, offering the reader a small slice of the overall picture which can never be conveyed. James Agee and Walker Evans, in writing their work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, talk about how the meaning of a house or person is channeled through them as writers but that their meaning is much larger. As they state, it “is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist. His great weight, mystery and dignity are in this fact”[32]. If we make a choice to bring a character from the annals of the archives to life, what responsibility does this carry with it to be as ‘true’ to his/her life as possible? Understandably, we often have documentation from which to pull their lives, stretch them out, unwind the lurid details but what of the deep interstices, the much that is left unsaid? At these moments, we begin to inevitably fictionalize and these people (at one time flesh and blood) become archival marionettes and although we may be honest puppeteers with wonderful intentions, we are nonetheless puppeteers. This is an interesting dilemma: to be caught between historical essence and fiction. The overriding question I suppose is, is it not all fiction and if it is and we are not beholden to Truth of any sort, does it matter if we pull from archives or imagination? The former is definitely more esteemed in circles of academia but I nonetheless wonder if imagination is not at play more often than many are willing to truly accept for the vertigo such a realization induces.
The second main question that arises after reading Stoler’s work is related to style. Stoler has a washing and re-washing of commonalities that runs throughout her work related to the concept of the historical, the play of the personal with the broader empire’s conflicted aspirations and sentiments, and the archive as a living and breathing entity. In its circular tempo, there is a linearity that employs dates, times and places but distorts them, allows new perspectives to bubble up and reworks traditional concepts of the colonial. Stoler’s work is a Picasso that we observe and recognize but are forced to deal with distortions that beg new questions, cause new realms of vision to erupt. I juxtapose this with Delueze and Guattari’s work, a work similar to a Magic Eye poster (pop-culture reference intentional) that is composed of multitudes of disparate colors and images but when stared at long enough, causes a coherent image or narrative to arise. In eking out colonial sentiment and ‘common sense’, what would happen is we were to employ a more Deleuzian/Guattarian approach? What would arise and what would be lost?
Stoler’s work is successful in the aims it is attempting to achieve. It is a piece in a long line of endless work to be done in distancing us from our knowledge, “unsettling what we think we know, defamiliarizing the familiar, [and] defamiliarizing us with ourselves”[33]. And this reader, although riddled with questions of responsibility towards the archive and style, looks forward to the next piece of the ever-assembling and dissembling puzzle.
[1] Johannes Fabian, Time and The Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 3.
[2] Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: On the Essence of Truth (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1977), 118.
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), 252.
[4] Pierre Bordieu, Outline A Theory of Practice: Structures and the Habitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 79.
[5] Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 94.
[6] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (New York: Pantheon Books), 82.
[7] Ibid., 85.
[8] Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 101.
[9] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (New York: Pantheon Books), 87.
[10] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 58.
[11] Ibid., 7.
[12] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (New York: Pantheon Books), 84.
[13] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 40.
[14] Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 98.
[15] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 20.
[16] Ibid., 57.
[17] Ibid., 58.
[18] Ibid., 60.
[19] Ibid., 66.
[20] Ibid., 69.
[21] Pierre Bordieu, Outline A Theory of Practice: Structures and the Habitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 82.
[22] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (New York: Pantheon Books), 83.
[23] Ibid., 89.
[24] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 139.
[25] Ibid., 175.
[26] Ibid., 249.
[27] Ibid., 252.
[28] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15-24.
[29] Ibid., 25.
[30] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 4.
[31] Ibid., 278.
[32] James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 9.
[33] Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 95.
