Page Title
Knowledge Production as Discourses of Power: A Critique of the Use of Archive
Conrad John MASABO, Ph.D.
Roskilde University, Denmark
The University of Dodoma, Tanzania
Knowledge production in the Global South, and Africa in particular, constitutes an area of heated debates and contestation. The call to decolonize academia challenges existing parameters to gauge authenticity of knowledge, its producers and sources used in production which to a larger extent have pushed the Global South and Africa to the margins of knowledge production in the world (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Thondhlana and Garwe, 2021). This essay contributes to this unfolding debate by revisiting the knowledge-power debate (Foucault, 2000; 1980). In this it examines one source of knowledge production – the archive – by elucidating how archives acquire power and the politics that are involved in knowledge production using the archive (Derrida, 1998; Pell, 2015). The goal is to tease out the power and politics of the archive in the context of the quest for decolonisation of knowledge production and to ask whether it is possible to decolonise the archive. This is imperative since “critical work emerging from archival and cultural studies has emphasized the archive’s social and political role in ordering knowledge, establishing criteria for credibility, and anchoring claims to authority and truth” (Pell 2015: 35).
That said, then the paper unfolds through four sections. The introduction provides a snapshot on the matters on the ground particularly the imperative of decolonisation of knowledge production. The second section provides a critique of the archive not only as a site of production of history but as a site of the production of power or what is frequently termed as the ‘discourse of power’, calling for not taking archive for granted. The third section questions whether decolonization is possible in knowledge production where use of archive is central and revisits two techniques of reading the archive: ‘reading against the grain’ and ‘reading along the grain’; a postmodernist kind of reading archival sources which is necessary and useful in the production of knowledge. The fourth which is a conclusion, explores the implications of argument advanced.
Archive and the Discourse of Power in Knowledge Production
Archive is a laden and hard to tame concept as it connotes a number of things. Nonetheless, the definition and conceptualisation of archive as presented in Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: Freudian Impression is probably the most comprehensive one, which sets the discussion rolling on the power and politics entailed within archives and achieving process. He conceptualises archive as a place of “‘commencement’ and ‘commandment’” where we keep returning to in search of origin of things (Derrida 1998: 1). From Derrida’s point of view, the quest is unfulfillable, because events themselves are not in the archive, but only the inscribed traces of them, which have been fixed by writing. In a way it cements the view of the archive as “the repository of memories: individual and collective, official and unofficial, licit and illicit, legitimating and subversive” (Bradley 1999: 108). In this regard, “the archive is therefore not a piece of data, but a status…the product of a process which converts a certain number of documents into items judged to be worthy of preserving and keeping in a public place, where they can be consulted according to well-established procedures and regulations” (Mbembe 2002: 20). As such, the archive should not be taken for granted because in archives we have not only memories of what only ought to be retrieved, but also the processes and meanings codified, and the inscription of power dynamics involved in the processes. Thus, “using the archive helps us to understand the dialectical nature of the relationship between past and present and our own positing within” (Bradley 1999: 107) in an attempt to configure future prospects informed by our past. In that regard, the nature of archive as “something that does away with doubt [in a long run it becomes the authority] exerting a debilitating power over such doubt” (Mbembe 2002: 21). But how does the archive acquire such power and under what political dispensation?
Archives as sites of knowledge production represent an element of power dominance, especially for those in charge of creating archives. In short, “archives have always been about power, whether it is the power of the state, the church, the corporation, the family, the public, or the individual” (Schwartz & Cook, 2002, p. 13). Thus, archives are not neutral sites nor represent neutral information that can aid the production of objective narratives for knowledge production. Archives are neither buildings alone, documents alone, nor only the two combined but much more than that, particularly the process involved “which culminates in a ‘secular’ text, with a previously different function, ending its career in the achieves-or rather becoming an archive” (Mbembe 2002: 19). In this regard, as Gilliland (2011) has observed, archives are not neutral, but rather carry within them the power ideology of the dominant class, social or community as well as the state that create the archives. Thus, “archives emerge not simply as a source, but also as sites of contested knowledge” (Hamilton et al. 2002: 15). Equally as Derrida (1998: 4) once contended, “there is no political power without control of archives”, and thus archives cannot stand as apolitical since politics are inherent in knowledge production. So, there is a need to decode power discourse inherent in archives if knowledge to be produced out of it is to be of relevance since “power recognised becomes power that can be questioned, made accountable, and open to transparent dialogue and enriched understanding” (Schwartz and Cook 2002: 2).
Archive and the Discourse of Power
In the previous paragraphs, it has been argued that the archive is the central source about the past. Although it is true that the archive cannot represent all past events, still it commands power and authority as an authentic source of past memory, despite the critique of its limitations (Bhatia 2020; Daly 2017; Gutsche-Miller 2020; Mbembe 2002). An often-recurring question then is about the origin of archive power, which requires an examination of the kind of politics that play out in the process of archiving. One way to make sense of the complexity of the processes involved, probably can be best approached by revisiting and engaging with Foucault’s 1976 theorization or concept of “regime of truth” (Foucault 2000: 111-133) and the related concept of “governmentality” (Foucault 2000: 201-222; 1991: 87-104). These two concepts can shed light on how archives acquire power.
The first concept, ‘regime of truth’, entails particular ways of thinking about the world which privilege some kind of knowledge as facts while ignoring or suppressing others, a process which is comparable to that of archiving. In this regard, it can be argued that “every archive is a product of exclusion…only particular histories are deemed to be valuable and thereby only certain vantage points are represented and preserved” (Bhatia 2020: 117). That is to say, in archiving the archive acquires the power of knowledge creation by distinguishing between facts and fiction, true and false. In this way at the core of archiving is the process of determining “what is and what is not collected, what is merely stored but not catalogued and hence made intellectually accessible), and what is thrown away” (Brown & Davis-Brown 1998: 23). Mbembe’s (2002) argument on how archives acquire power can be grasped by considering what he calls “the trade with death” (Mbembe 2002: 21), which manifests or unfolds into three dimensions. These are “the struggle against the fragment of life being dispersed … a kind of interment, laying something in a coffin, if not to rest; and] then these elements removed from time and from life are [thus] assigned to be a place and a sepulchre that is perfectly recognisable because it is consecrated: the archives” (Mbembe 2002: 22). Through such processes, the archive then acquires a new status of power and thus in any case “from then on it is consulted. [And in this regard] we are no longer talking about just any document, but a particular document, which has the power, because of a legal designation, to enlighten those who engage in an ‘inquiry’ into time inherent in co-ownership” (Mbembe 2002: 21).
Foucault’s second concept that I consider important in providing a guide to the search on how archive acquire power is the concept of ‘governmentality’, how the subject of government, that is the people are produced. Like the ‘regime of truth’, Foucault’s (1980) concept of governmentality is also concerned with the linkage between knowledge and power. It is in particular with the way in which the person who is governed is produced by knowledge in ways that make it seem unquestionable that we should be governed the way we are governed. Given the role and power of archive, then it is a significant agent of the system of knowledge that makes us subjects. Each of these two concepts, although they are not the same, subscribes to knowledge as a source of power. This is at the core of the dynamics involved in the knowledge production, the politics of knowledge production that define “who control, establish and maintain the archive and how do they do so” (Brown & Davis-Brown 1998: 17), which underscores the politics involved in the production of authoritative knowledge using the archive.
In that regard, then, it is evident that archives can in no way pass the neutrality test, as they are always the site of the production of authentic knowledge, which in turn cannot be divorced from the hegemonic ideology. As Foucault’s power/knowledge dictum suggests, engaging with archives entails an engagement with power discourse. Unlike the dominant view “by academic and other users, and by society generally [which views and treats archive] as passive resource; [in fact] archives are established by the powerful to protect their position in society. [In this way, they] represents enormous power over memory and identity, over the fundamental ways in which society seeks evidence of what its core values are and have been, where it has come from, and where it is going” (Schwartz & Cook 2002: 1).
Archive and the Politics of Knowledge Production
In the academic circles, the phrase ‘all knowledge is political’ is among the many comments made to describe the knowledge production process. As Derrida (1998: 4) famously asserts, “there is no political power without control of the archive.” In this way, the archive is an active site of high politics. This then complicates the relationship between the two. Mbembe (2002: 23) articulates the paradox: “On the one hand, there is no state without archives … [And] on the other hand, the very existence of the archives constitutes a constant threat to the state” (also see Daly 2017: 315-318). Thus, knowledge from archive or the archive itself cannot claim to be excluded from politics. This is so since “an inquiry around archive(s)… demands an attempt to understand the conditions and circumstances of the preservation of materials as, and exclusion of material from, the record, as well as attention to the relation of power underpinning such inclusion and exclusions” (Schwartz & Cook 2002: 9). Politics are at the centre of any form of engaging the archive, ranging from the archiving process to accessing documents in the archive where the power politics. Or simply put, the politics of knowledge production are then abstracted in elements of the archive, the technical-rational process defining the modern archive which are by nature non-political but end up representing what Brown and Davis-Brown (1998: 22-23) call “collection development [a manifestation of the] political dimension of micro-processes of archival and curatorial work.” Because of this, they treat archives as “contested sites of power,” highlighting “the relationship of archives to notions of memory and truth … and, above all the power of archive and records to shape our notions of history, identity and memory” (Schwartz & Cook 2002: 7-8), all which typically represent its political dispensation in knowledge production. In this way, politics run through all processes of collection development and utilization in the archive: in collection, in cataloguing and classification, circulation and access, budgeting and financing, preservation and conservation (Brown & Davis-Brown 1998: 22-30). In that regard, politics then come-in to mediate the power/knowledge interdependence. As such, archive ought to be appreciated much more “as a process rather than … as things [and] … turning further towards a politics of knowledge that reckons with archival genres … [and ought to be approached] not as sites of knowledge retrieval but knowledge production, as monuments of states, as well as sites of state ethnography” (Stoler 2002a:83-85). Approached this way it is much easier to appreciate the kind of politics which sits at the centre of archive as “the loci of power of the present to control what the future will know of the past” (Schwartz & Cook 2002: 13).
Archival Power in Knowledge Production: Is Decolonisation Possible?
Decolonisation is often understood “as the antithesis of colonisation [or]… an attempt to reverse the negative impacts of colonialism” (Emmanuel 2022: 304). That extends to epistemic or intellectual decolonisation in knowledge production. Intellectual decolonisation, or the call for decolonisation and its emphasis in knowledge production in the Global South seems to be recurring agenda with many advocates. Thus, although “intellectual decolonisation is a house of many mansions” as Nyamnjoh (2024: 4) puts it, the discussion in this section revolves largely on four prominent African advocates of decolonisation, namely Ngūgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kwasi Wiredu, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò.
The first two form the first group, as Ngūgĩ wa Thiong’o calls for decolonising literature or the mind (1989), and Wiredu (2002; 1998; 1996) calls for decolonising of African philosophy and democracy. What binds them together is that they emphasise the imperative of African indigenous language as a tool for decolonisation (Emmanuel 2022; Táíwò, 2022; 2019). Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Táíwò form the second group which shares the focus on the question of epistemic decolonisation. They all seem to respond to the decolonial call alluded to by Rutazibwa (2018) of moving “beyond merely adding some colour and other markers of ‘diversity’ to existing structures… [by undertaking] an explicit decolonial engagement with epistemic diversity”. Although Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Táíwò take up this call seriously, each approach it from two different standpoints. That is to say “while Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that epistemic decolonisation is vital for Africa’s political, economic and intellectual future; … for Táíwò, epistemic decolonisation (what he described in 2022 as Decolonisation2) is condescending because it fails to take African agency seriously by trapping intellectuals in unhelpful attachments to authenticity, nativism and atavism” (Nyamnjoh 2024: 2-3). Though different in their views, what they propose adds a significant layer for anyone interested in the decolonial agenda. But a critical question that then arises is that, with such contending views on epistemic decolonisation, and to use Bastian (2019: 206) “Is it ever really possible to decolonise the archives?” This is what the rest of this section attempt to grapple with.
Differentiated views to intellectual decolonisation calls for developing intelligible ways of approaching the archive to serve as a key to unlock the unscripted past in the archive. This is very important when one understands archive as “neither the sum of all text that a culture preserves nor those institutions that allow for record’s preservation ... [but] rather that ‘system of statements’, those ‘rules of practice’ that shape the specific regularities of what can and cannot be said” (Stoler 2002b: 96; also see Foucault 2002: 89-148), renders archive decolonisation as one the most intricate and complex undertakings. Engaging archives as memories of the inscribed past requires thinking beyond what can be seen immediately, and it needs extracting both the exoteric and esoteric meanings inscribed into the archive while appreciating the extent to which archives are more “fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern” (Richards 1993: 11). Thus, “whether the achieve should be treaty as a set of discursive rules, a utopian project, a depot of documents, a corpus of statements, or all above, is not really the question” (Stoler 2002b: 97). The question is rather how to be more cautious and critical of the “making of documents and how we choose to use them, on archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography” (Stoler 2002b: 90).
Decolonizing the archive entails thinking carefully on a number of issues, adopting “a more sustained engagement with those archives as cultural artifact of fact production, of taxonomies in the making…, [a] move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject” (Stoler 2002b: 90-93). This proposed move towards engaging archive as the object of study is in no way an easy undertaking. In a situation of incomplete archives, or archives with deliberate and significant exclusion of important and key documents, researchers must often turn to transnational archives as well as paying greater attention to form, effect and context than is usually accorded to contemporary state records as well as private individual records (Daly 2017). With such complexity, how can one decolonise the archive?
Bastian argues that it is possible to decolonise the archive, but the kind of proposition is not appealing. To her, calls for self-decolonisation in the sense need to leave behind colonial history and concentrate on pre-colonial past (Bastian, 2019, p. 206). This proposition is not what this essay supports. Instead, it supports two ways of engaging with the archive proposed by Stoler: reading against the grain’ and ‘reading along the grain’. Engagement with archive has for quite long been approached as reading ‘against the grain’. This has been a dominant approach adopted in the reading of the so-called ‘colonial archive’. However, Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), proposed an additional and more critical way of archival reading. This newly proposed way of reading the archive does not serve only as an alternative way of engaging with archive but much more as a complementary and a decolonial strategy of engaging the colonial archive, reading ‘along the grain’. The basis for this proposed way of engaging with the archive is an observation that “knowing the circuit of knowledge production is important prior to reading against the grain, one need to first “to explore the grain with care and read along it first” (Stoler 2009: 50) which entails comprehending what it entails. As she further argues, “reading along the archival grain draws our sensibilities to the archive’s granular rather than seamless texture, to the rough surface that mottles its hue and shapes its form” (Stoler 2009: 53). As such, “we need to read for its regularities, for its logic of recall, for its densities and distributions, for its consistencies of misinformation, omission, and mistake – along the archival grain” (Stoler 2002b: 100). That is to say: while reading against the grain entails to hear unexpressed voices and uncover suppressed information; the latter, reading along the grain entails to understand the nature of power and silences and omissions that shape the archive.
Conclusion
This paper has attempted to contextualise and discuss how to use the archives in knowledge production and production of African history in particular. The goal was to contextualise this analysis within the decolonisation turn and the politics of knowledge production as a way to establish the power matrix embedded in the archive and hence having the likelihood of influencing the knowledge produced using the archive as a major source as it is a common practice in the production of historical knowledge. To do so, the paper has discussed three but related issues. Just after the introduction, the paper attempted an exposition of power essence and centrality of politics in knowledge production. I have argued that archive represents the discourse of power which permeated through politics dictated by the ideology of the hegemonic class. After that I then moved to question whether decolonisation of knowledge production is possible where use of archive is central and revisiting two techniques of reading the archive: ‘reading against the grain’ and ‘reading along the grain’; a postmodernist kind of reading archival sources which is necessary and useful in the production of knowledge through the perspective of leading African figures in the decolonisation of knowledge production in the Global South.